by Sarah Helm
Soon afterwards Alfreda is taken away for a new incision, and when she is returned to the ward her wound is bleeding heavily. Her straw mattress turns red and a pool of blood collects beneath the bed. A camp nurse seems to take pity and gets a mug of coffee for her from the officers’ mess, but this of course does no good, so the nurse calls Oberheuser. Oberheuser clearly knows that Alfreda is close to death, as she tries to inject her with something to stop the bleeding. The doctors don’t seem to want her to die yet. Perhaps the experiment is not complete.
Complete or not, next morning two nurses come and take Alfreda away. When she is carried out on a stretcher she turns her head towards Stefania, her companion on the next bed, and smiles and says: ‘You see, I told you I was going to die.’
A moment later the others hear more terrible, inhuman screams—this time from Alfreda Prus. So piercing are Alfreda’s screams that other guinea pigs tell each other the whole camp must have heard her die.
* * *
*1 Pressure to find a miracle drug increased when the Allies started dropping leaflets over German lines, announcing that their soldiers were being treated with sulphonamides and penicillin.
*2 Hitler backed the experiments on concentration camp prisoners, saying they ‘ought not to remain completely unaffected by the war while German soldiers are being subjected to almost unbearable strain and our native land, women and children, are being engulfed under a rain of incendiary bombs’.
Chapter 14
Special Experiments
I found Zofia Kawińska in her tenth-floor flat overlooking the cranes of Gdansk shipyard. She was one of the second group of victims of Himmler’s sulphonamide experiments. A tiny, bent figure, she walks with difficulty, and has since the war. I ask if she still suffers pain from the experiments. ‘A little,’ she says, as she offers tea and biscuits.
She stoops to show the scars on the sides of her legs. ‘They put the bacteria in, and glass and bits of wood, and they waited.’ She looks up and fixes me with deep brown eyes, as if trying to see if there is any chance I understand. ‘But I didn’t suffer as much as some. Everyone in Poland came home with wounds.’
Zofia came back to find she had lost her father at Auschwitz. He had been arrested at the same time as her, at their family home in Chełm. ‘The last time I saw him was on the lorry to Lublin Castle. We shared a loaf of bread my mother gave us,’ she says, looking across at the cranes, eyes welling with tears.
Her memories of the camp emerge in a series of sharp images.
She remembers Binz. ‘She had a little dog that she caressed. Binz loved that dog, but liked to beat people. The guards were not educated women.’
She remembers the cold more than the hunger. ‘We made fur gloves for the pilots, but our feet were like blocks of ice. They took our shoes away in the spring.’
And when she talks of the experiments she remembers the smell of rotting legs. ‘We were locked in with it, you see, and we couldn’t open the windows. It was worse than the smell of rotting corpses. Our own legs. It was Oberheuser who locked us in, because we weren’t allowed to see the important doctors. The important doctors didn’t want witnesses because they knew they’d be shot for it.’
‘What was Oberheuser like?’
‘When it started, before we were too sick, I remember she came in and we asked her: “What have you done to our legs? We won’t be able to wear stockings now.” ’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing. She smiled, a strange smile.’
After we had talked for some time longer, I asked Zofia if she had ever lost her faith in Ravensbrück. She paused and looked away. ‘No. I have no less faith. You see we came to the camp with an iron will to survive.’ And she clenches two tiny fists on the tablecloth and darts another look—again, as if to see if I can understand.
After hesitating a moment, she got up and fetched something to show me: a small silver medallion with an image of Christ. It belonged to a close friend who died at Ravensbrück. Zofia had kept it with her always. In the camp she hid it in a hundred hiding places, burying it in soil, hiding it behind planks in the walls, but she always found it. Even when she left the Revier she found it again, hidden somewhere in the block. It was a miracle that she didn’t lose it, she says. ‘It protected me.’
—
On 7 October 1942 another group of guinea pigs were called up to the infirmary. Maria Plater-Skassa saw autumn leaves falling as she was marched out. Genowefa Kluczek was woken that morning by the Blockova, Marta Baranowska, who climbed up with tears in her eyes to her third-tier bunk bed, saying: ‘Get dressed, child. Come with me. Be brave.’ Pelagia Maćkowska still half-believed that the promise of return to Poland if she agreed to the operation might be true. She’d see her husband and sons again. Both had been sent to Auschwitz, as members of the Polish underground.
Everything happened as before. The new guinea pigs lined up, avoiding each other’s eyes, skin earthy grey, brushed with fine down. All delighted in having a bath until one of them started to cry, remembering her children. They were told to parade naked in front of a doctor, probably Rosenthal, who sat on a stretcher with a cigarette in his mouth, surrounded by German nurses. He was paying no attention to them.
As the new patients settled into their beds, they pleaded with Jadwiga Kamińska to tell them what had really happened to their friends Weronika Kraska and Alfreda Prus, but Jadwiga didn’t want to tell them in front of Maria Kuśmierczuk, one of Alfreda’s closest friends, who was lying on one of the beds. Maria, who knew Alfreda from school, had surgery a few days earlier and had the same code as Alfreda—K1—marked on her leg.
Dr Rosenthal examined Pelagia’s arm for a vein to inject. ‘Gut, gut,’ he said.
She woke up two days later hallucinating. Her mother’s face was leaning over her, and she shouted out: ‘Why aren’t you helping me, Mother?’ Her leg was a bluish-black log. As before, the women heard others’ screams before screaming themselves. And as before some of the girls got hiccups and some got stiff necks.
Although procedures were the same, the accounts of this later group suggest that the doctors’ demeanour had changed. Eager at first to work on Professor Gebhardt’s experiments, now they all seemed bored. Observation of the guinea pigs had been left in Dr Oberheuser’s lowly hands.
—
Oberheuser comes around the wards every morning, sometimes to take blood, but usually for no reason. A camp nurse called ‘the duck’ always accompanies her. The prisoners call her the duck because she waddles, and another is called the rat. The nurses all pull faces at the stink, but Oberheuser ‘seems used to it and just smiles, looking so pleased with herself,’ says Pelagia.
It is the day for dressings again and Stefania Łotocka peeks out from under the sheet and sees the doctors amusing themselves. On the left of the table stands Fischer. In his right hand he has a gleaming metal hook. On the right side stands Oberheuser, holding a large kidney-shaped bowl. She is wearing a white, rather transparent silk blouse, through which her pink underwear can be seen. She has gold bangles on her arms and rings on her fingers. They stand there smiling at each other and Pelagia sees they are flirting.
When Pelagia’s dressings are changed she hears the sound of metal instruments from under the sheet, and she hears Oberheuser saying: ‘Gleich, gleich’—‘Wait, wait.’
Back on the ward, Zofia Kiecol has hiccups and Kazia Kurowska, a sturdy country girl, lies unconscious, her grey-black legs swollen to four times their normal size. Maria Kuśmierczuk, Alfreda’s school friend, and the one with the markings Alfreda once had, is also dangerously ill.
To everyone’s surprise this group is suddenly given better food. ‘So the doctors don’t want us to die quite yet,’ someone says. But the smell of food, mixed with the stink of their legs, makes them retch. Zofia vomits and hiccups incessantly. Zofia and Leokadia Kwiecińska, who lie next to each other, are friends from the sewing workshop. Zofia used to ask Leokadia every day: ‘What do you th
ink. Shall we get back to Poland? If only we could get back. Who will look after my girls if I don’t get back?’
Now Leokadia watches the nurses take Zofia away. And they take Kazia too. But Maria Kuśmierczuk, the one with the same K1 code as her friend Alfreda, is still miraculously fending off the infection. Only nine of their group of twelve remain. ‘But we must hang on,’ someone shouts out. And they look at Maria, who was written off just a few days ago, but is still fighting for her life.
Dziuba Sokulska, the skinny lawyer, is told by Oberheuser that she’ll be better any day, and sure enough she is, and is sent to roll bandages on the other side of the hospital. And Stanisława Jabłońska has new strength too—enough to tell stories to the others, to give them something to think about, apart from rotting flesh.
More friends turn up to visit at the window. Everyone in the camp now calls them Kaninchen—rabbits. Those outside pass bits of food or crusts to the Poles who have contacts with the Revier, saying, ‘This is for the Kaninchen,’ and the gifts are smuggled in. At first the girls tried to discourage the name, but, as rabbits, they are famous. The guards call them rabbits too, so now the prisoners’ vocabulary is official.
It is not only by collecting food that others in the camp can help the rabbits. Prisoners are also collecting information. On bandage-rolling duties, Dziuba Sokulska is in touch with a Polish doctor, Zofia Mączka, from Kraków, who works in the Revier as a radiologist. Like all the prisoner nurses and doctors, Zofia is banned from the experiment wards, but she spies through keyholes, listens at doors and watches through windows, gathering information that she passes on to Dziuba. The doctors come and go in their cars from Hohenlychen. Each time they come they bring bacteria in little vials, which are labelled, and which Zofia sees later, lying around. She sees tubes of paper, covered with pus, which are used to insert the bacteria into wounds, and this tells her which patient had which dose.
Blood and urine samples are analysed in the lab by medical students, some of them Polish prisoners, who pass on what they learn. With all this information, Zofia learns that Weronika Kraska was infected with a lethal dose of tetanus well before she died, and that Alfreda and Kazimiera Kurowska were infected with gas gangrene bacteria in such massive quantities that their bodies could not put up a defence.
Zofia is able to monitor Kazia Kurowska’s death through a keyhole over several days, as the gas gangrene destroys her right leg and begins to infect the entire right side of her body. In the end the nurse, Gerda Quernheim, ends Kazia’s life with a morphine overdose.
—
Some weeks after the operations began, Zofia Mączka found a way to keep records, which she hid somehow with the help of friends in the sewing workshop. One day she would use the records to convict the murderers, she told Dziuba. Dziuba wanted to tell the world now, to stop the evil, but Zofia saw no chance of that. Soon after this, however, Maria Bielicka was presented with just such a chance. Maria had been rejected as a rabbit and was still working in the bookbinding workshop in the autumn of 1942. The workshop was next door to the Effektenkammer where three Czech girls worked, and they and Maria Bielicka became friends.
Maria learned that the Czechs often sent the clothes of executed prisoners back to their families. The system was always the same. The clothes were brought down from the storage and packed up in a box, which was sealed by the SS guards. The guards never checked, but just looked at the label on the box and sent it off. The bereaved family received a separate letter from the commandant that informed them their daughter had died of natural causes.
The Czech girls said it was possible to smuggle out letters with the clothes. Once or twice they had even fooled the guards by sending back clothes of girls who were not executed, with notes hidden inside. ‘Everyone was trying to help the Poles at this time,’ said Maria.
Everyone was shocked by these experiments, and terrified the same might happen to them, so they asked me if I would like to send some clothes home, so I could smuggle out a message to my parents about what was happening. Both my parents were in the Polish underground in Warsaw. I thought this was a big opportunity to tell them about the camp.
With this in mind Maria and some friends drew a big map, showing where the camp was, and the layout. ‘We wrote about the experiments and the executions, and everything we could, and the Czech girls put the letter in the bundle with my clothes. I told them to send everything except my overcoat and my snow boots—just in case. The guards sealed the box and stamped it with official SS stamps and sent it off.’
Later in the war both of Maria’s parents were captured and shot, so she would never have known their reaction to receiving the package, had it not been for a friend who lived close by in Warsaw and who was present when her parents opened it.
‘Imagine what they thought at first,’ said Maria. ‘They thought I must have been executed. But my friend told me that when they found the letter they were full of joy that I had been so clever to do it!’ Maria hoped her parents would pass the information on to the Polish underground and that it would reach the outside world. ‘But, you see, for us in the camp it was a victory anyway. Of course we wanted to tell the world about the crimes, but the joy for us was that we’d also fooled our enemy. It was a little victory. Actually this was quite a big thing. Sometimes it was smaller things. But these were the things that kept us prisoners going.’
—
By the end of October some of the women had been in the ward for two months. Beds once white were now grey and sticky. Stefania Łotocka tried to pull her blanket up tight around her neck so that the stink of her leg did not escape, but it didn’t work. Her matted hair formed a sort of coxcomb on top of her head.
They had been mutilated; now they’d been abandoned. Even Oberheuser rarely walked through the ward. Swarms of flies fed on pus, and white bandages were covered with black maggots. They would be killed by the filth, if nothing else, thought Stefania as she watched the cockroaches in the cracks of walls.
One morning Oberheuser walked onto the ward, brisk and important, announcing that they were all to be cleaned up and given clean nightdresses. The professor was coming again. Though he wasn’t due until 2 p.m. the women were prepared hours ahead, laid out on special boards in the surgery ‘like bodies in a mortuary’. Each wore a ragged nightdress and had been given a card to balance on her front, on which codes were written in fine Gothic flourishes. As the hours passed their wounds ached and bled. Oberheuser rearranged the cards from time to time: A1 A11, C1 C11, D1 D11, E1 E11.
It was late afternoon when Karl Gebhardt turned up with his doctors. All of them were drunk. Gebhardt, in boastful mood, showed off his Kaninchen to the rest, who marvelled at the sight. ‘Look here,’ he said, proudly pointing at swollen legs and festering wounds, and as he explained something behind his hand, everyone roared with laughter and a dozen eyes looked on, making mental notes. According to one woman, Gebhardt’s appearance that day was ‘fat with a pale, pudding-like face and small eyes. Dressed in civilian clothes—a navy-blue sweater.’
Each time the chief surgeon came up to one of the women, Fischer and Oberheuser hovered at his elbow trying to impress with their report, and as he nodded Oberheuser ‘beamed with satisfaction’, her face ‘excited and red’. Quickly bored with Oberheuser and the patients, Gebhardt left.
Like his staff Karl Gebhardt had obviously lost interest in the cases; the results, yet again, produced nothing new. Grawitz, the director of the experimental programme, had not even turned up this time. In any case, the man who promoted the sulphonamide experiments in the first place, Heinrich Himmler, had found more absorbing experiments to follow.
—
By late October 1942 Himmler’s enthusiasm for medical experimentation was burgeoning. Instead of cures for battlefield wounds, he was asking Sigmund Rascher, another favoured doctor, to find ways to revive sailors and airmen pulled out of freezing seas. Himmler had been reading about methods used by coastal communities in past centuries to save sh
ipwrecked crews in the Baltic. Country folk often knew excellent remedies, he told Rascher in a letter, such as teas brewed from medicinal herbs.
Himmler went on: ‘I can also imagine that a fisherman’s wife might take her half-frozen husband to bed with her after he had been rescued and warm him up that way.’ He urged Rascher to try the same, and told him to use Ravensbrück prostitutes, sent to work in the Dachau brothel, for the ‘human warmth’. At first Rascher rejected the idea, saying that it wouldn’t work, but Himmler insisted and as Rascher was another close friend, and a devotee of the Reichsführer’s Ancestral Heritage projects, he came round.
Since the establishment some months earlier of a brothel at Buchenwald, staffed by Ravensbrück women, a brothel had also been set up at Dachau, and Ravensbrück women had been sent to work there too. From among these women Rascher was given four ‘prostitutes’ for his tests.
One of the women, however, Rascher rejected on the grounds that she was too Nordic. He wrote later that she ‘showed unobjectionably Nordic racial characteristics: blonde hair, blue eyes, corresponding head and body structure’.
I asked the girl why she had volunteered for the brothel. I received the answer: ‘To get out of the concentration camp, because I was promised that all those who would volunteer for the brothel for half a year would be released from the camp.’ To my objection that it was a great shame to volunteer as a prostitute, I was told: ‘Rather half a year in the brothel than half a year in the concentration camp.’
Rascher said the woman had also given him an account of ‘the most peculiar conditions’ at Ravensbrück, and this account was confirmed by the others.
It hurts my racial feelings to expose as a prostitute to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who has the appearance of a pure Nordic and who could perhaps by assignment of proper work be put on the right road. Therefore, I refused to use this girl for my experimental purposes.
