by Sarah Helm
Grete asked, hesitantly, ‘If that’s what you really think, why do you stay here?’, to which Langefeld replied that she had to stay ‘to prevent the worst’.
And yet, as Grete also observed, Langefeld had no qualms, even now, about drafting new lists of Jews to be sent east, though she now knew better than anyone what would happen to them. Since Langefeld had last worked at Ravensbrück Jews had been entirely ‘cleansed’ from the camp and sent to Auschwitz, so the Jewish block here had been shut down. Nevertheless small numbers of Jewish women—either singly or in groups—still randomly arrived, caught up perhaps with other transports. They too were then sent straight to Auschwitz, so that Ravensbrück had now become a sort of transit camp for female Jews.
Langefeld now had the job of filling out these Jewish transport lists, and as she read out the names, ‘her face was distorted and her voice full of hatred,’ said Grete. Langefeld told Grete one day, ‘Auschwitz is the most horrible place that the mind of man can conceive of,’ but she didn’t mention the crimes committed against the Jews, saying, ‘I can never get over the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses I took there came to their end. But at least Teege and Mauer were saved.’
On return from Auschwitz Langefeld still seemed to admire the Führer, as well as the Reichsführer SS, but at the same time she made no secret of her hatred for the SS under them, and the new crowd at Ravensbrück seemed to her worse than the last. The SS now blamed her for everything that went wrong. In the winter two Poles working in the kitchen escaped by hiding in refuse bins that were loaded into a lorry and taken away. One was captured, brought back and put in the bunker, while the other was reportedly shot dead crossing a frontier. Ramdohr blamed Langefeld for lax security in the kitchen, which was ‘ruled by filthy Poles’.
Langefeld was a ‘strange woman’, said Grete, ‘who could show a warm heart’. When a Gypsy came to her for help—a woman she had known since Lichtenburg—Langefeld spoke to her ‘consolingly and with great kindness’. Grete also noticed that Langefeld, unlike any SS man, was open to persuasion, and that could be useful. On one occasion an asocial was brought into the office, reported for stealing a turnip, which, if proven, meant the bunker.
‘Did you steal the turnip?’ Langefeld asked the woman.
‘Frau Oberaufseherin, I was so hungry, really I was,’ came the answer, with broken sobs.
‘But if everyone stole turnips there would be none left for anyone else,’ said Langefeld, and sent the woman from the room.
Grete appealed to Langefeld, saying that the woman, whom she knew, would never survive the bunker, and she was not a bad person. ‘Frau Langefeld considered the case a moment as her face twitched nervously. With a sudden gesture she tore up the report and threw it in the bin.’
Langefeld still maintained her greatest sympathy for the Poles. On return from Auschwitz, she was particularly concerned about the Kaninchen, whose plight had by now won sympathy across the camp.
—
Towards the end of 1942 prisoners were told they could receive food parcels from their families for the first time. The news caused elation. Until now only certain favoured prisoners had been able to receive parcels from their families, and food had never been permitted. The idea was Himmler’s. If prisoners were to work to bolster the war effort, they needed better food; it made sense to let families help provide it. Himmler, as usual, had put his personal imprint on the order. The contents of the parcels were to be eaten within two days or would be confiscated (perhaps to prevent vermin). Any SS who stole from the parcels would be sentenced to death.
The first the Polish rabbits knew of the parcels was when friends started sneaking little luxuries to them. A Czech friend brought Maria Grabowska a little sugar, which she sprinkled on her bread. In mid-December Pelagia Maćkowska had received her own food parcel from home—including a warm pullover, knitted by a sister. Oberheuser and the nurses came to admire the treats.
Not only did the parcels contain luxuries such as home-made bread, cakes and sugar, they also contained hidden letters and perhaps a photograph of a child not seen for years. Now the rabbits’ thoughts of home revived again, especially as Christmas was coming.
On Christmas Eve the soup was served early on the wards as the German staff went off duty to celebrate. The talk turned to Christmases at home. A tap came at the window, and suddenly a friend called Halina was amongst the women, kissing them, her cold frosty cheeks against theirs. Only after Halina had gone did they find that she had left behind her a little cake made of bread, margarine and jam. On top was a jam rabbit. The rabbits were delighted by such a clever gift on Christmas Eve, but excitement set off their fevers. Pelagia struggled out of bed in her white plaster ‘boots’ to take water around, but as she moved her boots suddenly turned red and she heaved herself back to bed, crying out and leaving bloodstains across the floor.
By the New Year, several of the rabbits were deemed well enough to return to their blocks, including Stefania Łotocka, who was given her clothes and a pair of crutches and told to walk back. Somehow Stefania managed to stagger out of the Revier, but outside the door the frosty air hit her and she fainted and slipped to the ground. Fearing a guard would pass at any moment and kick her, she lay curled round her crutches thinking, ‘I’ll just try to make myself as comfortable as possible lying here’ when a figure appeared above her, grasped her gently under the arms, and carried her to her block. The ‘figure’ was Rosetta, Blockova of the Polish block. The warmth of Rosetta’s body revived Stefania as she lay in her arms.
In mid-January came the announcement the Polish rabbits had longed for: Herta Oberheuser informed them that there would be no more experimental operations. A day or two later, the commandant, Fritz Suhren, came in person to confirm the news and to deliver another announcement: two women, Maria Gnaś and Janina Pajączkowska, were to be freed. He spoke with glazed eyes, ‘as if we were not in the room, and then he was gone’. They all stared at Maria and Janina, whose wounds had barely even begun to heal, and everyone, including the two girls, could see there was no chance of them going home. One of Langefeld’s clerks then came with papers stating that the women were freed and ‘should go straight home to Lublin’.
‘But we can’t even walk,’ said Janina anxiously.
A few days later both were taken away—apparently freed, but Dziuba Sokulska soon heard otherwise. Dziuba made contact with a Polish friend in the Schreibstube who said she’d seen a piece of paper with the women’s names on, and beside each was a cross. The cause of death in both cases was given as pulmonary embolism, but everyone knew they had been shot.
When Dziuba broke the news to Block 15, silence fell, the same ominous silence Wanda had once struggled to explain. ‘We were silent because we were overwhelmed by our humiliation and the utter physical weakness that plagued us.’ There had never been any intention to send them home. The SS doctors wanted the two rabbits dead because alive, they were evidence of their crimes.
The grief poured out. Why Maria and Janina had been singled out first for execution, no one could think, and so no one could guess who would die next. With this came the fear: it could be any of them, at any time.
Dziuba Sokulska was the first to suggest a protest. Ever the lawyer, she said it should be done in orderly fashion, starting with a brief letter to the commandant, asking for an explanation. They sent their protest. Suhren did not reply. His silence, however, only fuelled the women’s disgust and spurred them on.
The early protests were small—more like individual acts of defiance—and were barely noticed, but they signalled a changing mood. For example, Eugenia Mikulska, struggling on her crutches in the Revier, saw Oberheuser and Fischer looking in her direction and laughing as she lost her balance. ‘I managed to support myself on my crutches enough to turn my back on the two criminals. They obviously understood my gesture of contempt, for they went away.’
The SS knew the rabbits had growing support around the camp, so they started to spread smear stories
, saying that their families in Poland had all received vast sums of money as rewards for their daughters’ suffering, that fathers, brothers, husbands had all been promised early release from prison.
The few who might have believed the lies soon changed their minds when they saw the broken figures of these once lithe and healthy girls come stumbling out of the infirmary, trying to return to their blocks. When the rabbits themselves heard what was being said about them, the talk of protest action grew more heated. Once back in the block there was a great deal of time to talk and plan. They could not go out to work, and remained inside assigned to knitting and sewing.
‘The sight of so many disabled women in one block had an effect on us and we suddenly had a growing sense of our own power,’ recalled Wanda Wojtasik. Groups of rabbits even started to venture out to breathe the air, and on sunny days they gathered in a sheltered spot against the block wall. Pelagia Michalik remembered the ‘painful sight’ of these young girls, ‘their shoulders unnaturally stiffened by their crutches, leaning against the back wall of the block and their thin pale faces turned towards the warmth of the sun for salvation’.
The worst tensions sprang from the continuing executions of Poles. No more rabbits were killed at this time, but other Polish women were picked out once or twice a week. A messenger would come and call numbers and the women would stand and walk away. That evening the shots would be heard.
In February 1943 two groups of eight were called on consecutive days, and by the time the volleys sounded on the second evening the entire block was in ferment. Arguments broke out, as ringleaders amongst the rabbits called for action, while others, often older and worried about repercussions, asked: ‘And what do you propose? You all went off to be cut up without complaining.’
Among the rabbits a new recklessness took hold, and some talked of hunger strikes, or a mass protest on the Lagerstrasse, even escape. The more cautious in the block—again, usually the older women—said mass protest on crutches was laughable, and as for escape, this was impossible. But the younger ringleaders argued back, saying they weren’t going to die for nothing, and their voices grew in number as more victims left the infirmary and came ‘home’ to the block.
The sister-in-law of Maria Gnaś, one of the murdered rabbits, really did escape. Somehow she got over the wall and walked away into the fields beyond. She was in some kind of trance, so people said. Captured at once, when Suhren asked why she tried to escape, her reply was: ‘I don’t want to be shot.’
Everyone became obsessed with how she got over the wall. Several said they would rather escape and be shot than go like sheep to the slaughter. Others said they would commit suicide before they were experimented on again. And though many were still in a pitiful state, all were slowly convalescing, helped by the parcels, which gave them both physical and moral strength.
By January Krysia too had returned to Block 15 and was mending fast, with Wanda’s care. The two shared a mattress, as before, and on the next bunk were the Iwańska sisters Janina and Krystyna, also from Lublin. Together the four mulled over the various choices—escape, suicide, hunger strikes—and then Krysia came up with her plan for ‘telling the world’. They should smuggle information about the doctors’ crimes to people outside. If they could only get a report of these atrocities to the Polish underground, the underground would signal it to London. Once it reached the Polish government in exile, it would find its way to the powerful people.
The women were well aware that everyone—at least in Poland—already knew about concentration camps, that people were dying there. But they also felt sure that no one could ever have dreamed that experiments were being done on healthy young women, who were then being shot. If the powerful people knew this—Krysia meant the governments in London and Washington, the International Red Cross, the Pope—they would surely speak out and it would be stopped, she said, and the others agreed. So they discussed how to get the story out, and it was probably Janina Iwańska who came up with the idea of writing in secret ink.
All four were trained scouts, and all four had learned about secret writing, using lemon juice, milk or onion juice as invisible ink. But what were they going to use for ink? Krystyna suggested urine. Her mother had once told Krysia that it had been used for secret writing in her own army days in the First World War. ‘But what do we use for paper?’ someone else asked. ‘And how do we smuggle our letters out?’
Maria Bielicka had smuggled information out some months earlier through her contacts in the Effektenkammer, hiding notes in clothes parcels, but Maria was in the Warsaw group; none of the Lublin girls knew of her smuggling or had contacts in the Effektenkammer. Their only communication with the outside world to date had been the monthly official letters in German, censored by the SS, in which they could say little more than ‘Ich bin gesund und fühle mich wohl’ (I’m well and I feel fine).
‘So let’s write between the lines and in the margins of the official letters,’ Krysia suggested. As this was something else her mother had done, she would know to iron the letters to show up the secret writing. Krysia solved the next question too: to tip off her family the invisible writing was there, she would give clues in the German writing.
As children, she and her younger brother Wiesław used to read the adventure stories of the Polish writer Kornel Makuszyński. A favourite was The Demon of the Seventh Form, in which the hero sent information in letters, concealed in code. The key was the word made up by the first letter of each line. Krysia’s idea was to make a reference to Makuszyński in her next official letter home. The family were bound to smell a rat, and her brother would get the hint.
The girls agreed that the plan might work. All four would write each letter together and nobody outside the group must know. When the next day came for an official letter home, they found a hiding space in the attic of their block; the space was already used by smokers who organised cigarettes from the stores. Here they prepared their first secret letter.
First they wrote their visible sentences in German, and in them Krysia reminded Wiesław how they used to admire the ingenuity of The Demon of the Seventh Form. She arranged the lines in the letter so that the first letters of each line made the words ‘list moczem’—‘letter written in urine’. Then dipping a stick in urine, she wrote in the margins: ‘We have decided to tell you the whole truth.’
The first secret letter was to be brief, so there followed just a few sentences about the medical experiments. At the end, Krysia wrote, ‘More letters will follow’ and gave a code word for the family to use in their next official reply, to show they had received the secret message. The first letter went off, but part of the code that signalled the secret contents was rubbed out somehow by the time it reached Krysia’s family, so the trick very nearly failed.
Wiesław Czyż, Krysia’s younger brother, remembers well the arrival of the first secret letter at their home in Lublin. As always when a letter arrived from his sister, his father, Tomasz, read the contents out loud to Wiesław, then aged fifteen, and his mother Maria. Till now the family had tried to read between the official lines for any hint about Krysia’s well-being, but the formal language was always the same. Then one day in early 1943 a letter mentioned a story by Makuszyński. ‘It seemed out of context,’ says Wiesław. ‘But as I was still very young the story was fresh in my memory, and straight away I remembered that the high point was a tale of children sending secret messages hidden in texts. So I quickly guessed what she was trying to tell us. Krystyna was a quiet girl but smart, and always full of bright ideas.’
Wiesław and his parents deciphered the code, but due to the missing letters they read the instruction as list mocz—wet the letter—instead of list moczem—letter in urine. So the family sprinkled water on the letter, which revealed the secret writing, but only in time to decipher it and then it disappeared. Guessing their mistake, they rushed out and took the letter to a trusted chemist to ask how to reveal text written in urine. He told them to apply a hot iron. This they
did and the words appeared again.
‘It was an extraordinary thing to get this information from my sister straight from a concentration camp,’ said Wiesław. ‘There were only three people at this operation with the iron, my mother, father and me. You are speaking to the only living witness.’
I asked if the family were worried by the risks Krysia was taking.
‘Yes,’ said Wiesław, ‘but nobody questioned it. We knew she was doing what she had to do—keeping up her resistance. It was instinctive. It was what we all did. It’s hard for you to understand today, but you see, resistance was all that kept us going at that time. We were living under a cruel and brutal power. The only thing that mattered to us was mutiny.’
After this first letter, more arrived, packed with more information about the camp, though all these years later Wiesław could not remember the details. He did recall that their mother, as a major in the Lublin ‘Home Army’, was able to pass on the reports to her underground chiefs in Lublin: ‘By sending the messages Krystyna knew that she would immediately be linked up to the wider Polish resistance network because of her own mother.’
Wiesław knew that the commanders in Lublin had sent the information on by signal to stations in Warsaw, who in turn passed it on to stations in Sweden, from where, the family hoped, the messages might even reach the Polish government in exile in London, though whether this ever happened, nobody had ever found out.
Was Krystyna particularly courageous? Not especially, said Wiesław.
She was just a normal girl like the others. The only thing you might say about Krystyna was that she had a special innocence. You see, she was particularly young. At the time of her arrest all she had known about was her schoolwork, and her patriotism. Her friends were the same. But she was younger somehow. More innocent.
