by Sarah Helm
A little woman with a pale, sickly face, slowly but steadily, without betraying her fear, is moving towards the table. Nobody can protect her. Everybody knows she is going to be beaten up. Maybe until she is half dead. ‘What’s that?’ And he stares with this face red from hate into the face of the woman. ‘What’s that?’ and he starts beating her with hands and with boots with metal studs. She tries to protect her face and save herself, but this enrages this beast even more, and red from rage and with foam on mouth he incessantly beats her on her back, face and chest. The woman is suffocating like a corpse and she is lying on the floor and bleeding from her nose and mouth and then he grabs her stool and by this time nobody was sewing any longer. Everyone was standing and with hate and terror stared at this beating up. In their heart there were tears of hate and impotence and humiliation and inner pain. And then there was a scream from the floor, a heart-breaking scream from the woman who could not resist any longer, and the beast, completely startled, stops and puts the stool down. He looks around at everyone scrutinising, gives her a last kick and then shouts: ‘Arbeit schnell.’ And leaves. Those were the frequent scenes. And we, the girls who fought at Stalingrad, could only look on.
Often Binz appeared outside the sewing workshop as the women queued to leave and lashed out at them—particularly the Red Army women—shouting: ‘Russian swine, you march your Russian march, now you march for us, you Russian pigs.’ One day she lashed out at Ilena Barsukova, the Odessa nurse. ‘She hit me over the head and back but I didn’t cry. I forced myself not to cry—not there outside the workshop. Then when I returned to the block Yevgenia Lazarevna was waiting for me. She had already been told. She knew. And as soon as I saw her, I started crying. And then everyone started crying. She cried too.*3 She told me in future to avoid the SS eyes. And then we got together in a group and planned how to do small pieces of sabotage by sewing up openings in the arms or cutting away an elastic so the garment would tear but in a way nobody would notice, which was easy with the white camouflage coats.’
Soon after that, one of the Moscow family wrote a poem about Binz. Anna Stekolnikova kept a copy, and she pulled it out of a drawer in her tiny flat at the top of a Moscow apartment block, where it had been hidden for seventy years. Anna said the poem was written by a friend called Lydia Gradzilowa, and she read it out.
‘A beautiful blonde’
You are so beautiful,
With shining blue eyes and locks of hair,
But if we could, we would tear the insides of your soul
And strangle your bloodthirsty heart.
Do you remember the girl you were whipping, Jacqueline?
How you stamped on Wanda, the Polish girl?
How you tortured the Russian girl Veronicka? You and the dog.
I asked Anna if Binz was actually called the Beautiful Blonde in the camp, and she said: ‘Beautiful bitch, more like. But she was beautiful—tall and elegant.’
‘Was she a sadist?’
‘We knew she hated us Russians. She treated Ukrainians differently, but if you were Russian you’d had it. Yes, I think she was a sadist, a real sadist. Her eyes almost shone when she beat people.’
One day, however, Binz spared Anna’s life by calling off her dog.
I’d been digging sand at the bottom of the lake and we were coming back to the camp in ranks of five and someone asked me a question and my lips moved. Binz saw and shouted my camp number and called me out to stand on the little mound outside the hospital for several hours. It was always windy there and terribly cold, so the girls in my barracks kept food for me, but then Binz came over with her dog and the dog bounded up at me with its paws and knocked me over. And I fell and it began to go for me but Binz pulled it back. It was as if she had pity on me and she shouted to me: ‘Weg’—on your way. Soon after the dog died, and Binz buried it right there where it died in front of a block and planted the grave with flowers.
Olga Golovina shook hands with a young woman’s strength, then told more stories about Binz, and the Moscow family.
‘In the block we always stuck together, but it was hard,’ she said, tipping cigarette ash onto a dusty pot plant. Her voice was husky, her hair blonde and permed. Olga was in intelligence. Her mission was to drop by parachute behind German lines. She had never parachuted before and had no training. To lessen the impact on landing she had bark strapped to her feet. She pulled out photographs of Red Army friends. ‘In the block we all had nicknames. I was Pushkin because of my curly hair. And then there was the Cat, and Vera Samoilova was the Bear, because she was grumpy. Alexandra Sokova was Graf [count], because for some reason she’d come wearing trousers and because she was so serious. We met in the evenings.’
Olga’s job at one point was to haul the giant Kesselkolonne (soup wagon) from the kitchen to the block. One day as they struggled the cart tipped over and poured boiling coffee over her friend Nadia’s legs, scalding the skin, but Nadia kept on walking all the way to the block, knowing that if Binz heard they’d all be in the bunker. On another occasion she and the other girls pushed the wagon into a pile of bodies, stacked like logs. ‘And they all fell down.’
She mentioned Lyusya Malygina: ‘You must write about Lyusya—so beautiful and brave, Lyusya saved many lives. She worked in the hospital and swapped names to save us from the death lists.’ Did Olga know about the Simferopol trial? I asked, referring to the trial in which Lyusya Malygina and others were accused of collaboration by Stalin’s secret police. She nodded, and asked me what I knew.
I showed her a letter I had found in Antonina’s boxes. The letter was written by Maria Klyugman, the Red Army surgeon, another of the accused. The letter is the only written record of the trial to have come to light; in it Maria names the accused and their accusers, and three others.
Olga asked to see the letter, read it and seemed shaken. It had always been rumoured that something like this happened, she said, ‘but no one knew for sure.’ She went for another smoke.
‘But there were no traitors in the camp,’ she said when she returned to the room. ‘Not that I knew of. In the camp we were strong, you see—we Soviet girls,’ and she recalled one October revolution day when Lyusya Malygina ‘jumped down from her bunk and danced’, and a French woman sang an aria. ‘Yevgenia Lazarevna would always come round and say: “Happy holiday, girls.” She always encouraged us to celebrate in any way we could.’
In autumn 1944 Rosa Thälmann arrived in the camp. She was the wife of the famous German communist Ernst Thälmann, shot dead in Buchenwald in August that year. ‘So Yevgenia Lazarevna said: “Let’s bake her a cake.” And we really did. We were given 25 grams of margarine at the weekend and a spoon of jam and somehow we mixed it with bits of bread and made this cake and decorated it with flowers that we stole from the grave of Binz’s dog.’
In the summer of 1943 Suhren made a new rule that on Sundays all prisoners must march, not stroll, down the Lagerstrasse in order to restore discipline and order, lost since Langefeld’s departure. The Soviets—banned until then from appearing on the Lagerstrasse on Sundays—were also instructed to march.
‘Our own beautiful blondes saw it as a chance to show off,’ said Olga, laughing. ‘They ironed their dresses by putting them under their mattresses and made themselves look smart. They even washed their hair using coffee. Then we all marched out as if on military parade and everyone stared.’
Dagmar Hajkova, the leading Czech communist, gave a more dramatic account in her post-war testimony. The march happened on a very hot day, she said. ‘The whole camp’s surface was covered with black cinders. It was as if the camp was wrapped in a mourning veil. Several thousand women in striped rags, with wooden shoes or on bare feet, were marching in ranks of five in thick clouds of black dust.’
The women were told to sing German songs. Some Czechs tried to sing Czech national songs instead, but the guards stopped them so they were silent. ‘Only the proletarians [asocials] carried on singing,’ said Dagmar, ‘mostly popular songs ab
out blue eyes, red lips and kisses. It was a sorry picture. All young girls, almost unlike human beings—greasy, barefoot or in wooden shoes, their steps stumbling due to tiredness. It wasn’t a real march at all. Some were limping. Everyone was longing for the end.’ Then suddenly a roar broke out across the camp and everyone turned to see the 500 Soviet women march to the main square, lined up according to height and marching in ranks of five in perfect military parade step.
Standing on the kitchen steps the commandant and his staff were watching, stunned. From the camp square, thousands of eyes of imprisoned women from all European peoples were watching the Soviet women too. When they arrived in the centre of the square, they all began to sing a Red Army fighting song. They sang with clear and loud voices, one song after another. They walked into the centre of the square, young faces, shaven heads as a sign of shame, but with their heads up high: and everyone froze on the spot. They walked on as if they were parading on Red Square in Moscow, not in a national-socialist concentration camp.
What Dagmar Hajkova says happened next seems like wishful thinking on her part. The other prisoners made a guard of honour for the Soviets, she claims. ‘Thousands of hands applauded them. The Red Army soldiers sang the Partisans’ Song, and now the whole camp joined in.’ Olga Golovina had talked more simply of the Soviet girls ‘showing off’.
Nevertheless, the SS were taken aback and didn’t react for some minutes. ‘Binz stood and waited for the signal,’ said Hajkova. ‘They hadn’t experienced such daring behaviour. It took them a while to chase them back to the barracks. We weren’t allowed to leave the barracks again that Sunday. But we didn’t receive a mass punishment. The SS didn’t report this event to Berlin. They didn’t want them to know. And we never had to march on a Sunday again.’
* * *
*1 Though killer disease was widespread in the camp, prisoners rarely complained of colds or flu. When fleeing the Germans on the Eastern Front, Ida Grinberg, a Red Army doctor, slept on branches of fur trees laid on the snow. ‘We didn’t get colds then either.’ Ida also observed that men were usually much weaker physically, ‘and I believe they had a weaker will than women’.
*2 Kulaks were prosperous peasants; many of them were liquidated in the 1920s and 1930s during the Bolshevik drive to collectivise farms.
*3 Ilena Barsukova’s is a rare description of women crying. ‘I saw very few tears in the camp. For some reason people didn’t cry,’ said Anna Stekolnikova.
Chapter 18
Doctor Treite
The Red Army women need not have feared being sent to the Siemenslager. Under the terms of their imprisonment they couldn’t work outside the walls; nor could they do munitions work, as they were likely to protest. Siemens didn’t want troublemakers at their plant, which by the summer of 1943 was performing exceptionally well. So pleased was the Siemens boss Rudolf Bingel with output at Ravensbrück that in 1943 he donated 100,000 Reichsmarks to Himmler’s ‘circle of friends’.
Since the factory opened a year before it had tripled in size, and more than 600 women now worked twelve-hour shifts, including a night shift. They made copper coils, switches, microphones, telephone equipment and condensers, which poured off conveyor belts to be sent to the finishing shop and then packed up and loaded onto railway wagons. The women had little idea what these parts were used for. ‘We thought, is this for a plane or for a gun?’ said the Bulgarian inmate Georgia Tanewa.
A railway network had been laid through the woods, linking the Siemens plant to a jetty on the lake and to the main line running through Fürstenberg. Plans were also being made to link the plant to a young offender institution for delinquent girls which was situated close by, in an area of woodland known as Uckermark. Run by the judiciary police, not the SS, the Uckermark Youth Camp, as it became known, held up to 400 adolescents said to be morally or sexually depraved. Prisoners in Ravensbrück said the girls had mostly committed petty offences: many had just been thrown off trains for not having a ticket. Young and strong, they were bound to make good slave labourers, so Siemens had struck a deal to build a factory outpost at the Youth Camp too. After a year at Ravensbrück the Siemens management and SS were working hand in hand. Important men in civilian clothes appeared at the plant, including the top Siemens director Gustav Leifer, another member of the SS, who visited Fritz Suhren in his camp headquarters, while Suhren had visited the Siemens headquarters in Berlin. Otto Grade, the Ravensbrück plant director, was on excellent terms with Suhren, and was often seen around the main camp. Working under him were scores of Siemens civilian staff—technicians, managers and instructors.
Not everything at the plant had run smoothly. The management had clamped down on contacts between civilian staff and prisoners. An Austrian-Czech communist, Anni Vavak, employed at Siemens, had tried to talk to the civilian staff to alert them to the atrocities. ‘I absolutely wanted to get in touch with these civilians,’ said Anni. ‘I wanted these German workers to pass on what I told them so people in Germany would know what happened at the camp.’
A handful of the senior managers seemed decent. One Siemens man used to hide a newspaper under his table so the prisoners might find it, and another civilian offered to post prisoners’ letters. However, most Siemens civilians were ‘coarse’ and were ‘repulsed’ by the prisoners, so Anni had failed to win any over. Most were also convinced Nazis. The head of the Spulerei (winding department), Lombacher, was ‘both a Nazi and a sadist’, and he was not alone. Even the kinder ones changed their behaviour after new directives from the Siemens management, barring all contacts. One such directive came into Anni’s hands, ‘which I screwed up in my fist and told myself that the political prisoners rose way above this rabble’.
Anni didn’t say what the notice said, but we know the company thinking on fraternising from another management note, which is on file. Frustrated at a stoppage caused by a shortage of parts, the manager complained: ‘It is incomprehensible that prisoners should in a sense be paid for warming themselves and resting in our nice clean production facilities. Feelings of sympathy are inappropriate in these cases and everyone must constantly suppress them in himself.’
Siemens managers had also complained about ‘feelings of sympathy’ shown by Hertha Ehlert, one of the first women guards at Siemens, who liked to give food to the prisoners, and had therefore been removed and sent by the SS to work at the death camp of Majdanek in Poland. Ehlert was replaced at Siemens by Christine Holthöwer, who was known as a beater, and a spy for Ludwig Ramdohr.
As the Siemens camp grew, new guards were recruited from Siemens’s Berlin staff. Lured here with promises of more money and food, some were homesick and hated the place. ‘I wanted to go back straight away,’ said one woman, ‘but they said I had signed so I had to stay. It was hard at first. For the first eight days I couldn’t swallow a thing. But then you get hardened to it.’
The declining health of the prisoners, caused by the appalling camp diet and overcrowded blocks, meant a high turnover of Siemens workers, but there was nothing to be done about it, as under the contract between Siemens and the SS, the SS had sole responsibility for the women’s food and accommodation. As one Siemens official put it: ‘As the housing and food were assured by the camp all measures on our part were superfluous.’ Nor did Siemens have to care about workers’ health: under its contract with the SS the company had the right to strike off its lists any sick women, along with any unsuitable women who had misbehaved or failed to meet the quota. Otto Grade, the plant director, made sure the number of rejected prisoners was always noted on his monthly reports to Berlin, as well as the number of new replacements.
The workers’ health was also damaged by the long march to and from the factory that they underwent four times a day. The distance from the gates to the wire of the Siemens plant was less than a mile, but for the prisoners it felt far longer. With ill-fitting wooden clogs they marched first across the wet sand or bog beside the lake, then plunged into woods and up the steep hill as feet sank into
soil and slid on wet leaves. In snow and ice the women slipped and fell.
The Siemens workers left the camp—after standing for Appell—with only their coffee for breakfast. ‘We reached Siemens frozen and began working with stiff fingers, stomach always empty, head sleepy,’ said Anni Vavak. To make matters worse, when the prisoners arrived, the civilians were often eating their breakfast. ‘Under our eyes, knowing we were starved, they took out all their delicious food, which we didn’t even know the name of any more,’ recalled Minny Bontemps, another Siemens woman.
On return for lunch the women just had time to grab a bowl of watery soup of swedes and two or three potatoes, but the push for quotas meant that the guards would chase them out before they’d eaten, driving them back up the hill shouting: ‘Hands down, gobs shut, idiots, filthy good-for-nothing bitches!’ At the end of the day, the exhausted women walked back again, and as dark fell the Siemens night shift set off, working through from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. without even a slice of bread.
Siemens women suffered severely from boils, swollen legs, diarrhoea and TB, but the long hours of repetitive tasks, and constant pressure to meet the quota, produced an illness of its own: nervous twitching. ‘After three months the women were a bundle of nerves and couldn’t go on,’ said Irma Trksak, an Austrian-Czech prisoner. ‘Many started wanting to dig sand or even empty ditches.’ Those with these nervous twitches were soon listed as unsuitable and quickly removed from the lists.
