Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Given the ICRC’s refusal to accept a role in helping the Jews and other camp prisoners, Burckhardt’s appeal for a personal friend was incriminating, and he removed his letters from the ICRC files after the war. Some of Himmler’s replies, however, have survived, and show Burckhardt appealed to the Reichsführer over Karolina at least three times. In the summer of 1942 he wrote asking Himmler where Karolina was being held, to which Himmler replied saying he would find out. In autumn 1942 Burckhardt even asked Himmler for a meeting to discuss her case. This intervention showed special hypocrisy on Burckhardt’s part, given that at precisely that time he was advising his Red Cross colleagues, at their landmark meeting in November 1942, to remain silent about those in the camps.

  As a result of Burckhardt’s letters Himmler obviously realised Lanckorońska was a valuable hostage, and from the moment she reached Ravensbrück he made sure she was treated exceptionally well. Her cell was fitted with the best white linen, and decked with fresh flowers. She was to be known in the camp under the pseudonym ‘Frau Lange’, and allowed to order books from the SS library and to roam around the bunker and the garden beneath her cell, chatting to inmates and guards. It was thanks to this last privilege that Karolina, a colourful and controversial character, was later able to give a picture of life in the Ravensbrück bunker.

  Amongst the first prisoners she encountered were two clairvoyants who had been punished for predicting the future for SS clients, and in a nearby cell was Gerda Quernheim, who appeared to Karolina to be a ‘gentle and well-mannered girl’ who ‘at the first sight of my food parcels took a great fancy to me and told me absolutely everything she knew’. Quernheim even answered Karolina’s questions about the abortions, admitting that it was a ‘nasty subject’.

  Karolina also met two German guards, one of them imprisoned for stealing prisoners’ clothes from the Effektenkammer and the other for lesbianism, which Karolina said was ‘widespread among the German women in the camp’. The same lesbian told Karolina about Ramdohr’s special prisoners, locked up without light or food, and she gossiped about the bunker guard Margarete Mewes, who had three children, ‘each by a different father’, and about Dorothea Binz, ‘the real power in the camp’, but only because she was having an affair with Suhren’s deputy, Bräuning. The two of them were often seen holding hands when prisoners were beaten on the Bock, said the woman, adding that the silk underwear hanging out to dry beside the bunker belonged to Binz, who had stolen it from a prisoner, and she knew which prisoner, but would not tell. Another of the bunker guards was ‘built like a Valkyrie’ but was sympathetic and helped Karolina to smuggle food to the dungeon prisoners and to the two clairvoyants.

  Quite often Suhren used to pop in and ask if there was anything else the countess wanted, offering to order books for her from the SS library, though Karolina said she preferred Wordsworth and Tacitus to the camp’s Nazi tracts, so the commandant arranged for her to order those in.*2

  Walking in the small flowerbed outside, Karolina observed the Fürstenberg spire and wondered how it was that her ‘beloved German culture had been so degraded’. Her musings were always spoiled by the smell from the chimney, which the German lesbian later told her came from burning hair.

  Out in the garden she chatted about the classics to Christiane Mabire, often watched over by Dorothea Binz, lounging in a nearby deckchair. Lanckorońska’s observations of Binz strike a different tone to almost every other prisoner. To the countess she posed no threat, seeming almost lonely, and adopting a subservient manner towards Himmler’s ‘Frau Lange’. She would chat about this and that, and told the Polish countess one day that she was a cook by profession, lived locally and was twenty-two years old.

  Not only did Karolina have no fear of Binz, her dog did not frighten her either. It seemed to Karolina to be a sad and scrawny mongrel, and not the monstrous hound described by other prisoners. It always seemed hungry when Karolina passed, and flung itself at her, sniffing persistently at her pocket in the hope of finding some food. ‘Isn’t it nice to see how much he loves you,’ said Binz one day, with a smile.

  We don’t know if Karolina ever met Himmler on his visits, but she describes his ‘bleak eyes, staring down from behind their pince-nez’, from a portrait on the wall in the bunker office. While she was in the bunker, he ordered a box of his prize tomatoes to be sent daily to her cell.

  —

  As he left the camp, Himmler would have observed the prisoners assembled for Appell. He may well have noticed how international Ravensbrück had recently become—letters stamped on prisoners’ triangles denoted twenty-two countries represented. He must also have noticed a very large number of yellow stars.

  Fifteen months earlier, Himmler had boasted to Hitler that Germany and all its concentration camps were judenfrei—free of Jews. But theory and practice conflicted again, because lined up on the Ravensbrück Appellplatz were now at least 400 Jews: the mixed-race women from Auschwitz and the ‘protected’ Jews—nationals of Germany’s allies or of neutrals—who had been spared the gas chamber, at least for now. The majority of the ‘protected’ Jews were of Hungarian, Romanian and Turkish origin, and had been living in the Netherlands or Belgium. Not only were Jewish women from these countries standing there on the Appellplatz, but so were their children—the very ‘avengers’ whom Himmler claimed in his Posen speech had ‘disappeared’. One of these ‘avengers’ was Stella Kugelman, a four-year-old child with big black eyes.

  —

  Stella remembers little of her arrival at the camp, except that it was night, and her mother, Rosa, collapsed as soon as she stepped off the train. Stella also has only fleeting memories of her life in the camp itself. Paradoxically, however, she knows a great deal about her first four years, before she arrived at Ravensbrück, because she has her mother’s diary, in which Rosa described almost every day of Stella’s life from the day she was born until the Gestapo came.

  Rosa Kugelman (née Klionski) was Lithuanian, and her husband Louis Kugelman, a Spaniard—both were Jews. Rosa and Louis both lived in London during the 1920s, where they met. Then they moved to Antwerp, where Stella was born one month before the outbreak of war, on 29 July 1939. Eighteen months later the Gestapo came to the door—the first event in her life that Stella remembers. She recalls a car driving up ‘and police telling us to pack our things and go. I remember it was a bright sunny day.’

  First the family were taken to a camp in Belgium, where Rosa and Stella were separated from Stella’s father. He was sent to Buchenwald, while they were taken by train to Ravensbrück. Stella thinks she remembers saying to her mother in the train: ‘Let’s run away.’ Her mother was already very sick with TB and too weak to attempt escape, so she stroked Stella’s long black plaited hair and tried to smile.

  It was the sight of the dogs on arrival at Fürstenberg that made Rosa shriek, thinks Stella. And when the truncheons hit her mother on the platform she collapsed and was immediately taken away, but Stella didn’t know where.

  Left alone, someone must have taken her hand and led her on, she thinks, because somehow, later, she was in a block. Her plaits had been cut off. There were other children there, and many were very sick. Older women looked after her. And Stella remembers that when her hair grew back, a French woman combed it.

  * * *

  *1 Once in England, Isa’s brother Erich had begun to broadcast against Hitler on the BBC and also wrote propaganda leaflets which were dropped over Germany by British and American planes. ‘As a result of this,’ Isa said, ‘I was arrested and put into Ravensbrück. My father and mother and another brother were also arrested and went to Sachsenhausen.’

  *2 When Karolina’s copy of Tacitus arrived, Binz informed her that the commandant had confiscated it because it contained ‘Catholic prayers’. Puzzled, Karolina asked to see the book, which was in fact Petrarch’s sonnets. She explained to Binz these were not Catholic prayers but love poems, and she was allowed to have the book. ‘So ended what I am sure was Binz’s only e
ncounter with Petrarch,’ commented Karolina later. ‘Presumably the phrase “Madonna mia” gave rise to the error.’

  Chapter 22

  Falling

  ‘Raus raus, Franzosensäue. Links rechts, links rechts,’ shout the guards, but the French can’t march. Only Christiane the general’s daughter can keep in step; most don’t even try. As they leave quarantine the women are herded down to their new blocks at the back of the camp. ‘Links rechts, links rechts.’ A straggler is kicked. ‘It’s the maquis down here,’ says Denise as they approach Block 27. Some call this line of blocks—27 to 31—the slums. With peeling paint and broken windows, they stand so far back in the compound that they are built on sand.

  As they enter, the women recoil. Arms blotched with sores reach for the evening soup. In quarantine the French had at first refused the soup. Four weeks later they grab bowls along with the rest. Suzanne’s bowl is snatched. She complains to the woman serving, a Pole, who answers in French: ‘So what are you going to eat with then?’ Suzanne is shoved aside. ‘Typical Slav,’ says Denise. ‘Just because she’s been here four years already and we haven’t.’

  Someone shouts at the thief, a Russian, who shouts back, ‘Ne ponimayu, ne ponimayu.’ The French girl throws herself at the Russian, shouting, ‘Ne ponimayu yourself, you brute,’ but someone else explains that ‘Ne ponimayu’ means ‘I don’t understand’.

  ‘This is not so funny,’ says Christiane. A Stubova tells Suzanne to go and look in the bins for an old tin discarded from a prisoner’s food parcel. ‘So others get food parcels?’

  The French stare and the other slum-dwellers stare back: ‘A bowl for a piece of bread?’

  ‘Du Scheisse Französinnen,’ shouts someone in the crowd. ‘A nice welcome,’ whispers Christiane, not noticing that a woman dressed as a man is watching her with hungry eyes. These are the Jules they heard about in quarantine. The Belgian Amanda Staessart takes her mother’s arm, promising they’ll stay together. Their numbers are consecutive, so they can’t be split up.

  Denise exclaims, ‘Look at that’ as she catches sight of another group of repellent creatures, but these speak some sort of French. They are what the jeunes filles bien élevées call les volontaires—French women who had ‘volunteered’ to come and work in Germany. The volontaires had been brought to Ravensbrück too, accused perhaps of a ‘crime’—stealing bread or having sex with a German—or more likely to be used for slave labour in the subcamps. ‘So we are in with the French gangsters too,’ says Denise.

  In the next block—Block 26—the women are also lining up for soup when a guard comes in; she is young, pretty and blonde, and carries a stick. ‘She looks OK,’ says one of the French girls, then the guard shouts, ‘Ruhe du alte Sau, ruhig toi, cochon’—‘Quiet, you old pig, quiet, you pig’—and the pretty pale face snarls and her stick comes down on one of the French ‘volunteers’. The girl had tried to style her hair in a knot on top of her head.

  ‘Französin?’ She nods. ‘Who is this?’ asks the blonde guard, turning to her interpreter, a prisoner, who gives a name then explains in French, trembling, that hair must be pulled back and flat, and anyone who disobeys will be beaten to death. Observing the effect of these words on the French faces, the guard turns and leaves. The Polish Blockova shouts: ‘Achtung, alle ins Bett’—‘Attention, everyone in bed.’

  So tightly packed are the bunks that to climb to the third tier you clamber like a monkey. At night it’s impossible to reach the lavatories without walking over hundreds of others, and many don’t bother, as is obvious from the stench.

  Denise, Suzanne and Christiane share a single mattress. There is one blanket between them and they lie in the mould left in the straw by the night workers who slept here in the day. Christiane’s nose nearly touches the roof. If she straightens an arm she touches the French peasant in the next bunk who is shouting for her daughter.

  The next they know is the Polish Blockova shouting, ‘Raus, raus, Achtung,’ and the siren screaming for morning Appell.

  —

  So large is the camp now that the waking siren has been brought forward to 3 a.m. It takes a strong hand to beat these women out of bunks, washrooms and outdoors by 3.30. The 959 new French arrivals line up to be counted with their comrades in arms: Paris, Montluc, Fresnes, Dijon and Toulon, standing motionless under the stars. Their triangles are red, for political prisoners, and their numbers run from 27030 to 27988. But they have not been given their ‘F’ for French, as the Poles have been given a ‘P’ and the Russians an ‘R’, or, for the Red Army, ‘S.U.’ This is deliberate, they say. The Germans want to crush French national pride. But the group is so large it soon gets its own name and becomes the vingt-sept mille, referring to the numbers given to this transport, all in the 27000s.

  ‘The bitches,’ one of the French girls whispers as guards appear wrapped in thick black capes, their blonde curls impeccable even at this hour.

  It is cold and getting colder. Christiane is tall enough to see right down the Lagerstrasse over the heads of 18,000 others, lined up in an infinite throng of ghostly figures. Annie de Montfort has a shaved head, bare to the sky, and sparkling with a thin covering of frost. The red flame of the crematorium chimney lights up the end of the Lagerstrasse.

  ‘Die Nase nach vorne, Franzosensäue,’ yells a guard—‘Noses to the front, French sows.’

  ‘Les vaches!’ retort the ‘volunteers’.

  Guards thump those who stamp their feet for warmth. A blast of freezing air cuts through the women’s thin clothing, then a whisper passes down the line, ‘Stand firm, les Françaises,’ but someone is missing and the count starts all over again as a row of bodies collapses, one by one, ‘like ninepins felled by some invisible ball’. Among those down is the librarian from the Quartier Latin.

  The missing woman is finally dragged out. Everyone watches her defend herself with flailing limbs against a corpulent figure with a red armband who grabs her by the hair, turns her over, pulls out a whip and gives her four lashes on her back. The woman no longer moves. Is she dead? The figure disappears into the darkness.

  ‘It’s Thury. Thury? Is she a guard? No, she’s another prisoner.’ The women are horrified to find they are guarded by prisoners too. An Austrian, Elisabeth Thury is head of the ‘camp police’. ‘La vache,’ say the French, staring at Thury.*1

  From another direction comes a ‘crow’ on a bicycle, and as she pedals she sees a woman stick out her tongue at her. It is an old French peasant woman, and she’s yelling in a Pyrenean dialect that not even the other French can understand. The crow dismounts and kicks her, and she falls. ‘Alte Sau. Franzosensau.’

  A desk is erected on the Lagerstrasse where Binz sits to check the count. Eventually, returning to their block, the vingt-sept mille are stiff and silent, and the sobs start. An old woman implores Denise to rub her hands very gently as they hurt so. Amanda Staessart notices that her mother’s hair has gone quite white.

  No sooner have they drunk their ‘coffee’ than the women are marched out again to join the Verfügs, casual workers, for the labour roll call.

  The Parisian trio are set to shovelling sand. Denise suggests they try to build sand castles to help distract them, and as they walk back at the end of the day they feel fit enough to march around the block ‘for no other reason than to show off’. Other prisoners observe the French in astonishment, murmuring: ‘Französinnen.’

  —

  There had always been ‘slums’ of a sort in the camp—blocks more cramped and dirtier than others, usually towards the back, and occupied by asocials, Gypsies and others at the bottom of the heap. In early 1944 the slum area was so big it became official; blocks 27 to 32 were cordoned off behind barbed wire. Block 27, built for 200 prisoners, now held 600, and more were arriving every day.

  Most Russians and Ukrainians were brought to the slum blocks, as well as the Jews who were arriving again at the camp. All the French were brought here automatically. There were no exceptions: the French coun
tesses, teachers, generals’ daughters, ‘volunteers’ and prostitutes were all ‘Franzosensäue’.

  Suhren had made sure to put Poles in charge of them as their Blockovas and Stubovas, thinking that they detested the French for leaving Poland undefended in 1939. Four years ago it was the Poles who had been at the bottom of the heap, hated and despised, but over time many had prised themselves out of the slums, and it was the French who were hated now—perhaps even more than the Poles ever were.

  The real camp aristocrats at the top end of the camp kept away from the slums because of filth and disease, and also because of vigilante gangs.*2 Even the guards had largely withdrawn from the area, leaving it in the hands of the prisoner police. Inside the blocks though it was often the powerful Puffmütter (brothel madams), like ‘Clap’ Wanda, who ran things.

  Anja Lundholm, a German prisoner sent to Ravensbrück in 1944, wrote later about a woman nicknamed Clap Wanda, who had worked in a military brothel before the war and was famous in the camp for infecting a whole troop of German soldiers with gonorrhoea. But Wanda had not been arrested for spreading disease, but because she strangled her newborn son, threw him in a bin and called out: ‘Here’s your present, my Führer.’

  Characters like Wanda were useful to the authorities as informers, and also for helping pick out women for the brothels. She was told to look for new arrivals who were ‘healthy and well-fed’. According to Anja Lundholm, Clap Wanda herself was ‘flabby, with a bloated face and repellent appearance, always surrounded by a clique of submissive women—all German black or green triangles whom she bossed around’.

  Submissive women of the kind that Wanda might take under her wing were arriving every week at the camp, usually more German ‘asocials’ made homeless by the bombing. One such was Lydia Thelen. Arrested by police in 1943 for loitering in the waiting room at Cologne railway station, she told interrogators that her husband had served in the Sudetenland offensive and was now away serving in France. She said that their apartment had been destroyed in the Allied bombing and everything she had was lost. She lived on money from the war damages office. But the city police suspected Lydia of prostitution. They said she was a danger to the Volk and sent her to Ravensbrück, where she died in October 1944.