Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  At night Clap Wanda would gather her clique around her to tell stories, Anja Lundholm recalled. ‘Wanda liked to be entertained by stories of love, sex or tragedy,’ and Anja herself became one of those storytellers. She was so good at it that Wanda rewarded her with bits of food, which made Anja hated and envied by others in the block.

  The French general’s daughter, Christiane de Cuverville, who lived alongside such characters in Block 27 and lives today in the exclusive 16th district of Paris, visibly shudders as she remembers women such as Clap Wanda. ‘Yes, there were women like that—quelle horreur.’ It was la pagaille—bedlam—she says, and then she folds her long legs under her, laughs and talks about the Jules.

  ‘The first time I was propositioned by a Jules she offered me a piece of chocolate. They had trousers and jackets and walked around with cigarettes in their mouths looking for a fight or for sex. Block 27 was impossible—affreux, dreadful. This crowd you can’t imagine—the Russians, the Gypsies, and the criminals from German jails, les Jules, les Charlies.’

  —

  After the first few days in the sand the Parisians’ hands hardened as their skin turned grey—their clothes, their mess tins, mattresses, full of sand. Many of the sand gang now had diarrhoea because their stomachs simply couldn’t digest the raw swede soup, which according to Denise Dufournier was ‘a yellowish liquid giving off a noxious smell’. Cystitis spread too, because there was no water to drink—only the ‘black stuff called coffee’.

  Within weeks almost all the French of the vingt-sept mille transport were covered in boils and several had succumbed to TB. Those who said on arrival that they wouldn’t get lice were scratching sores.

  Some believed that if they could just get work indoors things might improve. Everyone knew those chosen for Siemens were better fed to eke more work out of them, but they didn’t look much better off, coming off the night shift ‘like ghosts at dawn’. For the three Parisians, Denise, Christiane and Suzanne, the idea of making German munitions was the worst horror of all, so they kept their heads down and stuck with digging sand.

  Others simply couldn’t bear the torture of Appell. One morning a woman standing close to Amanda Staessart collapsed. When a guard set her dog on the stricken woman, Amanda cried, ‘What are you doing, you brute?’, so she was sent to the Strafblock and put to work shovelling excrement from the latrines, along with the Countess Yvonne de La Rochefoucauld.

  The countess had been working in the Revier as a nurse when she was given an order she didn’t understand, so she shouted back, ‘The English are coming, so you’d better learn English. The Germans have lost the war.’ She might have got off with a punch, but Carmen Mory, Ramdohr’s informer, overheard and reported her. The French said Mory looked like a figure from Hieronymus Bosch.

  —

  The freezing winter melted into a cold, wet spring. Water poured through the roofs of the slums, and at work, sodden sand caked on women’s feet. Denise, Christiane and Suzanne began to hate the sand and the lake. Their legs had broken out in boils, but they wouldn’t go to the Revier. They had seen the doctor—a new man, called Orendi—when they first arrived, and would never go back. He clearly loathed the French. When they went for their inspection on arrival he had made them undress and stand outside in the freezing cold ‘as if it were the most natural thing in the world to undress in a public place, in the open air, in temperatures below zero,’ wrote Denise. The SS dentist, Martin Hellinger, checked teeth for gold ‘so he could recover it later’.

  All the French women’s periods had stopped, and some noticed symptoms of early menopause. Gynaecological tests were carried out to see who had venereal disease, and the same instruments were used without cleansing for each woman, so many caught diseases from others. Some were made to swallow a substance that made them break out all over in septic spots.

  Older women and the very sick went back to the hospital, nevertheless, in the vain hope of treatment. ‘Where do you work?’ Orendi would ask them, and if the woman had a job at Siemens or in the sewing shop she might get an Innendienst, a permit to work indoors.*3

  —

  Usually, however, at his Revier ‘surgery’ Orendi just walked past the sick or kicked the patients out. ‘Es ist für das Reich. Sie müssen arbeiten gehen, krank oder nicht.’ (‘It is for the Reich. You must go to work, sick or not.’) On other days, he walked past the queue of sick, turned and grinned, drew his gun from his holster and pretended to take aim and fire. He laughed and shouted: ‘It would be better if I just shoot a few.’ The women screamed and he shouted again: ‘Why not? You’ll die anyway.’

  When Amanda Staessart was taken in sick from the latrine gang she heard that her mother was in the Revier.

  Someone said: ‘Come and see your mother, she is very bad.’ So I was taken to her and she said I’ll get better if you give me a little milk. And then she died. I stayed with her. I stayed for hours. A nurse came and told me: ‘Take your mother away.’ I had to drag her to the washroom.

  Yes, I did it myself. I had to drag her. I don’t know how I did it. And I stayed with her in the washroom until the truck came. It was a truck with thirty dead bodies on it. And they put my mother naked on top and took her away.

  Every nationality in the camp seems to have noticed how quickly the French began to fall. Some said they had only themselves to blame. The Czechs grumbled that if only the French had learned to wash they could have prevented the scabies, the swollen legs and the boils. The French were afraid of washing in cold water, said one Czech woman, ‘but we Czechs had known nothing else before the war’. Even when they fell sick the French would pretend it wasn’t happening, and claim that they were suffering from a lack of vitamins.

  A Red Army doctor, Ida Grinberg, noticed the French ‘were very emotional and shouted a lot’. Others said the French spent too much time trying to beautify themselves by putting grease on their faces, or making bows out of rags or arranging their clothes in stylish ways. The Russians remembered that they often managed to look ‘quite chic’. Some of the old hands noted that the French had no organisation, no leadership. In any case, they had no time to organise before their health began to fail, and then it was too late.

  The French had no support on arrival: no French Blockovas to watch out for them, no one in the kitchen to slip them extra food. They had no influence at all; they had arrived too late, when the good jobs had gone. And anyway, they didn’t want the Germans’ jobs and spurned other prisoners for working for the SS, like Countess Karolina Lanckorońska, who became Blockova of Block 27.

  —

  After several months in the privileged bunker, Karolina Lanckorońska had requested to return to the normal camp, believing that her place was with the other Poles, but instead she was sent to rule over the French. At first she looked forward to meeting other women of ‘high culture’, as she knew the French to be. Instead, she complained, she found ‘a rabble of women who refused to do anything to help themselves’.

  Each morning a gang from every block went to the Brotkammer (bread store) to collect the block’s bread, but the French could never get there in time. ‘One had to literally throw them out of the block or we all went hungry,’ said Lanckorońska, though she conceded that the containers were heavy and the French prisoners were weak. ‘But there was nothing to be done about it.’

  Furthermore, the French ‘set out to cause trouble’. Getting them out for roll call was ‘a hideous affair’ because French ‘agitators’ deliberately confused the count by whispering ‘Form ranks of nine, form ranks of eleven’ when they knew perfectly well it was supposed to be ranks of ten. Binz would turn up and say to Lanckorońska, ‘Natürlich die Französinnen!’ and she would order two hours’ standing punishment, ‘which meant another few cases of pneumonia’.

  No prisoners in the camp observed the new French arrivals more intently than Germaine Tillion, the French ethnologist, and her friend Anise Girard, who had both spent four months in the camp by the time their compatrio
ts of the vingt-sept mille arrived. ‘When they first entered the camp the sight was so optimistic and gay that it gave us hope—they were a ball of oxygen,’ said Anise Girard. ‘But at the same time we were full of dread. They arrived thinking the war was over. They were so unprepared. It was tragic what happened.’

  By early 1944, however, Germaine and Anise were arguably even worse off than the newcomers. In February both were assigned to a mysterious new block, Block 32. It lay in the very back of the camp, near the slum blocks, but was even more isolated, set right back against a rear wall. About 300 women were selected without warning for Block 32 and told they would have to obey an entirely new, draconian, set of rules.

  No contact was allowed with those in Block 32; there was a no-go area around it and it had its own cordon of barbed wire. Prisoners there were not allowed outside the camp walls and forbidden to send or receive mail. None of them knew it, but they had been designated as NN—Nacht und Nebel—which meant they were supposed to literally disappear into the night and the fog, and nobody would ever know where.

  The Norwegian visitor Wanda Hjort had first discovered the existence of this sinister category in 1943 when she heard that Norwegian prisoners held at Natzweiler in Alsace were designated NN, and she passed the information on to the International Red Cross. But nobody knew that in January 1944 an NN block was opened for women at Ravensbrück.

  Hitler passed the so-called ‘Night and Fog’ decree in 1942, and intended it to terrorise and deter resisters in western European countries. In the first years of Nazi occupation, resistance ringleaders were executed, but Hitler thought that created martyrs. Under the NN decree, dangerous resisters were to be sent to concentration camps instead, and executed in secret, their names and whereabouts never to be made known. In this way, Hitler intended that their families and friends would suffer as well, by living in perpetual uncertainty.

  Some time in the winter of 1944 the same order was applied to a small number of Ravensbrück women, mostly prisoners from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, as well as a few Yugoslavs and Poles. Also held in the NN block were the Red Army women and the Polish rabbits.

  Neither Germaine nor Anise understood why the rules of their imprisonment suddenly changed. ‘It all seemed random,’ said Anise. ‘Why did they shave one head and not another? Why shoot one woman one day and another the next? We never knew. In the end we understood that there was no logic to anything they did. Our stories were not much different to other French who arrived.’

  Germaine’s mother, Emilie Tillion, who had arrived with the vingt-sept mille, was not designated NN, though she and Germaine were in the same resistance cell. It had horrified Germaine to learn her mother had arrived at Ravensbrück, and now she couldn’t cross the no-go area to see her.

  At first the NN women were afraid. ‘We realised they wanted us to stay inside the walls so that we were available for execution,’ said Anise. But then nothing much seemed to happen, and they found there were advantages to being NN. The prisoners were all ‘political’ and well motivated, able to keep an orderly block—‘We didn’t need to be told how to queue for food.’ And those kept inside were spared the hardest labour. Germaine Tillion even found time to continue her ethnological research: instead of studying African tribes she started to study the camp.

  ‘What you must understand about Germaine is she had une énorme tête [a terrific mind],’ said Anise, who first met Germaine on the platform of the Gare de Lyon as both were waiting to leave for Germany.

  I came onto the platform and I saw this small woman with a very large bag—like a bag of potatoes. She told me that inside was her thesis on African tribes. She was planning to work on it in Germany, she said, but of course she had no idea where we were going, so she said she would find out and she pointed at one of the German guards. She said: ‘Look, Anise, I’m going to show you how to behave towards a savage. I’m going to ask him where we’re being taken. Germans love nature and animals. I’m going to show him a pretty photograph of a sand fox and see if he’ll talk.’ She took the photograph up to the German. Naturally he knew nothing and said go away—she spoke abominable German. But he loved the sand fox. And he wasn’t bad. He even offered to take a letter to my mother and I found later he had done it.

  Anise had planned to escape that day. ‘I had made sure I had good shoes for running and a ticket for the metro. I could have done it.’ I wondered if she regretted not trying.

  To escape you have to have a lot of courage. Leave the group and take risks. And I was afraid they would take my brothers. I knew if you escaped they took your family. But, yes, I have a sense of guilt for not doing it. And then there was Germaine too. I was big and strong. She was very small. She was not someone for escaping. She was a thinking person, not a runner.

  So Anise helped Germaine carry her papers onto the train, and when they were in the NN block she helped her again. After suffering from diphtheria on arrival, Germaine had a limp. ‘So she leant on me. That’s when they started calling us Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.’

  Germaine’s research on African tribes was confiscated immediately on arrival, but her studies of Ravensbrück were soon absorbing her instead. Early on she noted that the most frail and isolated prisoners were more déracinées, rootless, than any she had seen in Africa. The gap between the haves and have-nots—the Schmuckstücke—was wider than the gap between the Queen of England and a London street urchin.

  Soon Germaine began to collect figures about arrivals and departures and tried to count the numbers of the dead—‘and the living dead,’ said Anise. She quickly grasped that this was a place of slow extermination. She knew that the departure of the Majdanek transport on 3 February had been deliberately timed to make room for the new shipment of the vingt-sept mille that arrived later the same day. ‘We were the new stock,’ said Anise.

  Germaine also heard that black transports were continuing to leave the camp. The room in the Revier called the Idiotenstübchen was regularly being emptied. Trucks came for the ‘idiots’ at night, but no one knew where the trucks went or who the idiots were.

  Several prisoners working in the Revier were by now collecting information about the black transports too. They spoke of women being thrown on lorries half naked, their number traced in purple on their backs. The destination of these transports was more mysterious than ever. Majdanek, destination of the last major death convoy, had now been evacuated.

  After the uproar caused by the Majdanek transport, the convoys were being arranged with much greater secrecy. So well hidden were these smaller black transports that even today, little is known about where they went. A German nurse, Schwester Gerda Schröder, who arrived in April 1944, said in evidence later: ‘I knew that the mentally deficient went on transports and that they were exterminated, and I believe that the place of extermination was not far from Ravensbrück’. The camp informer Carmen Mory gave evidence suggesting that some of the black transports never even left the camp.

  On the night of one February black transport, Mory was being held in a cell in the bunker, and overheard guards talking. ‘From my window in the bunker I could see the crematorium chimney, which suddenly began to smoke,’ she said. She heard an SS man talking to a woman guard about the smoke and saying: ‘They’re killing off the women from the Idiotenstübchen.’ The guard asked how they went about it. The SS man replied that every evening a lorry went to the Idiotenstübchen and women were chosen and driven to the crematorium. There they were killed ‘in some way’ and burned.

  It came as news to Mory that the women had been killed right here at the camp. She sought to verify it when she returned to her block, and asked another prisoner, her fellow informer Giolantha Prokesch, what had happened. According to Mory, Prokesch confirmed much of the story and also told her that before the victims were taken away a medical commission had arrived to make selections: ‘The victims were first of all checked by a medical team, including Dr Treite, his boss Dr Trommer and a psychiatrist from
Berlin. For over six hours the doctors selected sixty names, placing a black cross against each.’

  Prokesch told Mory how during ten days in February a lorry had come every evening and taken away seven or eight idiots; sometimes it had come twice in one evening. When Mory asked how the women died, Prokesch said she had been told that the first groups were beaten to death and then burned. But Suhren was worried that the beating made too much noise, so the rest were killed first by injection and burned. Lists of the victims were promptly destroyed.

  —

  By April the French were dying faster than any other national group. Germaine Tillion would say later that the reason was simple: they couldn’t eat the food, so they lost their strength, and with it the will to live. Karolina Lanckorońska observed that there was something ‘hideous’ about the way the French suddenly started to die.

  They perished without a struggle. No death throes. Often in their sleep. Increasingly often at dawn. Just before roll call. A neighbour would come running with the news. ‘Madame X has died.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I don’t know. I know we were chatting together at dawn. I got up and now I’ve just found her body, already cooling.’

  * * *

  *1 Elisabeth Thury, a social democrat and journalist, had been arrested in Vienna on the first day of the war for anti-Nazi activity. At Ravensbrück, she had been picked for work sorting out the filing system in the camp clothes store, and graduated to head of the camp police in 1943. Isa Vermehren, the bunker hostage, said Thury was ‘power-hungry and vulgar’ and her ‘blows were feared’. She had ‘a big head, grey hair in a men’s style’ and sometimes conducted a camp choir ‘with savage sentimentality’. Others said Thury managed to protect prisoners from a certain amount of SS violence.