by Sarah Helm
Maria Moldenhawer may have been thinking of Jacqueline d’Alincourt, one of the groupe de comtesses, who in the early summer of 1944 had the ‘audacity’ to oppose the authorities’ attempts to send French prisoners to work in brothels.
In the summer of 1944 Himmler’s three new camp brothels were up and running, but the shortage of good recruits had become acute; the pool of German asocials arriving at Ravensbrück were now almost all too decrepit for the job. In December the Poles had protested over attempts to recruit them,*1 as had groups of Russians and Ukrainians. Such were the horrors now circulating about what happened in the male camp brothels that few were tempted, even if it meant getting away from Ravensbrück, and nobody believed the lies that they would be released after six months.
A woman who returned in 1944 after just six weeks in a brothel told Anja Lundholm of a horror of rape and abuse. ‘Every morning the prostitutes had to get up and let themselves be cleaned by female guards. After the coffee the SS men would come and start to rape and abuse the women. It would go on for sixteen hours a day, and only two and a half hours for lunch and dinner.’
Friedericka Jandle, an Austrian working in the Schreibstube, had a Viennese friend in the office who volunteered. ‘She believed she’d be released if she agreed. I tried to stop her but she told me, “I have nothing to lose.” Six months later she returned. She was finished. Totally used up. Destroyed. She said she wished she’d listened to me.’
The new French arrivals, however, had not yet learned the truth, so among the volontaires and the prostitutes brought from French brothels, the SS found ready recruits.
‘At first they didn’t understand, these women,’ said Jacqueline d’Alincourt. Just nineteen when she arrived—tall, elegant and of aristocratic stock—Jacqueline was horrified to discover that she shared her block not only with ‘brutal Russian peasants and thieving Gypsies’ but ‘an entire brothel from Rouen’. ‘They were uneducated,’ she told me.
They had nothing to hold on to—no religion, no values. I remember one of these poor creatures lying on her mattress saying: ‘Why am I here, why am I here?’ We in the resistance, we knew why we were there. We had a superiority of spirit, you understand. We had the desire not to die in Germany and to see France again. But these creatures had no idea why they were there. It was a question of spirit.
So we political women got together and decided to make a list of everyone who had volunteered to go. And we told them not to take this work. We said: Non! Ce n’est pas question de ça! [There’s no question of that.] We were very severe. And we watched carefully what they did.
I asked Jacqueline, meeting in her apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, if she ever knew the names of any of the French prostitutes—those from Rouen perhaps—but she looked astonished at such a suggestion and said no. ‘They didn’t write their memoirs, these women,’ she said. ‘And after the war they were certainly not invited to join any of the associations of deported women. They were not in the resistance.’
The French prostitutes in Ravensbrück are as thoroughly forgotten as the Germans; not a single published French memoir mentions the name of any of the French prostitutes there, or of the volontaires, though there were probably thousands. The resisters’ testimony may recall acts of kindness or even acts of courage from ‘a prostitute’, but even then, none thought to ask or remember the woman’s name.
The only known exception is a schoolteacher called Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre. She remembers meeting a prostitute called Simone (not her real name) who arrived in Ravensbrück in mid-1944. Like Marie-Thérèse, Simone was sent to the subcamp of Zwodau, where she was put on laundry duties, and smuggled extra garments to prisoners to keep out the cold. We only know this because one day she gave a warm vest to Marie-Thérèse, who was so grateful that she spoke a few words to Simone and the two women discovered they were both from Le Havre. Marie-Thérèse recalled:
I asked her why she was here, and she said she was not arrested for prostitution but because she’d been hiding American pilots in the brothel where she worked. There was a room above the cabaret where the Americans were hidden, while the German officers were with women in the next room. And she told me she’d fallen in love with one of the pilots, who had promised to come and find her when it was all over.
After the war, Simone had no wish to tell her story back in Le Havre for fear of being reviled as a prostitute. Yet as we now know, prostitutes played a vital role in resistance work, particularly with escape lines. Allied airmen were often hidden in brothels as they escaped from France, particularly in port cities like Le Havre and Rouen, and in the city of Toulouse, not far from the Pyrenees. Such women took as many risks as any other resistance women, yet none has ever been recognised. Some even met their future husbands this way.
Soon after she returned to France after the war, Marie-Thérèse bumped into Simone again in Le Havre and Simone told her that her American pilot had come back to find her. ‘She told me the American had asked her to go with him to America and marry him. What should she do? So I said: “You must go, of course. Go to America and start a new life!” ’ Papers held by the Le Havre town hall show that this is exactly what Simone did. In the summer of 1946 she married the serviceman whose life she saved, and went with him to America to live.
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In April 1944 the numbers rose again, with 4335 new prisoners registered and the recorded monthly death rate at the main camp put at ninety. Among recent arrivals was another group of evacuees from Majdanek, including more Red Army doctors and nurses, as well as 473 Gypsies transferred from Auschwitz. There were Italian partisans, Slovenians, Greeks, Spaniards and Danes, as well as three Egyptians and seven Chinese who, perhaps for reasons of marriage, or travel, or because they had volunteered to help the anti-Nazi resistance, found themselves swept up and brought to Ravensbrück. Two more British women had also arrived. A nanny, Mary O’Shaughnessy, was working with a family in Provence when she was arrested for helping hide Allied airmen. And a woman called Julia Barry, of Hungarian descent, was arrested on the Channel Island of Guernsey for sending signals to London about German troop movements.
By the end of the month the camp held a total of twenty-one nationalities and a babble of competing languages sounded on the Lagerstrasse; hardly anybody understood each other; the guards certainly didn’t understand the prisoners, or the prisoners the guards. The inability of guards to understand what prisoners said may explain why in the middle of 1944 prisoners started being hit more and more often across the face.
Soon after she arrived Mary O’Shaughnessy was called outside her block by a woman guard who spoke to her in German, ‘which I did not understand, and then she punched me violently on either side of my face, breaking some of my teeth. She then came back to me again as I was still standing up and hit me across the face with her fist, breaking my nose. I have seen many of the prisoners smacked across the face with whips by SS women.’ Mary added that the striking of prisoners by male and female guards ‘was too common an occurrence to be worthy of note at the time’.
It was the growing number of children in the camp that changed the atmosphere the most.
By early summer 1944 it was a common sight to see children at roll call, ‘sometimes dressed like dolls’, said Maria Moldenhawer. Some of them came with the recent Gypsy transport from Auschwitz; others were children of the ‘protected’ Jews—sixty-four in total—who had arrived from Belgium and the Netherlands. During the week the children stayed mostly in their blocks, but on Sundays they played outside, throwing stones, perhaps, or chasing each other around. Guards sometimes joined in. Or else the children would lie with their mothers, watched sadly by other mothers who were longing for their own children back at home.
Micheline Maurel, a published poet, wrote poems for mothers to help them bear their sorrow. One woman who had left two babies behind in France asked her to write a poem about her love for them, and wept over the words. Another young mother was found in tears, clutching another
of Micheline’s verses and yearning for her daughter.
Some grieving mothers adopted orphans in the camp and became their ‘camp mothers’, dressing them up in pretty clothes and jewellery, organised from the store. The French prisoner Odette Fabius adopted an orphan Gypsy girl with jet-black hair, whom she shared her mattress with. A Belgian woman called Claire van den Boom adopted Stella Kugelman, the dark-haired child who arrived from Antwerp in January, though Stella had several other camp mothers too. Later she remembered at least four.
In the early summer of 1944 Claire took Stella to see her own mother, who had been in the hospital since they arrived, and was now dying. ‘It was a grey day, like this,’ says Stella, who lives today on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Her small, simple apartment is full of dolls.
I remember Claire came and picked me up one day. And she asked me, ‘Would you like to see your mother?’ and she carried me out of the block to another block where behind a window my mother was sitting. I could see her. She looked the same to me, but she had fluffy hair.
And she’d made two little toys out of scraps of foil. We couldn’t speak through the window, but she smiled. Of course I didn’t really understand what was happening but I was very happy.
I saw her one more time. This was different. Someone came to get me—perhaps it was Claire again—and took me outside onto the Appellplatz and we stood, and she said: ‘Look, your mother is over there.’ This time I couldn’t see anyone who looked like her—a silhouette maybe.
Stella thinks now that the last occasion was just set up so that her mother could see her little girl for the last time, before she died. ‘I have a memory of Claire saying later: “You know your mother has been burned.” ’
Claire was sent away to a subcamp, and another camp mother, called Rosanne Lascroux, looked after Stella for a time. Stella liked Rosanne. ‘She was from Paris.’ Later Rosanne jotted down her memories of their friendship, and Stella was sent a copy, which she read out.
Claire was Stella’s main camp mother. She loved the little girl and was with her all the time, but she couldn’t stay with her because she was sent to work in the mines in Silesia. It was then that Stella began eating and sleeping in our bed.
I remember well how we washed her face and curled her hair. She never cried and it seemed that she understood everything.
She was exceptionally intelligent for her age. I talked to her in French and I could understand Spanish. Once she declared to me that she never wanted to see the Germans again as she knew they killed her parents.
Like all the children she was scared of the guards, especially Binz and the policewoman, Knoll,*2 who was always shouting angrily at the children.
Stella says she has no memory of most of these things. Almost all of what she knows about herself in the camp, she has been told by others.
She reads out a brief note that her mother wrote from the camp to a friend, Herr Lepage, in Belgium. Herr Lepage kept it, along with Rosa Kugelman’s rosary, and gave them both to Stella long after the war. The letter has clearly been smuggled out, as it is not on the formal camp paper. The postmark says Fürstenberg, and at the top Rosa has written her number, 25622, and Stella’s number, 25621.
Stella reads it: ‘I send you my greetings. I hope my letter will find you healthy. You will find a packet with this letter and I ask you a great favour’—but the rest of the letter has been damaged and is impossible to read. Stella doesn’t know what the packet was, or what favour her mother asked. But the date of the letter shows that it was written just before she died, on 14 July 1944.
* * *
*1 According to Wanda Wojtasik, when the Poles of Block 15 were lined up and asked to volunteer there was ‘thunderous silence’, until one stepped forward to boos and hisses. Wanda led a delegation to protest to the commandant, who ‘gaped at us and didn’t know what to do’, eventually cancelling the protestors’ parcels. Meanwhile, Irena Dragan and nine others—mostly rabbits—cut off the hair of the volunteer and beat her up. ‘I took the scissors,’ said Irena. Four of the beaters were given twenty-five lashes for ‘punishing’ the volunteer.
*2 The hated Kapo Käthe Knoll had by now joined the camp police.
Chapter 24
Reaching Out
By early summer 1944, Bernard Dufournier was beginning to lose hope of finding Denise. It was nearly a year since his sister’s arrest and he still had no idea where she was. With both parents dead, he perhaps felt especially responsible for his only sibling, and pulled every string to find her.
As a diplomat Bernard was well connected; he had even managed to raise Denise’s case with the acting president of the International Red Cross, Carl Burckhardt, who wrote back saying he knew nothing of Denise’s whereabouts, but: ‘We are in touch with the German Red Cross and if we hear anything we will let you know.’
Given what is known today of Carl Burckhardt, the ICRC and the Holocaust, that two-line reply to Bernard Dufournier is chilling. Clearly he was correct not to make a special plea on Bernard’s behalf, yet Burckhardt had used his own unique position to appeal direct to Himmler for the release of his friend Countess Karolina Lanckorońska. Far more disturbing is Burckhardt’s readiness, even then, to refer so confidently in writing to the German Red Cross as a serious body that the ICRC could do business with.
By the summer of 1944, under mounting international pressure to get off the fence, the ICRC was trying harder to send parcels to concentration-camp prisoners, but the attempts were again easily blocked by Himmler: only 250 parcels had arrived at Ravensbrück, all of them ransacked by the SS. The only camp the ICRC delegates had been allowed to inspect was the so-called model camp of Theresienstadt. Here German Red Cross minders took their Swiss visitors to see show blocks and to talk to tutored inmates, ensuring that glowing reports went back to Geneva HQ.
Meanwhile, the ICRC was being inundated with pleas for help from terrified relatives all over Europe. The approach of D-Day had exacerbated fears that once the Allies landed, Hitler would retaliate against his prisoners, even slaughtering them. Relatives who wrote to Geneva asking for news, however, all found the same: Geneva could tell them nothing at all.
—
As families tried to reach out to their missing relatives, so the women in Ravensbrück were increasingly trying to reach out to them. It was clear to all in the camp that Hitler’s days were numbered and that liberation was within sight, but the women had never been so afraid.
New arrivals from Poland brought good news about evacuations from the eastern camps ahead of the advancing Soviet front. And yet these same prisoners also spoke of further atrocities enacted by the Germans before the camps were evacuated. A Pole who arrived from Majdanek had witnessed the shooting in November of 17,000 Jews in a single day. Gypsies arriving from Auschwitz described the burning down of their entire Gypsy camp and the murder of 20,000 men, women and children.
The prisoners understood far better than the world outside that when Hitler felt the end was coming he would massacre them too, or hold them hostage. And if this happened they would be on their own, as nobody knew they were here.
Every national group sought news from its own war front, listening to the guards or trying to glimpse a German newspaper. Ojcumiła Falkowska, the Polish dancer, had a new job cooking for German officials evacuated from Berlin and relocated to temporary offices in the Ravensbrück woods. Here she heard snatches of the BBC news as the Germans tuned in, and she passed on what she learned.
Those lucky enough to receive post from their families looked for clues in censored letters. Micheline Maurel had written to her father in Toulon every month since arriving in 1943, but never heard back. Then in May 1944 she received an envelope postmarked Toulon, but found when she opened it that the censor had snipped out so much that just a corner remained, and on it one word: ‘Papa’.
Two food parcels then came from home for Micheline in quick succession. The first had been torn open before it reached her, and all that was left was
a small tin of meat spread and some chocolate bars. She shared the meat with her friends, and hid the chocolate bars in a bag beneath her mattress to eat the next day, but by then the bag had gone. In the next parcel came six eggs, only one left unbroken, so she and her friend divided it in two and ate it raw.
Others had heard that it might now be possible to receive Red Cross parcels if the International Red Cross knew their names and numbers. A group of Poles had managed to smuggle their names and numbers out through yet another group of friendly POWs whom they met on an outside work gang. Parcels had come, with their names on, but like all parcels they were rifled before the women got them. Guards were seen eating the Red Cross chocolate and smoking American cigarettes.
Most women, however, knew that even now nobody had any idea where they were. With the fronts advancing, even their official mail would soon be cut off and their families would simply think they’d disappeared. That was their greatest fear, so while they looked for news, prisoners also looked for ways to preserve their stories. Many tried to bury precious items with notes or photographs around the camp, in the hope that one day someone would find them, or else they told their stories to a friend, hoping the friend would survive if they did not.
Milena Jesenska had entrusted her story to Grete Buber-Neumann long before she realised that she was going to die. Throughout the winter of 1943–4 Milena’s health had continued to fail; then in April she was diagnosed with an ulcerated kidney. Dr Treite operated again, but it was too late. One day Milena said she wished to get up and go to her office in the hospital, to snatch a last look at freedom, just visible through the camp gate, but she was already too weak to move. Then her other kidney failed. ‘Look at the colour of my feet. They’re the feet of a dying person,’ she told Grete. ‘I shall go on living through you.’
