by Sarah Helm
Suhren’s other solution to the overcrowding was to send for a bigger tent. According to Halina’s report, the new one was about 20 metres wide by 50 long, twice as wide as the first, and its sides more than three metres high, with a two-peaked roof. The second tent had a gutter and a light, but it had no natural light, so it was darker, especially as the electric light was feeble and barely lit up one end. The gutter leaked with the first rains. It leaked more or less in the middle, forming, on top of the groundwater below, a permanent puddle of about 100 square metres. Halina reported the leaking gutter several times, but it was never repaired.
From the start there was not enough straw for everyone in the second tent, and still nowhere for the new arrivals to wash, or to cleanse their dishes. A lavatory was sited outside, but it wasn’t possible to go there except in groups, escorted by a guard. Soon the lavatory broke down. With about 100 under-twelves now living in the tent, the conditions became unspeakable. Twenty buckets were put inside, which were emptied into pits dug right behind the tent that quickly began to overflow.
By early October the nights were damp and cold. There was no medical help for the sick. The tent staff brought water from other blocks to wash the children, but it was almost impossible. There were more and more children and the fights for space increased. Within days of the new tent going up at least two women had given birth.
Every night the other prisoners heard dreadful high-pitched screams coming from the tent. One morning a prisoner was seen emerging and crouching just outside. Anja Lundholm saw the figure resting her head against a wooden pole.
Her long hair was in disarray, spread over her head and shoulders. It was probably once blonde hair, but was grey with dirt. In her skinny arms the woman held something, but we couldn’t see what it was. Slowly, carefully, she lifted her head, and saw us staring as we walked past with the kettle. She nodded and reached out her bundle towards us, smiling with an elated look. It was a baby. Rather, it was a baby’s dead body.
Chapter 26
Kinderzimmer
Karolina Lanckorońska was one of the first to notice how many of the Warsaw women were pregnant. Some of those pregnant were already mothers, and came with other children. Others were expecting their first child. Some gave birth outside the camp gates. Karolina asked Binz if she might give out milk to the pregnant women and Binz—perhaps a sign of pity—said yes ‘on the grounds that they are not criminals like us’.
The presence of so many pregnant women among the thousands who arrived from Warsaw was no more surprising than the presence of children. These women were a cross-section of Warsaw’s population, so many would naturally be in various stages of pregnancy. There had been no chance to screen the pregnant out before putting them on the trains. And yet the high number of pregnancies was especially striking. Karolina noticed large numbers vomiting. Many of these women were not sure yet that they were pregnant, but feared they might be, because during the German onslaught on Warsaw they had been raped.
Many women in the crowd spoke of rape, as Karolina and others heard when they walked around. One woman waiting at the gates screamed all night, every night. When Karolina asked what troubled her, the woman told her that her home had been ransacked, and she’d seen her daughter raped by Vlasov’s forces. Andrei Vlasov was a Soviet general who defected to the Germans, and who on Himmler’s orders led rogue Russian brigades into Warsaw, where they raped thousands of women, nuns and schoolchildren among them.
On arrival at Ravensbrück many of the pregnant Warsaw women were put inside the tent, but they were terrified of what would happen next. Eighteen-year-old Stasia Tkaczyk, two months pregnant, easily hid her pregnancy and took the chance to get out on a work gang leaving for a subcamp. Those closer to giving birth were unable to leave.
Nor was it only the women from Warsaw who were arriving pregnant. The screening of new arrivals in general was less thorough now, and pregnancy amongst other newcomers more common. A Breton woman who gave birth on the Lagerstrasse became infected and bled to death. Women were also more likely than before to fall pregnant at the camp itself; prisoners had more contact with men, particularly in the subcamps where German civilians and male POWs often worked alongside the inmates.
Nevertheless, it was the arrival of the Warsaw women that raised pregnancy rates to unheard-of levels. According to the office staff, one in ten of the Polish women arriving at the gates by September was pregnant. As a total of 12,000 women arrived from Warsaw by early October, this meant as many as 1200 babies were likely to be born in the camp over the next nine months.
The need to respond to the growing number of pregnant women in the camp was obvious to the SS; they could see the women all around and hear the sound of babies crying as well as anyone. In October women started going into labour at Appell, in the bathhouse and in the tent. When Leokadia Kopczynska felt contractions and collapsed at morning Appell, the guards, instead of kicking her, allowed her friends to take her to the Revier.
Perhaps it was Leokadia’s collapse at Appell that prompted Suhren to call through to Richard Glücks at the Central Camp Inspectorate (IKL) for further instructions, or perhaps the new instructions had already come. In any case, we know what the new orders were from what happened next: for the first time in the history of the camp, permission was given for babies to be born. A room in the Revier was designated, with midwives to assist.
‘I was taken to the delivery room in the Revier and straightaway gave birth,’ Leokadia remembered. A Polish midwife cared for Leokadia, and asked her to name her baby. ‘I said call her Barbara,’ and the midwife held the baby under a tap and said: ‘I christen her with this water and give her the name Barbara.’
The decision to allow the birth of babies at Ravensbrück was an extraordinary policy reversal. One of the camp’s most important rules had always been that birth was banned. At first, women found to be pregnant were sent elsewhere to have their babies, which were taken from them to be raised in Nazi children’s homes. Later, when numbers of pregnancies rose, abortions were carried out. Any baby born alive was murdered. At the same time everything was done to prevent any chance that the women sent to concentration camps might reproduce. Women were kept entirely separate from men in the men’s camp, and male SS officers punished severely for any contact with the prisoners. And not only was birth banned, but the women at Ravensbrück were used as guinea pigs for experiments in sterilisation.
The sheer number of pregnant women arriving at the gates in October forced a change in this policy. There were simply too many babies to abort. Already Percival Treite was spending half his time performing abortions, and the camp had no facilities for more. It was probably in early October 1944 that Treite announced the change to the Revier. His instructions to prisoner midwives and doctors were to make all necessary preparations for the delivery of babies.
Amongst the first to be told was the Czech prisoner doctor Zdenka Nedvedova, who was put in charge of making arrangements. Given that Zdenka was an able child doctor, trained at Charles University in Prague, the expectant mothers could not have been in better hands. Treite seemed at first genuinely to encourage a professional approach, and there were signs that he supported the whole idea.
When the go-ahead was given, the nurses and doctors set to work. ‘We got a free hand on preparing things,’ Zdenka recalled. Within a short time a clean and well-equipped delivery room was ready, with enough spotless linen and warm water available, as well as paper for nappies, good lights, and other essentials. Nearby was the operating theatre, which was made available if necessary.
Whether Barbara was in fact the first baby born is not clear from the testimony. According to Antonina Nikiforova, the Red Army doctor, the first baby to be born in the new delivery room was not a Pole, but a Russian called Victoria. Sylvia Salvesen, the Norwegian, who was working as a Revier nurse, agreed that the first baby was a Russian, but said it was a boy called Nicholas. The news of the birth spread around the camp, causing great elation. �
��People were all telling each other: “A child has been born in Ravensbrück called Nicholas.” ’
Sylvia Salvesen gave evidence to the Hamburg court in December 1946. ‘Nicholas was treated like a prince,’ she said. ‘He was wrapped in beautiful clothes, given by the women who had arrived at the camp with baby clothes, and hadn’t yet had them taken away.’
More births ‘miraculously’ followed. Zdenka considered it a miracle that sick and malnourished mothers gave birth to babies with a healthy weight of 3 kilos or more. One Warsaw Pole, Hanna Wasilczenko, collapsed at Appell after standing for three hours, and came to the Revier and gave birth to a 4 kg baby, called Witold Grzegorz. The Austrian prisoner Ilse Reibmayr, enlisted as a midwife, said ‘it was a miracle’ that the midwives in the Revier could actually bathe the mothers.
We did it in a big basin kept in the surgery. We undressed them completely and put them into this basin. With a cloth we washed, soaped and rinsed them thoroughly from head to toe. We did their feet and they got a white nightgown. We were able to order white frocks from the sewing workshop, where everybody wanted to help. The way the women were suddenly allowed to lend a hand was wonderful. Everybody was sewing nappies and dresses for us. The expectant mothers were prepared for birth as if they were in the best sanatorium.
The prisoner medics were still concerned that despite the good birth weight the babies would be sickly, but for the first days of their lives they developed quite normally. In fact the poor nutrition, which meant high water content in the tissue, made the babies quite puffy and therefore particularly adorable. ‘They looked gorgeous,’ said Ilse Reibmayr, ‘but of course we knew it was an illusion.’
Illusion or not, most wanted so badly to believe it that they raised no suspicions. In fact, reading the testimony, it is striking how little any of the prisoners involved feared the consequences of what was happening, or wondered why it was that births were suddenly being allowed. Sylvia says the women did wonder ‘What does it mean?’, but they simply told themselves that the SS were doing it for ‘good propaganda’ as the war came to an end—‘showing they were normal’.
In any event, for the camp’s prisoner medics there was no time to think further: they were too busy trying to help. As Sylvia Salvesen went on to tell the court, after the first baby, more and more arrived: ‘One, two, three…twenty or so in the early days, and at first they were still very well-treated.’ To begin with the mothers were even allowed to stay close by, although they were not allowed to see their babies at night, when the maternity room was locked and nobody was allowed in.
At the start Treite allowed a glass of milk for mothers immediately after birth, and for a while he even turned a blind eye when the kitchen smuggled oatmeal into the Revier to mix with the milk. Nor did he object when his staff rushed off to attend emergency births elsewhere in the camp.
‘We worked day and night,’ said Sylvia. ‘I was never without a pair of scissors and thread in my pocket. With these two things the life of a woman and child can be saved.’ One night she and Zdenka were called to the bathhouse, where a young Polish woman was giving birth on the bare floor. ‘We had to leave the mother. We rolled the child up in a blanket and took it back with us to the Revier.’
The miracle of the births, however, didn’t last, as Sylvia went on to tell the Hamburg court. ‘I remember a doctor telling me that two babies had died one night because there was no nurse with them at night and they had turned over and couldn’t breathe.’ At this point there was an interruption in the court proceedings as one of the defendants’ lawyers, Dr von Metzler, raised an objection to the way Sylvia’s words had been translated. The lawyer said that the translation was misleading, as it implied that the babies had been ‘deliberately killed’ because they had been unable to move, whereas the witness had not said this, just that they ‘could not breathe’.
The chief prosecutor, Stephen Stewart, tried to clarify the matter, telling the court: ‘The witness said, if I may repeat it, that the child turned round at night and because there was no nurse present it died, whereas the interpreter in German said it had no room to move and therefore died.’ Stewart went on: ‘Is that satisfactory, Mr von Metzler?’ and at that moment all eyes turned to the man who evidently believed the illusion too; because whatever error the translator made, everyone in the court—von Metzler, apparently, excepted—knew already that of course the babies born in Ravensbrück were to be deliberately killed, simply because in Ravensbrück a baby could not live.
Himmler knew this. The Reichsführer had long taken an interest in the rearing of young babies, even to the extent of giving his own instructions on the supervision and feeding of Aryan babies born in his special SS Lebensborn maternity homes. For example, in early 1944, to comply with new food rationing, Himmler had issued orders that the Lebensborn babies be fed on porridge made with water instead of milk.
Himmler also took a close interest in the rearing of his own children, particularly the two by Hedwig Potthast. In early October 1944, despite his busy schedule, he found time to spend a whole day with Hedwig and the children, who had moved to a home in Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, the Nazi leaders’ Alpine retreat. Next day Himmler confided in Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, that he had accepted no telephone calls but had devoted himself to ‘hanging pictures, doing things about the house and playing with the children the whole day long’. The little boy, Helge, was now two years old, and the little girl, Dorothea, four months. According to a letter written at the time by Gerda Bormann, wife of Martin Bormann, and one of Hedwig Potthast’s neighbours in Berchtesgaden, Hedwig and Heinrich’s new baby girl was ‘ridiculously like her father’ and had grown ‘big and sturdy and is so sweet!’
Within days of the first births at Ravensbrück, Treite received orders to stop the offerings of extra milk and porridge from the kitchen, so from then on the feeding mothers received only the usual diet of watery cabbage soup and a slice of bread. Very quickly none had any milk to speak of in their breasts and the babies began to starve.
The deliberate starving of babies was a long-established Nazi technique of killing. Baby starvation was first carried out during the euthanasia killings in 1939, when physically or mentally handicapped babies were deliberately left to die. Hermann Pfannmüller, a Nazi doctor and early exponent of infanticide by starvation, stated in 1939 that starving was a ‘simpler and more natural’ way than poison or injection. He devised a method whereby the baby’s food was not suddenly withdrawn, but rations were slowly reduced. This was the means now practised at Ravensbrück: although the mothers had very little milk, they were encouraged to continue to try to feed, even with just a few drops.
As soon as they realised that they were unable to feed their babies adequately, a kind of mania broke out, as the mothers pleaded and screamed for help to save their children. Some found ways round the problem for a while. Leokadia Kopczynska says that as soon as she found she had no milk she traded clean water from the kitchen in exchange for her daily bread. ‘I filled a bottle with the water and tried to feed her.’ But of course her baby wanted milk, not water, and refused to drink, became dehydrated and lost weight.
As Ilse Reibmayr explained, the pregnancy itself had already drained the mothers. The Warsaw women had suffered appalling privations travelling to the camp, and many were forced to live in the tent or engage in hard physical labour, as well as being fed on starvation rations throughout. ‘The foetus had to find nutriments from an organism that was at the limit of life, and the women themselves suffered from starvation that made them mad.’ When the mothers needed to produce milk, of course, they could not. For many this was a first baby and they had no experience of what to do. ‘Some perhaps got drops of milk but most got nothing,’ said Ilse, and the mothers became even more desperate, shouting, ‘Save my child, save my child.’
After about two weeks the number of babies in the Revier had grown to more than twenty, and no more could be accommodated, so the ‘delivery room’ moved to Blo
ck 11, where a so-called Kinderzimmer, babies’ room, was constructed at one end of the barracks, with the help of the Fürstenberg joiner Helmut Kuhn. Treite recruited new midwives specifically to work in the Kinderzimmer and to ‘care’ for the babies. He took some trouble about whom he chose, among them a young French woman called Marie-Jo Wilborts.
At the outbreak of war Marie-Jo and her parents had hidden British soldiers who were left behind after the evacuation of Dunkirk in their Normandy house. All three were captured; Marie-Jo’s father was taken to Buchenwald and in the summer of 1943 she and her mother came to Ravensbrück. At first Marie-Jo worked in the Siemens plant, but in September 1944 she was called to the Revier, where she hoped to do useful work. ‘So my friends cleaned me up and made me look the part,’ said Marie-Jo, talking in the front room of her house in Antony, a suburb of Paris, where photographs of her children and grandchildren filled the shelves.
When she entered the Revier Marie-Jo was shown to a room where Treite and Marschall were sitting at a desk. ‘He was blonde, slim, not bad-looking and wore a white coat. Oberschwester Marschall also wore a white coat. Treite had read my file already because he said, “I see your father is a paediatrician. Well you will be home to see him very soon,” but I already knew my father had died in Buchenwald.’
They took Marie-Jo to the new Kinderzimmer, inside Block 11. It was a boarded-up area—about 4 by 2.5 metres—in the middle of the block, with a single window and two bunk beds. At this time the mothers were still giving birth in the hospital, but their babies were brought straight to the Kinderzimmer, where Marie-Jo’s job was to help lay them out on the mattresses of the bunks. Along with three other prisoners—a Dane, a Dutch woman and a Yugoslav—she had the task of caring for them as best she could. Zdenka, the Czech child doctor, visited every day. An SS nurse, ‘Sister Helen’, had overall charge.
