Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Castle Hartheim was one of the first euthanasia gassing centres, opened in 1939, and had remained operational as a gassing centre until 1944.*3 One of the SS drivers, Georg Bloser, said he drove women as well as men to be gassed at Castle Hartheim. He picked them up from a local station. ‘They were always in a terrible state. When I got to Hartheim the staff there took them away. Sometimes I was taken to a waiting room where they gave me a cup of tea.’

  Karl Wassner, a crematorium worker at nearby Gusen concentration camp, also accompanied prisoners to Castle Hartheim, and on one occasion, as he waited, he saw inside the gas chamber. ‘I had a glance through the judas window. I could see that the prisoners were already lying down in this inner room. It was the gas chamber and was lit on the inside. I noticed that inside there were many more people than those we brought from Gusen. I was able to observe that there were women amongst them.’

  In December 1944, as the Russian front approached Austria, Castle Hartheim was closed on the orders of the Führer, and the institution restored as a normal sanatorium. Those given the task of destroying evidence of the gassing were a group of prisoners from Mauthausen, amongst them Adam Gołembski, who described what the castle was like inside.

  From the entrance, he said, you went deeper into the fortress. Eventually you came to a room for photography that led on to a room that ‘gave the impression of being a bathroom; the door was cast iron, with rubber around the edges and in it was a little peephole’. Inside were six showers. From this room a door led to a further room, where bottles of gas and other gassing equipment were stored. And there was yet another room hidden beyond, which was clearly a laboratory of some kind, as there was a large table. When Gołembski reached this room he found some papers, which appeared to be a report on research done on a body. From this room another door led to the crematorium, with two furnaces.

  Once outside again, looking to the left of the entrance, Gołembski found a pile of ashes with bones ‘enough to fill sixty bins’. He also found an electric mill for crushing bones left over after the burning. Finally, in the castle garage ‘we found clothes of children, women and men—enough to fill four horse-drawn carts’.

  How many of the Ravensbrück black transports were taken to Schloss Hartheim is impossible to say, but the November 1944 transport of 120 women—mostly from Block 10—was probably the largest. The Ravensbrück staff would also have known that this transport was the last to the castle gas chamber, which was about to be dismantled for good.

  For the most part, the deaths at Castle Hartheim remained anonymous, as nearly all German records about the castle were destroyed, as well as the camp records about the transports. The only women victims from Ravensbrück whose identities are known for sure are those few whose names were known to Loulou Le Porz and the other ‘staff’ in Block 10.

  In 2012, I tried to find out more about some of the women Loulou remembered. One was Marie Leger, and in order to help my research, Loulou’s son, Jean-Marie Liard, tracked down a copy of the book that had led to Henriette and Marie Leger’s arrest. He found it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Entitled Les voix du drapeau (Voices of the flag), the book is a collection of patriotic ballads, written in praise of French military heroes of days past, and is dedicated ‘to all those whose voice of agony and glory speaks to us down the years’. The introduction, written by the twins, speaks of ‘those who fertilised our soil with the holiness of their blood—the heroes of the trenches of Ypres and Furnes’, and implores readers to remember ‘all the cruelties and betrayals of the Great War and the terrible use of gases in that war’. Marie and Henriette dedicated their book ‘to those whose feet passed down the “road of blood” ’.

  * * *

  *1 Mory particularly hated Elisabeth Thury, who as head of the camp police was the only other prisoner with real power. In interrogations after the war Mory devoted pages to attacking Thury, implicating her in the ‘French jewellery affair’—a scam involving theft of prisoners’ jewels—in which Thury had got the better of Mory.

  *2 Germaine Tillion said later that Annie de Montfort had called for an ‘imaginary chauffeur’ just minutes before the end.

  *3 An estimated 18,200 disabled and mentally ill Germans and Austrians were gassed at Castle Hartheim. An early victim was Hans Rosenberg, a first cousin of Vera Atkins, the SOE staff officer, who had been taken to Castle Hartheim in 1940 from a mental hospital in Vienna.

  PART SIX

  Chapter 30

  Hungarians

  Eva Fejer was at school in Budapest in October 1944 when an announcement was made that all Jewish girls in her class should go to dig trenches because the Russians were coming. ‘We were taken out to a field and we had to start digging. We slept on an open football ground. A few days later we were marched out towards the west.’

  The October order came from the office of Adolf Eichmann, the man sent to Hungary, after the German invasion six months earlier, to implement this last stage of the Final Solution by rounding up the country’s 750,000 Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. Time was pressing: the Red Army was closing in.

  When the Hungarian roundups began in late March 1944 most Jews were unprepared. They knew about the slaughter of Europe’s other Jews, but until now Hungary, a German ally, had been protected. Eva Fejer’s father, a prominent lawyer, told his family: ‘It won’t happen here. Hungarian law won’t allow it.’ Franz Fejer was a Hungarian patriot and a German patriot too. The family all spoke German; Eva had a German nanny, and spoke fluent German by the time she was ten. The family took no precautions. ‘I think my parents just didn’t want to accept it. And my father didn’t want to frighten his family, so he didn’t warn us. He wanted us to have as much of our childhood as there was left.’

  This time, however, the world outside recognised the signs. The moment that Hitler invaded, the warning went out to Western capitals that Hungarian Jews were about to be exterminated too. Berlin barely attempted to hide it. The Swedes sent envoys to issue Jews with protective passports and papers, and the International Red Cross tried to offer clothes and food to those forced into holding camps, but even as this went on, tens of thousands of Jews were being herded onto trains for Auschwitz, and one of the first to go was Eva’s father. ‘He was sixty-one but he was very fit,’ said Eva, ‘so we hoped he might have survived. He was a fine skater and brilliant pianist. Sometimes one hoped that someone might make it out in an air pocket or something, but not one of his transport came back.’

  By July 1944, 430,000 of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews had already been rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where all but 100,000 were gassed. The only Hungarian Jews who avoided transport to Auschwitz were those deemed fit for munitions work, and they were sent on to the concentration camps in Germany. Hungarian arrivals at Auschwitz were also sifted for any who might make useful slave labourers.

  In July 1944, four months after Eichmann’s roundups in Hungary began, the deportations were put on hold. Miklos Horthy, the Nazis’ puppet leader in Budapest, had shifted his allegiance to the Allies, refusing to cooperate with further Jewish expulsions. The 200,000 Jews who remained—mostly in Budapest—appeared to have been spared, including Eva Fejer and her mother. In early October, however, the Horthy government fell, and Eichmann was set to resume. By now Allied bombs had destroyed train lines and rolling stock across Hungary and Poland: trains could no longer be used. Furthermore, the Soviet front was driving forward so fast that even Auschwitz in southern Poland was preparing for evacuation; the gas chambers were about to be closed down, and the camp had stopped taking in more Jews.

  Abandoning the roundups, however, was not an option; Hitler had ordered that every last Jew be removed from Hungary before the Red Army arrived. The only way Eichmann could achieve this was to force-march the remaining 200,000 men, women and children from Budapest to the Austrian border, a distance of 200 miles.

  It was 16 October and frost was already on the ground when women and girls between the ages of sixteen and forty rece
ived the orders to leave. Eva had managed to pack her girl guide’s rucksack—‘1939 Jamboree’ emblazoned on it—with food and spare clothes, smuggled to her by her German nanny. But she was unable to see her mother again before she left.

  Eva didn’t suffer on the march as much as most, she says. She’d learned first aid, and was sporty and strong. ‘My father used to make me learn to do everything myself. He’d mend my bike the first time, but I’d have to watch and do it myself the next time.’ She also knew the road the marchers set out upon, as the family used it before the war to visit relatives over the border. She marched all day and slept in football fields at night. It was cold, but Eva was wearing her culottes and had spare ski pants in her bag.

  Most prisoners marched in families, or small groups. Margit Nagy insisted on coming with her daughters, Rosza and Marianne. ‘I think she knew we might die and she wanted us all to be together. We held hands all the way,’ said Rosza. Girls who were alone were ‘adopted’ by other families, but Eva preferred to march alone. Guards from the fascist Arrow Cross beat the stragglers. Passers-by stared, and sometimes offered food. In the Swabian mountains a man walked next to Eva and started asking questions about her father.

  He told me he’d been my father’s valet in the First World War and that my father was good to him. He said: ‘So you come with me and I’ll see you’re all right.’ I could have gone, as nobody was really watching. But I thought we were only going to a labour camp and I’d be strong enough for that. I believed in my own strength. It was a hard decision, but I was worried about my mother; I didn’t want anything to happen to her if I did something wrong.

  After her father’s valet had loaded her bag with quinces, Eva walked on.

  Several days later the marchers reached the Danube and walked down planks to ferry boats. ‘People lost their footing and fell off the plank. We saw the drowned corpses in the water but I kept on going and didn’t fall.’ Somewhere near Vienna the marchers were put in trains, locked in closed wagons, and the trains continued west. ‘A guard asked if anyone spoke German and I quickly said yes, so I was made his interpreter and sat on a ledge where I could see out. I knew how to navigate by the sun, so I told the others the direction we were going.’

  When the train pulled up at Jena, southwest of Leipzig, the men were taken out and sent to Buchenwald, but the women stayed on. ‘We passed a medieval castle and I thought I must bring my parents here after the war.’ About two days later the train pulled up at a tiny station called Ravensbrück. ‘I’d heard of Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen, but not Ravensbrück.’

  After the departure of Eva’s convoy from Budapest the final phase of the forced marches out of Hungary accelerated. The weather worsened, and of the many thousands of women marched towards Ravensbrück at least a third are thought to have perished. An envoy of the International Red Cross, sent to observe the exodus, was overwhelmed: ‘The idea of standing by helplessly, powerless to do anything, is almost impossible to bear,’ he wrote in his report to Geneva.

  Deportations from other eastern countries that bordered the Reich accelerated too. Hitler was taking his last opportunity to clean out camps and ghettos ahead of the Russian advance. These Jews were still being deported in trains that criss-crossed what remained of Nazi-occupied lands, often stopping for days in sidings, as lines were bombed or communications broke down. On one of the trains was nineteen-year-old Basia Zajączkowska, who had survived the Kielce ghetto, in central Poland, because she worked in a gunpowder factory. As the Soviets approached, the workers were sent to Auschwitz. Basia escaped into the woods but was caught and sent to Ravensbrück instead, because by that time Auschwitz was beginning to shut down.

  —

  On 2 November 1944 Himmler halted the gassing at Auschwitz, but in the chaos some trains continued to turn up, including one from Slovakia whose passengers arrived in abject terror having received a graphic account of what to expect—two Slovakian men who had just escaped from Auschwitz and made their way back home told them about the gas chambers just before their transport left. On arrival at Auschwitz, one of the Slovakian women even asked an SS man where the gas chambers were. He replied: ‘They aren’t working any more. You are not to be gassed.’

  The Slovakians were put on another train, which arrived on 10 November at Ravensbrück, where they once again expected to be gassed. The women were herded towards the Ravensbrück tent but they refused to go inside. ‘Entering the tent the women were convinced they were entering a gas chamber,’ said Halina Wasilewska, the tent Stubova. ‘Many of them asked the tent personnel to tell them the truth—when could they expect to be gassed?—and they didn’t really believe it when they were assured that there were no gas chambers at Ravensbrück at all. Although at that time there really were no gas chambers at Ravensbrück.’

  —

  With the arrival of thousands of Jewish women in the late autumn of 1944, Ravensbrück was once again swamped; squalor and disease spread on an unimaginable scale. First all new arrivals were herded into the tent, where neither straw nor blankets were any longer provided, so women who had marched in the snow now slept on cold wet cement blocks. Most of those who marched from Budapest had contracted pneumonia, gangrene and frostbite on the road. Many had the symptoms of typhus too, and were suffering from high fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.

  The buckets overflowed. The canvas structure stank. Mothers tried to feed children, as well as feeding themselves. Amid this horror typhus broke out on a scale not seen here before. The SS sought desperately to control the killer disease by vaccinating not only SS staff but key prisoners—nurses and office staff, some of whom were too weak to endure vaccination, and caught typhus instead and died. A new rule was instituted that thirty patients from the tent could visit the Revier each day, but it was too few, and the rest were just sent back to die. Dead bodies mingled with the living and could not be easily extracted. Then when the corpse gang came to the tent they refused to take bodies because they didn’t have numbers. Many in the tent were admitted without them, and died before the numbers were given out.

  According to Halina, a new phenomenon specific to the tent broke out—‘feverish conversations of agitated people, complaining, fights over sleeping space, moans and screams of the sick, shouting back and forth in the crowd creating a constant deafening din, non-stop day and night’. Yet the tent ‘block’ nevertheless still had to stand for Appell like all the others. Those who couldn’t stand were laid out to be counted on their backs in rows of ten.

  After they had been in the tent a few days the first Hungarians to arrive were moved out to blocks; the healthier among them went to munition factories at subcamps. Straight away a new group of 1000 Poles (Aryans this time, noted Halina) came in from Auschwitz and refilled the tent. What made matters worse was that more and more sick women were returning from satellite camps. And not only were Ravensbrück subcamps sending their sick women back; more distant ones that had long ago been placed under the administration of men’s camps such as Buchenwald were returning their sick (and pregnant) too. These camps had for many months been sending their exhausted women workers to Auschwitz, but this was no longer an option.

  Closer at hand, Siemens too was sending more and more unsuitable women back to the main camp. Its few surviving monthly reports detailing prisoner turnover show a remarkable upturn in 1944. In October the company sent fifty unsuitables back to the main camp from the finishing shop alone. This compared with an average of three returned from the same small section eighteen months earlier.

  Women rejected by Siemens went straight to the Revier blocks or joined others working outside in the labour gangs. Betsie ten Boom, sent back in October, worked levelling ground for a few more weeks before being admitted to the Revier, where she died in early December. Corrie saw her sister’s naked body on a mattress: ‘a carving in old ivory, I could see the outline of the teeth through the skin’. Then she caught sight of Betsie’s body again, stacked up with other corpses against the Revier wa
shroom wall, ‘her eyes closed as if in sleep, the deep hollows of hunger and disease, simply gone. Even her hair was graciously in place, as if an angel had ministered to it.’

  For the Siemens managers, replacing exhausted women was harder than ever, but young Jewish women were now pouring into the camp, some still agile and strong enough to work. Siemens had employed Jewish women at its Berlin factories at the start of the war, before the mass deportations, and valued their skills, so when Basia Zajączkowska, the Kielce ghetto survivor, appeared on the ‘cattle market’ they were swiftly put to work making electrical parts.

  —

  Throughout November and December more Jewish women continued to arrive from the East; most had to fight for their lives in the tent. A teenager called Sarah Mittelmann entered it to find ‘women all around me having fits and beating each other. There was no room for anyone even to stretch out.’ A new transport of Polish Jews arrived talking Yiddish, which the Hungarian Jews didn’t understand. Selma Okrent, another young Hungarian, remembered the smell in the tent. As she stood in line for soup someone said: ‘If you don’t behave, you’ll smell like that as well.’

  They took away my clothes and broke my earrings to get them out. I was given a red triangle and the number 79706 and told to watch out for green triangles, as they were thieves. I was made to work pulling stones and sometimes we had to schlepp out the dead. I had a skirt and was playing with the hem when I felt something in it and it was somebody’s wedding ring.

  Selma and Sarah got out onto good labour gangs by making sure the Meister chose them first. This was what Eva Fejer did almost as soon as she arrived. The man from Daimler-Benz snapped her up. ‘He asked who spoke German and I said I did, so he said, “Yes, you’ll do,” and I became his translator at the factory in Berlin.’ Before Eva left Ravensbrück she spotted her best friend arriving on the next transport from Budapest and shouted to her: ‘ “Martha, whatever you do, get out of here as soon as you can,” but she didn’t believe me and died.’