by Sarah Helm
‘First of all fifty prisoners were killed daily in front of the crematorium by a shot through the neck,’ he said. A doctor had to be there because ‘one bullet doesn’t always kill the prisoner immediately’. In a second statement, on 14 August 1946, he described how the victims were not only the old and sick but also ‘young women capable of work’, who were brought to a place near the crematorium and shot in the back of the neck with a small-calibre gun from a short distance—the Genickschuss.
It was always done at first light, said Treite. ‘The dawn was enough for the executioners to see what they were doing.’ Afterwards two prisoners from the men’s camp brought the victims to the crematorium, where Treite waited to ‘perform my task of certifying death’. Hellinger prised out the gold fillings and crowns ‘and the bodies were burned’. In a further statement on 2 October 1946, Treite talked of an occasion when fifty prisoners were brought from the Youth Camp to be shot by rifle two at a time.
Treite claimed that he didn’t remember who gave the orders, but it was almost certainly the Auschwitz man Otto Moll. Ravensbrück’s own executioners said Moll was in charge and even brought his own team of assassins, which angered the local crew. Walter Schenk, the Ravensbrück crematorium chief, complained that while the killing was going on, the Auschwitz gang ‘slept in my crematorium’.
Moll and his SS comrades would certainly have chosen the Genickschuss as their preferred method of shooting. They had practised it before—most notably to kill hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs. It was fast and efficient—a prisoner could be shot in the neck every thirty seconds or so, then the body taken to be burned. The system was cleaner than mass shooting by rifle, and cheaper on ammunition.
Treite was quite clear that the shooting took place ‘near the crematorium’. When the shot to the back of the neck was used it probably took place just inside the so-called shooting alley. The alley, about twenty metres long and two wide, lay between two high walls—one formed the back of the camp bunker and the other abutted garages. One end of the alley opened near the crematorium. The alley had been used for smaller-scale executions before, and obviously had advantages; the high flanking walls removed any risk of hitting bystanders and ruled out any chance of escape. They would also have ruled out witnesses, as well as muffling the sound, which goes to explain in part why not a single prisoner in the main camp seems to have heard any shots.
There is evidence to suggest that when overcrowding intensified, some arrivals—those from Hungary, for example, or from other subcamps—were never registered at Ravensbrück at all, but taken straight to be shot, or else held temporarily at the newly vacated Youth Camp, and then shot.
Such a system would also explain why the office prisoner secretaries, mostly reliable sources, say little of the early mass shootings, though they all heard Conrad, the Ravensbrück executioner, boasting about how he ‘knocked off women with the butt of his gun’. In any case, as Christmas approached, the secretaries in the offices and other influential prisoners had other things to occupy their minds.
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In early December 1944 prominent prisoners were planning a children’s Christmas party. The idea began among the Germans and Czechs but quickly spread. In previous years Christians, as well as secular and even Jewish prisoners, had marked Christmas in small ways, by singing in their blocks, making decorations. Only the Soviets ignored the celebrations, and many seemed entirely ignorant of this ‘festival that happened towards the end of the year’.
In 1944 the planned celebrations were far more extensive than ever before, largely because there were so many more children in the camp than before. A year ago the only children here had been the sixty-four under-twelves who arrived, mostly from Belgium and Holland, with the ‘protected’ Jewish families and a few other strays. Since then more Gypsy children had come from Auschwitz, Polish children came during the influx after the Warsaw Uprising, and in the autumn children arrived with the Hungarian and Slovakian Jews. There were small numbers of Russian, Romanian, Yugoslav, French and Greek children too, making 4–500 in all. Many were Jews, but there were non-Jewish children as well, swept up and brought here from all corners of the war.
In the winter of 1944 children were seen all over the camp, playing quietly in the corners of blocks, running terrified from guard dogs or crouching in the mud, and all of them—like recent adult arrivals—had a black cross daubed on the back of their clothes to identify them as prisoners. Gypsy children delighted everyone, and were given free rein to roam the Lagerstrasse selling things—cigarettes stolen from SS officers’ pockets, silk scarves from the ‘Galeries Lafayette’, scraps from the kitchen. One day a French prisoner was offered a copy of Molière’s Le Misanthrope; the Gypsy seller said she came from Lille. Polish teachers organised classes in the blocks for more than seventy school-age Poles, while Blockovas smuggled in extra food.
By December 1944 the Blockova of Block 27, Ann Sheridan, counted forty children under her one roof, as well as seventy pregnant women. This was the mysterious ‘British’ woman whom survivors criticised after the war for being too close to the Germans. What they meant was never explained, but from her own testimony Ann made good use of her influence. Each day she persuaded the camp kitchen staff to give the children in her block an extra milk ration, ‘though the mothers sometimes drank it themselves’.
Children lived in the blocks with their mothers if they had them or with adopted camp mothers if they didn’t. The women’s instincts towards the older boys were not always so maternal. Menachem Kallus, a ten-year-old Jewish boy who came from Holland with the ‘protected’ Jews in January 1944, recalls how Red Army women in his block took an interest in boys of his age: ‘We were the only men. They came and played around with us. It was our first sexual experience. It was harmless. They taught us. But the Germans saw what was happening and moved us out to the men’s camp.’
The arrival of more and more children encouraged more women to become ‘camp mothers’, and there was competition to adopt the prettiest orphans. The Russian Ekatarina Speranskaya recalled being adopted by Aunt Nastasya. ‘She told me not to talk to anyone else and just to breathe the air. We slept together on the bottom bunk.’ Ekatarina thinks Aunt Nastasya probably had her own children at home, ‘or had lost them somehow’.
Camp mothers never lasted long; by December 1944 Stella Kugelman was on her fifth. Often they would fall sick or be posted to a subcamp, as happened to the Dutch nurse Claire van den Boom, probably Stella’s favourite camp mother of all. Claire was sent to the underground munitions plant at Berndorf in September, after Carmen Mory reported her for smuggling food to patients in Block 10. Since then an Austrian called Frau Strassner, wife of a former president of the Viennese Supreme Court, had cared for Stella, and Karolina Lanckorońska helped out. She helped Stella write letters to her father, who, as they had found out, was in Buchenwald.
The sight of the children was the inspiration for the party, though as Sylvia Salvesen remarked, they were ‘not as we think of children—starvation, suffering, shock and terror marked them all’. The grown-ups found it impossible to tell their ages. ‘Children who looked four were eight, and twelve looked like eight-year-olds,’ said Sylvia. Many didn’t know their dates of birth, or their names. One Russian child, Nadia Bolanov, captured at first with her grandmother, was quite alone in the world by the time she was swept up at Auschwitz and sent on to Ravensbrück. ‘I was like a little animal, very frightened,’ she recalls.
By the second week of December planning for the Christmas party was well under way, with prisoners in the camp offices, the blocks and the Revier all involved. The German communist Hildegard Boy-Brandt ran the puppet show, while the Belgian nurse Emmi Gorlich organised parcels, and the Czechs created a children’s choir. A ‘Christmas man’ was planned as a secular Father Christmas, in order not to alienate the communists.
As arrangements advanced, new bonds grew up between the different national groups, and a planning committee was formed with r
epresentatives from eleven nations. Such was the excitement that other groups joined too, including the Poles and the French. Everyone seemed to want to help prepare, making little toys and sewing decorations. The organisers hoped that the children’s party would be a symbol of cooperation and reconciliation—‘a symbol for the future’.
In the winter of 1944, talk of the need for reconciliation after the war was heard more and more around the camp, especially among the German communists, who knew that among new prisoners coming from abroad, they were often hated just for being German. Grete Buber-Neumann recalls that as far as the many foreign women were concerned, ‘all Germans were the same as the SS, and as they hated the SS, so they hated the Germans’. Grete observed that in later years even the foreign communists in the camp often shared this view. ‘They regarded the German communists as beyond the pale and the German communists made no attempt to defend themselves.’
Such fractures may in part have caused the discord that erupted within the Christmas party committee. The Poles disliked being told what to do by the German communists and quite quickly decided to break away and hold their own party on a separate day. Other groups broke away as well and held their own separate events.
Despite the disagreements, however, a date around New Year was eventually agreed for the main party, and Dorothea Binz—to everyone’s astonishment—agreed to allow the organisers to take over an entire block—Block 22—for the event. Her stipulation was that only children would be admitted, along with twenty organisers. No mothers or camp mothers must attend.
In the final days the preparations were frantic. A Czech artist made the puppets and the forestry gang organised a tree that was decorated with tinfoil secured by a Siemens worker. French prisoners made toys out of rags, and each child was to have a small parcel and a large plateful of bread and butter, organised from the kitchen. The children’s parcels were to contain five lumps of sugar donated by the Norwegians and Belgians—the only prisoners to be receiving food parcels at this time—and they were wrapped in envelopes from the stores. Sylvia Salvesen spent every evening for three weeks drawing on each parcel a picture of a Norwegian child on skis, wearing a red-tasselled cap, standing outside a small Norwegian cottage with a pine wood all around. Somehow she got hold of red, yellow and blue pencils.
As soon as the party began, however, things started to go wrong. Sylvia was posted at the door and led the children in. ‘Most were like starved skeletons and some were so weak they had to be carried to their chairs.’ The children were arranged in front of the stage. Bräuning said a few words, and he and Binz stayed for the singing of ‘O Tannenbaum’, during which the children began to cry. As the crying continued Binz and Bräuning stormed out.
When the puppet show started the children had no idea what to do. ‘They hadn’t the strength to laugh. They had forgotten how to laugh,’ said Sylvia, and many were frightened of the puppets, particularly the dogs. ‘One or two whimpered weakly from terror when Punch, with bells on his cap, appeared on the puppet stage. One or two cried hysterically and had to be carried out. The older ones clapped after each scene, but the little ones looked up terrified at the sound, which no doubt reminded them of blows they had received.’
Afterwards, when the food was given out the children fell on it ‘like wolves’, but couldn’t eat it, as their stomachs couldn’t tolerate it. ‘Most could only manage a couple of mouthfuls. Tears began to roll down their thin cheeks, leaving little white strips on their dirty skin.’
Although the organisers gave accounts of the children’s party after the war, the children’s view has always been obscure. Most of the children who attended did not live for more than another two months. Of the handful who emerged from the camp alive, few have ever spoken of the party. Those who did have quite different memories from the organisers’. Naomi Moscovitch was seven at the time. There was a party, she recalls. And she was there because she was in the children’s choir.
Naomi Moscovitch was one of the sixty-four Jewish children who arrived at Ravensbrück from Holland in the winter of 1943–4. She lives today in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv—a striking figure, with long dark curls, a flowing oriental style of dress, and an open, welcoming smile. Her younger sister, Chaya, smaller and fair, had come to talk too, but she doesn’t remember a thing, she says, as she was only one when she reached the camp.
The girls’ mother was originally Slovakian, and their father Hungarian. Before the war he was cantor in a synagogue in Bratislava—‘he had a wonderful voice’—and in 1938 was chosen as cantor of a large new synagogue in Amsterdam, so the whole family moved to Amsterdam, and hence their arrest in Holland. ‘As my father got his Hungarian papers, and Hungary was with the Germans, we were OK,’ says Naomi, meaning by that that they were not put on trains to the death camps. In fact her father was sent to Buchenwald and Naomi, Chaya and their brother Yair, aged eleven, came with their mother at the same time as Stella Kugelman to Ravensbrück.
Though they were the first significant group of children in the camp, they were treated just like other prisoners, says Naomi.
Only difference was we got a bowl and two spoons—one extra as we were four people. I remember coming into the block for the first time and asking my mother who all these men were, as I’d never seen people without hair.
My mother must have been so brave and strong. She was thirty-seven. Her name was Frieda Moscovitch and she kept all three of us going. She stood with the baby in her arms for hours and hours at the Appell, and at that age children got teeth and cried and cried. The food was terrible, one piece of bread for the whole day and a bowl of soup, but she smuggled in extra porridge somehow, and when I had typhus she got me an apple. I never knew how she got that apple. My brother got so thin he said one day: ‘Look, I can see through my hands.’
When Naomi caught typhus she was kept in a hospital block and remembers a Jewish woman lying in the bed shouting in German: ‘I’m going to kill anyone who comes near me.’ Naomi, who spoke a little German, tried to calm her. ‘The woman in the bed on my other side died. I woke up one morning and she was still. Dead. But we got used to that. No it didn’t bother me at all, or haunt me. It’s just like someone was there and then they were dead.’
The children played inside the block mostly, ‘just jumping out of the window, things like that. There were no toys. We played in a kind of field, I remember, near the fence, and they told us not to go too close. And someone threw themselves against the fence and died and we weren’t allowed to play there again.’
Naomi remembers a few big events: the Gypsies arriving in the summer, for example, and being told they were thieves. ‘They came into our block and I remember thinking they were very dark. We were dark but they were darker. I don’t know if they were really thieves, but I know my mother made a little bag to keep our bowl and spoons in and hid it under the pillow.’
In the autumn of 1944 the Hungarians arrived, and everyone was amazed by the state they were in. ‘It was a terrible sight—they’d had no preparation, unlike us. We’d been in a camp before we got here—in Holland—but they had come straight from home or from the ghetto. They were in total shock and filthy.’ Chaya interrupts to ask something about the camp and explains that she is always learning new things, ‘because I never knew anything at the time—just that I was there, but where was it that I was? All I remember is sitting on a floor. When I came out I didn’t know about most normal things. People always made fun of me and said—oh, you know, she’s like that because of the camp.’
When the big groups began to arrive from Hungary and Slovakia, their mother, being Slovakian and her husband a Hungarian, would go and see if she knew anyone, ‘and of course she spoke Hungarian’. One day she found her husband’s sister, Aunt Chaya (Chaya was named after her), in the tent.
And so my mother told our aunt that we couldn’t get her out but we’d bring her things when we could. One day my brother comes and says: ‘I think they are killing Aunt Chaya.’ So my mother went to
look, and because my aunt had tried to get out of that tent they hit her badly, and so we got her out somehow. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know how my mother managed that either, but Aunt Chaya came to the block and lived with us, so we stayed together as a family from then on.
After Naomi had talked a while longer she paused and looked at me, as if there was something specific she wanted to say. Then she asked if I knew about the children’s choir. I said I didn’t.
So I was in this choir. It was the end of forty-four and they made a barracks for the children to go to. They said at Christmas we’d go there and we learned Christmas songs in German. Both my brother and I were in this choir. We both sang well, like our father. And we went to this barracks and there was a big Christmas tree and they said after the singing they would make a party and give us something. So we sang opposite the Germans and the women with the dogs.
After the singing stopped my mother came and stood outside the window, and I don’t remember exactly how this happened, but she must have shouted to my brother and said we had to come out straight away, because this was not our religion and we couldn’t stay to celebrate and we had to go with her back to the block.
And my brother took me by the hand and we climbed out of the window. I didn’t know, but it was after that they said everything exploded and there were no barracks any more. So my mother saved us. And in the place where the barracks was, the next day was just water all frozen over. I didn’t think about it, just that where the barracks was there was nothing any more. When I met some of the other kids years later I said I was in that choir and they said but how is it possible—how did you stay alive? These others told me that the Germans threw hand grenades in the window and that was how they wanted to finish off all the children.
I asked Naomi if she thinks it really happened, that they blew up the children in the barracks at the Christmas party. ‘That is what I remember about what happened and what people say. I can’t explain it all but that’s what I know. And in Belsen it was terrible too.’ She was talking now about what happened to the Ravensbrück children who were taken to Belsen a few weeks after the party. ‘It was cold and we were in bags on the floor, no beds, no nothing. People were dying everywhere. And I remember my mother got typhus and my aunt saying look, we have three little children and everyone who schlepps out a dead body from the block should get an extra bit of bread.’
