by Sarah Helm
I wondered if Naomi had talked much about the bombing of the barracks when she went back to Holland after the war. Most people in Holland had not been in the camps, she said, and ‘you didn’t talk about it with children of your own age. A lot of people don’t want to talk about what happened at the camps. My brother has never talked about it even to me, and won’t talk now.’
Naomi Moscovitch’s account of the bombing of the Ravensbrück Christmas party is not supported in any written testimony, and yet several other surviving children remember something similar. Stella also believes the story to be true.
Stella says she wasn’t at the party herself because she was sick and unable to go. Her information came from her last camp mother, a Russian called Aunt Olympiada, who helped Stella in the final days. Aunt Olympiada told her that she’d once had a son, and that ‘she’d lost him in the bomb’. She knew no more than that, but she is sure that Aunt Olympiada meant the bomb at the children’s party.
After the war Stella met some of the grown-up party organisers, including the German communist Erika Buchmann. ‘Erika would say to me: “But Stella, you must remember how we gave you bread and everything at the party,” but I didn’t remember that at all.’
As no written evidence survives of the bombing, and the adults didn’t talk of it, it is hard to believe the story, and yet, as this is the way the children remember things, for them it is clearly true. The horrors the same children went through in the weeks that followed were arguably far worse, and better-documented. The first of those horrors began a few days after the Christmas party.
In the last days of December prisoners in the Revier began to talk about another of the new Auschwitz men, one of the two doctors. He was ‘a little man called the professor,’ said Sylvia Salvesen, and not long after he arrived Gypsy children were called up for sterilisation. Their parents were told that if they agreed to the operation they would be freed. The man was Carl Clauberg, the doctor ordered by Himmler early in the war to find a means of mass sterilisation, as part of the drive to create a master race. For three years Clauberg had been experimenting at Auschwitz, maiming and killing hundreds of women, but all his experiments had failed. Now, in what he must have known were the last months of the war, he wanted to experiment again on new ‘material’ at Ravensbrück.
In the Revier, the message got out that Treite was to carry out the surgery under Clauberg’s supervision. According to Sylvia Salvesen, Treite’s secretary, the Belgian Emmi Gorlich, suddenly turned ‘pale as death, with dark rings under her eyes—she knew what was going to happen’. The prisoner staff in the Revier all told Emmi to plead with Treite not to cooperate with Clauberg. ‘And through the thin partition we heard her begging him. Voices rose, the door flew open. But Dr Treite stormed out saying: “Orders from Berlin.” ’
Emmi Gorlich said later that the sterilisation started with children aged eight to ten.
All the Gypsies came into the hall. They were small children. They called out to me as I passed. I went to try and find them some sugar; they didn’t understand what was going to happen. My friend, an Austrian doctor, often helped on operations. She was forced to do this. I told her you must not do this, they can kill you. She came back green in the face, saying Dr Treite had sent her away.
According to Zdenka Nedvedova, Clauberg carried out the sterilisation by spraying a substance into the womb under pressure and watching the effect on the fallopian tube through an X-ray screen.
Sylvia remembered two Gypsy girls coming into the Revier aged eight and ten—both called Elisabeth. ‘They were asking: “We are already sterilised, why are we called in?” They put them in the room behind me and I asked to see Dr Treite to ask him to do nothing more to the children. Dr Treite said again: “It’s no use. It’s orders from Berlin.” A child came out crying in a hysterical way.’ Zdenka said the eight-year-old’s screams went on for two hours after she was operated on.
As more and more children were sterilised, prisoners in nearby blocks also heard the children screaming and weeping. The prisoner medical staff became more and more desperate to find a way to stop it, and a German nurse called Gerda Schröder, who had recently joined the staff, offered to help. ‘We pleaded with her to give them at least a painkiller, and she did this,’ said Zdenka.
Afterwards we took the children from the X-ray room and we put them in bed in a small treatment room where they lay bleeding from the uterus. Their poor little female bodies made a distressing sight, and at least two of the little martyrs died. In these cases both children suffered further from inflammation of their abdomens, which meant they died in desperate pain.
According to figures later discovered in the German records, between Christmas 1944 and February 1945 500 Gypsies were sterilised at Ravensbrück, including 200 young girls.
Chapter 32
Death March
Grete Buber-Neumann said that you could always tell women who had arrived at Ravensbrück from Auschwitz, as they had a special hardness about them—especially those who survived the death march of January 1945. The Jews among the 20,000 women left at Auschwitz at the end were still there because they were ‘lucky’ enough to be young and fit when they arrived and so to be selected for work. Allegra Benvenisti was eighteen when she came from Thessaloniki in Greece to Auschwitz with her parents, sisters, brothers and cousins. At the first selection, the SS officer pointed her one way while almost all the rest of her family went the other way, to the gas chamber.
As Allegra noticed, many of these healthy girls then died of sickness after two or three weeks. She too fell sick and nearly died, but a Ukrainian nurse saved her by smuggling her out of her hospital block just before a truck took all the sick away—‘dead or alive’. Susi Bachar, another Greek, was also selected for work, along with her two sisters. One quickly died of typhus and the other of dysentery.
Throughout the summer of 1944, Susi, Allegra and other ‘working’ prisoners watched as Auschwitz reached the zenith of its power, exterminating 400,000 Hungarians in just two months. But during the autumn the churning of the trains back and forth, bringing victims for slaughter, was slowing as the Soviet advance continued and the camp prepared for evacuation. By October those still alive at Auschwitz dared to hope that they might survive, especially when on 2 November the furnaces stopped smoking. Lydia Vago remembered a civilian boss in the factory where she worked whispering to her: ‘See to it that you get home now—there are no more chimneys.’ For Lydia, home was in the Transylvanian mountain town of Gheorgheni, in Romania, where her father was a doctor and her mother a dentist. The whole family—Hungarian Jews by origin—had been rounded up in 1944 and Lydia, aged twenty, with her younger sister, Aniko, ended up in Auschwitz.
Late that year Auschwitz’s blocks and streets began to thin out as prisoners were transferred to camps in Germany. Some of the most hated guards left too, among them Irma Grese, the farmer’s daughter who had trained at Ravensbrück and risen to the post of chief woman guard at Birkenau. Now Grese and several of her Ravensbrück cohort were reassigned to Belsen.
With fewer guards, Maria Rundo, a Polish student, recalled an ‘idyllic period’ in Auschwitz in late autumn when the prisoners had more freedom of movement and were left to some extent to their own devices. The weak, old and sick went to the former Gypsy camp, where Maria found work as a nurse. ‘We were saving the sick with our own hands; we cooked soup for them, bathed and combed them, deloused them.’ Here babies were even born and could be looked after.
The divisions between Jews and non-Jews began to relax. A Polish-Jewish doctor, Alina Brewda, recalled being sent to live in a mixed block of Jews and ‘Aryans’. ‘It had been a strict rule that we be kept separate, but now we were living together.’ The brothels closed down and one of the prostitutes asked Alina to treat her, as she was dying. In return she gave Alina a knitted black dress, felt shoes and a warm jacket, which served her well on the coming march.
In January 1945, with the Russians just a few days from Aus
chwitz, the SS began to prepare frantically for the evacuation. It soon became clear that anyone fit enough to walk was to be forced on the march, but anyone too weak was to be killed. As the moment came the guards began to cull the sick and dying by shooting. They also prepared to blow up the camp. Lydia Vago, who had fallen ill, was in the sickbay and she remembered a nurse shouting at her to get out now. Lydia left the Revier, and as she walked away she saw a truck arrive to take those too feeble to move, to be shot.
On 18 January work continued normally, including construction of a new block. As night fell, the call came to clear out. Maria Rundo remembered a total blackout in the hospital where she worked, and then the lights came back on and an SS man ordered the nurses to collect all the cards of the sick, which he took away. On the Lagerstrasse people shouted that all those able to march should return to their blocks, as the evacuation was to start. It was snowing, and as prisoners ran back to the blocks those too sick to march panicked. ‘There was no doubt about their fate, as the SS would not let the sick be liberated,’ said Lydia Vago.
Some didn’t want to leave, hoping to greet their Soviet liberators. Alina Brewda, the Jewish doctor, hid with the sick, but an SS officer found her and threw her out. Some made for the clothes stores and collected whatever they could for warmth—blankets, coats, sweaters. Allegra, the girl from Thessaloniki, was on the night shift at the factory when the call came. She had no time to eat or get warm clothes and went straight to the line now gathering at the gate. Lydia Vago found time to get into the pharmacy of the small factory Revier and put aspirins and bandages into her small bag made of blue-grey uniform cloth. She and her sister Aniko carried extra clothes and blankets strung in bundles on their backs, the string clasped tight in their hands.
On the evening of the evacuation, those selected to leave gathered at the gates: men, women, Jews and non-Jews, Kapos and non-Kapos. Children were told they couldn’t leave, but some came. Just before the gates opened the guards handed every prisoner a loaf of bread and told them to get in line, women at the back.
This was not the first death march. In the early years of the war the Nazis force-marched Jews into the ghettos and Red Army soldiers into the camps. In the summer and autumn of 1944 they marched many thousands of Hungarians to Germany. But this forced march of some 60,000 enfeebled, terrified Auschwitz survivors, including 20,000 women, out of the camp gates into the snowy night, with Russian artillery sounding just three miles away, surpassed all others in horror.
Lydia held on tight to Aniko. It was vital not to lose each other as the crowd now began to move. The guards shouted: ‘Alles antreten’—Fall in, line up. Get out. The dogs barked. An air-raid alert sounded and for some minutes all the lights went out, plunging the camp into darkness. People thought of hiding, but what was the point if the camp was going to blow up? As the prisoners moved away they knew the Red Army was close, as they could see ‘Stalin’s candles’—the Soviet Katyusha rockets—lighting up the skies.
The line shuffled out down the snowy road, the men in the front, the women at the back, with SS on all sides, carrying rifles. The temperature was plummeting. Alina Brewda remembered the guards ordering them to run, prodding with bayonets. While some ran, others stumbled. Before long they saw the first dead men lying in the snow, shot for falling over. Soon they saw women shot as well. Allegra kept slipping as snow got stuck on her wooden shoes. When Alina couldn’t keep up, stronger runners on either side picked her up under the arms and carried her, so she ‘ran’ between them barely touching the ground.
Now they slowed a little. The SS had calmed down as they put more distance between themselves and the Russians. Guards started to overtake them on motorbikes or in cars. The factory workers’ group tried to stay together, but soon they got mixed up with the massed ranks from Birkenau. Sisters, cousins, friends, all feared losing each other. They knew it meant death to be left alone amid the trudging crowd.
On the first day, the guards allowed them to rest a few times and relieve themselves on the side of the road. But they were afraid they’d fall asleep, squatting there, and freeze to death. They’d eaten their loaf of bread and anything grabbed before leaving. ‘So we ate the snow,’ said Maria Rundo, who noticed groups of male corpses, in prison stripes, near where she stopped. ‘They’d had their skulls cut open right across the top of their heads with a knife, and their brains scooped out. We supposed the SS did it with long sticks, with some kind of wooden ball attached to the end. There were SS on the march who were armed with such sticks.’ After this Maria tried not to look at the ground at all. ‘I pretended it was all a fairy tale and watched the sunset and sunrise instead.’
Shots rang out repeatedly behind them, as the SS executed any stragglers. The marchers now trampled over corpses strewn along the road, shot where they slipped and fell. Lydia saw a blue-eyed boy under her feet and stepped over him. One girl and her mother carried an exhausted younger sister until they couldn’t carry her any more. ‘So we sacrificed her and she died.’ They knew the guards had killed her, because they heard the shot seconds later.
After three days they lost track of time. In Lydia and Aniko’s factory group the marchers reckoned they were already down from 500 to 300. Sometimes they seemed to be trudging with thousands, sometimes just with a small group, separated temporarily from the billowing crowd.
Mostly they tried to sleep at night in barns, but often there was no room, and many lay down in the road to freeze to death. Some even managed to flee, reaching nearby farms where Poles hid them. Others were found and shot. Once the guards sent Lydia and Aniko to a small barn with soft dry hay where they slept for a few hours. They thought of hiding in the hay and asking the Polish farmers for asylum, but next morning the Germans came and stabbed the hay with bayonets, shooting anyone they found. On another occasion they rested in a cowshed where peasants were milking the cows. The peasants gave the marchers bowls full of warm fresh milk.
Allegra remembered another night when the SS marched them to a barn with one guard carrying a can of gasoline. Everyone thought the SS were going to burn them all to death, ‘but I was too tired to worry’. So she lay down in the barn and to her astonishment found her cousin Berry next to her, whom she hadn’t seen since their arrival at Auschwitz. Berry had worked at ‘Canada’, the warehouse where the clothes and personal belongings of the gassed were sorted. She gave Allegra some spare warm clothes she had brought with her from ‘Canada’.
‘We vowed we wouldn’t let anyone separate us again, and for the next days we marched in line holding each other.’ More and more stragglers were being shot. At one point Allegra told Berry she couldn’t go on—‘Let them shoot me.’ Berry urged her on. Further ahead, they reversed roles, Allegra encouraging Berry. At one point a friend called Diamante joined the girls and carried Berry some of the way.
After two or three days the SS broke up the endless column, as they marched the men down different roads towards Mauthausen, Buchenwald or Gross-Rosen. The women kept on towards Ravensbrück, 420 miles northwest of Auschwitz. Yet often, straying in the Polish wasteland, the SS lost the way. Word of the chaos on the Polish roads got back to SS headquarters in Berlin, so Rudolf Höss, the former Auschwitz commander, was sent out to assess the evacuation.
In his memoir Höss said he was surprised to find that already the Russian armoured spearheads were fanning out on the east side of the Oder, while on every road and track west of the river he found prisoners stumbling through deep snow without food. He first ran into men bound for the concentration camp of Gross-Rosen, ‘but most of the non-commissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea how to get there.’ On his first night out there he came across countless bodies of prisoners who had just been shot and were still bleeding.
Allegra and Berry’s group marched for another 250 miles west and then north, passing through Prague and on into Germany, where shelling was intense. They spent one night in a field with dead bodies and dead horses and the next day
the guards herded them onto train wagons. Just before the train left:
I spotted loaves of bread on the ground. I don’t know how I gathered the strength to run and steal two loaves and run back to Berry to give them to her. I picked up a blanket from a dead person and we climbed into the open train car, keeping the bread hidden. We covered ourselves with the blanket and during the night, while the train was moving through the snowfall, we ate the bread and also ate the snow from on top of the blanket. We travelled this way through the night and the following afternoon we reached Ravensbrück.
Alina Brewda, the Jewish doctor, was put in a covered train that went northwest through Hamburg and then doubled back to Berlin, where they saw mile after mile of ruins ‘and rejoiced’. Guards loaded Lydia and Aniko’s group onto open cattle wagons in Loslau in Silesia, with only standing room. Aniko had developed a septic sore, caused by the string of her makeshift bag, which had cut into her flesh.
‘We were snowed in,’ Lydia recalled. ‘We were standing sardines. Falling was impossible, although we couldn’t feel our frozen numbed feet, which had no strength to support us. Have you ever heard of human beings dying upright? That’s what happened on the death trains.’
Lydia and Aniko stood near the front of the wagon where the SS guard sat on a bench with his German shepherd dog at his feet. The dog got up, and Lydia crawled under its belly and lay there for warmth. She was sure the guard would tell the dog to bite her, or he’d shoot her. But he just complained ‘My dog has no space’ and told her to get out of the way. ‘We travelled this way through the night and the following afternoon we arrived at Ravensbrück.’
