by Sarah Helm
Keeping selections out of sight would also ease the concerns of the wider camp staff, who would not need to be briefed, at least at first, in case discontent broke out in their ranks too. Prisoner doctors and nurses in the hospital blocks were the most likely source of protest, because they were already terrified of more black transports. Two SS doctors had even shown signs of rebellion: Percival Treite had refused to be present at the mass shootings that Otto Moll was still carrying out, and the other new doctor, Franz Lucas, who arrived in December, then refused too.
In order to hoodwink the medical staff—prisoners and SS alike—Schwarzhuber devised a charade with real actors and props. He sent a French prisoner doctor called Dora Revier to the Youth Camp before the first group of prisoners arrived, giving her medicines and a set of sham instructions to start a sickbay. Two nurses came with her. Now rumours spread that the new camp really was a sanatorium. Indeed, so effective was this latest deception that at first it fooled some of the Revier’s most experienced staff, including Loulou Le Porz, the Block 10 doctor, and Erika Buchmann, the German communist who had by now taken over from Carmen Mory as Blockova.
According to Buchmann, Treite also appeared to believe in the charade. He walked into Block 10 one morning and asked for a list of prisoners who were most acutely ill, explaining that they were to be ‘transferred elsewhere for better treatment’. The transfers he referred to were almost certainly the first dispatch of prisoners for the Youth Camp. Testimony varies about when this was. Erika Buchmann said Treite’s request came on 20 January, so the first women probably left very soon after that.
Erika had compiled the list straight away, ‘without the slightest fear about what it might mean, in view of the terrible conditions in Block Ten’. At the same time the guards began calling out prisoners with pink cards and selecting among them for the new camp.
In the offices the ‘old rat’ secretaries—‘death secretaries’ they called them at Auschwitz—collated the lists without a qualm. They surely should have known better, having assembled so many black transport lists since 1941. The Austrian communist Hermine Salvini remembered being told when the first group left to note beside their names: ‘transferred to the new camp’. She said the secretaries had no idea of the conditions prevailing at this camp. ‘We were even glad that the old women were going to a place where conditions were good and where they would only do a little knitting and no hard work.’
The Belgian nurse Renée Govers, however, had fears from the start. When the sick from the main Revier were taken off to join the group and she tried to give one woman a warmer coat, one of Schwarzhuber’s guards shouted at Renée: ‘You idiot. She won’t need that now.’
It took several more days after the first departure before suspicion began to spread. Sylvia Salvesen got word of conditions at the Youth Camp from a Jehovah’s Witness who ran an errand there and returned with news of prisoners starved, stripped of their clothes and left out in sub-zero temperatures. Dora Revier, the French doctor, and one of the nurses who went with her returned in a state of shock after a week, bringing back their unused medicines. The so-called Revier was an empty barracks with no mattresses or even running water. Dora complained at once to Treite, who replied that the Youth Camp was not his responsibility: Schwarzhuber was in charge.
Sylvia went to find Cicely and Mary to stop them going, but it was too late, they were already behind the barbed wire in the death zone at the end of the camp, waiting to leave. A third British woman, Mary O’Shaughnessy, was with them.
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Mary O’Shaughnessy knew she was destined for the Youth Camp as soon as the guards started calling out pink cardholders; she held a pink card because she had an artificial arm. Of Irish immigrant stock, raised in Leigh, near Wigan, Mary had learned to cope with her disability from a young age. As a teenager she had set off to France to work as a governess and to seek adventure and independence. Following the French surrender in June 1940, Mary offered to help a local resistance cell, hiding stranded British servicemen on their way down escape lines to the Pyrenees. In Ravensbrück her artificial arm had often provoked beatings from women guards, but she had been spared the most gruelling labour, and after nine months in the camp she was still in a better state of health than her two British friends.
Mary Young, the Scottish nurse, was continuing to weaken. A tiny, slight figure, Mary was the daughter of a grocer’s clerk from Aberdeen, who in 1909 had gone to France as a private nurse and then served in the field hospitals behind the trenches. She settled in Paris, where she was arrested in 1942 on suspicion of helping British airmen, and arrived at Ravensbrück in February 1944.
Mary’s closest friend in the camp was Cicely Lefort, the forty-six-year-old SOE woman who had arrived on the same transport from Paris. In the 1930s Cicely, an accomplished yachtswoman, had travelled to France seeking adventure and fallen in love with a French doctor called Alex Lefort. He owned a yacht, which he sailed off the Brittany coast. The couple married, and when war broke out Alex encouraged Cicely to go back to England and volunteer for SOE, given her knowledge of France and the French coast. It was Alex Lefort who had first notified SOE in London that Cicely was in Ravensbrück, after receiving a letter from her with the camp address. During her first months in the camp Cicely had stayed in touch with her husband through the official camp mail, but during the summer of 1944, she received a letter from Alex asking for a divorce. Devastated, Cicely found the means to re-write her will in the camp, cutting him off; she even found a camp doctor to witness the document.
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The group waiting to leave for the Youth Camp with the British women—probably the second group to leave so far—was a mixed crowd with almost every nationality represented, and all ages. Romana Szweda, a Polish teacher, was one of the first Polish prisoners to arrive in Ravensbrück and had helped build the first roads. In early 1945 she fell ill and was in the Revier when SS officers came to select for the Youth Camp.
Several long-standing German prisoners were also waiting to leave. A Frau Rissel from Wiesbaden was due to be released in January, but the guards forced her to stand outside the office in the freezing cold for several hours while she waited for her discharge documents. She caught frostbite on her face, and instead of going home now stood behind the wire. Frau Thüringer, who had lost three sons at the front, had only recently been arrested on spurious allegations of speaking out against Hitler; her selection may have been due to her grey hair, which she wore in pigtails. Another German, Gisela Krüger, had arthritis in one leg, which Dr Treite decided—quite unnecessarily—to amputate. She too was bound for the Youth Camp.
Recent arrivals from Hungary were also listed, including Klara Hasse, who lost her right foot on the forced march out of Budapest. Some seventy Dutch women included several who had worked at the Siemens plant before they fell too ill. Scores of Poles from the Warsaw Uprising were here, as well as survivors of the Auschwitz death march, plucked out of the Ravensbrück tent.
Members of the same family volunteered for the Youth Camp group so as not to be parted. They included the French Tambour sisters, who had worked on the SOE’s ill-fated Prosper circuit near Paris. Madeleine Tambour was desperately sick, and when she was selected her sister Germaine volunteered to join her, having heard the rumours about better food and conditions.
Even now, new rumours of extra blankets and individual mattresses were circulating among the prisoners heading for the Youth Camp, and they couldn’t help but feel some hope. The simple prospect of leaving the main camp and walking out into the trees gave the women some sort of cheer. Neeltje Epker, a Dutch midwife and Ravensbrück veteran, put it like this: ‘Though we had experience not to believe all those things, we never could imagine that they were telling us such flagrant lies or that they could be quite so cruel. We never imagined that they were going to murder us.’
Irma Trksak, an Austrian-Czech prisoner in the group, recalled the same mood of tentative hope: ‘You see, we wanted to believe so m
uch. And our only chance by now was to believe in a miracle.’ In any case, most knew they didn’t stand a chance of getting off the list; the women selected had no influence in the camp.
Ilse Gohrig, another Dutch woman, simply accepted her fate, as did many others: ‘I was sent to the Youth Camp because I was a knitter. I was not a Kapo. I would not be a Kapo as I knew the Kapos were the worst types. I was detailed to go there. I did not try to stay behind as I decided to do what God had decided to be my fate.’
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The orders came to line up in ranks of five and the gates at the back of the compound opened. Ahead ran a track leading deep into the woods. ‘Later we’d call them “the little woods of death” [Todeswäldchen],’ remembered Janina Habich, one of the Poles. Those able to walk crunched through the snow, some of them pushing or pulling carts that carried amputees and other disabled women. It took more than an hour to cover the half-mile to the Youth Camp. When at last it came in sight, this huddle of five squat grey barracks ringed by wire seemed disconcertingly small, but the pines shimmering with snow made a pleasant impression on some.
When they got there, Cicely and the two Marys were crammed into one of the smaller blocks with about seventy other women, and no room to sit or lie down. The guards made out that this was just a temporary arrangement while their permanent quarters were made ready. Instead, they were left in the room for three days. No food or water was provided on the first two days, and no one could go out to relieve themselves; urine and excrement soon covered the floor.
Alina Brewda, the Jewish doctor who came on the Auschwitz death march, recalled reaching out of the window and grabbing snow to quench her thirst and to wash. Mary O’Shaughnessy said that during those first forty-eight hours, at least three women in her block died and their bodies remained where they lay. Another seventy women were locked up in an adjoining room, where Mary heard several screaming madly until they passed out, ‘presumably through exhaustion’.
On the third day, the guards handed out a splash of watery soup and a scrap of bread before they moved the women into a larger block, along with several hundred other prisoners. There were beds of a sort—planks fixed to walls. The guards gave each woman a single blanket and a straw mattress, sopping wet from lying out in the snow. With the heat of their bodies the mattresses dried, but then seethed with lice. There was still nowhere to wash, and the latrines turned out to be an open ditch forty feet long on the far side of the camp.
Neeltje Epker, the Dutch midwife, remembered that women slept four or five to each plank, as the Youth Camp swelled to about 800 women. So small a gap was there between one plank and the one above that prisoners could barely squeeze onto them. ‘Everyone had a fifteen-inch space.’ Food was half of the rations issued at the main camp: half a litre of watery cabbage or swede soup at lunchtime, and 100 grams of bread.
One incentive for moving to the Youth Camp was the promised absence of an Appell, but on about the fourth day the women were woken at 3.30 a.m. and forced to stand outside in the freezing air for six hours. Some collapsed and died. The next night, the guards took the women’s remaining blankets, and then their coats and jackets at the 3 a.m. Appell. They were standing in a snowstorm when the coats were taken, Neeltje Epker remembered. Leonarda Frelich, another Auschwitz death-marcher, recalled standing for seven hours. ‘Many were passing out, but the group was still not allowed back into the blocks.’
When eventually the women were let back inside, the guards opened the windows wide. The prisoners sickened fast, with severe diarrhoea and swelling caused by starvation and exhaustion. Few had the strength to reach the filthy latrine, but Stijntje Tol, from Amsterdam, struggled over and saw a pile of confiscated clothing outside the back of the hut. ‘When we stood for the next Appell we were dressed in nothing but thin dresses, in temperatures now dropping as low as –25 degrees centigrade.’ All this time more women were being marched up from the main camp. The five wooden barracks were filling up fast, while the last barracks, used as a morgue, was piling up with corpses.
On about 5 February the chief guard, Ruth Neudeck, held a special roll call. Instead of lining up the prisoners as usual she called numbers from a list in her hand, ordering the women to step aside. Neudeck used her silver-handled whip on any woman who didn’t respond fast enough, or else the sanitary workers Koehler and Rapp dragged the women forward. Neudeck herself said later she didn’t at this stage know where the selected victims were going. Schwarzhuber had given her the list and written at the top: ‘Schonungslager Mittwerda’—‘Rest Camp Mittwerda’.
These Mittwerda lists, as they became known, named the prisoners marked for the gas chamber. Schwarzhuber’s charade meant that prisoners, and possibly Neudeck herself, could share the brief delusion that a rest camp existed called Mittwerda.
At the main camp offices, the new lists caused the greatest surprise among the prisoner secretaries. Unlike previous black transport lists, these had to be signed by Suhren. Secretaries used to euphemisms like ‘transferred to another camp’ found Schwarzhuber’s reference to a place called Mittwerda perplexing. So specific was the order that some thought it really meant somewhere better. Then someone thought to check on a map. Mittwerda was well east of Ravensbrück, in Silesia, and had already fallen to the Russians. Schwarzhuber—nicknamed the ‘loving God of Ravensbrück’—must have known his latest lie would be discovered by the prisoner secretaries, and that Ruth Neudeck and everyone else would find out soon enough what it meant.
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The silver-topped riding crop—some called it a cane or stick—was the first thing people noticed about Neudeck though Leonarda Frelich also recalled that the woman wielding it was elegant and pretty. Appearing with this stick, she stalked up and down the ranks, using the curved handle as a crook round the necks of the selected prisoners, pulling them out. Any resistance was met by punching; the woman was thrown to the ground and kicked. Frelich also remembered that two men were usually at Neudeck’s side and one was always drunk.
Usually Neudeck carried a list, but as Mary O’Shaughnessy observed, on some occasions she and the SS men simply chose women who seemed in poorer health, ‘looking at the legs to see if they were swollen and the eyes to see if they had any life in them. If they didn’t move quickly enough she hit them with the riding crop that she always carried in her hand.’
Janina Habich remembered Neudeck parading up and down the ranks ‘with her thin black staff with a silver handle that she hooked around a prisoner’s neck as she called “Links” [left]’. Several others testified after the war to the same effect, often adding: ‘I saw this with my own eyes.’ But there was never any danger that the survivors’ evidence would be doubted, because, unlike most other women guards, Ruth Neudeck admitted everything they accused her of and more.
‘I had to beat prisoners now and again because of a lack of discipline,’ she said. ‘I always gave them one or two strokes with the whip. I couldn’t strike them with my hand because they were always infested with lice. In the punishment block I also beat three or four prisoners a day because they didn’t want to go to work.’
Neudeck’s lawyers attempted at one point to claim mistaken identity, suggesting that it was someone else, not she, who carried the silver-handled whip. Neudeck would have none of it. She told the court: ‘During the second half of January I received from Sturmbannführer Sauer a cane that had a silver handle. I never lent it to anyone else and as far as I can remember nobody else in the camp had a similar one, or one with a silver handle.’
After the selected group were called they were made to stand to one side and then marched off to a large block known as the gymnasium; it had served as a gym when the camp housed teenage girls, but now it served as a holding zone for the gas chamber. Few details have ever emerged about what happened inside it, but Kapos and prisoner secretaries spoke of the ‘dreadful tragedies played out there’. These prisoner Kapos handled most of the day-to-day running of the Youth Camp, in return for privileges, just
as they did at the main camp.
One of the Kapos, Józefa Majkowska-Kruszyńska, an arrival from Auschwitz-Birkenau the previous summer, got work with the Youth Camp corpse commando, which was ‘something like the Sonderkommando at Birkenau’. Sometimes she went to the gymnasium to remove the bodies of women who died before they were even sent for gassing. Once she was asked to extract gold teeth from the dead, but she refused, so someone called Dr Vera did it instead. The SS man Rapp was always drunk, said Jozefa, and Lotte Sonntag, the prisoner messenger, was always beating, but Neudeck was the worst.
It was usually just before dark when Neudeck ordered the detainees out of the gymnasium and into a lineup. Despite the snow, they were then made to strip off all their clothing. Mary O’Shaughnessy sometimes witnessed the scene through a slat in her hut wall. Once the prisoners were naked, a dark-haired young woman wearing a white coat would approach the group. This ‘Dr Vera’ wrote the women’s camp number in indelible ink across their left forearm, or across the chest instead.
Next, the guards allowed the prisoners to put back on one article of clothing—usually a thin shirt or cotton dress. They stood outside for two or three more hours until it was nearly dark. At this point a motor lorry arrived, driven by Josef Bertl, the head of transport. Koehler and Rapp would appear, and Neudeck too. The women were told to get in. If they struggled, the guards threw them into the truck, as their screams rang through the Youth Camp. Eyes peered through windows and cracks, watching as Koehler and Rapp kicked any woman who resisted; or Neudeck screamed and lashed, or kicked out with her jackboots.
