by Sarah Helm
The sense that the wider world was throwing lifelines into Ravensbrück, even as selections for the Youth Camp redoubled, shored up some prisoners’ morale and encouraged them to take on greater risks. The Red Army women protested to Suhren when they heard that a group of Russian children had arrived at the camp to be killed. Suhren allowed the children to live, as long as they stayed in the Soviet block.
When a further round of selections happened in Block 10, Loulou Le Porz and her friends Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Jacqueline d’Alincourt discussed whether they too should approach Suhren to protest. The three women met during the Sunday walking period on the Lagerstrasse and talked of what should be done. Loulou recalled:
We were all in shock. We began to understand that they were out to annihilate all our sick and probably us too. Jacqueline wanted to go straight to the commandant and protest, and she would have gone to Suhren flying the French flag if she could. But I thought, what if I’m sent to the Strafblock, and I can’t care for my sick at all? Marie-Claude was cautious too. So we decided not to protest but to help our prisoners in our own way.
In the NN block some of the rabbits were even daring to hope that they might go home after all, simply because they hadn’t yet been shot. More than any other group, the rabbits had always had reason to believe they were to be killed, because they were living proofs. Just in case, one of them had recently secured a camera on the camp black market and persuaded Germaine Tillion to take photographs of their legs as insurance should the final execution happen.
Wanda Wojtasik, however, believed that if the SS had wanted to shoot them they’d have done it by now. ‘We had started allowing ourselves to think of the prospect of freedom,’ said Wanda. And Krysia Czyż, who could no longer write secret letters home, had instead been passing her time drawing intricate maps showing the roads along which she intended to walk home, all the way to Lublin.
When on 4 February, therefore, a messenger came with the news that all rabbits were to stay inside the block until further notice—this was a sentence of death, and all of them knew it—the shock was far worse than it might have been had they never begun to hope.
‘Total and unimaginable silence followed the messenger’s departure,’ said Wanda Wojtasik. She looked at Krysia’s face, which was grey—‘not pale but ashen-grey’. In seconds the news had spread around the whole block, and others who had not been operated on broke down, wailing about injustice. A peasant girl called Lodzia began sobbing, which set everyone off, and the whole block wept.
‘Now we knew the war was drawing to an end and that we were to be exterminated completely. The experiments done on us and others were a crime against mankind, and as witnesses we had to be destroyed,’ said Wanda. That evening rumours spread that they were to be evacuated to Gross-Rosen, not executed, but everybody knew this was a lie, as Gross-Rosen was already liberated.
All night the block held feverish meetings as prisoners discussed what to do and messages of support poured in from around the camp. Some passed the time ‘waiting for death’ by writing letters to their loved ones, which they handed to fellow prisoners to pass on. Other rabbits sang patriotic Polish songs.
One group made plans to resist by all means possible. It included stalwarts of earlier protests—Wanda, Krysia and Dziuba Sokulska—and many others. The leaders were Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, who proposed a two-point plan. First, a delegation would make a statement to Fritz Suhren, challenging him to admit that the suggestion that they were bound for Gross-Rosen was a lie. They would then demand that their alleged crime be read out to them before their executions. ‘We agreed that we would tell him that we had a duty to return to our motherland, or, if we were going to die, we wanted to die like soldiers on the battlefield,’ Wanda said.
While the statement was made, the other rabbits would do whatever it took not to be taken and shot, which would mean hiding around the camp. One scheme involved smuggling themselves into work gangs of the Zugänge—newcomers—who did not yet have camp registration numbers.
They knew from experience that the first attempt to round them up would probably take place at morning Appell, so they had only hours to prepare. For the plan to succeed, the rabbits needed volunteers to take their places in line while the Poles hid. The word went out at once to friendly Blockovas, and by the time the siren sounded at 4 a.m. the volunteers were primed. Support came from the Red Army women, also in Block 24, some of whom gave the rabbits their ration of soup, saying: ‘You’ll need all your strength now, girls.’ Szura, a Soviet electrician, promised to turn the lights out during Appell to cover the rabbits’ disappearance. Two other Red Army girls sought out Karolina Lanckorońska and told her: ‘Miss Karla, we won’t surrender the rabbits.’
‘An incredible, unheard-of thing happened—the whole camp decided that we were to be saved,’ said Dziuba Sokulska. One rabbit was to be replaced by a Red Army doctor, another by a Yugoslav. A Norwegian prisoner told her rabbit friend that she would insist on being executed in her place. ‘You should be the one to live to tell the world about the crimes committed against you. I am older. I can perish,’ the Norwegian wept. Many Poles also came forward. An old Polish woman called Władka begged to replace Wanda, claiming she had cancer and was going to die soon anyway. If not Wanda, then Krysia, she insisted, so she should survive to tell the tale. Neither Wanda nor Krysia would agree.
Twelve rabbits offered to hide first, and by 4 a.m. they and their stand-ins were ready. As the parade got under way, the twelve slipped away and their replacements filled the gap before the guards began to count. Roll call started, and then prisoners heard a murmur from the far end, followed by voices shouting: ‘They’re coming for them! They’re coming for them!’ Wacława Andrzejak saw Suhren in the distance, surrounded by guards with dogs, walking down the Lagerstrasse. One of the guards held a sheet of paper with a list of names. The siren had not yet sounded for it, but the shout Arbeitsappell!—‘Work roll call!’—rang out from within the lines of prisoners, and they all broke ranks. Some shouted: ‘We won’t let you take them.’ The guards tried to retake control, but at this moment the Red Army electrician threw a switch and the camp was plunged into pitch darkness.
Columns of prisoners collided blindly with each other, while more rabbits were collected and hidden by prisoners from other blocks. The guards held back, waiting for order to settle. Suhren had clearly ordered them not to shoot. By the time the grey light of dawn broke, the confusion was total. Work groups began to form up for the day with the wrong prisoners, while several rabbits succeeded in joining the unnumbered Zugänge groups of new arrivals. Others swapped numbers, preventing the guards from keeping track of prisoner movements.
When the Lagerstrasse finally cleared, only the two guinea-pig leaders, Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, returned to their original block to coordinate the resistance. During the next hours they carried messages between prisoners in hiding and acted as public spokeswomen for the group while putting the second part of their plan into action. Zofia and Jadwiga confronted Suhren, challenging him to admit that the claim to be sending them to another camp was a lie. Sticking to their script, the women said if the rabbits were to be executed, it should be ‘with honour’. Suhren refused to yield, and issued a fresh order for all prisoners to assemble. Out went the order from Zofia and Jadwiga: Stay in hiding.
Each day at roll call, the same stand-ins took the places of the missing rabbits; each day, Szura managed to switch off the lights just as the counting began. Suhren demanded extra roll calls, more searches and closer surveillance of the camp exits, but to no avail. Some rabbits left with the Zugänge for munitions plants many miles away; the rest were scattered across the whole camp. One of the rabbits, Maria Cabaj, was hiding on a hospital ward amid the sick and dying. Still in terrible pain from her own ‘operation’, she feared that she’d quickly be found because she couldn’t move, and was terrified that she might then be thrown alive into the furnace. She found new energy—‘from wher
e, in all my pain, I don’t know,’ she said later. ‘I only know that in spite of everything I didn’t want to die.’
Antonina Nikiforova, the Red Army doctor, hid Wacława Andrzejak on a typhus ward, registered as a Hungarian patient who had just died. Wacława lay for two days in terror, feigning unconsciousness. When she dared to see, she witnessed worse horrors than any in the guinea-pig block. ‘Forty to fifty women died around me every day. There were women here who were no more than skeletons. They were starving and ate what was given to them but could digest nothing as they excreted it all immediately. The smell in the ward was almost unbearable.’
At first Wacława didn’t dare go to the bathroom. At last she plucked up the courage, and found the bathroom heaped with corpses. ‘After a few days I became indifferent to the sight of these naked corpses who had died of dysentery or typhus, and I got used to washing without glancing at them.’
All the time more women were entering the ward, where selections for the gas chamber were now regularly taking place. ‘I couldn’t hide there any longer in case I was selected myself—or else I lost my mind.’ So Wacława returned to her own block, where other rabbits were hiding in the gap between the floorboards and the earth foundations. Maria Cabaj was equally appalled by conditions in the Revier. ‘One day I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I jumped out of the window and went back to my old block. I’ll stay here even if it’s the end of me, I told myself.’
Wanda Wojtasik likened the rabbits’ manoeuvring to ‘a fearful game of hide-and-seek. The watchword “They’re after the rabbits” was understood by everyone and warnings went out in a flash.’ Leokadia Kwiecińska, another rabbit, looked back on those last months as a ‘strange incomprehensible dream—a tragic dream, but one that had its comic aspects’.
Normally the rabbits took pride in their ‘upstanding behaviour’ and neat appearance. Now, ‘as if a magic wand had been waved’, they disguised themselves to ‘look like the masses’, while striving to conceal disfigured legs. Joanna Szydłowska cut off her magnificent long hair. Wanda and Krysia dressed up as Goldstücke, tying scarves under their chins ‘Ukrainian fashion’, plaiting hair over their foreheads and scrapping for food.
Krysia looked suddenly quite different. ‘Without her glasses she had a pleasant little face and a look of uncertainty and excessive seriousness,’ said Leokadia. As Leokadia couldn’t manage without her spectacles, she covered half her face with a black kerchief.
Over the next two weeks, while the rabbits continued to live ‘like hunted animals’, not one of them was betrayed or captured. Some prisoners noticed that the guards didn’t seem to rush to find them either, backing off ‘perhaps because they were beginning to think about themselves and how to get out alive’.
Then came a new initiative from Suhren. Clearly exasperated, he summoned one of the rabbits, Maria Plater-Skassa, and offered her the chance to sign a declaration stating that her scars were caused by an ordinary accident in a workshop, not by experiments. Sign, and he would free her. She refused. Flanked by the ‘delegation’ women, Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, Maria told Suhren that he should understand the whole world now knew their names, and killing them would simply exacerbate his crime. Suhren then indicated that he was aware the news had got out. It would not in principle be difficult for him to execute sixty women, he said, except in the rabbits’ case, because ‘the details are known in America, Britain and, more important, in Germany’.
Suhren explained that he could not take the initiative himself, but would ask Berlin what to do and ‘try to resolve the issue in a humane way’. He added that he couldn’t do so immediately as he ‘had other things to think about’.
According to another account by Janina Iwańska, it was as a result of this meeting with Suhren that the girls now learned that the list of those to be executed had in fact been sent direct to Suhren by Karl Gebhardt, with instructions they be gassed. Suhren’s annoyance at Gebhardt’s interference was obvious to the rabbits at the time, and it was also obvious in his testimony after the war. Suhren evidently resented the fact that Gebhardt had used ‘his’ prisoners for these experiments in the first place, thereby implicating him and tarnishing his own record. Now, due to his friendship with the Reichsführer SS, Gebhardt was pulling rank on Suhren and ordering him to gas the women, which in the circumstances he was loath to do.
As Karolina Lanckorońska put it: ‘The girls succeeded extremely well in frightening the authorities, especially Binz, whose name, as well as Gebhardt’s and Suhren’s, had by now been broadcast.’
Meanwhile, the other rabbits stayed in hiding, desperately hoping that the Russians would get here before the SS found them.
* * *
* When Aka eventually reached the United States in late 1944 she gave interviews to several newspapers and broadcasters, in which she described the conditions in Ravensbrück and the medical experiments in detail.
Chapter 35
Königsberg
At the little camp of Königsberg, on the River Oder, Violette Szabo, the British SOE woman, was also clinging onto hope. She spoke of her baby, Tania, to friends in her block. ‘In a few months I’ll be able to hold her in my arms again.’
It was now nearly three months that these women, who had arrived together from Paris in September 1944, had been slaving at the Königsberg punishment camp—the result of refusing to make munitions at Torgau. After working on a frozen airfield, now they were digging a trench for a narrow-gauge railway and laying the track. Grasping the heavy steel rods with frostbitten hands, and stumbling on frozen feet, was more than most could do. The guards put the stronger Poles and Russians at the head of the line, but the French and the small group of British and Americans couldn’t keep up with them.
At least on Sundays they could rest in the block and talk, which was when Violette befriended Christiane Le Scornet, a seventeen-year-old French girl. ‘Violette treated me like a little sister,’ Christiane remembered. ‘She had a rare loyalty and a rare courage.’
All the SOE women were in Christiane’s block. She recalled that Lilian Rolfe was extremely thin and shockingly pale, while Denise Bloch suffered terrible sores from malnutrition. The three Americans—Charlotte Jackson, Lucienne Dixon and Virginia Lake—were there too, and another Englishwoman called Jenny who kept aloof and didn’t like to say she was British. Of the group, Violette was in the best state of health and cheered them all. ‘She often spoke of Tania. She would say: “She’s in London with my parents, loved and protected.” She was certain that she would find her little girl again soon in good health.’
That Christmas, as the women decorated their block with pine branches, Violette had sung ‘God Save the King’ and Christiane joined in. Christiane described how she then turned to another French woman, Mathilde, and said: ‘Now it’s your turn to sing, come on, Mathilde, sing!’ But Mathilde said: ‘I’ll sing when I’ve found my children and my husband.’ When Christiane pressed her further, Violette, her eyes full of tears, said: ‘Leave it, Crissi. I understand her, she can’t.’
‘Violette was like that,’ said Christiane. ‘She always had time for those suffering more than her, and tried to give them courage with her gentleness and her smile.’ Christiane also remembered Violette’s ‘absolute conviction’ that Germany had lost. ‘She spoke all the time about how the Allies were advancing every day. “We must all hold on, we must be strong,” she would say.’
Violette and all her fellow prisoners knew they were bound to be the first women of Ravensbrück liberated because of the subcamp’s location. Königsberg was just six kilometres to the east of the River Oder and lay right in the path of the Red Army. In January 1945 the First Belorussian Front army had begun the major assault that would lead it on to Berlin. The roads around Königsberg were already filling with refugees fleeing west, while civilians working at the airfield began to pack up and leave.
January was the coldest month at Königsberg. Each morning at Appell women passed out on the snow.
If a friend failed to carry them to the infirmary they stayed there. Those still on their feet were now only interested in saving themselves. ‘One’s first reaction was “I won’t move, I can’t help anyone, I’m so weak I must save the little strength I have, or I shall fall myself,” ’ said Virginia Lake. Jacqueline Bernard said many simply grew weaker and weaker, never realising they were dying. ‘Most who died this way were never admitted to the hospital hut and were compelled to stand up every morning at roll call in the bitter cold. Many died before the roll call ended.’
Lilian Rolfe collapsed at Appell one morning in a fit of coughing. Denise Bloch could not help because she was suffering terribly from a septic foot. Violette and Virginia Lake, the strongest of the small group, helped lift Lilian to the sickbay, which was already full.
Suzanne Guyotat, a young French woman who huddled on the floor near Lilian, remembered the sickbay as more like a pigsty than a hospital. There were no medical supplies, no heat and no blankets, yet prisoners outside still longed for the Revier to escape the sub-zero temperatures outside. Virginia’s friend Janette was among them, and with a temperature of 100 degrees was finally admitted, only to be kicked out when her temperature fell again.
Sick women who could not stay in the Revier were crammed into the ordinary blocks; festering sores covered their legs, their hearts and lungs were failing, and they clearly could not work. The Königsberg commandant despatched many of these useless mouths in trucks back to Ravensbrück, and the news would come back that they were dead. Furious at the number of sick still on his hands, the commandant made all those remaining stand for five hours in the snow at Appell, just as they did at the Youth Camp. Death by Appell was now a favoured weapon at several other subcamps too.
Those left on their feet went off to work. The weakest collapsed in the snow: Suzanne Guyotat noticed one of her friends was missing and found her dead body frozen fast to the ground. On another day Virginia discovered her friend Janette crouching behind stacks of sod and sobbing: ‘I want to die. I can’t stand it any longer. I want to die.’
