Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Before long, however, the prisoners did see a pattern in Winkelmann’s selections. Julia Barry noticed that he always looked down, at women’s legs. Denise Dufournier said he often appeared with Hans Pflaum, the ‘cattle merchant’, but unlike Pflaum, ‘also a hefty beast of a man’, Winkelmann didn’t beat the women. ‘He just stood and looked at their legs.’ Loulou said that in Block 10 he sometimes asked a nurse to yank off a blanket. ‘Then standing well back, he slowly turned his thick neck, raised his eyes and allowed them to hover for a second or two over a terrified prostrate figure, particularly the legs.’

  Winkelmann inspected only legs because the selection criteria had whittled down to just that: was a woman capable of walking, and therefore of joining the coming evacuation march? The Führer had insisted that no prisoner should be left alive in the camp when the Russians arrived, but it was clear by now that there wouldn’t be time to gas everyone, so the rest must be force-marched out. Those who could not walk were to be gassed.

  Within a week of Winkelmann’s arrival the Schreibstube secretaries noticed that he had doubled the numbers going to the Youth Camp from about 50–60 a day to 150 or even 180. Most of those sent had swollen ankles and calves.

  He also took over selections at the Youth Camp, where Ruth Neudeck was losing control. Prisoners were fighting back and some had escaped. A Hungarian managed to find her way to the main camp after being offered the white powder by Salvequart. She was hidden in a block and never found. According to Hedwig Kuna, a German assigned as Neudeck’s interpreter, Adolf Winkelmann blamed Neudeck for these incidents. As soon as he arrived at the Youth Camp he accused Neudeck of choosing women for gassing ‘who still had the strength to resist’.

  A young woman from Warsaw was so strong when selected for gassing that she managed to escape from the gas chamber itself, ran back to the Youth Camp and described what she saw. As Irma Trksak, the Austrian-Czech Stubova, recalled:

  She told us that they were taken into a hut which had an opening in the roof. They were all told to lie down and go to sleep, as it was night, but the next thing they knew this gas was coming down through the opening in the roof. But not all the women died at first, and as this Polish woman wasn’t completely dead, she managed to get away before the others were all taken to the crematorium.

  The terrified woman had no idea where to flee, which was why she ended up back at the Youth Camp, and tried to hide there. The guards didn’t see her at first, so knowing that the dogs would be on her any minute she hid in a ditch where prisoners’ excrement was dumped, together with wet straw. ‘She thought if she hid there, under the straw, the dogs wouldn’t be able to smell her and she’d be safe,’ said Irma.

  At first the dogs didn’t find her, but one stood there beside the ditch where the woman was and another prisoner—another Czech Stubova—saw this:

  The Stubova shouted: ‘She’s in the ditch, let’s burn the straw.’ So Neudeck set light to the straw, which smoked the Polish woman out. Straight away she was locked up again and put on a truck to the gas chamber the following day. As the truck took her off she shouted out from the back: ‘It’s all a lie. We’re not going to Mittwerda, we’re going to the gas chamber and to be burned.’

  After this episode, not even the most crazed of Youth Camp prisoners believed in the Mittwerda lies.

  In early March rumours spread around the Youth Camp that Winkelmann would pick anyone out with a pale face, so they would pinch their cheeks or rub them with something red. More and more women resisted, screaming, kicking and scratching, usually as they were loaded onto the lorries, often with women already dead. ‘There were terrible scenes,’ said Hedwig Kuna. One afternoon a young guard returned after going with a transport to the gas chamber, and her whole body trembled. ‘She told me it was gruesome and she couldn’t do it again.’

  All this time Mary O’Shaughnessy still lived in terror of being selected because of her artificial arm. Then in early March the Scottish nurse Mary Young heard her number called out. Mary Young was very weak by now and unable to protest, said Mary O’Shaughnessy. ‘That morning we were all going mad. We were led out to stand before our huts. SS men came and made us walk along for about twenty yards in ranks of ten. As we walked the SS picked out women to stand out. Before me was Mary Ellen Young with a French woman, Tambour. Mary and the Tambour woman were picked out by the SS men.’

  The Tambour woman was Madeleine Tambour, who had worked with the British Prosper circuit near Paris. Her sister Germaine was with her in the Youth Camp but was not selected. Mary O’Shaughnessy said she had no idea why Madeleine Tambour and Mary Young were chosen this time. ‘There was no logic in it. Mary seemed no weaker than anybody else.’

  After selecting at the Youth Camp, Winkelmann returned to the main camp, which in March became the focus of his interest. During the first phase of gassing, women from Block 10 and some of the other death blocks were selected, but from late February onwards he selected from ordinary ‘workers’ sick blocks too.

  Germaine Tillion was now writing a daily diary—‘the most essential facts; the ones that horrified most; that were too important to commit only to memory’—while still collating figures handed to her by the ‘old rats’. Soon after Winkelmann arrived, after the first evacuation transports, Germaine noticed that the numbers in Ravensbrück started to go down for the first time. At the start of February there were 46,473 women counted there, which was probably the peak. At the start of March there were 37,699.

  On 2 March women were called for a further mass evacuation transport, this time to Mauthausen camp, near Linz, in Austria. The transport was to take all Gypsies, a large number of old and sick, as well as all the NN prisoners. Germaine’s diary records: ‘This evening 1000 women—of which, all the NN (except those in hiding) and Gypsies with their children—were locked up in the Strafblock.’ Germaine doesn’t mention the ‘essential fact—the one that horrified most’ that she too was sent to the Strafblock, because, as ‘NN’, both she and her friend Anise Girard were listed for Mauthausen. Later she explained that thanks to an influential Czech friend, the artist Anicha Kapilova, both she and Anise were taken off the list at the last minute. Their places were taken by others who left next morning locked inside closed cattle wagons.

  Reports of what happened to those who left for Mauthausen emerged only after the liberation. At least 120 women died on the journey of thirst and suffocation. On disembarking, those ‘still dying’, as one of the prisoners put it, were quickly ‘finished off’. Walking towards the gates of Mauthausen, a Dutch woman called Sabine Zuur noticed a young woman in front of her holding a baby in one arm and holding the hand of a small child in the other.

  She marched two ranks ahead of me. She was at the end of her strength and kept tripping. When the SS hit her, those who marched beside her lifted her up, but she only fell again. So the SS pulled her out of the crowd and beat her up, leaving her at the end of the line. The other women had to look after her children. We were terrified of tripping and being beaten like her.

  Once Anise and Germaine had been taken off the Mauthausen list, they were hidden—Anise in the block where Germaine’s mother, Emilie Tillion, had been all along and Germaine, who was sick, in an ordinary Revier block. Word then spread that a Generalappell was due next day. Generalappell was a mass selection in which anyone might be chosen for gassing, but particularly the old, or women with bad legs. At sixty-nine years of age, Emilie Tillion was obviously at risk, but so was Germaine, who was not only sick but still limping heavily owing to her bout of diphtheria. While Emilie stayed in the block, tended by Anise, Germaine’s friend Anicha smuggled her out to a safer Revier block. Anicha knew that Grete Buber-Neumann lay ill in the Revier at that time in a ‘safe ward’, meant for privileged prisoners.

  ‘I was in the sickbay when the window was opened from outside by Anicha, who said excitedly that a general Appell was on the way and some hiding place must be found for Germaine,’ Grete recalled. The only other woman in the saf
e ward was lying, very sick, on the mattress below Grete, so Grete was able to take Germaine into her bed and hide her under the blankets.

  Outside the siren sounded the Appell, and more than 30,000 women lined up beside their blocks as Winkelmann, Suhren and a posse of guards and prisoner policewomen drew near. Among them, Zdenka Nedvedova noticed a woman guard with a cane forty centimetres long, with a silver crook. Each prisoner had to undress and quickly walk by them. Anyone with swollen legs, grey hair, wrinkled bodies and the like had to stand to one side.

  We stood in an extraordinary roll call on the Lagerstrasse while before our eyes half-naked women were taken from the hospital blocks and taken away on trucks. Among those taken I remember the writer Milena Blacarova Fischerova, who was suffering from TB, a mother of two children. She was taken to the gas chambers. We stood powerless and very shocked. Women who were led away cried out and fought. Lorries stood by waiting to take the victims.

  At the end the chosen prisoners were taken to another block and to the Youth Camp by truck. Those suffering from TB and the ‘insane’ were taken straight to the gas chamber. I saw them clad in nothing but a shirt piled up in heaps on lorries, and within an hour I observed flames spurting high from the chimneys and a thick suffocating smoke spread over the camp.

  Zdenka and many other prisoners said the camp police helped the SS to round the women up and hunt down those who were hiding. Certain Blockovas helped too. The French later accused Karolina Lanckorońska, Blockova of their block, Block 27, of helping the SS to round up women.

  As the mass selection continued Grete and Germaine heard the bawling of guards outside the blocks, ‘and we knew the search parties would be going through the whole camp,’ said Grete. ‘We heard the sound of lorries starting up and driving off and various other sounds. After an hour, steps sounded in the corridor outside our room and Germaine hid further under the bedclothes. Three men came in—Treite, Trommer and Winkelmann.’

  ‘How many sick are in this room? asked Treite. Grete answered, two. Treite looked at her, and at the dying woman below, then turned with the others and went out. Soon after the siren sounded the end of the Appell. ‘Anise’s face appeared at the window frozen with horror,’ said Grete. ‘She said, “Germaine, your mother has been taken to the gas chamber,” at which Germaine sprang out of bed sobbing: “My mother, my mother.” ’

  The selection was over and the women were returning to their blocks. Anise told Germaine that she and Emilie had tried to hide but had been forced to line up. Emilie had then been picked out and put on one of Winkelmann’s lorries. The prisoners believed she was taken to the Youth Camp, and not direct to the gas chamber, so Germaine hoped there was still a chance of saving her.

  Germaine wrote a message to her mother and asked Micky Poirier, a friend who worked in Hans Pflaum’s office, to make sure the letter reached Emilie in the Youth Camp. If anyone could get a letter to the Youth Camp it was Micheline ‘Micky’ Poirier, aged nineteen, who had arrived in Ravensbrück in July 1944 and quickly become the camp’s most influential French prisoner. Largely because she was a fluent German-speaker, born in the border region of Alsace, but also because she was a clever administrator, Micky was made assistant to Pflaum, which meant she knew the whereabouts of almost every prisoner in the camp.

  Germaine’s message to her mother read: ‘Watch your health and try to seem happy.’ She asked her mother if she had seen two French women also sent to the Youth Camp—‘Have you news of Evelyne or Madame Bailly?’ She sent a package too, containing painkillers, a piece of sugar and a biscuit. Germaine sent a second and a third letter to her mother over the next days, as well as packets containing pieces of charcoal for diarrhoea. ‘For the charcoal you must scrape it very fine so as not to irritate the intestine,’ she instructed.

  Germaine waited days for an answer, but none came. A week later Micky gave Germaine the packets back, as well as the letters, telling her that her mother had gone to the gas chamber. The gassing of Emilie Tillion devastated the French, and sympathy poured out for Germaine, though some asked, and ask to this day, why it was that Germaine hadn’t stayed with her mother. ‘I think I would have made sure I went with my mother to the gas chamber, wouldn’t you?’ said Loulou Le Porz, when I asked her what she remembered of that day.

  Others blamed Karolina Lanckorońska for not saving Emilie. Lanckorońska was Blockova of her block and had influence with Binz and Suhren. She could have intervened. Anise Girard blamed herself. She had promised her friend Germaine she would look after Emilie, to whom she was also very close.

  Jeannie Rousseau, instigator of the Torgau protest in September 1944, was by this time back in the main camp, and says there was nothing anyone could have done to save Emilie Tillion:

  Germaine was in the Revier and could do nothing. Anise was with Emilie and said to her, look, you don’t have to go. I can hide you. But Madame Tillion said to Anise: ‘I have always looked my life in the face. I want to look my death in the face.’ She didn’t try to escape it. She didn’t want to try. ‘My moment has come and I must face it.’ She had to go and see what it was.

  And Anise has always borne the guilt. She has not forgotten it for one second. Whenever she speaks about those moments. She weeps. Weeps. Weeps. That is why she won’t leave Germaine’s side even now.

  I met Anise Girard twice. The second time was at Germaine’s Paris house in 2009. Germaine was 100 years old and lying, very weak, upstairs. Anise sat in constant vigil over her dying friend. A picture of Emilie hung on the wall. I asked if it was true that Karolina Lanckorońska had refused to help prevent Emilie’s selection.

  Yes, I thought Karolina would save Emilie. She was in the same circle in the camp. She was a professor of art like Madame Tillion and they both gave lectures on art in the block. They were in a group of intellectuals and ambassadors’ wives—the milieu culturel. But Lanckorońska found most of the French detestable in the camp. The French were always refusing her orders and she had a big wooden stick and she hit us with this and she said: ‘Mesdames, you have no civilisation.’

  Yes, she could have helped. She was near us when the selections happened, but she did nothing.

  Anise started to cry. She had never talked about the camp at all ‘until Faurisson’, she said. Robert Faurisson, a British-born academic who lectured at the University of Lyon, wrote articles in the 1970s questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers and saying there was no proof of a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. In support he cited the records of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which didn’t mention a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. Faurisson’s claims caused uproar around the world, and pain amongst Ravensbrück survivors, in particular those who had seen family and friends taken off to be gassed.

  By the 1970s Germaine Tillion was busy studying African tribes again, so Anise Girard took on the task of refuting Faurisson. ‘We were terribly tired as old deportees; we had wanted to forget and drive all that out of our lives, but when we read what Faurisson said we had to do something.’

  If the International Red Cross files that he saw did not mention a gas chamber, it came as no surprise: Himmler fooled the ICRC over the gas chamber at Ravensbrück and much else besides. The facts were confirmed before the post-war Hamburg trials. Johann Schwarzhuber, the SS officer who conducted the gassing, described the gas chamber and outlined how the killing happened.

  Later more SS evidence emerged. Fritz Suhren, who in early statements confirmed the existence of the gas chamber but denied any personal involvement, escaped just before the Hamburg trial. Recaptured, he appeared before a French court at Rastatt in 1949, where his role was proven. Suhren was even shown a ‘Mittwerda list’ with his signature at the bottom. The list, dated 6 April 1945, with 450 names of women selected for gassing, had been obtained by prisoners and secretly brought out to be used in evidence.

  Other witness testimony later came to light, some of it given by survivors of the men’s camp who had worked in or around the gas chamber. Because
these survivors lived behind the Iron Curtain after the war, their evidence was at first almost unknown in the West, but it added important new details. Anise discovered the evidence of Emanuel Kolarik, a Czech prisoner who did odd jobs around the gas chamber—cleaning and moving bodies. He said that during his work he often spoke to the men who performed the gassing. These were the Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz imported by Schwarzhuber to form the Ravensbrück Sonderkommando.

  In the yard beside the building the women were given a small towel and a piece of soap and taken into the left side of the building, where they had to undress. They were told that they had to wash well, as this was important in the camp where they were going. In the gas chamber the SS shouted to them: ‘Wash well, there’s no hurry.’

  According to Kolarik the men of the Sonderkommando took the dead bodies out of the gas chamber by dragging them with hooks. ‘Many of the dead had obviously tried to escape or fight their way out at the last minute, because the dead women’s fists were clasped tight, holding clumps of hair, and bodies were clinging to each other so that the workers couldn’t disentangle them.’

  On his way to do repairs near the gas chamber, Kolarik saw a Jewish worker picking up dead bodies and piling them up outside the crematorium like logs ready for burning. The worker wore an apron made of sacking as protection, and in the apron pocket he had some bread. ‘This prisoner was so desensitised that he ate the bread he had in his apron while he went off to collect a new body. This spectacle made me vomit.’ Kolarik called his boss over to show him the scene—an SS man—and he vomited too.

  Anise also unearthed evidence suggesting that there may have been a second gas chamber at Ravensbrück. Both she and Germaine had always wondered how it was that the primitive wooden gas chamber described at Hamburg by Schwarzhuber and others had managed to kill so many, given its small capacity. Furthermore, the wooden structure was reportedly destroyed in the very first days of April, and yet there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that gassing went on longer than that. Other testimony shows that it went on until late April, so where?