Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  The women climbed inside the buses and the Canadians helped. Inside they were each given a piece of cake and a large piece of cold sausage. The vehicles started up and drove away. The women were told they were heading to Lake Constance and the Swiss border.

  —

  After the 299 French had gone, those left behind talked of who might go next. They knew that time for rescue was running out. The secretaries were holding daily bonfires burning documents and files. The front was closing fast, and with about 30,000 prisoners still held in Ravensbrück, orders to evacuate—or blow the camp up—were certain to come soon.

  Sylvia Salvesen had given up hope. It was four weeks since the nurse Gerda Schröder had left, taking with her the second of Sylvia’s smuggled letters and promising to pass it on to Wanda Hjort and the Norwegian cell at Gross Kreutz. ‘She had been gone over a month and dreadful things had happened during those weeks,’ Sylvia recalled.

  Then on the day the French left for Switzerland—5 April—Gerda reappeared. She came to Sylvia’s bed that night, carrying a parcel and bringing news. Sylvia was astonished and overjoyed. Gerda was upset at the sight of her friend, who in four weeks had grown ravaged, white-haired and thin. She gave Sylvia the note sent back from Mrs Hjort and Mrs Seip, but Gerda had more recent news than this. She explained that after she left Ravensbrück in early March she’d been unable to get back to the camp due to the bombing of the train lines. Gerda had tried to get back to Gross Kreutz, but the lines to Potsdam were also bombed. On Easter Monday, however, Gerda managed to telephone Gross Kreutz and arranged to meet Wanda Hjort in Berlin.

  Miraculously, given the turmoil in the city, Gerda and Wanda had found each other. Wanda brought with her the Norwegian Professor Arup Seip, a key member of the Gross Kreutz cell. They met in a small café near the central station, where trains were still arriving, though the front was so close now that they could see the wounded soldiers being brought in on the S-Bahn. All over the city the streets were plastered with notices saying: ‘Berlin will never surrender.’ It was rumoured that Hitler was in an underground bunker, said Gerda. Everyone knew the end was near.

  Arup Seip had told Gerda that the previous day Bernadotte had met Himmler at Hohenlychen for a second time. He also told her that at the meeting ‘Himmler had given the Red Cross permission to fetch the Norwegian and Danish women from Ravensbrück’. Sylvia was ecstatic. ‘I shall never forget that evening,’ she wrote later. ‘I was told to write another letter with an up-to-date list of names, as Professor Seip was afraid that some of our prisoners had been moved.’

  Gerda told Sylvia to write the list at once, as Wanda aimed to come to the camp next day to collect it, and take it to the Swedish task force. How Wanda would make the perilous journey to the camp Gerda had no idea: the lines had been bombed again, even since Gerda had made it through. Nor did Gerda know how Wanda would gain access to the camp. But she told Sylvia that she had given Wanda directions about where to find her in the nurses’ quarters if she did get through the gates.

  Sylvia now wrote her third letter to her Norwegian friends. In clearer terms that nobody this time could misunderstand, she told them that the women of Ravensbrück were being gassed.

  Thousands have been picked out and sent to the gas chamber. A number of them were ill but some of them were quite well, though older. It was almost enough just to have grey hair. The saddest scenes have been enacted here. Many had dyed their hair with shoeblack or soot. By a miracle I have escaped.

  She gave names of ninety-six Norwegians and twenty Danes still in the camp. Fearing that, as with the French, the weakest might not be allowed to leave, Sylvia begged the Swedes to make sure that those too ill to walk should not be left behind. A group of French had been released that same day, she wrote, apparently to be exchanged for Germans. But many French ‘intelligentsia and women of good families’ had been kept back, which Sylvia clearly feared might happen to her. ‘It will be terrible to be left alone without any other Norwegians,’ she wrote.

  Sylvia also gave as many names as possible of the Norwegians who were NN and had therefore been sent to Mauthausen, but she wasn’t sure she had them all. ‘We believe that they arrived [at Mauthausen] but have heard rumours that half of them were selected on arrival and sent on to another camp.’ Others on the NN list were still at Ravensbrück, she said, and employed in the workshops, ‘so they are in less danger of being chosen for the gas chamber’.

  Sylvia gave her letter to Gerda. The next day Gerda told Sylvia that Wanda had made it to the camp, and she had handed the letter to her. Wanda had come with a message that the Swedish Red Cross buses would be here within a few days. ‘You must pack your rucksack immediately. You must believe it,’ Gerda told Sylvia, at which Sylvia took Gerda in her arms to hug her—‘A prisoner, daring to hug a German sister.’

  Wanda Hjort had arrived at Ravensbrück just a few hours earlier. It was her most daring expedition yet. Bombing had disabled the railway line, so Wanda had come in the car loaned by the Swedish legation and driven by Bjørn Heger, the Norwegian doctor, who had joined the Gross Kreutz cell. The couple had worked on several dangerous missions together in recent months—they had also become lovers.

  Wanda and Bjørn were receiving help now from the ICRC delegation in Berlin, who had given them Swiss Red Cross identity papers to get them past the camp gate. On arrival, the SS sentry let them in, at least as far as the camp offices, where Bjørn went to drop the parcels they brought. When no one was looking Wanda managed to slip away down an alley to look for Gerda, as arranged, in the SS nurses’ block. It was hard to find. She felt conspicuous in her thick warm coat and good boots. ‘All round me were women in rags, pulling carts with bare feet in wooden clogs.’

  Wanda kept on walking, and found Gerda’s room almost by chance. There was a bed, a chair, some artificial flowers in a vase. Nobody came and she feared she would be caught, thinking: ‘If I’m tortured I’ll give everything away—Gerda and Sylvia’s names too.’ But Gerda appeared, the letter was delivered, and Wanda made her way back to the camp gates. Bjørn was waiting, trying to look at ease. Wanda tried not to run. As they were leaving, the guard eyed the couple with a look that suggested to Wanda he had understood something—‘perhaps that we were all in peril now’—and he let them go.

  Back in the car, Wanda broke down and sobbed. ‘This time it was too much,’ she said later. ‘All these women—starving, humiliated and defenceless—and many my age.’ They sped off to deliver Sylvia’s list of names to the Swedes.

  —

  ‘Sylvia’s to be freed,’ said Zdenka to those in the Revier the following day. She was wearing an organised English tweed coat, and hugged her friend. The Oberschwester, Elisabeth Marschall, gripped Sylvia’s hand and cried. Norwegians in the ordinary blocks had had no idea that rescue was close. Nelly Langholm and her Stavanger friends only learned when they were ordered into the showers the night before. ‘But we didn’t believe it,’ said Nelly.

  The next day we came out in our new clothes and had to walk to the gate. We saw the buses and there were these Swedish men in grey uniforms with red crosses on their arms. They were just standing outside the gate. I think they told us: ‘Now you will go to Sweden—now you will be free.’ Before we left, the German big boss came and said: ‘Meine Damen, Sie sind frei—Ladies, you are free.’ Can you imagine? Here was a German calling us Meine Damen. Were they really talking to us? We hadn’t been called ‘ladies’ for such a long time. Meine Damen.

  And Nelly laughed. ‘Margrethe said to me: “I would rather he’d said Meine Schweine.” ’

  Nelly recalled that other prisoners were standing in the camp and watching as they left. ‘We were given bread to take with us and we took it; we didn’t know when would be the next time we’d get something.’

  ‘How did it feel, leaving the other prisoners behind?’

  ‘I think we felt sorry. It is not easy to understand, but if something so good happens you feel sad at the same time. Very sad.
’

  ‘Could you say goodbye?’

  ‘No, we couldn’t, because we came out of this building straight to the buses.’

  ‘Did you think they would be collected too?’

  ‘I can’t remember. But we heard that the camp was—that it was going to be blown up.’

  Leaving on the bus was ‘like a miracle’, said Nelly.

  I was with Margrethe, and there were two Germans on the bus with us. So we thought, what are they doing here? What is going on? There was a Swedish driver and two on a motorbike in front. It was terrible to go through Germany. It was one month before the end and it was shocking to see a big town like Hamburg. I don’t think I saw a house—not a whole house. We heard the shooting from the west—the Americans—and the Russians from the other side. But we found a way through all these ruins. These terrible ruins. Because the Germans, they repaired the roads very quickly you see. They needed a way through too.

  From Hamburg the buses drove on to the Danish border. Nelly smiled as she remembered.

  And we saw the grass, the green grass—and we hadn’t seen green grass for two years. So Margarethe and I asked if we could get down from the bus and go into the grass. We wanted to pee. And we wanted to pee in the grass. So they let us down and we ran across the field and took our knickers down. I will never forget the feeling of the green grass. It was a feeling so beautiful, cool and soft. Freedom—you know.

  As the Swedes crossed the Danish border, 200 miles northwest of Ravensbrück, the 299 French who left with the Swiss were arriving at Kreuzlingen, 550 miles to the south on the German-Swiss frontier. They left three days earlier, but their journey the length of Germany was longer and harder. Loulou and Jacqueline Héreil, two of the Block 10 team, were on the bus, tending the sick and working with Hans Meyer, the Red Cross doctor. Violette Lecoq, their comrade from Block 10, classified ‘NN’, was left behind. All the way women cried out ‘Are we at the frontier?’ only to find they had stopped for another air raid. Zim told Loulou that all she cared about now was to cross the border so that she could die in France. Many were saying the same.

  On 8 April at the town of Hof, on the road to Nuremberg, a bombardment held the convoy up all day. At dawn the buses moved off, as figures pushing carts and trolleys poured out of the city’s burning ruins. ‘Now it’s their turn,’ said the French, looking down at the wretched German faces. ‘They’re the prisoners now. See how they like it. And we are free.’

  At nine that night the buses slowed to a halt in front of barred gates and sentry posts at the Kreuzlingen border post. Floodlights shone through a cold drizzle as the women were unloaded for a last Appell while German guards checked papers. The checking took over an hour. On the other side of the barriers figures gathered in the gloom—nurses, doctors, Samaritans, reporters, priests, and ordinary people come to welcome and to help. Their shouts and cheers died out at the sight of so many silent ghosts. As the gates opened a German shouted a command. That made a Swiss policeman step across the road, raise his arm and growl: ‘Non, monsieur. That is enough. Withdraw!’ He turned to the women and smiled. ‘You are free now.’

  They boarded the buses again. Figures came forward to lift, embrace, and to offer gifts and food. ‘You’ll have soup and a hot bath.’

  Just across the border they stopped for the night and were led into a warm gymnasium where soup was waiting and much more. Men cried as crumpled figures swathed in bandages were stretchered from the buses. Six women were taken straight to hospital, while others lay on mattresses of fresh straw covered with wool and piled with blankets.

  Next morning officials of the ICRC in Geneva arrived. They advised the women not to speak about the camp, as it might be dangerous. Then they made assessments of needs. Doctors had already diagnosed dysentery, TB, typhus, gangrene and acute malnutrition, as one of the Red Cross men noted. ‘A Doctoresse Le Porz and four other medically qualified prisoners are helping treat the sick,’ he wrote. The women had arrived with nothing but the clothes they stood in—‘which obviously don’t fit’. Those few with any small possessions were carrying them in Red Cross boxes. ‘We’ve some here who are completely shaved.’ One woman had lifted a sleeve to show a number tattooed on her arm; others had pieces of cloth with their numbers sewn on.

  Swiss dignitaries came from Geneva, among them a woman who spoke to Loulou. ‘She was very elegant. She said she was part of a delegation that had been to the camp and she talked about the charming commandant’—this was Suhren. A Swiss colonel told Loulou not to speak to the woman. ‘You have friends still there. All you say to her will be transmitted to the Germans.’ He told Loulou that the woman was the wife of ‘some high-up person in Geneva’.

  At midday the women were put on a train for France. According to the notes of the Red Cross escort, it was the same one used the previous day to take the exchanged Germans back to Germany, but no record survives of who those Germans were. We only know that they numbered 450. As only 299 French were released in return, there was plenty of room on the train, but not enough water to clean the WCs, ‘which were in a lamentable state, in view of the cases of dysentery,’ noted the Red Cross man.

  At Berne a dying woman was taken off the train. At Annemasse, just across the border, more women were taken off the train to hospital. One of them was Zim. ‘At the hospital she regained consciousness. She knew she was in France,’ said Loulou, who had kept Zim’s death notice and read it out: ‘ “Mademoiselle Marie-Louise Zimberlin. Died 13.4.45.” She lived two days after crossing into France. I was surprised she lived as long as she did. She was exhausted and very, very thin. But she still had her intelligence,’ said Loulou. After the two days, Loulou and the others left on a train for Paris. Zim stayed in hospital in Annemasse. She wasn’t married, but her sister Sophie had been alerted and was coming down from Cluny to be with her. Later Sophie wrote to Loulou, recounting Zim’s last hours.

  ‘On the morning of April 13th, I received a telegram from Annemasse saying come urgently. Marie-Louise is repatriated. We were mad with joy and made arrangements to bring her home. We received another call in the afternoon. She was not to be moved. We should go to Annemasse as it was urgent.’ The trains were delayed so Sophie took a taxi. ‘We drove like madmen. When I got there, I entered the room and only recognised her by the colour of her eyes. She smiled at me gently and said, “My sister is coming.” I said, “Here I am. Here. It is me. Mimi.” She said, “It is an angel.” So I took out what I had bought for her. I had made a lemon drink with beautiful lemons. I gave her two spoons. Suddenly her eyes opened and she recognised me. “Oh my chérie, now I see it is you,” and she took me in her thin, thin arms.’

  ‘I told her, “I have never eaten anything or put on any clothes without thinking of you.” She took my hand and looked at me. I understood that the last minute had arrived and I took my courage in two hands and pronounced the verses that came to my mind; God is love, there is no greater love than to give your life for your friends. I said the Credo. She looked at me in serenity. This lasted about ten minutes until a nurse told us that the heart was no longer beating.’

  —

  Crossing into France, the Red Cross officials told the women once again not to talk about the camp, but nothing now would stop the story from spilling out. The day the women reached the French border—11 April 1945—the US Third Army, commanded by General George Patton, liberated Buchenwald. It was the first camp liberated by Western Allies and Patton decided there should be no more secrets about concentration camps, calling for reporters and photographers ‘to get the horrid details’.

  A young American diplomat sent to report on the French Ravensbrück arrivals related those details—his shock evident in every word. He described ‘a convoy of martyrs, frightfully mutilated, skeleton like—a terrifying spectacle…The looks of pity and horror on the faces of the doctors responsible for the medical examination spoke more than all the speeches professional secrecy forbade them to make.’

  The most signif
icant account of Ravensbrück to emerge from this French convoy came from the only non-French prisoner in the group: Karolina Lanckorońska. During the negotiations on the prisoner swap, Carl Burckhardt, the ICRC chief, had again appealed to Himmler to release her, and on 2 April 1945 SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner wrote to Burckhardt saying that Himmler had agreed on condition that the countess stay silent on the camp. Or, as Kaltenbrunner put it, ‘conduct herself loyally’ in respect of the Reich. Lanckorońska, however, had no intention of keeping quiet. In a twenty-two-page report written largely in the present tense, she described for Burckhardt and his Red Cross Committee exactly what she had seen, and, more important, what was still going on at Ravensbrück. In particular, she wrote of the danger still facing the Polish rabbits. ‘They are under threat of death’ and ‘are in hiding as I write’. The rabbits ‘are therefore in extreme danger and an intervention of the ICRC on their behalf is of the greatest importance’.

  Karolina said that even as she was writing, the SS was clearing away the evidence of its crimes. Just before she was evacuated, she says, ‘the gas chamber was dismantled and all evidence of what happened there destroyed’. She also tells the ICRC that ‘A little before April 5th—the day our transport left—a machine appeared which resembled a bus and was in the forest near the camp. It was a mobile gas chamber and was painted green.’

  * * *

  * Bernadotte also had a personal interest in France; as a direct descendant of the Napoleonic marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte he had a great deal of French blood.

  Chapter 39

  Masur

  In the days after the Swiss and Swedish convoys left, prisoners working outside the walls peered into the trees wondering if more White Buses would appear. None came. Instead the women saw more gassing vehicles, like the green-painted bus that Karolina Lanckorońska had described when she arrived in Switzerland.