Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  As expected, the fifteen ambulances were swiftly followed by a second, larger convoy. Having led the ambulances safely back to Lübeck—now the Swedish base—Hans Arnoldssen had reached Bernadotte by telephone, calling urgently for more vehicles and warning that time was fast running out. A line of trucks and buses had been hurriedly assembled and set off at dawn. The urgency had redoubled with the news that the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, on Berlin’s northern periphery, had just started. Himmler’s promise to halt evacuations had been a lie.*

  Just as he had done in January, when the Auschwitz death march began, Rudolf Höss went to take a look at the ‘starving hordes’ who trudged out of the Sachsenhausen gates in another ‘mad evacuation’, as he put it in his prison memoir. The 40,000 men were to trek 100 miles west, facing nothing but mass starvation and death. ‘At least now it was warmer and drier,’ he observed, ‘but these prisoners faced the constant menace of low-flying Allied planes which “shot up the road”.’ Among the Sachsenhausen death marchers were at least 2–3000 women, sent to the camp in recent weeks, many from Ravensbrück.

  To pre-empt a similar Ravensbrück death march, an ICRC delegate was told to make his way to the camp and to formally request that Ravensbrück be handed over at once to International Red Cross control. He could not get close. Just north of Berlin his car was swamped by a torrent of refugees, trucks, bicycles, animals and field guns fleeing the Russians. They forced him to turn around and try to find another way, but he knew it was probably too late.

  —

  At the camp the women waited for more Swedish White Buses. Jean Bommezijn de Rochement, a Dutch woman, had been living for weeks in a small attic hideout to avoid selection for the gas chamber. She now felt confident enough to come out. In her diary she wrote:

  The Red Cross is coming to take us away. The few Dutch and French that remain are mad with excitement. But I am past believing rumours. I’m much more likely to believe another rumour, namely that they are about to shoot the lot of us now, and that the camp is surrounded by the advancing allies so the food supply is about to be cut off. If this is true we can do nothing.

  All over the camp the SS staff were busier than ever, cleaning, tidying, brushing, painting and burning, ready for the arrival of the Red Army. Everything had to seem normal before the Russians came. Bodies were taken from the washrooms, from the mortuary and from the stacks around the camp, to be burned in ditches, as the crematorium was too slow. In Block 10, as the sick were selected for gassing, the guards replaced the holes in the glass that all winter long had let in the wind, rain and snow, helping to kill the sick.

  In the bunker the beating Bock was dismantled and burned. Prisoners held in the privileged cells as useful hostages were now deemed useless encumbrances and shot. Odette Sansom (alias Churchill) was still in a privileged cell, and watched as the others were led away, knowing her turn must come soon. Certainly there appeared to be no question of the British being rescued by the Swedes—not a single British name had featured on any rescue list—so Mary Lindell took it upon herself to find out why. After drawing up her own list of British women, she walked over to Suhren’s office, to ask him if they were to be included in the rescue transports.

  Suhren turned to Binz and said wearily: ‘Die Engländerin! Despite her stay here she is still as arrogant as when she first arrived.’

  ‘On what authority do you still keep us here?’ demanded Mary.

  ‘Do you realise that I can still have you shot?’ said Suhren, but before Mary left the room he changed his tune, and asked her to give him the British list. He told her that the women should all line up outside Pflaum’s office the next morning, and he would make sure they received passes for release. Mary reported the conversation back to Yvonne Baseden. Yvonne was still in the Revier, ravaged by TB, and far too weak to consider what Suhren’s offer might mean. ‘By that time I was reconciled to the idea that I would probably die,’ she said.

  A few hours after her conversation with Suhren, the chief of the camp police, Elisabeth Thury, came to the Revier to warn Mary that Suhren’s real intention was to kill the British women. If she brought them tomorrow to Pflaum’s office, as Suhren had suggested, they would be shot. The source of the tip-off was Micky Poirier, the French-Alsatian woman working in Pflaum’s office. Instead, Thury advised, Mary should confront Suhren again. She had nothing to lose, and Suhren, like everyone now, was interested in saving his own skin.

  So Mary entered the commandant’s office again. ‘Ach so, die Engländerin!’ said Suhren as she came in. Mary retorted: ‘Well? In England our word is our bond. Obviously you have a different code in Germany.’ Suhren, seeing she had learned what he intended, apologised. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but orders came from Berlin that you were not to be released after all.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mary. ‘But what do you intend to do with us?’ Suhren replied that the English were to remain in the camp, though he said nothing of shooting them, implying instead that they were now all to be held as hostages, like Odette. He walked to a large cupboard in his office, opened it, and showed Mary stacks of tinned food, obviously rifled from Canadian Red Cross parcels. ‘To show you my good faith I give you permission to take this food for the British and Americans.’

  ‘But how do you expect me to carry so many tins?’ asked Mary. Suhren signalled to Binz, who left the room and returned with several camp policewomen carrying large washing baskets, as well as police to act as guards, to keep away the starving women who by now were roaming the camp ‘like wild beasts’. Before the women left with the food, Mary took out several tins and left them on Suhren’s desk, saying: ‘You may need food yourself before too long.’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘That is not for you. It is for England.’

  —

  By the time the next Red Cross convoy arrived on 23 April the Oberschwester, Elisabeth Marschall, was sporting a Red Cross emblem on her uniform. The prisoners could see there were so many trucks and buses this time that they would surely be able to take hundreds—some said thousands. The Dutch woman Jean Bommezijn de Rochement was told to line up with the rest of her block in the passage beside the Revier. The Blockova whispered to them that they were going—leaving the camp—and would probably be set free. Jean noted in her diary:

  This sounds too good to be true, and we do not believe it, we know better. When we have waited a while, the SS man Hans Pflaum and a woman guard appear. They sit behind a table and call our numbers from the lists before them. When the person whose number has been called steps forward, the guard tears the number and the triangle off her sleeve. For the first time since we arrived we stand, though still in prison rags, as individuals not numbers.

  Whip in hand, Pflaum herded the women forward. ‘A shabby procession of creatures that barely look human,’ noted Jean. ‘But where are we going?’ Terrified, they were marched not to the gates but out into the woods. After about fifteen minutes the women realised they were heading towards the men’s camp, which was nearly deserted, and the block they were taken to was filthy, stinking and dilapidated. Simone Gournay, a French woman, was also with this group and saw ‘ghostlike men’ appear who tried to talk to the women but were beaten back by the SS.

  Jean Bommezijn de Rochement saw ‘A long row of men, or what must have been men at one time, for now they are living skeletons, a macabre collection. They greet us with their eyes. For a moment something like joy illuminates their features, joy at the sight of fellow martyrs, their sisters in sorrow.’

  The same afternoon, one group of these women was led back again to the women’s camp. Jean was not among them but the French woman Simone Gournay was. ‘At 4 a.m. we were marched in lines of five to the exit, beaten and kicked as we went,’ said Simone.

  The SS now seemed hysterical. They were shouting and kicking us. Just before the gate [of the men’s camp] they tore from us anything we were still holding—little bags that we had made with souvenirs of our friends who had died. We passed by a pile of corpses. We were
a miserable line of women. We weren’t thinking of liberation. We weren’t thinking of anything. We were in a trance.

  They re-entered the women’s camp and were lined up just inside the gates to wait.

  Now they caught sight of tall blonde men wearing grey and green. The women were marched out and the men tried to help, ‘but we didn’t understand and we pushed them away’. It took Simone a while to realise who these men were, and that the blue and yellow emblem on their shoulders was the Swedish colours. Dazed, she climbed into one of the buses. ‘We drove off. With the daylight we could see the countryside. We saw lines of carts and people carrying boxes and bags. It was the German exodus. Once we had to stop because of the bombing, but nobody was hurt. Then we reached Lübeck and stopped for a picnic on the grass. It was my first feeling of liberty.’

  The Swedish drivers remembered the women’s picnic too. One recalled: ‘When we stopped the women ran around looking for green herbs, which they picked and ate. Particular favourites were dandelion leaves, which had just begun to sprout in the spring weather. Using twigs they dug up the plants by the roots, dusted off the soil, and ate them.’ Drivers also remember that during the ‘picnic’ the women told them about the camp, and for the first time the rescuers heard about the gas chamber, and learned that gassing was still going on, reinforcing the rescuers’ determination to get back to the camp as soon as they could.

  At the same time word had reached the Lübeck HQ that Franz Göring had opened discussions with the Reichsbahn about requisitioning a train.

  —

  When the next White Buses appeared at the camp gates confusion broke out about who was to leave this time. One large convoy of vehicles with several Canadian and Swedish drivers, led by a Dane called Gösta Hallqvist, arrived on 24 April and left early the next day. Among those aboard was Jean Bommezijn de Rochement, the Dutch woman.

  Jean and her friend Toto had not slept the previous night and had passed the time standing outside their stinking hut, talking in the night air. ‘We are nervous, very nervous, even if we pretend we are not,’ she wrote. ‘Like two children we play our fantastic little game of make-believe, what it will be like to be home again, who will be there to receive us, where shall we go. We go back in the hut, which is dreadful, the smell overpowering.’

  At lunchtime the women were still in the camp and a couple of pots of watery turnip soup and some bread were handed out. ‘And we wait, wondering what is going to happen to us.’ At about 5 p.m. they hear a whistle and they are told to move.

  We leave the camp, and find ourselves moving in the direction of the gas chambers, and for many of us this is too much. A few are seized by a kind of nervous fit, and we have to calm them, and drag them with us in the column. It is only a few minutes, but the tension lasts hours, and we are safely past the gas ovens. On we go, not daring to think of liberty…for if it doesn’t happen after we have counted on it, we are lost. We move and see the back of the camp—here are the stores, there is Siemens. Some of the inmates appear behind the windows and the barbed wire, looking at us. By their faces I can see that they wonder what is going to happen to us and where we are being taken. They know that ‘transport’ usually mean death.

  The group found themselves on the main road in front of the camp, standing in front of the SS living quarters. Faces stared from the windows. ‘And suddenly pandemonium breaks loose; we scream, weep and cheer as a white truck, flying the Red Cross flag, with red crosses on the doors and bonnet, appears round a bend in the road. And the people inside smile at us and wave their hands.’ As the prisoners made for the vehicles, the men beside the buses smiled.

  At last we see men who do not beat us, shout and swear at us. These men are deeply moved when they see us, and there are tears in their eyes as they speak to us. We must have looked dreadfully wretched indeed, if these men, who are certainly used to seeing terrible things, weep when they meet us. More and more cars appear on the road, all marked with the Red Cross. The officials ask us if we will mind the long journey, if we will be nervous or afraid. They do not know that for years we have faced death every moment of the day.

  Suddenly as we are about to mount the buses there is a scramble as people fight for places, as nobody wants to be left behind. But quite a number have to remain behind and the Red Cross men promise they will come back with more. And we are off, stared at by the SS and the guards, whom we mock to their faces. We can laugh at them now.

  As the buses left the women turned and were horrified to see what Jean described as: ‘a high earthen embankment fitted with gun emplacements and guns trained on the camp’. Like others who had left before them they now understood that the SS really had planned to destroy the camp and everyone in it.

  Jean’s convoy moved off into the night. The drivers told the women that there was a risk of attack from Allied fighters: many German military vehicles were using the roads and many were being hit. As night fell the rescue trucks drove with no lights, but luckily there was a full moon. For safety’s sake, they split up: one group of vehicles headed north on the Wismar road, the other went south via Schwerin.

  Jean was on the Schwerin road, and as the convoy moved close to the front line, word came that there could be an attack at any minute. The buses pulled off the road into the thick of a wood, and the women watched tanks and cannon go past on the main road ahead. ‘The sky is as bright as day and we hear the explosions of bombs and rumble of the guns, but nothing matters to us as we are alive and approaching freedom,’ wrote Jean. As they waited in the darkness, the women talked to their Danish protectors, who told them it was touch and go whether the Red Cross buses would be able to come for them.

  When dawn broke the convoy moved off again. All was well. The fighter planes had moved away for now, but a few hours later they had to stop again, and this time the drivers told all the women to get out fast and take cover in the bushes alongside the road.

  There are planes on the way and we are going to be attacked. We are too slow to take cover, as we don’t really believe it. They urge us on, telling us we are in real danger, but we are sceptical because we have noticed that it is usually factories that are bombed and not the concentration camps. So why fear that a Red Cross column will be attacked? Nobody had told us that the Germans use red crosses as cover for their own transports.

  Crawling and helping each other, the women reached the bushes. Jean lay under a bush with two other women, and a little further on she saw two more take cover under another bush. Planes appeared and dived lower and lower,

  and suddenly we are machine-gunned. Through the roar of the planes we can hear the whistling bullets raining down on us. The shots pass so close to me that one singes my hair. For a moment I taste the bitter irony of being killed by our own Allies on the road to freedom, and they are gone and I live. Looking around I see a terrible scene. Behind me a woman is bleeding to death. A bright red stream of blood is pouring out of her in gushes. Her lips are bluish white and her eyes break as I look at her.

  Another woman has a small hole-like burn in her dress where she has been shot through the breast. There are many victims. Blood and pieces of flesh are everywhere but we are quiet and calm. There’s no screaming or moaning. We have to act, and quickly, for the drivers tell us they will be back to attack us again. And so it happens, there is another attack, but it’s not so bad this time. When it’s all over we put the corpses together on one truck, along with the wounded.

  Further on down the road the convoy reached a French POW camp, where the White Buses were able to stop safely. The drivers and SS staff were traumatised and new vehicles and new drivers were sent for. The women waited, talking to the French POWs, who were astonished by their appearance and asked who they were and where they were going. They said they were going to Sweden with the Swedish Red Cross, and the Frenchmen laughed. ‘You’ll never make it. You’re surrounded on all sides and you’ll end up in the firing line of our own side.’

  Hours later the relief buses arrived. Ear
ly next morning Jean’s convoy crossed the Danish border and the women saw the Red Cross camp. ‘People are smiling and waving at us. We are indescribably happy. They feed us porridge and hot milk.’ The Danish flag, however, flew at half-mast. The second convoy that took the Wismar road to the north had also been attacked, and at least ten women killed.

  How many died on the Schwerin road convoy nobody knew, or ever would. Some reports say nine women died, some say seventeen. Jean Bommezijn de Rochement said at the time that there might have been far more. The Danish convoy leader, Gösta Hallqvist, was also seriously injured, and one driver killed, a Canadian called Eric Ringman. Ringman was buried at the Red Cross camp in Denmark, and a Norwegian seamen’s pastor said prayers over his grave. Then the women and their drivers and helpers headed on to Sweden. After a further Swedish protest, Sir Victor Mallet, British ambassador in Stockholm, telegraphed London reporting a number of deaths in three attacks that day ‘by low-flying British aircraft’ on Red Cross convoys from Ravensbrück. ‘Nobody knows the nationalities but it is possible that among them were British and American women.’

  —

  News of the slaughter on the Schwerin road reached the camp, but it meant little to those still hoping to leave on the next Swedish convoy: they would far rather run the risk of being hit in an air attack than face the prospect of a death march.

  All around the camp were the signals that evacuation threatened. Suhren had put a map on his office wall, marking out the route. The last of the documents from the offices were being burned and in the bunker all newly vacated cells were scrubbed, chairs installed and mirrors hung on the walls. In the punishment cells the most important cleaning up was now carried out.