by Sarah Helm
Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’
Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.
In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.’
Izabela Rek, one of the rabbits whose legs had been badly mutilated, had no hope of getting away from the Soviet soldiers. With the help of friends, Izabela tried to escape into the woods.
Suddenly we were walking towards a river and the Russian soldiers arrived. One soldier told me not to worry but the others were dragged off and I could hear them screaming very badly nearby; crying and shouting. Then they attacked us all and raped us, even though they knew we were prisoners. When we reported what happened to another group of soldiers they said come with us and we’ll look after you. Two girls went with them but we never saw them again.
The French teacher Micheline Maurel, who by the end of the war weighed only 35 kilos and was ravaged by dysentery and scabies, described the systematic rapes in detail. On 1 May Micheline saw her first Red Army soldier. ‘A big burly fellow, gay and debonair’, he walked into the courtyard of the barn where she and her friends Michelle and Renée were hiding after escaping from the Neubrandenburg evacuation march. ‘He immediately raped Michelle and then left, running across country as bullets flew past him.’ Later that day, while looking for food in the burning town of Waren, Michelle and Renée were both raped again several times by Russians who were staying in looted houses.
On the second day of ‘liberation’ the three friends were still hiding in the same barn when a company of Cossacks arrived. ‘They looked just like their pictures—superb men, wearing high astrakhan caps, long, fitted coats and spurred boots and riding magnificent horses that pranced around the farmyard. They brought us a gramophone and played dance music. They offered us vodka in big cups and this helped our pains.’
Micheline says the only reason she wasn’t raped was that she persuaded the soldiers that her sores were deadly and infectious. But her friend Michelle had no sores. ‘I tried to protect her but it did no good,’ said Micheline. ‘Nor was it really a question of protection, for the Russians had no evil intent, no animus whatever against us. Quite the contrary, they were filled with extreme cordiality, brimming over with affection, which they had to demonstrate immediately. “French? You French, me Russian, it’s all the same! You are my sister. Come lie down here.” ’
Each day the French trio’s health deteriorated; each day more Russians assaulted the women as they went on their way. The story was always the same. ‘Whether they were big blondes with drooping moustaches, little yellow Mongols with bowed legs, superb dark Cossacks, to each we had to explain: “Two years in the camp, we are exhausted, leave us alone.” But they wanted to make love to their French sisters.’
One of the Russians, on hearing the women were French concentration-camp survivors, rose to his feet indignantly and declared: ‘You are one of the conquerors like ourselves and you sleep in straw, while a German family next door sleeps in beds.’ At which he picked up his rifle saying: ‘I’m going to kill them. You shall have their bed.’ The Russian then marched the French women to the house where a family of Germans, including several children, were eating. As the Russian pointed his rifle at the Germans screaming ‘Kaputt, kaputt ’, Micheline interpreted for the family. The German farmer rose and led the women to a room that contained beds. The Russian then left, embracing the French women and taking one of the German girls with him. ‘Later that night she returned to the farmhouse sobbing.’
There is little doubt that the worst violence was meted out to German women. ‘I remember my mother held my little sister tight to her bosom as a kind of protection. She said the Russians have respect for little children,’ recalled Wolfgang Stegemann, then a twelve-year-old Fürstenberg schoolboy. The German soldiers had left Fürstenberg about one hour before. ‘It was very silent, then came a great noise, and the Russians came into the village on foot. Most were drunk and they came into the houses and destroyed everything. There were a lot of atrocities. A lot of rapes.’
Rudolf Rehländer, who grew up in the same village as Dorothea Binz, three miles away, remembered what happened when the Red Army arrived at Altglobsow. ‘The first ones rampaged through our houses. Everything was looted—boots, clothes. They left the village with five or six watches on their arms. Then they started to rape. The first troops were the worst. They were the ones who carried out most of the rape. Almost every woman in the village was raped unless she had managed to hide.’
I wondered if Dorothea’s mother was still in the village. Rudolf thought she was, because his family ran the village bar where Rose Binz drank. ‘I had the job of filling glasses and I couldn’t fill Rose Binz’s glass quick enough.’
It was the same everywhere, says Rudolf, and there were hardly any men in the village at the time; either they were at the front or they had fled or killed themselves. Rudolf, just seventeen, was one of the oldest left behind, so he and the other boys had to bury the bodies. The mayor and three other top Nazis in the village killed themselves.
I remember we were burying the mayor when someone shouted, ‘Come quick,’ because they’d found the Ortsbauernführer [the peasant leader]. We ran there and it was a horrible sight. Both he and his wife had been hanged, but their bodies had been taken down and were lying on the ground. The woman was naked from the waist down and had a stick up her vagina. She was just lying there in the forest and I had to bury them.
I asked the Red Army intelligence officer Yaacov Drabkin what he thought of the atrocities.
Yes, everything happened. After what our soldiers had seen and been through it was difficult to tell them not to kill every German they saw. When the war was over I had to talk to the German population, explaining that the Red Army was not so bad. I had to respond to the German nation for all our crimes and I always heard in reply about the rapes.
I asked him about the rape of the Ravensbrück prisoners. At first he expressed surprise that it had happened, ‘as they were in such a terrible state’. He said:
One should understand that it was a terrible, terrible monstrous war and everyone had gone completely inhuman. The soldiers had just fought their way through the fires of Danzig. The whole city was in flames. After that they just wanted to stay alive until the end. And remember that at Fürstenberg it was not yet over. Berlin had not been taken yet. There were still several days to go.
By early May, the fighting troops had largely moved on past Ravensbrück but Major Bulanov stayed behind to impose order, moving into Dorothea Binz’s villa. He ‘behaved decently’ and tried to help the women, but the camp was now in chaos, with male and female prisoners roaming around looting and destroying
. He and his staff could not determine how many prisoners were here, or who they were. They could not keep track of the death toll. ‘Women started dying faster than ever after the Russians arrived,’ said Kamila Janovic, a Pole who stayed behind to help. ‘I think they had tried so hard to hold on until the liberation that when they relaxed they died.’ There was no means to burn or bury them, so the corpses continued to pile up. Many prisoners died miles away from the camp, possibly because they ate and drank too much for their emaciated bodies to digest.
Prisoners began wandering around Fürstenberg. ‘I remember them sitting in the street and under trees,’ said Wolfgang Stegemann. ‘They seemed very quiet. Very shy.’ Major Bulanov ordered local people—now mostly women—to go to the camp to help clear up and bury the dead. ‘When my mother came back she was very sad and depressed, but she never told me what she saw,’ Stegemann recalled.
The Soviets brought in better food, as well as blood and medicines, and restored the electricity. Camilla Sovotna remembers a French priest arriving, and a British woman called Pat turned up to help.
One day Marie-Claude went looking for mattresses in the SS houses, and found a male prisoner asleep in a big bed, ‘his head on a feather pillow under a pink satin quilt’. Another day she entered Suhren’s house. She found a piano and played on it for hours. ‘I felt welling up in me hopes and desires that had so long been buried.’
Fifty miles northwest, Fritz Suhren was fleeing for his life.
Suhren’s gamble that the subcamp of Malchow would be a last safe haven for the SS had backfired. By 2 May it was clear that the Red Army, not the Americans, were closing in on Malchow, which would be overrun within hours. According to Odette, held hostage there for the past four days, the camp was littered with bodies as the SS periodically opened fire on the prisoners.
When more prisoners poured in and the carnage mounted, Odette asked Suhren to open the gates and let everyone go. She described the scene outside Suhren’s office to her biographer. A radio was blaring out the news that Berlin had fallen, the Germans had surrendered in Italy, and the British had taken Lübeck. Inside, she found Suhren in tears. ‘Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, is dead. He died as a hero in the forefront of battle,’ Suhren told her, ‘his mouth twitching in ungovernable grief’.
Suhren told Odette to get into his black Mercedes-Benz car, along with two Polish women who had worked for him at Ravensbrück, and his white dog Lotti. They drove off, escorted by armed SS packed into cars in front and behind. After about two hours the cars stopped by a wood. ‘He [Suhren] opened the back of the car, took out an armful of official papers, walked to the edge of the trees, and made a fire. They were Ravensbrück records. When the papers were consumed he stirred the ashes with his foot, making sure that there was nothing left.’
Suhren then turned to Odette and said: ‘So that’s that. Are you hungry?’ He produced sandwiches ‘wrapped in a white napkin’, a pot of crystallised cherries and a bottle of wine. He showed her the label—Nuits-Saint-Georges—and said: ‘There you are. A real French Burgundy.’
The convoy drove on, and after a while Suhren told Odette he was taking her to the Americans. She didn’t believe him, telling Suhren that when the Americans saw the SS escort they would open fire ‘and we will all be killed’. Suhren replied, ‘You are quite right,’ and he stopped to tell the other cars to keep a good distance behind him.
After nightfall they reached the small village of Rostoff. Odette saw a group of soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms at a point where the road narrowed. ‘One of them cradled a gun in the crook of his arm, stood in the middle of the road and shouted for the car to stop.’ In broken English, Suhren told the American soldier: ‘This is Frau Churchill. She is related to Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England.’ Odette said she then stepped out of the car and added: ‘And this is Fritz Suhren, commandant of Ravensbrück concentration camp. Please take him as your prisoner.’
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As the Allies moved on forward, seizing the last slice of territory, prisoners wandering around in no-man’s-land suddenly ran into advancing American, Russian, French and British troops. By 5 May every remaining subcamp had been liberated except for Neurolau in the Sudeten Mountains. Here, that day, Maria Bielicka and her Polish comrades were still waiting for the end of the war.
After the SS guards had left them hiding in the beer warehouse, Maria and her group had retraced their steps back to Neurolau. They knew that the German manager of the porcelain factory was probably still there, but they also reckoned that all the SS guards must have fled. Neurolau seemed the safest place to wait for liberation.
Across the Sudeten Mountains, just a few miles from Neurolau, one of the final battles of the war in Europe was under way. US forces had surrounded more than 100,000 German soldiers, including two panzer divisions, whose commanders were refusing to surrender.
‘We had no idea what was going on,’ said Maria.
We began to wonder if the war would ever be over. Then one day we discovered somehow that it was finished, and crying like mad, we decided we were not going to sit there any longer. We discovered the Russians were only fourteen kilometres away and we didn’t want to fall into their hands. But we had to act fast if we were to get to the Americans in time.
So I went to the factory director and said: ‘For tomorrow I need a lorry and a driver, thirty loaves of bread and three sacks of potatoes.’ He said OK, but can you send the lorry back with the driver when you’ve finished with it. He said the Russians would be there soon and would want to check his inventory and he’d be in trouble if the lorry was missing. Stupid man, he should have escaped in it instead of worrying about that.
I asked her what happened to the man.
I don’t know and I don’t care. He was probably shot. But we got the lorry. And you know, before we left he invited us to see his display of fine porcelain. I remember he showed us a beautiful dinner service made before the war for our president, with the Polish Eagle on it. He wanted to show that he was on our side. Then he wished us well and tried to shake my hand. I said: ‘No, I won’t do that.’ It was too late for that.
The lorry driver took about thirty women five kilometres up the road and dropped them at a crossroads to return for a second load. ‘As we stood there we suddenly saw an American soldier. He was sitting all alone on the side of the road, smoking, just like that,’ said Maria, imitating someone drawing slowly on a cigarette.
We walked up to him and he said: ‘Who on earth are you?’ We said: ‘We are from a concentration camp.’ He said: ‘What’s that?’ We were speaking English, but we soon discovered he was a Pole from Chicago.
He said: ‘Oh my God, what do I do with you? Are you hungry?’
Then he looked at us some more and said: ‘Look, we can’t do anything for you today, we are rather busy. We’ve just taken about a million Germans as prisoners.’ Then the American stood up and said: ‘Come over here a minute.’ We thought this is strange and he led us up to the top of the hill and pointed down, and we were looking over this sea of Germans. He told us it was the whole of Hitler’s Seventh Army. They had just surrendered. There were heaps of them as far as you could see. They were lying, sitting, standing. There were tanks and mountains of ammunition. And there we were, in our prisoner clothes, standing looking over them. You can imagine our joy.
Epilogue
On 28 April, under a blustery sky, the midday ferry from Copenhagen pulled up to the docks at Malmö and the first prisoners rescued from Ravensbrück by Bernadotte’s White Buses came down the gangplank.
‘All in thin rags, shoes made of paper and wood and odds and ends,’ wrote a journalist. Some were carried on stretchers. Some clutched Red Cross boxes, and small parcels containing lists of the dead. Ann Sheridan carried a pot of poison smuggled out of the Youth Camp. A Dutch woman, Anne Hendrix, carried her two-month-old baby lying sleeping in a box.
Once on land the women looked ahead to see a series of tents, from which men in
white coats appeared and asked them to strip; the women screamed in horror. Inside the tents they were sprayed with disinfectant and asked to stand under showers. ‘We thought, what is this nightmare all over again?’ remembers Yvonne Baseden.
For their part, the doctors who examined the women on arrival were horrified by what they saw. One recalled how a woman screamed out when she saw him—a man in a white coat. She kept crying: ‘I don’t want to burn, I don’t want to burn.’ Some of the nurses fainted.
The first night the women were put up in the towering Malmö citadel, part of which housed a museum; Yvonne found herself sleeping beneath a dinosaur.
By the time George Clutton, second secretary at the British legation in Stockholm, arrived to report on the British contingent’s arrival, the women were recovering strength, and greeted him wearing Union Jack badges that Lady Mallet, wife of the British ambassador to Sweden, had sent them. Some had curled their hair and acquired handbags and jewellery, offered by the people of Malmö. To the young diplomat, the British women presented an astonishing picture. Julia Barry, the Hungarian camp policewoman, was ‘a very cheerful lady and pathetically patriotic about the Channel Islands. Her main anxiety is to get back to her island and find the three bottles of sherry she hid in her piano just before her arrest,’ noted Clutton. Barbara Chatenay had ‘obviously suffered much’ but was ‘cheerful and serene’. She had twice been chosen to be gassed, she told Clutton, but after protesting that they couldn’t gas an Englishwoman, was spared both times.
