by Sarah Helm
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Dr Karl Gebhardt, mastermind of the Ravensbrück medical experiments, with injured First World War veterans and sportsmen at the Hohenlychen SS clinic in the 1930s
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The Children’s Christmas Party, 1944. Painting by Ceija Stojka, the Austrian-Romani artist who was a child prisoner at the camp, having arrived from Auschwitz in 1944. The painting shows children with crosses on their backs, clearly identifying them should they escape.
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Zimni Apel (‘winter Appell’) by the Czech prisoner Nina Jirsíková
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Nourritures terrestres by Violette Lecoq
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Schmuckstück by Katharina Katzenmaier, a Catholic nun who saw this woman dying in Block 10
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Antonina Nikiforova as a young doctor in her Red Army uniform
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Zdenka Nedvedova, the Czech doctor. Probably taken in the mid-1930s
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Stella Kugelman was four years old when she was taken to Ravensbrück with her Belgian mother
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Yevgenia Klemm, the Red Army leader in the camp. This picture was probably taken in 1912, when Yevgenia was in her teens.
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Yevgenia Klemm’s number and red triangle
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Loulou Le Porz, the French Block 10 doctor. This photograph was taken in 1940, shortly before her arrest.
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Yvonne Baseden, the British SOE agent, on joining the WAAF in the early 1940s
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The British agent Violette Szabo, on joining SOE, early 1940s
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Mary Young, the Scottish nurse arrested in Paris for helping the resistance. This picture, believed to have been taken when she was a trainee nurse in the early 1900s, appeared in the Aberdeen Journal on 27 September 1945, and is the only known photograph of her.
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The Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen in 1957
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Marie-Louise Zimberlin, the French resister, as a young teacher in Cluny, France
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Countess Karolina Lanckoro´nska in 1938 at Rozdół Palace, her family’s main country estate in Poland
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The crematorium, showing two of the three furnaces. The picture was taken by the Czech prisoner Hanka Housková within hours of the liberation of the camp.
Bodies photographed by Hanka Housková soon after the SS fled on 29 April 1945. Piles of corpses lay all over the camp. Later, local people were sent to the camp to help bury them.
Ukrainian and Russian mothers and babies in the ‘maternity block’ photographed by Hanka Housková immediately after liberation. Words on the back of the picture say that one of the women was among those raped by the Red Army soldiers who liberated the camp.
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Women rescued by Bernadotte’s White Buses on the boat to Malmö, Sweden
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Folke Bernadotte (centre) discussing the rescue with an SS doctor and a Norwegian pastor in Hamburg, March 1945
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An unidentified French woman, rescued from Ravensbrück by the Swedish Red Cross, photographed in a Danish hospital in May 1945 by Tage Christensen
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French women brought out of the camp by the International Committee of the Red Cross are welcomed with soup and blankets in a gymnastics hall in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, 6 April 1945.
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Ruth Closius (formerly Neudeck), chief guard at the Uckermark Youth Camp. This photograph was taken at the British internment camp at Paderborn in 1947, before her trial in Hamburg.
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Johann Schwarzhuber, Ludwig Ramdohr, Gustav Binder and Heinrich Peters (SS officer at the men’s camp) in the dock at the Hamburg trial, which began in December 1946
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Fritz Suhren, camp commandant 1942–5. Suhren probably wore these civilian clothes when he drove to American lines with Odette Sansom to give himself up.
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Dr Herta Oberheuser being sentenced at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, 20 August 1947
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Dorothea Binz, Margarete Mewes, Grete Bösel, Vera Salvequart (in row behind) and Eugenia von Skene in the dock at the Hamburg trial
Oberschwester Elisabeth Marschall, Vera Salvequart, the prisoner-nurse at the Uckermark Youth Camp, and Dr Percival Treite being sentenced at the Hamburg trial
Carmen Mory, the Swiss prisoner and Blockova of Block 10, with her lawyer Dr Zippel
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Tragende by Will Lammert
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This sign—‘You are not forgotten’—was put up by a German survivors’ group near the overgrown site of the Uckermark Youth Camp.
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A view of Tragende from outside the camp walls, looking across the lake towards Fürstenberg
Acknowledgements
My intention in this book was to tell the story of Ravensbrück primarily through the voices of the women themselves, but time was already running out. My initial task was to search for the last survivors. For this, I needed guides, and my first thanks go to them.
Survivors in Russia and the East were bound to be the hardest to find, not least because so few names were known.
I first met Dr Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow in her sunny allotment in East Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Karlshorst mansion where Nazi forces surrendered to the Red Army on 9 May 1945. The daughter of a communist survivor, Bärbel had grown up in East Germany living and breathing the story of Ravensbrück, and the East European survivors had become her ‘family’. Their stories first came alive for me sitting at a table in Bärbel’s allotment and from there I set off on trails which led to Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev and Donetsk. Bärbel helped in countless ways to the very last days of my research.
My introduction to the Polish women came from Wanda Półtawska, who invited me to talk to her in Kraków and put me in touch with other survivors, including other Polish ‘rabbits’ whom I found in Gdansk, Lublin and Warsaw. I was assisted in this by Anna Pomianowska, translator, companion and guide. The Polish historian Eugenia Maresch passed on names of Polish survivors in the UK and, later, Eugenia unearthed priceless testimony about the camp in the National Archives.
My first introduction to the French survivors came through Dr Annette Chalut, President of the Ravensbrück International Committee, and Denise Vernay, general secretary of the French survivors’ body, L’Association nationale des anciennes déportées et internées de la Résistance (ADIR), which led me to dozens of French survivors. I was particularly grateful in the early days to Anise Postel-Vinay, Christiane Rème, Michèle Agniel, Françoise Robin and Marie-Jo Chombart de Lauwe, for their hospitality and advice and for pointing me to others, and to Richard de Courson.
In Israel I met Irith Dublon-Knebel, who advised not only on the Jewish survivors but on Ravensbrück’s place in Holocaust history. In the Netherlands I was assisted by Joke van Dijk-Bording. Selma van de Perre, a Ravensbrück survivor and my neighbour in West London, helped with countless questions, particularly on Siemens. For contacts and background on Austrian prisoners I am indebted to Brigitte Halbmayr and Helga Amesberger, whose research on the Burgenland Sinti and Roma was of particular value, not least since they were the hardest group to reach. Gerhard Baumgartner gave valuable advice on the Austrian story as did Gerhard Unger at the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes in Vienna.
From the start, and at every later stage, the help of staff at the Ravensbrück Memorial site was invaluable. I am particularly grateful to Insa Eschebach, Director of the Memorial, for her support, to Alyn Bessman for her excellent research and tireless answers to questions, and to
Matthias Heyl for his suggestions about themes to pursue. I would also like to thank Sabine Arend, Monika Herzog, Cordula Hundertmark, Janna Lölke, Britta Pawelke and Monika Schnell for advising on the Memorial’s archives and collections, and Sigrid Jacobeit, the former Memorial director, for her advice.
Searching for survivors and testimony, I relied on many local guides as well as translators who often proved as committed to the story as me. Lyuba Vinogradova, the Russian journalist and author, climbed to the top of Moscow apartment blocks and plunged into St Petersburg’s labyrinthine subways time and again as we sought out survivors and looked for testimony. Marina Sapritsky (now Nahum) translated and advised as we trekked through dusty Black Sea villages to find old ladies who hadn’t known we were coming but who welcomed us, filled their tables with food and talked of Ravensbrück, often for the first time. Ilena Izugrafova took overnight bus trips with me across the Ukraine and then waited outside closed doors for hours, certain they would eventually open—which often they did. Many stepped in to help along the way, including Vyacheslav Gorlinsky, an eighty-five-year-old Buchenwald survivor who had taken on the task of delivering small payments to survivors around Odessa, so knew every woman’s name and address. And I would like to thank Vova Chaplin of Odessa’s Jewish Museum, who explored the city’s archives and graveyards for me and even found the tomb of Yevgenia Klemm. I owe an enormous debt to Georg Loonkin, a former Soviet journalist, who had researched Klemm’s life and gave me his dossier, containing the story of one of the most remarkable women in the camp. William Bland did a terrific job translating Russian archival material.
In Germany I relied heavily on several translators and researchers, none more so than Henning Fischer, who helped me from beginning to end with every aspect of the story, not only translating but researching, advising, proofreading and answering countless queries. Beate Smandek’s assiduous research and insights in the early stages were invaluable. Helmut Ettinger offered to translate on numerous occasions and always did more, filling in background and context and opening doors. For help with the Polish material I am enormously grateful to Barbara Janic, who gave her time to reading and translating books and testimony. I could not have covered the Polish story without Barbara, who also read the final proofs. Many others kindly provided assistance at various stages, including Andrew Smith, Tanja Röckemann, Sophia Schniederat, Tomasz Małkuszewski, Agnes Fedorowicz, Zakhar Ishov, Daniel Knebel and Esther Hecht, who all translated and helped follow trails. I would also like to thank Nikita Petrov and his staff at the Memorial human rights body in Moscow as well as Len Blavatnik and Eugeniusz Smolar for making introductions in the Ukraine and Poland respectively.
Nobody followed the Ravensbrück trails more widely or more assiduously on my behalf than the Second World War historian Stephen Tyas. With instincts second to none, Steve searched archives in Germany and the UK, finding testimony, often previously unknown. He not only dug in the archives but in the undergrowth of Mecklenburg forest, as we trekked through fields searching for Himmler’s Brückenthin house, or wandered in the desolate woods at Uckermark before driving the 600 miles back to Calais, to catch the midnight ferry home.
Many of my helpers were the children or relatives of survivors. Anita Leocadia Prestes, daughter of Olga Benario, gave me advice and showed me her mother’s letters. Judith Buber Agassi talked about her mother Grete Buber-Neumann and provided insights into the Jewish story, while Tania Szabo shared her memories of her mother Violette and her own research material. I am also grateful to Marlene Rolf, daughter of Ilse Gostynski; Caroline McAdam Clark, daughter of Denise Dufournier; Franz Leichter and Kathy Leichter, son and granddaughter of Käthe Leichter; and to Irena Lisiecki, sister of Aka Kołodziejczak. Maria Wilgat, daughter of Krysia Czyż, and Krysia’s brother Wiesław, talked about Krysia’s secret letter-writing, and Maria passed me copies of all her mother’s letters.
I am indebted to the granddaughter of the SS doctor Walter Sonntag, who agreed to talk about him and her own life, and passed on his letters.
Jean-Marie Liard, son of Dr Louise Liard-Le Porz, not only passed on advice and translated, but gave up time to carry out research and read my first draft, correcting errors and giving suggestions for which I am enormously grateful.
Dozens of helpers stepped in at different stages: Wolfgang Stegemann and Wolfgang Jacobeit talked about Fürstenberg; Keith Janes helped find Comet Line women; Anna-Jutta Pietsch talked about Olga Benario; Michael Pinto Duschinsky talked about Siemens. Nikolay Borodatin attempted, with great skill and in no time, to explain life under Stalin’s purges. I should also like to thank David Coulson, Hella Pick, Father Edward Corbould, Martyn Cox, Michael Hegglin, John Hemingway and Krzysiak Lukasz. Ian Sayers and Peter Hore helped with details of British survivors, and Fiona Watson at NHS Grampian Archives and Richard Hunter at Edinburgh City Archives helped trace Mary Young, who was gassed at Ravensbrück. The details on Mary, as well as other lesser-known British women, were particularly hard to come by. This failure to recognise their courage and suffering should bring a shame on their country.
For the stories of the SOE victims and the general context, I was again grateful to Professor Michael Foot, Duncan Stuart, Gillian Bennett, Francis Suttill and Tim Mant, who had helped with my first book on Vera Atkins. I made use of material, photographs and memories of John da Cunha, who was part of the prosecution team at Hamburg. My early talks with John were in many ways the inspiration for this book.
It was an enormous pleasure to meet Wanda Hjort, who had brought help to the Ravensbrück prisoners and played a key role in the Swedish White Bus rescue led by Count Bernadotte. For background on the story of the White Buses, I am also grateful to the Swedish historian Sune Persson, to Ricki Neumann and to Bertil Bernadotte.
Several German historians advised on specific aspects of the camp’s history. Bernhard Strebel’s exhaustive study of Ravensbrück was an essential resource. I am particularly grateful to Stefan Hördler, whose work on the SS at Ravensbrück, Lichtenburg and other concentration camps has been groundbreaking, and who readily sent material, corresponded and met to talk. Johannes Schwarz, Simone Erpel, Christa Schikorra, Linde Apel, Loretta Walz, Irmtraud Heike, Susanne Willems and Grit Philipp were among other historians who helped.
For the wider historical background I am grateful to Sir Martin Gilbert, who generously gave time to talk, and made suggestions. I would also like to thank Anne Applebaum, Antony Beevor, David Cesarani, Richard Evans, Peter Longerich and Nikolaus Wachsmann, who all gave advice.
Lord Weidenfeld passed on his unique memories of the period and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, kindly talked of her time in the camp.
Others whose assistance I have valued include the journalist Andrew Gimson, the columnist Joan Smith, the professor of English Philip Davis, the biographer Nancy Wood and the politician and author Denis MacShane. There are countless others who lent books, looked up references, and passed on names and testimony found while researching their own book or simply encouraged me at difficult moments. There are too many names to mention here; I am grateful to them all.
Material was drawn from archives and libraries in a dozen countries and I am indebted to the archivists for their advice and help. In the UK I was particularly reliant on staff at the National Archives, the London Library, the Weiner Library, the Imperial War Museum, the Polish Study Trust, the Polish Institute and Library and the BBC Written Archives at Caversham. In France I was assisted by staff at the Musée de la Résistance in Besançon, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) in Paris and in Germany at the Bundesarchiv in Ludwigsberg, the Stasi Archives in Berlin and the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Staatsarchiv. I would like to thank Frank Wittendorfer at the Siemens Archives, Munich, and Barbara Oratowska at the Muzeum Martyrologii ‘Pod Zegarem’ in Lublin.
At the ITS (International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen I received help from Reto Meister and his staff, and at the ICRC (International Committee
of the Red Cross) in Geneva by the chief archivist Fabrizio Bensi. In Jerusalem, Alexander Avram at Yad Vashem gave valuable advice. I am also grateful to Brigitta Lindholm at Lund University Library, to staff at Oslo’s Hjemmefrontmuseet and to Gro Kvanvig at Stiftelsen Arkivet, Kristiansand.
My gratitude to the Ravensbrück survivors themselves is, of course, immeasurable. I am grateful not only for their memories, their patience and their inspiration, but for their hospitality and friendship as I asked them—sometimes time and again—to recall a painful past.
Amongst those women I met were women who fought at Stalingrad, defended the Crimea, dropped by parachute into Nazi-occupied France, stared Himmler in the eye, permed Dorothea Binz’s hair and marched in protest to the commandant of a concentration camp. I was honoured to meet every one of them; each story enriched my own life.
