If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (103 page)

Dealing with the murdered nuns must have been one of Neudeck’s final tasks at the Youth Camp, because when the last of the prisoners had been killed, or had returned to the main Ravensbrück camp, the extermination annex was closed. Neudeck was promoted and sent to run the subcamp at Barth. Salvequart continued to hide out in the male camp, disguised as a male prisoner, awaiting the liberation.

The Uckermark Youth Camp prisoners who started arriving back at Ravensbrück, probably in late March, were greeted as if they’d returned from the hereafter. Some were shepherded into the
Revier
and cared for by friends. Irène Ottelard, who weighed just 29 kilos on return, wrote later: ‘I would never
have believed that I could experience such joy at seeing Ravensbrück again. And when I found myself in the hands of a French woman doctor it was like heaven.’

Others were not as lucky. Mary O’Shaughnessy was marched straight to the mayhem of the death-zone blocks behind the wire. Conditions were little better than at the Youth Camp, though she was glad to have a blanket. Youth Camp killing methods were being used here too. In early April hundreds of women suffering from dysentery were taken to Block 22, to be locked in for three days and three nights without food or water and with no means of relieving themselves, obviously in the expectation that they’d die. Julia Barry, the British camp policewoman, tried to get inside the death block, as one of the women taken there was her husband’s aunt, who had come from Hungary in December. Mary was not allowed inside, ‘but I did see through a door, bodies piled up on top of another, perhaps as many as thirty. I particularly noticed one corpse of which the eyes were hanging out of the sockets, which I believe was due to rats with which the block was infested.’

Mary O’Shaughnessy soon found herself facing Winkelmann again. The 1500 sick and dying women in her block were ordered to strip to the waist and run past him. As her false arm was exposed, she thought she was now bound to be selected, but at the last minute she was rescued by her Blockova, Ann Sheridan. Seeing the threat, Ann managed to bring Mary indoors after the count, along with several others, and hide them under a bed at the back of the block. ‘This selection happened three times, and on each occasion I was able to avoid it with the help of Ann Seymour Sheridan,’ said Mary O’Shaughnessy in her post-war testimony.

Once back in the main camp, Youth Camp survivors were also hunted by the ‘cattle merchant’, Pflaum, who was determined to send them off to the subcamps, no matter how near death they were. The Dutch midwife Neeltje Epker recorded that twenty-five of the seventy-nine Dutch survivors of the Youth Camp were put on a transport to a subcamp; seventeen were so weak that they died on the journey.

The round-ups had by now assumed ‘a tragicomic’ form, observed Maria Moldenhawer. ‘Pflaum would personally enter blocks and look under beds or climb up onto the highest bunks, while everyone who could would hide, and Winkelmann would come and look at women’s legs.’ Anna Hand, the Austrian camp secretary, saw Pflaum in the labour office at this time and observed that he was now ‘permanently drunk’. She watched him ride through the camp on his bicycle with women scattering as they saw him coming.

The ordinary SS were seen about far less by now. ‘They weren’t idiots,’ said Violette Lecoq. ‘They knew the end was coming.’ But Pflaum’s ‘special posse’, SS men with revolvers and riding crops, were always present and would surround blocks day or night and take away entire columns of women to a subcamp as they
were heading off for work. Whether they got there alive no longer mattered as long as they were sent somewhere to get them out of the camp. Hitler’s orders had been reiterated to Suhren: not one prisoner must fall into Russian hands.

As the fronts advanced, Suhren’s choice of subcamps to send his women to was dwindling by the day. They fell into an ever-shrinking band as the Red Army moved forward to the east, the British to the north-west and the Americans to the south-west.

On 15 April Belsen ceased to be an option for Ravensbrück’s evacuees as British forces reached the camp, uncovering unimaginable horror. By this time the Americans were forming bridgeheads across the Elbe and air attacks intensified, so that any prisoners packed off in trucks or trains were almost certain to be hit. Even if women reached a subcamp alive they would starve as food supplies were cut off. The Polish woman Janina Habich, and 150 others, arrived back from the Youth Camp to spend three days digging a trench around Ravensbrück before being loaded onto trucks for a two-day journey, dodging Allied bombs on their way to the salt mines at Berndorf. Here they were set to work 200 metres underground making V2 rocket parts. ‘In those first April days 140 of us women were held here for ten days and given only rotting carrots and turnips to eat.’

Eva Fejer, the Hungarian teenager, was sent to work in a factory on the southern edge of Berlin. When it was bombed the prisoners were sent to clear up, ‘but we hid in the latrines instead’. Here they overheard the SS discussing whether to blow the whole place up, prisoners and all, but instead they marched them back into Berlin. ‘They put us on the underground and we saw all the names of the stations that we knew from children’s books, and the guards said: “Stay with us or you’ll be spotted.” Some escaped, but I didn’t dare. I thought, if I’ve got this far I’ll not jeopardise it now.’ They were put on a train to Oranienburg, on the northern edge of Berlin, and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

We were taken to the baths and led inside stark-naked. I don’t know how long we were left there. I remember a child started screaming and I never saw her again. I sat with my head in my hands, thinking – whatever happens let it happen quickly – and the SS man came and opened the door. He shouted ‘
Raus, raus
’ and we were loaded into a truck and taken to a proper bath and given a wash. We were loaded into another truck and taken back to Ravensbrück and we saw lots of commotion and bits of furniture being packed and were given Canadian five-kilogram parcels.

Women were moved out to Malchow, Barth and Torgau, three subcamps that lay furthest from the advancing fronts, but even as the trucks were leaving, prisoners from other camps, newly overrun, were brought back to
Ravensbrück. Many recalled the return by truck from Rechlin, the punishment camp 50 kilometres north-west of Ravensbrück. Hermine Salvine, the office secretary, said:

On the lorry were lying dead bodies, dying and living prisoners all mixed up together. They were unloaded, reloaded and taken out through the gates. This happened late in the evening. All night the crematorium chimney smoked. In the morning when I had to write the daily strength return [prisoner count] I learned that they were all dead.

Evacuation transports were the new way to kill. Trains were crisscrossing, circling and doubling back between the ever-fewer camps and subcamps as yet out of reach of the Allies. Isabelle Donner had reached Ravensbrück by cattle truck from Budapest in December 1944 and was sent west by open rail wagon to a work camp at Dachau in February 1945. ‘The train was bombed and two wagons had their tops blown off – there were many dead.’ The group was taken off the train and marched north, and came under attack from the air, but they marched on west, away from the Soviet front. Helen Gaweda, a Pole, had marched from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück in December 1944, and was trucked out to the Malchow subcamp north of Ravensbrück in February 1945. In April 1945 she was evacuated south by train to Leipzig, and then again on foot, ahead of the advancing US and Russian troops.

Krystyna Dąbrówska, the seventeen-year-old from Warsaw, was evacuated from a subcamp near Hamburg as the British advanced and put on a train south to Leipzig. She sat on an open cattle truck, next to a wagon crammed with ammunition.

As the Allied planes
were flying over we looked up and we thought our friends will see us in these open wagons – the American pilots won’t drop their bombs on us, but they did and our train was bombed as well as the ammunition train. There were so many dead nobody could count them. I remember seeing women still conscious with no legs. There was nothing anyone could do. We tried to run away but were brought back and marched back to another train.

Rosza Nagy, her younger sister Marianne and their mother Margit had marched almost all the way from Budapest to Ravensbrück in October 1944 and stayed together at the camp until January 1945, when the two girls were sent to a subcamp at Chemnitz, near the Czech border, leaving their mother behind.

‘
When mother saw us
go she didn’t cry,’ said Rosza. ‘She just said: “Stay together girls and you’ll be all right.”’ In mid-April, as the Russians approached
from the east and the Americans from the west, they were put in closed cattle wagons bound for Mauthausen, a journey that took them directly between the Russian and American fronts.

‘It was quite dark in the wagon and we had no food. We sat packed together, sixty to a wagon, like this’ – Rosza folded her knees up to her chest.

It was completely dark all the time but I held my sister’s hand. Mother had told us never to let go of each other’s hands. Then people gave up, and they started to die. So we tried to pile them up in one corner of the wagon. We could hear the cannons while we went along. We thought this was probably Dresden they were bombing, as we must have been close. We didn’t know if it was the Russians or not.

After a few days many more people started to give up, and Rosza tried to urge her fellow passengers to hold on.

I said we are going to stay alive. We are soon going to be free. I tried to talk to them to give them strength. But they didn’t want to live any more. My sister gave up. She was only twenty and she was not as strong as me. I was sporty and went cycling and played tennis. My sister was a cellist and had a beautiful voice, but on the train she lost her strength.

After a week in the darkness of the wagon, the train started to pass through Czechoslovakia. Then it slowed and pulled to a stop. The doors were thrown open.

There were people outside wanting to help. It was the Czech Red Cross but we couldn’t get out. Eventually we crawled out on hands and knees, as we couldn’t stand, and we crawled onto a field of grass so we ate the grass. In the wagon behind us were the dead people and they took them out.

It was wonderful for a moment because we could breathe. And the sunlight was so bright it dazzled us. It was wonderful to see the light. When they opened the door it was like a miracle.

The women were ordered back in and the train moved on for another week. On arrival at Mauthausen more than half the passengers were dead. The living were herded into a tent. Rosza’s sister Marianne died at Mauthausen two days later.

At Ravensbrück they all knew the final act was coming. On 12 April the Siemens women had been confined to their barracks. Two days later the Ravensbrück plant was emptied, the last prisoners marched to the main camp
ready for evacuation, and all Siemens equipment loaded on barges and sent away out of the line of fire.

Some in the camp still hoped the Americans would reach Berlin – and therefore perhaps Ravensbrück – first. They weren’t to know that on 15 April
Eisenhower had told
his stunned commanders at the Elbe bridgeheads to stand fast. Contrary to all expectations, the Supreme Allied Commander had decided to allow Stalin’s forces alone to take Berlin.

At 3 a.m. on 16 April the Soviets’ final thrust towards the capital began with a massive attack on the so-called Gates of Berlin – the Seelow Heights, fifty miles to the east – and such was the extraordinary firepower that the rumbling was heard even at Ravensbrück. That morning, the camp’s selections for the gassing vans continued, and ‘old rats’ still filled in prisoners’ names on transport lists as usual, but two days later, as news came that German resistance at Seelow had collapsed, the
Schreibstube
staff were told to burn the lists instead.

New orders had come through to destroy the most incriminating evidence of all – the prisoners’ files, and with them all trace of every order that had ever been issued at Ravensbrück. At first the prisoners were ordered to form a human chain stretching from the camp offices to the crematorium, boxes of documents passed from hand to hand and into the furnace.

The guard in charge of the camp library, Irmgard Schröers, burned all the Nazi texts as well. She explained to her assistant, a Polish prisoner: ‘Times have changed and the Germans will have to adjust to other people. You are going to be free and I am going to be locked up. Apparently that is how it must be.’

The
Effektenkammer
staff had been ordered to clear out evidence too. Prisoners’ valuables – wedding rings, photographs, letters, carefully labelled and stored under lock and key since the earliest days of the camp – were now removed, loaded onto trucks and sent away.
Suhren revealed later
that the valuables were shipped first to Fortress Doemitz on the River Elbe, but as the Americans advanced they were moved again and ‘stored in the vicinity of a youth hostel’ – though whether the valuables ever arrived there, and what became of them, nobody ever knew.

In their blocks, the Red Army women were making preparations for the Soviets to arrive – preparing reports on the camp, drawing maps of the area, anything that might be of use to their Soviet liberators. Irma Dola had a brother fighting with Rokossovsky’s army, who said he’d be there in days and he’d sort the SS out. Antonina Nikiforova was talking about making a film of it all after the war.

Recriminations broke out. The head camp policewoman, Elisabeth Thury, was accused by some of sucking up to the Red Army women now that their victory was assured. Blockovas who had been too close to the SS were carefully watched by other prisoners, and if necessary cut down to
size. A new woman guard arrived, called Zetterman. She’d been transferred back to Ravensbrück from Belsen just before the British arrived. Zetterman roamed around Ravensbrück with a revolver, kicking and hitting, and threatening the women that she’d use her Belsen methods on them. The prisoners asked ‘But what will you do when you lose the war?’, at which she scoffed and said she’d ‘know to shoot herself’ and roamed around and kicked and hit out some more.