If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (110 page)

Instead of heading for Malchow, north-west of Ravensbrück, the Volkssturm, backed by a few SS guards, drove the Red Army prisoners northward to the sea, directly in the line of the Soviet advance. ‘The roads were full of people and carts,’ said Yekaterina Boyko. ‘And when we saw we were going towards the Baltic we thought we were going to be taken to Africa as slaves.’

Georgia Tanewa, the Bulgarian, was marching close to Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm. In 1943 Klemm had passed orders down the lines when the Red Army women were marched west to Germany; now she resumed the same commanding role as they marched towards their liberators. ‘Our guards were just old men who looked like they’d been dressed in uniforms for the day,’ said Georgia, who lives today in east Berlin. ‘But Yevgenia Lazarevna was really the one in charge. She’d say: “Stay together girls, do as I say, just keep marching.” So we marched along the road in our wooden clogs. Clack, clack, clack’ – and Georgia bangs the table to make the sound.

In Fürstenberg we walked
past beautiful empty houses – we’d forgotten what civilisation was. And then we thought, what are these old [Volkssturm] men going to do with us? They aren’t going to kill us in this little town. They knew the war was lost and were probably thinking, what are we going to do with this stinking bunch of starving women? Then we thought they might bring us to some big prison or other. And when we realised we were heading north we thought: ‘Aha! They’re marching us towards the sea to drown us.’

Did Georgia believe this might happen?

That is what I personally thought, yes. The sea was actually very far away, but we didn’t know that. Then suddenly we had been marching some hours and looked around, and there were no soldiers, but our clogs were still banging on the road, clack, clack, clack. There was nobody on the road at all except for us. We kept looking around and nothing happened. We didn’t know where we were, and there were only these ploughed fields for miles.

The front half of the column carried on up the road, hoping to find the Russian front. Those near Yevgenia Lazarevna asked her what to do. ‘She said we must find a wood and hide,’ says Georgia.

We ran like mad over this ploughed field and then there was a wall on the edge of a wood and we were running on pine needles. There were pine needles everywhere and we were in the forest and we looked around and there were eyes all around us and then the eyes popped up and we found they belonged to prisoners from Sachsenhausen who were hiding. So we lay down in the pine needles and had a rest, and it was wonderful.

When Georgia woke up she saw a boy on the road.

I spoke a little German so I asked the boy for water. He took me to a village and we found a pump and some pots. We walked around the village and people hiding in their houses thought we were going to kill them, but of course it didn’t cross our minds. Everything was empty. Kaput. We asked the boy where the road went and he said to Neustrelitz. He said the Soviet army are in Neustrelitz, so we headed to Neustrelitz.

On the way some of the women were caught in crossfire. ‘I was lying on the ground and got hit by a piece of shrapnel,’ said Ekaterina Speranskaya.

Then I remember the tanks and lots of bodies, and it was then I heard Russian spoken and saw our soldiers. When they came close the Russian captain said: ‘My God, where are you from? Have you come from the grave?’ And when we stepped forward in our striped uniform, all dirty and tired, they started laughing and crying and said ‘sisters’ and they welcomed us and gave us food and so we carried on to Neustrelitz.

By midday on 29 April the last evacuees were marching out of the main camp. Fritz Suhren darted up and down the evacuation columns and then returned to Ravensbrück, where he was seen pacing nervously beside the gates. ‘Then suddenly he ordered the guards: “Close the gates. Those still inside, shoot them” – I heard this diabolical statement myself,’ recalled Elfriede Meier.

If Suhren did issue this order, it wasn’t carried out. Zdenka recalled a different parting gesture: ‘He sent me two large sacks of salt, a few sacks of musty flour and a rack of loaves of bread with which we were supposed to feed the sick.’ Marie-Claude said that Suhren’s last instructions were that the remaining prisoners should dig a ditch to bury unburned corpses, ‘then we
should fill it in properly and make a cross to place on top. To think that a few days before women were still being gassed.’

By the middle of the afternoon, Fritz Suhren and the entire SS contingent – Binz among them – had driven off in trucks and cars, or on horses and carts, to Malchow.

As soon as the SS had gone the women began to explore their camp. They found piles of Red Cross parcels in the cellars of the headquarters buildings and in the SS houses; some had been rifled, some left unopened. One cellar was full of sugar, dried milk, porridge, Swedish bread, conserves, soap, toothpaste, all with Swedish labels except for the American cigarettes. Next, the women inspected the crematorium, piled with partly burned corpses, and peered into the half-destroyed gas chamber, where they saw empty tins of chemicals bearing the name Zyklon. They also found eight cases of documents, which they put aside to give to the Russians.

It was now, walking out into the woods, that the women found the remains of gassing vans, which Zdenka compared to removal vans with ‘a mechanism allowing exhaust gases to be pumped inside’. She said they were found near the Youth Camp.

Venturing over to the men’s camp, also evacuated, they found some 400 sick men who had been left behind. ‘They’d been without water for a week and were dying of hunger and thirst,’ wrote Marie-Claude. ‘They didn’t look like men but like ghosts, and the suffering had driven them mad. Nobody, but nobody, could have described it – nobody would have believed it. We did what we could to help them, but we had so little ourselves.’

On 30 April, the women awoke to the roar of Russian artillery, which grew louder by the hour, the gunfire so close that the sky above the perimeter wall lit up. ‘Women ran in a panic onto the Lagerstrasse and one of them lifted her arms to the sky, her hair all wild, and knelt in the middle of the road, praying at the top of her voice,’ said Zdenka. A small group went out of the gates to find out just how near the Red Army were. Others prepared beds for wounded Soviet soldiers and made a red banner to hang across the camp gates when they knew liberation was assured. Some still expected the Germans to blow up the camp. ‘We came out one day and there was no siren, so we said let’s get ready to be blown up, let’s say goodbye,’ said Maria Vlasenko, one of the Odessa nurses who had stayed behind.

The first Red Army soldier to enter the gates of Ravensbrück was a young man on a white horse, wearing a golden fur hat – or so Zdenka Nedvedova remembered. Marie-Claude said he rode on a bike: ‘At 11.30 the advance guard of the Red Army arrived, and seeing the first cyclist ride through the
camp gates my eyes filled with tears of joy and I remembered my tears of rage when I saw the first German motorcyclist ride through the Place de l’Opéra five years earlier.’

Antonina Nikiforova saw the cyclist too. ‘Everyone who could run ran out to greet him.’ Then the Russians came through the gates in tanks and cars.

‘We ran up and kissed them and showered them with cigarettes until they told us to stop. “Are you mad?” they shouted. “It’s enough to kiss us!” And we surrounded them and stared at them and cried. There they were all covered in dust, but to us they were the most precious things in the world.’

Maria Gorobotsova, from Tbilisi in Georgia, said the soldiers ‘looked terrified when they saw the state we were in. Then they said: “
Girls, let’s kill a pig and eat
.”’ Maria Vlasenko saw a tank commander jump down from his vehicle and walk towards them. ‘He asked us, Is there anyone here from Maykop, which was his home town. He had lost his sister, he said. And his sister then came forward. He could barely recognise her and he cried.’

According to Red Army testimony, the first soldiers arrived on motorbikes. Alexander Mednikov, a captain with the Second Belorussian Front, reported that a reconnaissance patrol was riding near Fürstenberg when it came across a high wall topped with rows of barbed wire. ‘
Our submachine gunners
got down from their motorbikes and one accidentally touched the wire with his hand, and received a strong electric shock [suggesting the electricity had not been turned off after all] which knocked him to the ground.’ A few armed men, probably elderly Volkssturm militia, were still defending the camp. ‘As our men rode along the wall, they found the gate, which also had a thick tangle of barbed wire over it. And suddenly from the other side a machine gun started chattering. Our men had already understood what sort of place this was and decided to enter, at which Hitler’s men fled and tried to hide behind some barracks.’

Minutes later, Colonel Mikhail Stakhanov arrived in a tank:

After fighting all the way
across Russia and Poland, I happened to take part in the liberation of the women’s camp of Ravensbrück. We drove over the barbed wire in our tanks and broke the camp gates. And then we stopped. It was impossible to move further as the human mass surrounded the tanks; women got under our tanks and on top of them, they shouted and they cried. There was no end to them. They looked awful, wearing overalls, skinny; they didn’t look like human beings. There were 3000 sick, so sick it was impossible to take them away, they were too weak.

It was probably the day after the advance guard arrived that Yaacov Drabkin turned up at Ravensbrück. Driving a jeep with loudhailers attached,
Drabkin entered the camp gates, looked around briefly, then swung his vehicle around and headed out again; he was looking for someone.

Drabkin was a young Jewish political officer attached to the 49th Army of the Second Belorussian Front. His job was to pick up intelligence and put out propaganda to undermine enemy morale. By the end of April Drabkin was based in the small town of Gransee, ten miles south of Fürstenberg. ‘
I remember celebrating
my birthday the day we crossed the Oder, so it must have been a few days after that that I heard about Ravensbrück. I don’t think we’d known of the women’s camp before, though we’d passed by Auschwitz, Majdanek and all the other camps. For a Jew it was of course particularly hard to see these things.’

Once in Germany Drabkin gathered intelligence from Russian and Ukrainian teenagers brought as slave labour for farms, and now fluent in German. ‘They passed us notes saying this German is a good guy, don’t kill him, or this one treated us badly, kill him.’ The boys told Drabkin a great deal about Ravensbrück, which he passed on to his headquarters. His superiors ordered him to get to the camp straight away and try to find Rosa Thälmann.

The Soviets knew by now that Ernst Thälmann, once the head of the German Communist Party, had been executed at Buchenwald. ‘They still hoped to find his wife alive, they wanted to know what she knew,’ said Drabkin, seated in his book-lined Moscow study. He failed to find Rosa at Ravensbrück, so he drove around Fürstenberg, calling her name on the empty streets through a loudhailer.

The Germans had all fled. It took a few hours but eventually I found her. She’d been hidden away in a small house in a back street. She was in a very bad state – emaciated, barely alive, the way everybody was. She was still wearing her prison clothes. She already knew her husband was dead, and all she wanted to know was what had happened to her daughter.

Twenty-six-year-old Irma Thälmann had been taken to Neubrandenburg subcamp some weeks earlier. Rosa had no idea if her daughter was dead or alive.

My instructions were to tell her that our commanders were pleased she had survived and would do everything to help her. We wanted to know what she could tell us, about the camp, the party, certain people we were interested in. But she wasn’t able to tell me anything, she was too distressed. She was terrified in case anything she said might put her daughter in more danger somehow. She was a tiny shrunken figure.

What was Yaacov’s response when he saw Rosa?

‘It’s hard to say,’ he said, moved by the memory. ‘A mixture of compassion and pity.’

Drabkin and the rest of the Soviet advance guard soon moved on west, promising the prisoners that Red Army units in the rear would bring supplies and medics to help them. While they waited, for two or three days more, the women hung their red banner over the entrance ‘to announce to the world that we were free,’ said Antonina. The Czechs asked Antonina for ‘permission’ to hang their national flag on their block, and soon every nation was flying its flag. Antonina described how everyone redoubled their efforts to help the sick, drawing up calorie charts, scavenging for food and mattresses, trying to start a clean-up. She did not mention that both in the camp and outside, Russian soldiers were now systematically raping prisoners and German civilians.

The Red Army’s sexual rampage at Ravensbrück was witnessed by Ilse Heinrich, a German asocial who was too weak to leave her bed when the Soviet advance guard arrived. A few hours later, Ilse and other bed-ridden prisoners saw Soviet soldiers, drunk, and bent on raping even the women who were sick and dying. ‘And then it began,’ she said. ‘I had only one thought at that time – to die, because I was little more than a corpse. Later, when the senior officers arrived and they set up their quarters in the camp, we had some peace and order. But first, we had to undergo that! It was the worst thing. And half dead as I was.’

How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims – already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead – did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it. Antonina, the senior Red Army woman left in the camp, apparently never mentioned it and nor did the other prominent communist prisoners. Only Zdenka chose to speak out later, revealing that not only were the sick and dying raped but so were women in the camp’s maternity block. Left behind after the evacuation were scores of women too pregnant to march, and many women with newborn babies, all housed in the same block. Soon after the Red Army liberators arrived one of these women ran to Zdenka screaming. ‘She cried that the soldiers had come and locked themselves in the block and tried to rape the women.’ Zdenka immediately went to the senior Soviet officer, Major Sergej Bulanov – a doctor, who was much respected – pleading for help. Bulanov must have quickly established that the men had done far more than threaten the women, because after a short time the prisoners heard shots. ‘And the next morning we learned that the soldiers had been executed,’ recalled Zdenka. ‘At the time we thought this punishment may have been too hard.’