If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (112 page)

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.’

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

O
n 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.

Most remarkable was Countess Françoise de Laverney, who had ‘suffered with six weeks’ solitary confinement, during which she was fed only once a week. She was very emaciated but absolutely on top of the world. She had in her possession a valuable diamond ring, a diamond bracelet and a diamond brooch which she claimed to have kept from the Germans by swallowing constantly.’

Clutton said that the women showed ‘a joy in life that I have never encountered in a human being’, adding this may have been due to their feeling of ‘triumph over death and evil’. It was certainly down to a knowledge they had survived by pure luck.

He noted that other British women had not been lucky. A Miss Jackson was murdered at the Youth Camp and a Mrs Gould from Jersey had been ‘gassed and burned’. Clutton heard of an Irish woman ‘who starved to death in Block 22’, while the British golf champion Pat Cheramy was ‘Sent to Mauthausen. Fate unknown.’ Mary Young, the Scottish nurse, was ‘killed at the Youth Camp, too ill to resist’. News of the murder of the SOE women was reported back to Baker Street. One of the SOE group, Yvonne Rudellat, was thought to have been on the
last transport to Belsen
.

Clutton was also instructed to file a report on the camp itself, which was difficult as the women’s accounts ‘telescoped backwards’, but he found ‘a very intelligent French woman called Germaine Tillion’ on whose information he was able to rely. Germaine, who began passing on her analysis of the camp as soon as she reached safety, briefed Clutton on slave labour, saying it meant ‘giving prisoners only enough food to keep them alive for the time they might be useful, then killing them and replacing them with someone else’.

When it landed on Foreign Office desks back in London, Clutton’s report elicited little comment on the remarkable stories of these British women snatched from Ravensbrück.

There was far more to be said as to whether it might be appropriate to ask the Treasury to stump up for a token of Britain’s appreciation for Sven Frykman, the Swedish driver who had been responsible for getting the British women out. A series of official notes on the question reached a view that it would be best to give Frykman a gold watch.

Back in Germany, the camp was emptying fast. By mid-May the last survivors were heading home – some walked all the way to Prague, Warsaw and even Vienna, joining the millions of refugees, ex-prisoners and captured German soldiers on Europe’s roads. Micheline Maurel and her friend Michelle stopped a passing cart, which was flying a French flag, and hitched a lift.
Reaching a US camp, they joined a long line of men queuing for soup. An American soldier spotted them, took their hands and ushered them to the front, saying: ‘Ladies first.’ Micheline tried to thank him but cried instead.

Mothers all over Europe wept on seeing daughters suddenly turn up at their doors, but many survivors had no homes to go to. Gypsies reaching home in Austria found entire villages destroyed. Many waited at home and nobody returned. The Spanish Jew Louis Kugelman, freed from Buchenwald, learned that his wife had died at Ravensbrück and that his five-year-old daughter Stella had disappeared without trace; he began to search.

The Russians had to wait the longest to go back. All were held for several months in so-called ‘filtration camps’ where they were forced to undergo checks carried out by SMERSh, which had already started looking for ‘traitors’. Antonina Nikiforova was one of their first victims. As she awaited repatriation Antonina passed the time gathering more material for her book, but the SMERSh got to hear of this, seized her notes and manuscript, and used it to concoct evidence showing she was a Nazi collaborator. They then persuaded Antonina’s comrade Valentina Chechko to accuse her. Chechko made a statement to SMERSh on 15 June 1945, stating that Antonina Nikiforova ‘
took part in the selection
of people for extermination’ at Ravensbrück and that she ‘twice gave ill people poison’. Valentina also confessed to selecting people for extermination herself. This was the same Valentina Chechko who would later face trial at Simferopol and accuse other comrades.

In another filtration camp Yevgenia Klemm bided her time working as a translator for a Russian general. Others worked at a Soviet military court where Ravensbrück camp guards were put on trial, though several German guards were lynched instead.

By the end of the year most of the Russian women were piling into trains east, taking with them trunks, bags, sacks, all packed with items looted from abandoned German homes. Ilena Barsukova recalled that Yevgenia Klemm took more than anyone; her carriage was piled with pots and pans, books, blankets, old clothes. ‘She knew she had nothing to go back to,’ remembered Ilena. ‘My mother had a cow and a chicken, so at least there would be food, but Yevgenia had no family left.’

Against the tide of Europe’s refugees, a victors’ army – different from the fighting forces – was moving into Germany. These were men and women, civilians as well as soldiers, assigned to set up the military government, carve Germany into zones of occupation and hunt down war criminals.

Fritz Suhren, arrested at a US checkpoint with Odette Sansom, was one of the first Ravensbrück criminals to fall into Allied hands. Hearing that the commandant of Ravensbrück had been captured, the British SOE officer
Vera Atkins flew out to Germany to interrogate him about her missing women agents. Accompanied by a Scottish major, Angus Fyffe, Vera – in WAAF uniform – entered the interrogation room at a Paderborn internment camp to find the once-dapper Suhren standing in socks, breeches and shirt. Suhren saluted, but Atkins got nothing out of him; he even denied there were any British women in Ravensbrück, apart from Odette.

In the last chaotic days at the camp Suhren had floundered, cut off from orders, but now he was quite clearly following orders again; these commands, spread among captured SS men held in internment camps, were that none of them should admit to anything at all, in order not to implicate comrades.

Vera then interrogated two women guards held at the same camp. According to Angus Fyffe, one was ‘a middle aged woman of very low mentality’ and the other ‘looked half silly’. These guards confirmed there were English women in the camp, so Atkins and Fyffe confronted Suhren again; he still admitted nothing but ‘started slightly’ at mention of the crematorium. ‘
By this time
it was dark and the cell was lit by a fluorescent strip, which gave Suhren a sickly colour,’ recalled Fyffe.

Not long after Percival Treite gave himself up at a British checkpoint, saying he had deserted his position at Ravensbrück on 30 April ‘in order to avoid fighting as his father was a British subject’.