If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (115 page)

*

By this time, the children of survivors were beginning to ask questions, but most found answers hard to come by. As I talked to survivors, their children and grandchildren often came to listen; few had ever heard their mothers talk in detail about the war. Many in this second generation had been damaged, perhaps by years of separation when mothers were in the camp, or disturbed in later years by what their mothers had suffered and could not discuss. Maria Wilgat, daughter of Krysia, the secret letter writer, saw her mother erupt in fury when she heard the German language or if she saw red salvia flowers, but Krysia never told her daughter why. I heard of several in the second generation who had taken their own lives. Mina Rupp, the German communist, who confessed before a Soviet court to selecting fellow prisoners for gassing, was pardoned in 1954. Her daughter committed suicide by gassing herself two months before Rupp was freed from prison in Dresden.

Naomi Moscovitch, one of the Jewish children who arrived in the camp in 1943, spoke of a very different family tragedy. She had gone to live in Israel after the war, and when I met her there she talked for many hours about Ravensbrück, describing, most memorably, her recollections of a bomb at the children’s Christmas party in 1944. As I got up to leave we talked about her new life in Israel, and she said it had been hard. She asked me if I knew about the Sbarro Pizzeria suicide bombing. On 9 August 2001 a Palestinian suicide bomber and his female accomplice walked into the Jerusalem pizzeria where Naomi’s daughter, her daughter’s husband and their three children were eating. The entire family were among the dead.

In the early 1980s a young West German schoolgirl was having difficulty finding out about Ravensbrück; it was a place she had heard her parents mention when they were talking about her grandfather Walter Sonntag, one of the first doctors at Ravensbrück and the most sadistic.

At the camp Sonntag married his fellow camp doctor Gerda Weyand and they had a child, Heidi. Clara,
^*
Heidi’s daughter, was born in 1966. She was five when she first sensed the taboo about her grandfather; her parents talked of how he had worked at the camp and afterwards was put in prison, but it had been a case of mistaken identity. ‘I couldn’t find out any more. At school we learned about Belsen, Dachau and the death camps, but not much about Ravensbrück. And the teaching didn’t relate to real life. Teachers had to be careful what they said. They knew that parents or grandparents might have been involved.’ The mystery about her grandfather made Clara unhappy. She developed a face rash, which she says worsened as the sense of taboo intensified. Clara’s grandmother, Gerda, was still alive, but kept a distance from her
own daughter, telling her nothing. ‘So my mother was brought up with all these losses and tried to make a nice world for herself saying her father wasn’t such a bad guy.’

As a teenager Clara started her own research but did not know where to turn. ‘I went to the Bundesarchiv but they told me I had to get permission to read anything. It isn’t easy to find things out if you don’t know how. I looked in books but Ravensbrück wasn’t in the index.’

The end of the Cold War brought change for Ravensbrück. A West German director moved in to run the memorial site and plans were made to abolish the communist exhibits. Debate began about how the site should be preserved: as a cemetery, a crime scene or as a place of education and academic study? Changes came slowly; the Russians did not move out until 1994, and until then nobody could visit. But in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, survivors were invited back and many were able to come from the West for the first time. For those who had buried memories of the camp for so long, the return brought the deepest pain.

As Loulou Le Porz walked around the compound, she saw in her mind bodies piled up in the Block 10 washroom and spilling out of the mortuary. The speeches and the chattering crowd that had gathered for the memorial event presented a ridiculous backdrop to these visions of the dead and Loulou was pleased to get away. Michèle Agniel looked around and could not imagine this person – her younger self – who once had been here. ‘It was as if it was someone else.’

After German reunification in 1990 small sums of compensation were at last paid to survivors in the East, which encouraged women who had never done so before to talk about the camp and archives in Russia and Eastern Bloc countries were opened for the first time, revealing new evidence. A flurry of new material came to light in the West too – letters of a former SS man hidden in a chimney stack; diaries of mothers, never read before. Scholarly research on all the camps multiplied.

In America a new immigration computer helped US war crimes hunters trace Elfriede Huth, the former dog-handler at the camp who had entered the US illegally in 1959. Huth had lived in California, where she married a Jewish man called Fred Rinkel, whose parents had died at Auschwitz. Elfriede was extradited back to Germany, but there was little chance of a trial. Of the estimated 3500 women guards who passed through Ravensbrück only a fraction have ever come under investigation in the German courts, which don’t even keep a record of the numbers they have charged. It is probably less than twenty-five, with even fewer convicted. I tracked Elfriede down to a well-appointed old people’s home in Willich, near Düsseldorf, hoping to talk to her about the camp.
Her name was on a buzzer. ‘
Forget it
. There is nothing to say. Forget it,’ she barked down the intercom.

The end of the Cold War made it possible for Dr Sonntag’s granddaughter Clara to visit the camp. ‘I worried the staff would point a finger at me accusingly saying, Why didn’t you come earlier or something, but in fact they were very nice.’ Clara found out a lot about her grandfather and the camp, and noticed her face rash clear. But she needed to know more and made her way to London to read the trial testimony at the National Archives. She stayed in a bed and breakfast a long way from the archives. ‘It sounds crazy but I was frightened someone might put two and two together and realise who I was.’

I asked Clara what it was she was trying to find out. She had always been puzzled by the stories of her grandfather’s drunkenness. ‘They said he rode his bicycle around the surgery table. Sometimes you think it can’t be true. Blood is thicker than water – you know – and I had always had this feeling that there was something of him in me. So I was looking for excuses for him, I suppose. I mean, did his drinking mean he had a conscience? Was he an arsehole or a drunk? Then, reading all that stuff, I knew it was true.’

* * *

In December 2013 I went back to Ravensbrück. Fürstenberg seemed just the same, sullen, with its back turned to the camp across the lake. The town had paid dearly for its ties to the women’s concentration camp. The Red Army ransacked homes and raped women as it passed through in 1945, then when the DDR came into being locals were forced to become communists and worship at the camp’s new communist shrine. When the Russians left the town the locals sought permission to build a supermarket on the site. The request was turned down.

In the woods by the lake the sun was burning the frost off the trees. There had been changes at the site: a new exhibition had been set up, and beside the lake a visitor centre. Ravensbrück now receives 150,000 visitors a year, though its brother camp of Sachsenhausen, closer to Berlin, gets far more – and more money as a result. ‘We were always on the margins of the story,’ says Insa Eschebach, director of the memorial site.

There have been many excuses for marginalising this camp: it was smaller scale than many others; it didn’t fit easily into the central narrative; camp documents had been destroyed; it was hidden behind the Iron Curtain; the prisoners were only women. And yet it is precisely because this was a camp for women that Ravensbrück should have shaken the conscience of the world. Other camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to man. The Jewish death camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to an entire race. Ravensbrück showed what mankind was capable of doing to
women. The nature and scale of atrocity done here to women had never been seen before. Ravensbrück should never have had to fight ‘on the margins’ for a voice: it was – and is – a story in its own right.

The Nazis committed atrocities against women in many other places too: more than half the Jews killed in the death camps were women, and towards the end of the war women were held at several other camps. But just as Auschwitz was the capital of the crime against Jews, so Ravensbrück was the capital of the crime against women. Deep in our collective memory, throughout literature of every period and every country, atrocities against women have always horrified. By treating the crime that happened here as marginal, history commits a further crime against the Ravensbrück women, and against the female sex.

At the memorial site today the story is told more fully than before. In the new exhibition chapters largely left out when communists had control of the story – the asocials, the prostitutes, the Gypsies, the Jews – are now included, while the chapter extolling the communist heroines has been toned down – perhaps too far. Cold War rhetoric is certainly out of place in the twenty-first century, but the German women who stood up to Hitler – many of them communists – were indeed ‘fighters against facism’ and should be recognised as such. I was glad to see
Tragende
was still standing. Her foot raised as she seems to step out over the lake, Olga Benario deserves her place as a ‘strong woman who helped her weaker comrades’.

I wandered towards the crematorium. More ashes have recently been found in a mass grave near by. Plans to plant a thousand roses on top of the grave are held up by a dispute about whether this will desecrate the remains.

A new academic study of surviving lists and figures has revised the estimate of numbers killed at Ravensbrück, slashing the figure of 90,000 set at the Hamburg trials, and agreed by most camp historians since, to a precise 28,000. The British calculations were too crude and took no account of releases over the years, or of women released from subcamps, says the study. But these new calculations should be treated with caution too. Digging rather than academic analysis might produce more truth – it would certainly produce more ashes, more mass graves.

The whole site is a cemetery, the lake itself a grave. The real number killed here can never be known. Many of the victims – particularly in the last months – were not even registered on camp lists. No attempt has been made to find out the truth of gassings in lorries and buses in the final weeks, or to excavate around the site of the second gas chamber, camouflaged as the
Neue Wäscherei
.

In fact, re-examining the figures exposes just how little of the horror is known, even today. Are those sent away on ‘black transports’ for gassing to be counted? If so, how many were there? Nobody knows. Counting deaths at subcamps complicates the story further. Are all the murdered
babies included in the revised figure of 28,000? How many were killed in the final evacuations, when prisoners were piled on trains in the sure knowledge they’d be bombed by the Allies? The women killed on the death marches are not included – neither those marched out of Ravensbrück itself nor those marched from the multiple subcamps. Those killed in the White Buses, hit by Allied fire, remain uncounted – nobody knows how many there were.

The original estimate of 90,000 dead was
almost certainly too high
. A figure of between 40,000 and 50,000 – depending on which deaths are included – is probably as close as it is possible to get to the truth. But does the precise number of dead really matter? Survivors think names are more important than numbers. ‘The Germans were always counting us,’ scoffed Loulou Le Porz. ‘Now the academics count us again. Some study us like ants.’ The author of the ‘Memory Book’, Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow, also believes that names matter more than numbers. Her
Gedenkbuch
now contains 13,161 names, but a lack of funding has stopped her research.

I walked over to the Siemens camp to see what had changed there, but the path was blocked by barbed wire. Access to information from the company’s Munich headquarters is also still largely blocked.

When I first approached Siemens for information about its involvement with Ravensbrück I received a glossy brochure about the company’s successes. Later the company’s official history, published in 1998, came through the post. ‘Siemens felt forced to cooperate, however reluctantly, with the regime,’ said the introduction. In 2013 the company announced its archives were open, but the few documents made available on Ravensbrück contained not a single prisoner’s name. When I asked to speak to a Siemens director about how the company today viewed its involvement with the Third Reich, I was told that only the company archivist could speak about the past, so I sent him my questions.

And yet from the top of the Siemens hill, which I reached via a back route, the company’s past at Ravensbrück is clear for all to see. The skeleton of an old workshop still stands, and in the dip below are the old rail tracks which took parts back and forth. Also clear to see are the wooden trails along which trucks carried women to the gas chamber once they were ‘taken off the lists’ as too weak to work.

During the British post-war de-Nazification case against the Siemens head of personnel Wolf-Dietrich von Witzleben, claims were made of the illtreatment of prisoners and that Siemens ‘made gas ovens for the concentration camps’. A British adjudicator noted that the defence statement in the case was ‘rather woolly’, but no evidence was found to support the claims, which were rejected.

That Siemens staff didn’t know about the existence of the ‘gas ovens’, or that in the latter period their exhausted workers at Ravensbrück were gassed, is impossible to believe, however, especially from the top of the Siemens hill. The crematorium chimney is less than 300 yards away; its stinking smoke blew right over the Siemens plant. By January 1945 the gas chamber stood alongside the crematorium. Anni Vavak, the Austrian-Czech prisoner, described how in the last months of the war she stood there watching trucks loaded with half-naked women driving from the Youth Camp, past the Siemens plant and then heading to the gas chamber. When Anni told the Siemens civilian staff what she saw they ‘winced’. Selma van de Perre and other survivors recall selections for gassing taking place at the Siemens plant itself during the last months.