If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (12 page)

In the autumn of 1939 Langefeld was looking for a new Blockova for the Jewish block. The place was in chaos: women always late for
Appell
, the lice count high, food being spilled. A group of orphaned Gypsy children had been put in the block too, which didn’t help. Even Doris Maase described the Jewish block as ‘a rabble’ as she watched the women line up at the
Revier
.

From the start the Jewish prisoners had been deliberately brought lower than any other group. Just 10 per cent of the prisoner strength, the Jews had been isolated in a single block at the end of the Lagerstrasse, subject to constant
harassment. Rations were meaner, and they worked longer hours, without a day off. Not surprisingly, many Jewish women soon fell ill, suffering mostly from swollen legs, nervous fits and chest infections. Many were also afflicted by sores and wounds caused by beatings. It was the practice of the night shift guards to sit around in the canteen talking about what they’d read about ‘Jewish sluts’ and ‘rich Jewish bitches’, before striding off to lash out at any Jewish ‘swine, whore or bitch’ they saw.

The outbreak of war brought an escalation in abuse, as Marianne Wachstein observed when she returned to the block after her period in the isolation cells. She saw sick women forced out into the early morning cold by Blockovas, and made to stand at
Appell
having epileptic fits and seizures, while others fainted as they stood to be punished in the rain. ‘
A Jewish woman
called Rosenberg who was at that time in side B of the Jewish barrack, had to undergo a standing punishment inside the block with the door and windows open in the freezing cold – even though she had a bad chest,’ said Marianne. ‘The Rosenberg woman had been reported for failing to make her bed properly.’

The fear of standing obsessed Marianne because she herself could hardly walk or stand. On arrival in the camp in June a ‘humane’ SS doctor excused her from
Appell
, but in the autumn a new SS doctor told her she would have to attend. Marianne objected and demanded that he should examine her first to see if she was well enough, but he refused ‘and said something rude and disparaging about Jews’ and the nurse sitting behind the desk ‘followed with a jeering smile’. Marianne said: ‘I will tell people abroad how one is treated in a concentration camp,’ upon which the doctor grabbed her and threw her out. ‘I’ll report that too,’ Marianne said, clearly believing that the wrongs she was suffering would soon be put right.

After the incident, Marianne returned to her block and told her friends: ‘The physician has taken his oath and must examine me, the Jew, just as he examines an Aryan woman when he checks if she is fit or not,’ and the others all agreed, including Edith Weiss, Modesta Finkelstein, Leontine Kestenbaum and several more of the Vienna ‘rabble’.

Such a rise in anti-Semitic abuse in the camp was hardly surprising given the increasing Jewish persecution across the Reich. The Führer was not yet ready to order wholesale German-Jewish round-ups – not least because there were no firm plans about where the Jews would go – but persecution had intensified, and by the time war started in September 1939, 500,000 German Jews had found the means to leave Germany; 250,000 remained, two-thirds of them women – widows, divorcees, single mothers, the destitute and the homeless, none standing any chance of securing a visa and all at high risk of being picked up by the police and accused, like Herta Cohen, of the crime of ‘infecting German blood’.

The pick-up happened, said Herta, in one of her many statements to the police, in a restaurant called Bremer Hafen in Essen, where she went for a glass of beer.

It was 5 p.m.
And I sat down on the table where there was nobody. On another table were two men in uniform. Grey uniform. The two men came to my table and sat down. They wanted a beer too. One left. And the other stayed. When we were alone I told him I was Jewish but for him this was not important and he wanted to sit here. He gave me a drink. I got dizzy. After two hours I was leaving and the man paid for the drinks. On the way home he asked if I wanted to drink beer near my flat in Adolf Hitler Strasse.

He asked her to go to his flat. ‘I say I cannot do this as I am Jewish. And he says be quiet it doesn’t matter. I stay with him. He gives me more beer. The next morning I am lying next to him. I don’t know what happened to my clothes. The next morning we had sex.’

The interrogator wants to hear more, and now asks exactly what happened, where it happened, and how it happened – ‘Was it full sexual intercourse? … Was he inside you? … Was he right inside you?’ But that left the man unsatisfied, so the questions resumed next day. To one of them Herta answers: ‘I had to clean up the semen,’ and the questions go on until finally there is no more to say, so she is sent to Ravensbrück. The ‘reason for arrest’ given on her file was ‘infecting German blood’.

So desperate were some of these abandoned German-Jewish women that several had tried to flee across the Dutch border, but travelling alone made them conspicuous. A Frau Kroch, from Leipzig, had sacrificed her own chance of freedom by letting her husband go on ahead with her children, staying behind to cover their tracks. When the coast was clear she set off to join them but was arrested and brought to Ravensbrück. A German political prisoner who had known her before recognised her in the camp one day. ‘They had cut off her hair and she went about in bare feet. I shall never forget the sad look she gave me.’

Mathilde ten Brink never had much hope of getting away, as she had no papers. Mathilde was a fifty-one-year-old homeless woman from Osnabrück. She had lost her job as a cleaner in the family shop when it was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom, which may also explain how she lost her
Reichspass
, identity card. In any event the Dutch police arrested her at Emmerich and handed her back to the Gestapo. A German police report noted that she was ‘
Not married. 138 cm
[4' 6"] tall and weak.’ She had Jewish features. ‘Nose is very big. Big ears. No teeth. Speaks German
and poor Dutch.’ Mathilde had ‘No children and no home,’ said the police report, which included dozens of pages of official correspondence, before Mathilde had even been sent to Ravensbrück, as did the report on Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman accused of
Rassenschande
. Irma and her ‘Aryan’ husband – who was also jailed – had two little girls who’d been taken away; one was now living with Irma’s parents, the other taken to a Nazi orphanage.

Irma received only scraps of news about the girls in censored letters from her parents. In one of her replies it is evident that Irma had been toiling on an outside work gang, because she says she’s seen children roller-skating – villagers perhaps, or children of the SS, playing in their villa gardens:

Dear Mutti
,

I was terribly happy about your letter. Yes, that’s the way I imagine Ingrid to be. She’ll be someone who knows how to stand up for herself in life. Rollerskating seems to be in fashion. Here at work I often see the children roller-skating. Now you’ll be getting the garden in order. You don’t say anything about emigrating any more?

Tender wishes and kisses also to my roller-skater
,

Your Irma Mutti
.

When Doris Maase described the Jewish block as a rabble, however, she meant not only that these women were the most desperate, but also that they had no discipline, no organisation, no common cause. Though identified as Jews, religion meant little or nothing to them and few shared any political beliefs. In Blocks 2 and 3 the communists and other politicals were planning how to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on 7 November, but the tiny group of Jewish communists in Block 11 were reviled by other Jewish women as Reds, and they in turn scorned the ‘bourgeois’ Viennese women and recoiled from the prostitutes. A minority of the Jewish women could console themselves that they were here for fighting fascism, which was what Maria Wiedmaier and her comrades tried to remember as they were herded every morning into line.

Within weeks of her release from the isolation cell, Marianne Wachstein herself was once again demanding to know why she was in the camp at all, and was brought again before the commandant. Evidently she still thought she could make Koegel see sense, but instead ‘The Herr Director took the file that was lying in front of him and hit me several times on the hands and I realised that I was not allowed to defend myself.’ Koegel ordered Wachstein back to an isolation cell and told Langefeld to sort out the block of ‘Jewish whores’.

Langefeld’s response was radical. She dismissed the Blockova of the Jewish block and walked out onto the Lagerstrasse at
Appell
to choose another. But rather than turn to the criminal or asocial blocks, she walked towards the Jewish women, and observed them with silent disgust. Johanna Langefeld hated the Jews as much as anyone, but one of these women stood out. Olga Benario was a striking, handsome figure even in her striped uniform and Langefeld, who had known Olga since Lichtenburg, was well aware of her story. She called her out of line, made her stand to attention, and told her she was the new Blockova of the Jewish block. Till then, no political prisoner – Jew or non-Jew – had been offered the poisoned chalice of ruling over fellow inmates.

The SS burned all documents about the appointment of Kapos and other prisoner staff, so we have no official information on why Olga was given the Blockova job. Accounts from the prisoners in Block 11 are rare, as few of the Jewish prisoners survived.

After the war Olga’s communist comrades tried to explain her appointment, but their version of events is not always reliable. By the early 1950s the majority of Ravensbrück’s German communist survivors had settled in the East, where they wrote a history of the camp with one main objective in mind: to extol the courageous communist resistance.

In the new German Democratic Republic (GDR) the heroism of camp communists was trumpeted to help bolster the country’s image as a bulwark against fascism. Olga Benario, Stalin’s own revolutionary, was central to this narrative; streets, schools and buildings across East Germany were named after her. Certain elements of Olga’s story, however, did not fit this theme, particularly her appointment as a Blockova – a role that meant she had to implement the orders of the SS.

To sanitise Olga’s appointment, these communist historians omitted to mention that such a job came with privileges and made out that her taking it was not collaboration but a sign that the SS had run out of other ways to break her – they made Olga Blockova to ‘bring hatred on her head’ they said. And as soon as she was appointed, Olga turned the Blockova role to her advantage, showing these ‘
bourgeois Jews
the evils of fascism’, wrote Ruth Werner, Olga’s first biographer.

Werner, who was not in Ravensbrück, but trained with Olga in Moscow, and based her biography on interviews with communist survivors, described the other non-communist Jewish prisoners in Ravensbrück as ‘feral women’ with ‘a me-first attitude, stealing clothes and blankets’, giving proof – if it were needed – that anti-Semitism was rife amongst many German communist prisoners in the camp too. Olga herself was not really fully Jewish,
some comrades suggested. Maria Wiedmaier said that she looked like ‘an Aryan’ and might have been ‘half-Aryan’.

The communists’ post-war idolatry of Olga reached its zenith with the inauguration of the Ravensbrück memorial site in 1959, when crowds gathered at the foot of a statue called
Tragende
(Woman Carrying), depicting an emaciated woman, high on a pedestal, carved in bronze, holding the limp figure of another woman in her arms.
Tragende
is meant to be Olga Benario. The Olga who stands there today seems distant, stark and cold, nothing like the tortured Olga – wife and mother – who accepted the role of Blockova in October 1939.

Returning from Berlin in September, there can be no doubt that Olga Benario was at breaking point. Three years spent behind bars, most of them in solitary confinement, had weakened her both physically and spiritually. She came back to Ravensbrück to find the communist group in the camp almost crushed. Hanna Sturm was still in the bunker. Her dear friend and fellow revolutionary, Sabo, was dead, probably from pneumonia, though some reports say beaten to death. Jozka Jaburkova was dangerously ill. And faith in Stalin had been unsettled by news that he had entered into a pact with Hitler.

Olga had her private pain too. She had long ago rejected her Jewishness, but now everything that was happening to her stemmed from it. How she viewed this conflict – did she long to be in the communist block with old comrades, or to join her fellow Jews in Block 11? – we will never know. Nor will we know how deeply she feared for her estranged mother and her brother’s safety. An aunt, her mother’s sister, had fled to America, but Olga’s mother and brother were still in Munich. Her deepest despair, however, clearly lay in the knowledge that during the summer real hopes of seeing Anita and Carlos again had been snatched away.

Olga could have refused the Blockova job – she had shown the courage for such defiance in the past – but that was before she had become a mother. If she refused she risked being shot, or at best put back in the bunker with no mail and no way of hearing news of Anita. If any new chance of emigration came up, she wouldn’t know.

Exactly when Olga became Blockova isn’t clear, but it must have been by 14 October 1939, as on that day she wrote to Carlos saying she could sometimes read a newspaper, which can only mean that she was receiving a Blockova’s privileges, and she was obviously able to move around and see her friends. She adds: ‘The few weeks in Berlin reminded me that it is the most difficult thing to be alone. Here I have my comrades who worry about what I eat.’ Olga worried about how Carlos was coping, as she knew he was still in solitary confinement. ‘Do you walk – do you exercise? It really depresses me to know
you are alone.’ As always, her letter returned to Anita. ‘I’m dreaming of you and the little one again and again, but it’s bitter to wake up in the morning.’