Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
Marianne came across other prisoners in the bunker, including Alma Schulze, ‘an Aryan, beaten so badly that she screamed at night: “My eyes my eyes” because she was afraid she would lose her sight’. The ‘mad’ opera singer, Hedwig Apfel, had never been released since her days in the wooden cell block; Marianne heard her screaming.
The misery grew worse. Marianne’s ‘wet pitch-black cell’ was one floor below ground level.
I was in cell 15 and it was so wet that the wall with the window was covered with black mould. In solitary confinement one is not allowed to do anything. Not to read or write, just to sit. Not walk either. It was not heated in any way. The winter was very cold. Even though I am quite tough I was freezing, shivering, teeth chattering in complete darkness. I sat in the prison block with bleeding feet.
After a few days, Marianne was released. As she left her cell she heard Apfel screaming. ‘She did not sound human any more, more like an animal. I think that there is another insane woman because another voice could be heard that also had nothing human in it any more.’ In her report she wrote that it was precisely five o’clock on 23 February 1940 ‘when God took me out of there by transporting me here’. ‘Here’ was the Vienna hospital where she was now recuperating. Her journey back to Vienna had been quite the opposite of her nightmare journey to the camp in her nightgown nine months before.
As Marianne was waiting in a Berlin prison for her place on a train, a doctor put ointment on her frostbitten feet, and at other prisons en route back to Vienna she received more kindness and ‘very good food’, including on one occasion ‘two slices of real rye bread and butter’.
On arrival in Vienna Marianne was admitted to a hospital. The conditions of her return remain unclear, but we know she was released to give evidence at her husband’s trial, to be held in Vienna, on trumped-up charges of corruption relating to her Jewish family business. Given her sickness, however, she couldn’t testify immediately, so she was allowed to recover, and in hospital she found the strength to write her report on Ravensbrück, addressing it to an official of the court – a Herr Hofrat Dr Wilhelm.
Marianne had no fear of being sent back to the camp, so she made no attempt at self-censorship, even presenting her report as testimony. Just as she had believed in Ravensbrück that she could protest to the SS commandant, as if he hailed from a normal world, so she thought the Viennese courts would listen to her warnings and prosecute the Nazi perpetrators on the basis of her evidence. She even suggested that lawyers check her claims by talking to other witnesses in the camp, and she named some of the Austrian Jewish ‘rabble’, including Toni Hahn, Ami Smauser, Louise Olhesky and Kate Piscaul. She also mentioned the Austrian prisoner Susi Benesch – the latter ‘a communist and Aryan’ – who had been in the bunker with her.
‘But in order to interview these witnesses it is necessary to get them out of Ravensbrück, as they would not dare to tell the truth in the face of medieval punishments, involving lashes, beating and the straitjacket,’ wrote Marianne.
As Marianne wrote her report on Ravensbrück she had no idea where events she had witnessed were leading. At this time the very first gassing centres, commissioned under Hitler’s new euthanasia programme, were only just being set up. Her report therefore speaks to us from before the Holocaust, and its innocence is startling. Yet Marianne clearly believed she had witnessed a monstrous crime in the making, and that she had been released by God to tell the world.
Soon after her report was written, however, Marianne Wachstein was sent back to Ravensbrück, and in February 1942 she died in one of those same euthanasia gassing centres. Whoever received her report in Vienna hid it for the duration of the war, and Marianne’s warning to the world only came to light in the late 1950s, when it was anonymously handed in to the camp memorial’s archives.
I
n February 1940
a train from Moscow pulled to a halt on the Soviet side of the Brest-Litovsk Bridge on the Russian–Polish border. Figures climbed down the side of a coach, feet feeling for icy rungs. One by one they jumped the last long gap, thumping down on to snow. Twenty-four passengers in all, including two women, stood staring across the bridge into Poland, wondering what was to happen to them.
The group were Germans, all former communists, released from Stalin’s Gulag and now being handed back by Stalin to Hitler. The bridge they stood on had already given its name to many a treacherous pact, as over the years Germany and Russia had fought over Poland. These men and women were a gift to Hitler, this time as part of the Nazi–Soviet pact.
One of the two women was thirty-nine-year-old Margarete Buber-Neumann, widow of Heinz Neumann, once a leading light of German communism, now dead – a victim of Stalin’s purges.
*
During the 1930s Neumann, like others amongst the German communist elite, spent time in Moscow. Grete, his wife, also a true believer, followed her husband there in 1933. After staying in the famous Hotel Lux, where foreign communists – including Olga Benario – gathered to pay homage at Stalin’s court, the couple left for Spain to start a communist newspaper but instead became entangled
in the lethal internecine power games between the German Communist Party and Moscow. Neumann displeased Stalin in ways that he never understood. Like millions of others he was declared an enemy of the people and on return to Moscow was arrested and shot in 1937 after a show trial. A year later Grete was also arrested and sent to hard labour at Karaganda, a Soviet concentration camp in the Kazak Steppe.
Her husband’s execution, and two years in the Gulag, brought Grete low. Before leaving for the border, she and the others spent time in Moscow, where they were restored to a semblance of health in case the Nazis should get the wrong idea about their treatment. But nothing could restore her faith in communism. She returned to her native Germany a bitter woman, disgusted by Stalin and dreading what the return home would bring. The Nazis were certain to punish her for high treason committed during her years as an active communist.
The prisoners were taken off by a German escort and packed into the back of a truck, which headed for the Polish city of Lublin, 170 kilometres southwest, where they were held for a few days in Lublin Castle, in the heart of the old city. Here from the windows Grete could see the marks of the first six months of war. Much of the city had been reduced to rubble, and under the orders of Odilo Globocnik, Himmler’s police chief in Lublin, Jews were being herded past the castle towards an area that would become their ghetto.
Inside the castle prison, Grete heard from fellow prisoners – nuns, students, professors, doctors – of the wider Nazi terror, and she met Polish communists, who still hoped to escape east to Moscow in the belief that this offered salvation. She tried to disabuse them of their faith in Stalin, but as she spoke ‘their faces turned to stone’.
Grete was moved on west to the Gestapo jail in Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Known as ‘the Alex’, it functioned as a clearing house for prisoners bound for concentration camps. Each night the women talked about ‘the KZ’ and when they might be going. On Fridays a list was read out of those being sent the next day. One Friday a Jewish doctor called Jacoby heard her name was on the list. That night she hanged herself from a water cistern, but she was discovered and cut down. The next day she was sent to Ravensbrück.
Here in the Alex Grete met a young German communist called Lotte Henschel, for whom Soviet Russia was still the land of hope. Lotte asked Grete about her experiences there, and when she had heard Grete out, she sat on the mattress beside her and wept. ‘What have we got to live for now?’ she asked.
On Friday 1 August 1940 Grete heard her name called on the KZ list, and the next day she left for Ravensbrück. Fifty women travelled on Grete’s transport, but only two made any impression. One, whom Grete took to be a
prostitute, declared she was only going for re-education and would be out in three months. The other was a Jehovah’s Witness, who looked like a schoolteacher and who prayed constantly.
They arrived at Fürstenberg station in the mid-morning. Dogs growled as the women were piled into trucks and taken to Ravensbrück. Grete stared with fascination and dread at the Nazi camp, which she instantly compared with what she had known at Karaganda. The high wire, the guards, the shouting – the Russians had yelled ‘
Davai, Davai
’ and the Germans shouted ‘
Raus, Raus
’ – were familiar. But as she came closer differences emerged.
The Nazi camp was tiny by comparison. When Grete arrived it stood at about 4000 women; Karaganda alone held 35,000. Her memory of Siberia would always be of winter, the time of year she left it – a vast, grey, freezing encampment, where armies of prisoners, mostly men, toiled on the Kazak Steppe under a steel grey sky.
When Grete reached Ravensbrück it was early August and the German camp was into its second summer; outside the gates the limpid water of the Schwedtsee was lapping against the reeds in a warm summer breeze. Once inside, she noticed to her astonishment beds of bright red flowers; ahead lay a kind of street lined with sixteen wooden blocks, all of them painted, and beside each block stood a small sapling.
The paths near the gate were covered with sand, which was freshly raked in intricate patterns. To the left, near a watchtower, was an aviary. Peacocks stalked slowly around and a parrot squawked. At Karaganda there were no flowers or green lawns, but this was eerier somehow, and for a few moments all was silent.
Yells and shouts broke out again as a column of prisoners came by and Grete saw German camp inmates for the first time: not the shuffling ramshackle figures – men mixed with women – of the Gulag, but women in orderly ranks, each wearing a clean white kerchief bound round her head, with striped dress and dark blue apron. ‘Left, right. Left, right. Heads up. Arms by your side. Line up.’ Their faces were impassive. They all appeared identical. A siren howled. Now women came marching in columns of five from all sides. Some carried spades on shoulders, and what most astonished her was that they were singing ‘silly marching songs’. It was all very Prussian, and Grete knew about Prussian ways, having been brought up in Potsdam.
Further on, she noticed more and more ‘Prussian thoroughness’. The new arrivals’ details were registered, files stamped, dossiers checked and double-checked. Some of the women shouting orders were wearing the same striped clothes and were obviously prisoners. In the Gulag too prisoners had been co-opted to do much of the work. Grete had got used to seeing Russians in those roles – they were called the ‘brigadiers’ and were usually men. To see
women, German women, as ‘brigadiers’, shouting orders at other prisoners, ‘some with evident relish’, shocked her.
Even the woman now searching Grete’s head and pubic hair for lice was a prisoner, a Jehovah’s Witness. Meticulously the woman probed, brandishing cutters, but found nothing and Grete was spared the razor. The shower attendants wore white overalls and they too were prisoners.
In the Soviet camp distinctions were made between political and criminal prisoners. Here the inmates were divided into many categories, as Grete discovered when she saw the small coloured triangles. As a political prisoner, she received a red triangle with the number 4208.
After the shower Grete stood before a camp doctor, who slapped his leather-booted calves with a riding whip. Dr Sonntag, a recent arrival, picked Grete out from the line. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded. ‘Political,’ she said. ‘Bolshevist shrew,’ he snapped. ‘Get back in line.’ Soon Grete was wearing the clothes she had seen the marchers in: striped dress, blue apron, white headscarf. No shoes were worn in the summer and her group walked barefoot over the sharp gravel to Block 16, the reception block. With the other fifty newcomers, Grete waited outside it, rubbing the soles of her feet to dislodge sharp flints.
Beyond the huts she saw the high camp wall and counted five lines of barbed wire. The midday sun reflected off a blackboard with a skull and crossbones painted in yellow. Earlier that day a Gypsy woman had run into the wire, she heard. ‘You’ll see where later. When they pulled her body away her fingers were torn off and they’re still there.’
A guttural voice yelled names in an accent Grete recognised as Swabian.
*
The woman was Blockova of Grete’s block. She was another political prisoner with a red triangle and a green armband too. Grete found her repulsive; someone said her name was Minna Rupp.
Inside the block rows of women were knitting grey socks. Because of the growing numbers, new arrivals were held separate while their registration was completed, and as they waited they knitted soldiers’ socks. The hut ‘seemed like a palace’ compared with the clay huts in the Gulag. There Grete walked into the steppe when nature called; here there were proper lavatories and basins, as well as furniture – stools, a table and lockers. The new prisoners were each given their mess kit – mug, spoon and bowl – and two woollen blankets, a white sheet and a long, blue and white striped nightdress. They were told the rules about washing, eating and folding.
Later Grete learned from other inmates about the many more rules enforced by Minna Rupp. Rupp treated a scratch on a prisoner’s mess tin as
sabotage, and would report the offender, who might get a thrashing or a spell in the bunker. Women must not smile at each other or shake hands, or they’d be sent outside for ‘standing punishment’.
The Blockova even checked the way the women put on underclothes, in case they had tried to stuff paper inside for warmth. No one must visit the toilet at night and there must be absolute silence at all times. But nothing mattered more to Minna Rupp than making the bed. A crinkle in the blanket meant the whole of Sunday was spent making beds as punishment. Repeat offenders got the
Strafblock
or the bunker and twenty-five lashes, and Minna Rupp knew the terror of this herself after being sent to the
Strafblock
for stealing half a carrot. She was later thrashed as well.