If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (16 page)

Grete’s friends in the newcomers’ block were mostly Poles, resourceful women, many of them teachers. They’d been here some weeks already and had learned a great deal about how to cope. One of them, a music teacher, showed Grete the trick for bed-making. She used a stick to square the mattress off, so that Rupp could not complain. They all loathed Rupp. Until recently only asocials and criminals had held these prisoner posts, but there had recently been a coup, Grete learned, and now communists like Rupp held the jobs too.

As the days passed, Grete watched out for the communists. She probably knew some of them of old and dreaded meeting them. Like the other communists she’d met since leaving Russia, none of them would want to hear what she had to say about Stalin. They wouldn’t like the fact that she’d been brought here from Moscow. They’d be suspicious.

After just a week the showdown came. Grete was sitting knitting socks when a group of prisoners wearing red armlets came into the block and called her name out. One was Minna Rupp. The trio took Grete into the sleeping quarters, where normally no prisoner was allowed in the daytime, and their interrogation began.

‘You were arrested in Moscow? Why?’

Grete realised this was a political interrogation on behalf of the communists in the camp. She answered frankly, telling the story of Stalin’s persecution.

‘All right,’ said Minna Rupp. ‘You’re a Trotskyist, that’s what you are.’ By this, Rupp meant that Grete was a traitor to the true Stalinist cause. From that moment on she was blackballed. Grete had once again been branded an enemy of the people, this time by her former German comrades, now fellow prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.

The communist coup
that ousted the green-and the black-triangle prisoners from their Kapo jobs was a major turning point in the early life of the
camp. It took place some time in the spring of 1940. Until then the SS practice of selecting asocials and criminals as Kapos had continued; the appointment in November of Olga Benario as Blockova was an exception. Then early in the New Year the political prisoners took a deliberate decision to try to displace the ‘greens’ and ‘blacks’. They had several reasons.

In January 1940 a skeletal figure came hobbling out of the camp bunker and saw sky above her. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, and one of the communist stalwarts, had been released after six months in solitary confinement. She had lived in darkness, on starvation rations, and very nearly died.

Back in her block, Hanna was able to relate to her comrades the horror of the bunker, and how she’d been given up for dead. In the freezing winter months she had fallen sick. She couldn’t eat and grew so weak that she just lay on the ground. One day she overheard Zimmer outside the cell door saying, ‘She may as well kick the bucket in there,’ but Hanna ‘didn’t want to do Zimmer that favour’. She forced herself to chew on her bread. Spitting out the solid, she managed to swallow enough of the goo that remained to slowly build up strength.

One Sunday a friendly guard called Lena was on duty. Hanna knew that ‘Lenchen’, as she called her affectionately, was kind because she’d met her once before coming to the bunker. On that occasion the two had gone to repair a window in the commandant’s villa, and Lenchen said to Hanna: ‘See how well the SS live here, and we work hard and earn a pittance.’

Now Lenchen opened Hanna’s cell door and said: ‘Oh, so you’re in here. You’re looking pretty bad, what’s up?’

‘I’m sick, very sick,’ said Hanna.

‘How can I help? In here you’re going to die, that’s for sure.’

Lenchen fetched Hanna food as well as medicine, and the next day she even brought a doctor in to see her – a doctor who was only in the camp a short time. The doctor said Hanna was probably suffering from typhus. Her strength crept back, however, and, suddenly, at the end of January 1940 Koegel came to her cell.

‘Do you want to go back to your block again?’ he demanded.

‘Yes sir,’ responded Hanna.

‘Well out you go. But I’m warning you – I don’t want to hear of you again.’ Hanna’s release delighted her comrades, but the sight of this once strong Austrian now reduced to skin and bone was further evidence of the plight they were all in.

Since Hanna’s confinement many other communist comrades had been brought to breaking point. One had thrown herself on the wire, and the official beatings on the
Bock
had spread a new despair. A woman called Irma von
Strachwich was locked in the bunker for shouting ‘Heil Österreich!’ When she continued to shout she was given fifty lashes and died. Soon everyone seemed to know a prisoner who’d been thrashed. Ira Berner, another German communist, said: ‘I’ve seen women whose skin was one big bloody mass so that they couldn’t sit down for weeks. Many had damaged kidneys and other injuries.’

It was the ‘unofficial’ beating of the Austrian communist Susi Benesch that caused the deepest shock of all. Rosemarie von Luenink, another German political prisoner, saw what happened:

At that time
we had to unload bricks from a ship. Benesch was so weak that she couldn’t carry the stones any more and she collapsed. Rabenstein hauled her up by force, placed the stone on her shoulder again, and then she collapsed for the last time. Rabenstein thereupon lifted up the stone herself and smashed it down on Benesch’s head. Benesch died instantly and we saw how the blood streamed down from her mouth and her tongue hung out.

After Susi’s murder the communists’ morale plunged, and Käthe Rentmeister, one of the old hands, led a move to restore their pride. She called the faithful to her bunk in Block 1 and they discussed what to do. All had served long terms in prison before the camp. They’d cut their teeth in the 1920s at trade union and communist youth meetings, in the corridors of the Reichstag or at Red Help committees. Most had husbands, brothers, fathers in the camps. Käthe Rentmeister’s brother was in Sachsenhausen – he was one of those sent to build Ravensbrück. Maria Wiedmaier was the hardest of all. She’d worked for the secret service of the party and organised strikes in Holland and France. In 1935 the Gestapo told her the man she loved was dead. Maria refused to believe them so they took her to a cemetery and
exhumed his corpse
for her to see, then locked her up.

The women agreed that Koegel had all but crushed them and there was no defence against the SS, but they could surely defend themselves against the likes of Margot Kaiser, the
Lagerschreck
, and her green- and black-triangle criminal Kapos. Each one of those here had at some point been sold out to the SS by one of Kaiser’s ‘bandits’. The red-triangle political women couldn’t even meet without being betrayed by Kaiser, while the asocial and criminal ‘filth’ stole from fellow prisoners and enjoyed privileges denied to the rest.

If the communists could somehow procure these Kapo jobs their lives might improve. It was not impossible, especially as there was reason to believe they might have Johanna Langefeld on their side. Langefeld had recently agreed to the women’s pleas that the political prisoners should all live
together, here in Block 1. The
Oberaufseherin
appeared to approve of the way they kept order, and one or two of their leading figures had won her confidence. Everyone knew that Langefeld was fighting her own war with the SS. She needed new allies, even among the prisoners.

Some argued against doing the work of the fascist SS, but others said that the Jewish block had transformed since Olga Benario had taken the Blockova’s job. The Jewish women held their heads higher now, organised poetry readings, and the Jews were even talking of staging a play.

If the communists didn’t grab some power, others would beat them to it. The Czechs had jobs and Langefeld was even favouring certain Poles. Maria Wiedmaier was in touch with Olga, who was urging them to go ahead; it was their duty, as communists, to survive. Maria said they should try to get jobs not only in the blocks but in the kitchen and the offices so that they could gather information, work undercover. Like Olga, Maria was Moscow-trained and hadn’t forgotten how to infiltrate – she would never forget, as
her later Stasi file
shows.

Hanna Sturm came up with a plan. Some weeks after her release from the bunker she had been sent to work in the SS supplies cellar, where asocial Kapos were in charge. Prisoners in the cellar were often accused of theft. Hanna proposed framing one of the asocial gang leaders there. She and a group of others set about stealing cigarettes and alcohol from the supplies and planted the loot on a prominent green-triangle block leader. They made sure Langefeld got to hear of it.

The plot worked better than they’d hoped. Furious at the betrayal of trust by her asocial Kapos, Langefeld removed almost all of them from their jobs and threw Margot Kaiser into the
Strafblock
. By late spring it was the political prisoners who held most of the influential camp posts, and a communist called Babette Widmann replaced Kaiser, securing the top prisoner post of
Lagerälteste
. No thought was given to the fate of those ousted; the communists were too busy helping their own.

Barbara Reimann
, a young communist from Hamburg, had been arrested in 1940 for writing letters to German soldiers at the front, urging them not to fight. She arrived at the camp just after the communist prisoners seized power and found many comrades ready to help her. Minna Rupp, now Blockova of the newcomers’ barracks, signalled to the new
Lagerälteste
that Barbara had arrived, and through Langefeld it was fixed to move her to the political block. Here older German women, some of whom she had once known as mothers of school friends, took her under their wing.

Not surprisingly, the newly empowered communists were determined not to see their influence undermined. When in August word spread that Grete Buber-Neumann had arrived and was telling lies about Stalin, a decision
was taken to condemn her as a Trotskyist. The communist women said later that the SS brought Grete out before them one morning like a trophy, saying: ‘You want to know how bad a concentration camp can be? Ask her about Stalin’s camps.’ According to Maria Wiedmaier it was Olga Benario who proposed that Grete be blackballed, and the communist committee agreed.

Grete’s daughter, however, doubts that Olga was the one who blackballed her mother. The two women had met briefly in the Hotel Lux in Moscow in the 1930s. ‘My mother only ever expressed admiration for Olga,’ says Judith Buber Agassi, sitting in a blaze of sunshine in her villa on the Israeli coast. Judith nevertheless makes clear that her mother was always bitter about her treatment by the rest of the communist clique.

For my mother it was the worst thing. She saw the communists as bigots. Anyone who was not a communist was of less value, even in the camp. If someone was in the camp because she was a prostitute, or a Jehovah’s Witness or a Jew it was all the same. The communist women were a narrow-minded bunch. My mother couldn’t stomach it. After the war they made out that they had helped the Jews in the camp. But of course that was not possible. They couldn’t help.

It was not entirely true that the non-Jewish political prisoners were unable to help the Jews. Through Langefeld and those in her inner circle, the new political Kapos gleaned intelligence that they could pass on to the Jewish women. Maria Wiedmaier continued to smuggle Olga’s letters out, so she could write to Carlos and Leocadia more freely than through the camp mail. Furthermore, the Jews themselves clearly believed the new red-triangle Kapos could help them, which was why not only Olga but other Jewish leaders in Block 11 supported the political prisoners’ grab for power.

Käthe Leichter had delighted the Jewish block with her poems and storytelling from the moment she arrived in the autumn of 1939, and had since made a name for herself in the camp. A social democrat, Käthe was not privy to the communists’ intelligence, but she had her own contacts, and in April she heard that an old friend from Vienna, another social democrat called Rosa Jochmann, was being brought to the camp. Käthe arranged to meet her as soon as she arrived. She told her that she, Rosa, was to be a Blockova.

Rosa recalled later:
‘We weren’t allowed
to talk with Jewish people, but of course we did. On my first day Käthe and I walked all over the camp and she told me what I was going to do and gave me my instructions.’ Käthe was sure that Rosa was cut out for a Blockova job, because she knew her strength of character of old.

That Rosa Jochmann should have joined Käthe Leichter in Ravensbrück was in itself extraordinary. The two women knew each other on the Vienna workers council in the late 1920s, battling to improve the conditions of women at work. Their backgrounds were very different. Rosa, born in 1901, the daughter of a washerwoman and a steelworker, started work in a factory at the age of fourteen. By her twenties she was active in Austrian trade union politics, and became head of the Socialist Women of Austria, a socialdemocratic body.

Four years Rosa’s junior, Käthe Leichter, born in Vienna in 1905, came from a prosperous, cultured Jewish family, but rejected her bourgeois roots and went to Heidelberg in Germany to study sociology under the philosopher Max Weber. When the First World War broke out Käthe organised pacifist protests and was sent back to Austria; when the Nazis came to power her doctorate was annulled.

As women’s rights rose up the agenda of Austrian liberals, both women were at the forefront of the campaign, though Rosa, who believed in industrial action, did not always see eye to eye with Käthe, who called for negotiation and tried to tell the working classes what to do. Nevertheless, the two became friends and worked together until Austria’s new fascist leaders banned their activities. In early 1938, by which time Hitler’s annexation of Austria (the
Anschluss
) looked inevitable, both women were active in the antifascist resistance and were at risk of arrest; neither took her chance to escape.

Käthe Leichter’s husband Otto, editor of an anti-fascist newspaper, and their two boys left for France, expecting her to follow but for reasons her family never quite understood – probably because she found it hard to desert her mother, still living in Vienna, and because she didn’t believe she’d be caught – Käthe delayed her departure. Eventually she booked her train out but was arrested the evening before she was due to leave.