Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
When Rosa Jochmann arrived at Ravensbrück about six months after Käthe she was astonished to see her friend there, and even more astonished by what she said. She later recalled Käthe’s briefing word for word, giving a rare insight into the desperate rationale behind the prisoners’ decisions to cooperate with the SS in the early years of the camp.
As soon as she heard of Rosa’s arrival, Käthe negotiated her appointment as a Blockova, and this alone shows the influence that certain prisoners – even Jewish social democrats – had managed to secure. She told Rosa:
Don’t forget
that it isn’t like being on the trade union works council back home. You will be an extended arm of the SS. And you always have to agree with the SS. And if they beat somebody to death in front of you, you have to ask the person who’s being beaten: Why did you do such a thing?
And so on. At the same time you have to do what you can to try to prevent the guard from giving a report. And as block leader you must stand in the corner and shout at everyone during roll-call: ‘Attention. Everyone look towards the guard.’
Käthe told Rosa it often happened that a guard would beckon somebody out of line with their stick, perhaps because she hadn’t sewn something on right, or for some other irrelevant cause. ‘And she beats the woman nearly to death under your eyes,’ said Käthe.
You are standing next to the scene and you are forced to pretend to be outraged by what the prisoner has done as well, and you say: ‘Why have you done this, who do you think you are?’ And you have to pretend to be outraged as well. But you have to try to take the guard to one side and say to the guard: ‘Frau Aufseherin, I cannot understand this, she is normally such a well-behaved person.’ And you say, so don’t give her a report. I will put her on lavatory duty. Or make her carry the food for two months. You must always agree with the SS. Always.
Käthe’s brutal pragmatism about the position of the Jews shocked Rosa most of all. At the end of her speech Käthe turned to her and said: ‘Rosa, and if the SS want you to say, “Stinking Jewish women,” what are you going to do?’
I said: ‘No I will not say that, Käthe. You can do what you want but I’m not going to say that.’
And Käthe said: ‘Then you can’t become a leader of the block. You will be unable to do it. You have to say it.’
So Käthe gave me my instructions. She said: ‘You cannot contradict the SS. They are all stupid, evil and cruel. But you might just be able to help if you cooperate with them a little by being diplomatic and agreeing with them.’ And that was the truth. Käthe Leichter was right.
Käthe’s conviction that cooperating with the SS was the only way to survive may have reflected her faith in negotiation, as well as her experience of the ‘celebrities’ work gang in the camp. The celebrities gang – so called because they had princesses and prima donnas amongst them – were at one point suddenly left to do as they pleased. Clara Rupp (no relation to Minna), the German communist and teacher, was one of the ‘celebrities’, and recalled in a memoir:
Prisoners liked
nothing more than to fool the guards, break the rules. Some groups were so good at it that they almost didn’t care about the SS at all.
It once happened that a prisoner smuggled a wonderful azalea branch out of the nursery into the political prisoners’ block. The theft was discovered because the commandant’s fresh flowers were not delivered that day. But the theft was so well organised that the smugglers were not discovered, which gave them great happiness.
Such tricks, she says, were far easier to get away with later on, when the camp numbers grew so vast that the SS reign of terror became more erratic, more diffuse. Like many women imprisoned there from start to finish, Clara looked back on the first years as the most terrifying, simply because the SS control reached into every corner: every individual ‘lived in imminent danger’.
And yet, says Clara, back in 1940 one group of women briefly found freedom. They were building a new road to the camp when they were suddenly told to down tools because building materials had run out. As there was no work – and no chance of escape – no guard was assigned to watch them. A friendly green-triangle Kapo was left in charge, recalled Clara.
So the Jewish prisoner Käthe Leichter starts to talk to the green triangle. And Käthe tells the woman the war will soon be over and that Hitler is finished and the Kapo – a good-natured woman arrested for carrying out abortions – believed her. Soon we were leading the green triangles and not the other way around. This turn of events was mostly due to Käthe from Vienna. She was the most prominent member of the group and developed the most particular abilities in this matter. She was very good at arranging things. Since she was Jewish she wasn’t allowed to have newspapers, but as I had friends in high places I got newspapers for her. When Käthe gets her newspaper she forgets the danger and flips it open, studies, and even forgets who and where she is.
Another prisoner, a German called Elizabeth Kunesch, supported Clara’s report about the road-building gang. She was there from the start and remembers the gang to this day, in particular a woman called Käthe. ‘Käthe was Jewish and very intelligent and very kind. She used to sing to us as we heaved the stones and made us forget the pain.’
According to Clara there was a real princess on the celebrities gang too; she had been denounced by her cook for saying bad things about Hitler and was very musical. ‘If you asked her she would hum any part of the orchestra.’
There was another university doctor, Maria, ‘a walking encyclopaedia’ who taught Clara English history for an hour every evening:
She herself was an original character: tall, with a lot of brown spots, often with lice, quite a big belly. She used to wrap herself in anything possible as protection against the cold, but usually lost it all again. Many stupid people made fun of her but the clever ones were her friends. I loved the way she longed for open skies, meadows and forests.
There was Anni from Prague, once secretary to Tomáš Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia between the wars. ‘She always knew the best rumours in the camp.’ Even when there was work to do the celebrities marched out singing. ‘If the Princess is in a particularly good mood she sings the “Rose” aria from
Figaro
.’ The friendly green-triangle Kapo gave out the tasks ‘with a wink from our side’. Then the women talked philosophy or literature.
Every day there was discussion in some corner of our road which was under construction indefinitely. Once nearly all of us were in a trench laying stones, and as we had already sung Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner, Maria began a lecture about Romanticism and we were so absorbed that we hadn’t noticed a guard coming from the laundry. I stepped on Maria’s foot and she started scolding me till she saw the expression on our faces. The guard chose to take it out on me and yelled ‘I will teach you how to work, just you wait,’ and I was put to work in the laundry, brushing dirty sheets and coal sacks.
The celebrities talked of returning home soon, or they’d talk of Marx and about the dispute in the Jewish block between the communists and the social democrats. They would hear how Käthe argued with Olga about whether capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Some say Hitler’s power has been underestimated. Sometimes we move out to work even though it’s raining because we’re in the middle of a topic that has to be finished. Ours was the best work gang of all; we worked for ourselves and not for the Nazis. Käthe was our real gang leader. She was always lively and gentle. She tells us one day she has a plan to fit a motor on her barrow. We laugh with all our heart. She shows us the letters from her two lovely boys.
Kathy Leichter, Käthe’s granddaughter, and daughter of one of the lovely boys, says that even today the family still ask themselves why Käthe didn’t leave Austria when she had the chance. ‘
She could have got out
to safety with the others,’ says Kathy, a film maker, who lives on New York’s Upper East Side. ‘Most women didn’t think they were in danger. But Käthe knew. So as
you trace her story you want to shout at her all the time: Get on that train. Go on, get on it. Why were you not leaving, for God’s sake? Leave, Käthe! But she doesn’t.’
I asked what she thought Käthe was like. ‘She looked a little like me,’ said Kathy, who has long black curls tumbling around her shoulders and big dark eyes.
But she was bigger. She was quite a manly woman. And like me, she was a woman with a job, juggling care of the children. She studied childcare and the rights of home workers and she talked to seamstresses and asked what their problems were. She had been trying to make a better world, especially for women, and in Ravensbrück too she tried to carry on. And she was cultured. She knew every painting in the Louvre. But she is also hard to know. I am searching always for her voice. It was blocked. I just get occasional glimpses. Through others’ memories, or her poems. Or the play.
Thanks to Käthe, the celebrities knew all about the play. ‘Only the Jewish block could organise something like that,’ said Clara. The play was called
Schumm Schumm
and an entire script was written down, but it was fake, so as to seem harmless, in case the play was discovered. Käthe, along with another Austrian Jew, a lawyer called Herta Breuer, devised the real script; the words had to be learned by heart and spoken only on the day. The story was of a Jewish couple and their daughter who were released from a concentration camp. They were sent into exile on an island where Jewish features were seen as divine and Jews were treated as royalty. There were several allusions to the camp: the Jewish mother passed out on arrival and nothing would revive her until ‘
Appell, Appell
’ was whispered in her ear.
Preparations for the play caused excitement, and many non-Jewish women helped the Jewish dramatists, particularly with the costumes, which ‘were made with love and care out of nothing,’ Clara remembered – from bits and pieces ‘organised’ – filched – by other prisoners. The women had dresses made of lavender-blue headscarves brought in by Czech prisoners ‘and organised for us by friends,’ said Clara. Jewels and ornaments were made from silver and gold paper, also organised by friendly prisoners, as was the paper for the men’s tailcoats. The island savages wore sand couch-grass skirts; Gypsies in the matting workshop smuggled the grass out.
The play was staged in the Jewish block on a Sunday afternoon. Amongst those in the audience were many Blockovas and Stubovas from other barracks, and because they came, ordinary prisoners came too.
The next day disaster struck. In Block 2, a separate group of prisoners were
caught dancing, and when the guards reported them they complained that the Jewish block had staged a play so why shouldn’t they dance?
At first it looked if the entire Jewish block would be punished, along with everyone who attended, but ‘negotiations’ were carried out, and only those who took part in the production were punished. Clara doesn’t tell us who the prisoners were, but they were obviously all from the Jewish block, and must have included the creators, Käthe Leichter and Herta Breuer, as well as Olga Benario, the Jewish Blockova.
There was nothing their non-Jewish comrades could do to help them now, whatever Kapo positions they held. The six were offered a choice of punishment: twenty-five lashes or six weeks in the bunker. They chose the bunker and all six were crammed into one small cell. They had food only every fourth day. The women were ‘deeply troubled on release’, said Clara. ‘One told us: “Being so hungry, I couldn’t stand hearing anyone chewing. The one who had something left while the others had already finished their food was hated most. Because they went on chewing.” They warned the rest of us to avoid the bunker at any cost. They were in a very bad way.’
W
ithin weeks of her arrival at the camp, Grete Buber-Neumann found herself standing on the Appellplatz waiting to see if she might be selected for a Blockova’s job. Her Polish friends had put her up to it.
By August 1940 the red triangles’ takeover had gone further than anyone had predicted: not only were communists being allocated camp jobs once held by the asocials and criminals, but so were other political prisoners of all persuasions. The Poles, fearing they would never secure such posts themselves, hoped nevertheless to benefit from the coup by proposing their own candidates, and they felt sure that Grete had the necessary qualities. They hoped she’d be appointed as their own Blockova instead of the loathed Minna Rupp, but the plan went wrong.
‘I was lined up with half a dozen other women in the square, and there we waited, standing to attention. Langefeld came along and subjected us to a detailed inspection, asking each of us where and why we were arrested and how long we had been in the camp. She picked out a number of us, including me, and said I was to go to Block Two.’
When Grete told the Poles her destination they were horrified. Block 2 was full of the dreaded asocials. Sure enough, she found that entering the block was like ‘stepping naked into a cage of wild animals’. Her first task was to serve the black triangles their lunchtime soup. As she tried to do so, hungry women seethed around, holding out their bowls, shouting: ‘Get on with it! Our table first.’ Grete lifted her ladle and froze in panic, with no idea how to control the menacing crowd.
When the politicals ousted the asocials and criminals from power they
hadn’t reckoned on having to live amongst them as their Blockovas, but for the SS, putting political women in charge of asocials was just another opportunity to ‘divide and rule’. The political prisoners appointed to asocial blocks were horrified by what they had to face. When Nanda Herbermann was made Blockova of an asocial block she found characters there ‘from Sodom and Gomorrah’. The filth repelled her: ‘They took their dishes into the bunks at night and relieved themselves of their greater and smaller needs in them.’ The moral ‘filth’ horrified her more, especially the lesbianism. Nanda had lived a sheltered life, working for the bishop of Münster, editing an anti-Nazi Catholic newspaper. ‘Their fate had also made them hard and egotistical,’ she said.