If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (38 page)

And it was precisely Binder’s own stupidity that made the sabotage possible. His insistence that the same procedures happened ‘in the same way, on the same day’ applied also to the way he checked finished clothing. Every day the same parts of a garment were checked and others overlooked. So Wiktoria Ryczko, who sewed buttons onto the uniforms, observed that although Binder always checked the strength of the sewing, and women got hit on the head and face when it wasn’t strong enough, he never checked the positions of the buttons. So she sewed on her buttons securely, but in positions where they wouldn’t do up.

Another Pole, Krystyna Zaremba, discovered how to waste thread by making deep cuts through whole spools. ‘The more damage we did the better we felt, and it helped us survive the horrible days in the camp.’

The most effective sabotage was in the fur workshop, which opened in early 1942. Arctic conditions during the Soviet winter of 1942 had crippled German soldiers with frostbite, and Ravensbrück now became the main workshop for warm army clothes. Angora rabbit fur, farmed in the hutches outside the camp gates, was already used for making caps and gloves, but a far larger source of fur was now available. In December 1941 Himmler ordered the confiscation of all fur owned by Jews, and also ruled that ‘fur of all kind, sheep, hare and rabbit, must be made available for the Waffen-SS factories at Ravensbrück, near Fürstenberg’.

The order also stated: ‘It is important also to examine the items to make sure nothing is hidden or sewn inside’ – a reference to the vast amounts of hidden cash and jewellery concealed in the pockets and linings of the clothes.

By early 1942 sumptuous coats, mufflers, hats and gloves bought in some of the most fashionable stores from Paris to Prague poured into Ravensbrück. ‘
It was a kind of history lesson
in German conquests,’ said one of the fur workers. ‘Sometimes we had the whole of Europe lying on our work table. We could read the labels from every city.’ There were ‘beautiful furs, embroidered as if from a museum’.

The SS were likewise impressed, particularly the general manager of the textile factory. Fritz Opitz ‘
took the money and gold
from the clothing and fur coats of Jewish women and children and lived like a king’, wrote Maria Wiedmaier. ‘Drunk on his riches, he barely hid his debauchery, then afterwards there were orgies with the women guards in the rooms of the SS.’

Another woman, Maria Biega, remembered seeing Opitz
‘laden with Jewish furs’
as he thrashed a worker, a Polish grammar school teacher, across the face ‘so that her blood spilled all over the fur-shop floor’. Graf, the sewing shop manager, joined in, beating the woman with a rubber truncheon.

The fur-shop night shift was considered the most gruelling of all, but it was best for the saboteurs: with SS eyes on the loot there was less attention to quotas. The furs were hand-sewn, which created more chances to spoil garments than on the machines. The workers, many of them young Poles, were supervised by an asocial prostitute who walked along the table ‘
lifting our chins
up with her foot if we started to nod off’. According to Irena Dragan, one of the fur-shop Poles, the prostitute’s legs were covered with boils and open sores.

The fur was not always so sumptuous, and often arrived stinking and verminridden, having been packed away for months. And for some of the workers the horror of this was too much to bear. One young woman asked Irena to poke her with a needle so she could ‘wake up from the nightmare’. But others were carefully sewing loose stitches, knowing the anoraks would fall apart. Sometimes they put notes inside them telling the soldiers they were fighting a losing war.

Women often worked together, agreeing to destroy the finest fur by cutting it into tiny pieces, which they called poppy seed or macaroni, ‘but we had to be very careful because of German women working with us’, said Irena. Others worked in groups of up to twelve, taking advice from veterans like Halina Chorążyna, the Warsaw chemistry professor, who calculated how to give the anoraks special treatment by piercing the fur in such a way that it would fall apart.
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They packed a well-made anorak on top, with the sabotaged ones beneath, so as not to be spotted.

One day there was an order to make anoraks for the Luftwaffe chief,
Hermann Göring himself. They were to be made of selected silver fox fur. ‘We’d given the fur special treatment so that from the outside the anoraks looked very good.’ But when the prisoners beat the fur – which they always did before collection, so as to soften it – it fell apart a little too easily. ‘The Germans were furious, but they thought they had made a mistake in beating such delicate fur, and somehow we got away with it.’

On occasions when they didn’t get away with it the punishments were harsh, ‘but it didn’t stop others from doing it again and again,’ said Krystyna Zaremba, though by the summer the night shift had started losing some of its most courageous saboteurs.

Stanisława Michalik remembers the blood-red sunrise on the morning of 18 April 1942. ‘
Even today when
a day like this dawns I feel terribly sad.’ Wanda Wojtasik remembers it was a
‘beautiful sunny day’
and that soon after morning roll-call, and certainly after the night shift returned, a guard entered Block 11 and called out a series of prisoners’ numbers. The women called were to go
nach vorne
– out front, near the office buildings. Neither Stanisława, Wanda nor Wanda’s best friend Krysia were on the list, but several of their close friends were, including the sisters Grażyna and Pola, and others who had been in Lublin Castle.

Many of the Polish survivors said later that when this first summons came they had no idea what was going to happen to those called out. The call
nach vorne
could have simply meant a punishment or a ‘report’, said Wanda Wojtasik. It was unusual for so many names to be called at once, and there was a certain nervousness that all the names came from the
Sondertransport
, but most thought that if those called were to be shot it would have been done directly on arrival, not after keeping them alive for six months. Nevertheless, the word
Sondertransport
had always sounded sinister and had never been explained to the women. And among the group were many who, on arrest in Lublin, had been brought before Odilo Globocnik’s puppet police court and then supposedly sentenced to death.

This spurious legal process, which usually took place in the country of arrest, appears to have been triggered in certain cases where a captured man or woman was considered by Nazi occupiers to be particularly dangerous or to have played a significant role with a paramilitary resistance group.
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The choice of those to be ‘tried’, however, was itself often random; among this
Sondertransport
were women who didn’t know if they had been sentenced
or not. Later it was learned that some of them simply had the words ‘
Fanatical patriot
, not to be returned to Poland’ written on their files. In any case, there was no conceivable logic to explain why the women on this first list had been called out and others not. In fact, throughout the life of the camp nobody ever found any logic to explain why some women were called for execution on a particular day while others, who might have expected it, never were.

Some of the women in the block even had cause to hope that those summoned were about to be released. In January that year a group of ten resisters had been called out from a different Polish block and sent back to Warsaw to be freed – or so it was said. Maria Bielicka, who was in that block, remembered the events clearly because among the group was Władysława Krupska, the woman who had first betrayed her.

By April, however, when this new summons came, neither Maria nor any of the other
Sondertransport
women had yet learned that the group sent back to Warsaw in January had in fact been shot. They only found this out some weeks later when more Poles arrived from Warsaw and told the prisoners what had happened, including the heart-rending story of their near-escape.

On the way to Warsaw the lorry carrying the ten prisoners had broken down and the women were left unguarded briefly while the driver went for help. Several wanted to escape but Władysława Krupska persuaded them not to, saying they were bound to be caught, and would not then be freed. On arrival in Warsaw all the women – including Władysława – were shot.

Whatever confusion reigned amongst their comrades, it seems that the women listed for 18 April had little doubt what would happen. As the day went on, more were called. Stanisława Młodkowska was
sewing on buttons
next to one of them, Zofia Grabska. Zofia had just returned to work after several days in the
Revier
, where she was treated for swollen legs and arms. ‘She was looking in a little mirror she’d somehow got hold of, and she was complaining that her family would no longer recognise her as she had got so thin and pale,’ Stanisława recalled.

At that moment the guard, Erich, came into the sewing room and read out Zofia’s number and told her to go out. Zofia stood up on trembling legs and looked at me piteously, and with a sad smile, threw the little mirror on the table and went up to the guard. As she was going out she forgot to take off the cotton slippers that belonged to the sewing room, for which the guard kicked her on the legs.

Grażyna also knew what was to happen. The night before, friends had got word from contacts in the
Schreibstube
that she might be called at morning
roll-call. Grażyna herself was on the night shift, so when she was sleeping, her Lublin friend Janina Iwańska went through her clothes and hiding places searching for scraps of paper on which her poems were written, so if she was searched she would be ‘clean’ – and also to save the poems. Two days earlier she had written her ‘Sunflower’ poem; it was the ‘
scream of unbearable longing
we all felt’, said Wanda Wojtasik.

Grażyna had had a premonition, said Wanda. ‘She had been telling her friends that she was soon to die.’ Wanda recalls that most of the girls ‘refused to believe the worst – but not Grażyna’.

‘Why Grażyna?’ I asked.

‘Grażyna was different. She always thought she was about to die. She was one of those who had very little will to live.’

What is most puzzling, perhaps, about the 18 April summons is why the camp’s old-timers – the Poles and others who had seen it all before – didn’t appear to know what would happen. And if they did – as they surely must have – why they didn’t say?

By this time all camp veterans, especially those working in the offices, knew that
Sondertransport
and
Sonderbehandlung
were Nazi euphemisms for killing. At least five Polish women had been executed at the camp already, and as the veterans knew, by identical procedures. In each of these cases a special courier had arrived by Berlin the day before to deliver the order for execution into the hands of the commandant. And in each case, elaborate camouflage was used to make the women think they were to be freed, or sent to another camp.

Perhaps these veteran Poles were protecting the younger women from what they knew for fear of frightening them. They may simply not have known what to say, as there was nothing they could do. In any case, well before 18 April all the signs that a mass execution was about to happen must have been there for the old hands to see. So large were the numbers this time that a special execution squad had been formed, among them Artur Conrad. In the SS canteen Conrad had even been boasting he’d get extra food.

In case of any lingering doubt, a special courier arrived from Berlin the day before to deliver the execution order to the commandant with a list of fifteen names. As Maria Adamska, the Polish office worker, herself admitted, from now on any suggestion that the girls were going to another camp was an ‘elaborate charade’. But it was one that the whole camp was forced to watch, and in which several prisoners played a part.

The
Effektenkammer
women’s part was to collect the girls’ clothes, so that everyone could pretend they were going home, and yet there was no order to return their luggage, as would happen if they were really going home. The women in the kitchen were ordered to make food for the journey home, but
the tiny amounts they prepared wouldn’t do for a journey; they were sent to the bunker instead.

The bunker chief Dorothea Binz, along with her prisoner assistants – three Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Polish dancer Ojcumiła Falkowska – were waiting at the bunker entrance to receive the women. Ojcumiła, who had worked until recently in the SS canteen, had been sent to the bunker for smuggling bread, but instead of being locked up had been hired by Binz as her interpreter. Ojcumiła said later that as soon as she set eyes on her Polish comrades at the bunker door she knew what was going to happen to them. ‘
I knew they were
going to be shot when they appeared in civilian clothes without luggage.’

But even Ojcumiła resisted giving any warning to the girls, probably because she was strictly watched by Binz, but also because she too wouldn’t have known what to say. Instead, she played her part in the charade by following Binz’s instructions, showing the women to their cells and giving them a lunch of the usual soup.

Then the ‘formalities’ began, as Ojcumiła put it. Binz checked the women’s identities and read the death sentence, Ojcumiła translated. ‘After lunch a lorry came and I and the Jehovah’s Witnesses had to load the lorries with the right number of coffins.’ Ojcumiła explained that at this time there was still one coffin per person but, to economise, later there would be two bodies per coffin.

The
Lagerführer
[commandant] came with an employee of the political department and the head of the bunker, and with my assistance as interpreter, a final check of identity was made. The
Lagerführer
all the time held all the papers he had firmly in his hand. From where I stood I could see papers for every prisoner, sometimes with photographs.