Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
As a result of her decision two weeks earlier to halt the execution of the crippled women, Johanna Langefeld had been dismissed. Himmler himself had approved the decision. For this – and an array of other ‘crimes’ concocted against her – she was to face charges of breach of discipline before an SS court. In early April 1943 Johanna Langefeld left Ravensbrück for the last time.
V
alentina Samoilova, a medical student in Kiev, was celebrating the end of the term eating ice cream on the banks of the Dnepr River when Hitler’s forces crossed into Russia in June 1941. ‘Then the sky lit up and
orders came to mobilise
,’ she remembered. ‘At first we sang songs and then came the sirens and the boys said goodbye to the girls. That night we saw planes on fire in the skies and wounded horses in the streets. We had to work to clear the area of bodies. We could see everything coming to an end.’
It was the same story across the Soviet Union. War broke out just as students were finishing exams. Anna Stekolnikova, a trainee teacher from Oryol, south of Moscow, was celebrating the end of term when the voice of Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, burst out over a speaker system, saying war had started.
We were all told to gather at our college, where we were taught to set off incendiary bombs. Then the boys left for the front and we never saw them again. Then suddenly we all had to leave. It was 2 July 1941, and the order came for all medical staff to evacuate the hospital. The students amongst us had just finished exams, but everyone was called up.
In Odessa, on the Black Sea, trainee women doctors and nurses were given military uniforms, assigned to a marine medical division and sent to treat the wounded in trenches at the front, which was closing on the city. ‘We didn’t think twice about it. We were little more than children but we loved our country and wanted to defend it,’ says Maria Vlasenko, an
Odessa nurse, who was wounded in the trenches by shrapnel in the eye and leg.
When the harbour city of Odessa fell in November 1941, Maria and her medical division retreated with the troops to the Black Sea beaches, to board ships to Sevastopol and defend the Crimean Peninsula. Sevastopol already lay in ruins, and there was little hope of halting the German advance, but Stalin’s orders were to fight to the death. ‘There are no Soviet Prisoners of War, only traitors,’ he told his forces who were pushed back to the tip of the promontory, where they were trapped by the Germans, sea on all three sides. Ships took senior Red Army officers off to safety but the nurses and doctors were left on the Crimean clifftops, tending the wounded.
We were told we would be rescued by ship or by submarine, but none came for us. We moved to the very last bay – Sandy Bay – where the wounded lay all around us. We dragged them close to the cliff so they could be hoisted off onto rescue ships, but they still didn’t come.
We used everything we had to help them – old sheets or shirts. For splints we chopped up a stool. We used alcohol instead of morphine. But we knew we were cut off. We were isolated there with our wounded on this promontory, which was about to collapse. Bodies were falling into the water where they bubbled and burst. The sea was turning red all around us. Then the peninsula was hit by a bomb.
As Maria Vlasenko talks, other members of her family arrive at her small dwelling in a dusty village on the Black Sea coast. They sit cross-legged on the floor and listen. They haven’t heard her story before.
Maria and others like her are among the most anonymous Ravensbrück victims of all. Western survivors would recall the ‘disciplined’ Red Army women who came to the camp, but nobody knew much about them, and once the Iron Curtain came down, these women disappeared entirely from view. Moreover these survivors were also anonymous in their own country, where they were terrorised into silence.
It was Stalin himself who instilled the terror. When Soviet survivors returned to the motherland after years of suffering in German camps, Stalin proved true to his word and treated his own soldiers as traitors simply because they had been captured and hadn’t fought to the death. Among the returnees were
800,000 Soviet women
who had volunteered or been mobilised to work in intelligence units, as signallers or as doctors and nurses. The very fact that they had been in a foreign country and mixed with foreigners – albeit foreign prisoners – meant they were contaminated by fascism.
Back home in Odessa, Maria Vlasenko and most of her comrades were
interrogated by SMERSh, the Soviet army’s wartime counter-intelligence service. At best they were then blacklisted and denied work permits. At worst trumped-up charges were invented and suspects tried in secret Soviet courts. Comrades were tortured, bribed or blackmailed into denouncing comrades, then the ‘guilty’ were sent to Siberia or shot.
After Stalin’s death in 1953 the atmosphere eased and some of those exiled to Siberia were able to return, but fear of persecution persisted and accounts of the Nazi camps were still heavily censored. It was only after German reunification in 1990, when for the first time Berlin offered small sums of compensation to those in the old Eastern bloc, that victims began to declare themselves in order to claim their cash, though by this time most were dead.
Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian authorities have also given limited access to their archives, throwing more light on the extent of Stalin’s persecution. The documents include papers relating to secret post-war trials. For example, in 1949, at Simferopol, in the Crimea, five Red Army women – doctors and nurses – were tried for ‘collaboration’ with the ‘fascists’ in Ravensbrück. During the trial one of the accused was ‘turned’ and gave evidence against her friends. Another hanged herself in her cell. The remaining three were found guilty and sent to Siberia.
Maria Vlasenko knows of the trial. Her friend Lyusya Malygina, one of the Red Army doctors, was one of those found guilty of collaboration and sent to Siberia. But she won’t discuss it – ‘It was a dark story.’ Her friend Ilena Barsukova lives near by, and may know more.
‘
Malygina was
a beautiful woman, and very brave,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘She saved many lives in the camp. And she tried to save us all from capture too.’
When the Red Army doctors and nurses were cut off in July 1942 on the tip of the peninsula, a volunteer was required to swim with a message from the head of the Crimean forces, General Ivan Petrov, to officers across the bay. ‘The message was for Stalin,’ said Ilena. ‘It was Lyusya Malygina who volunteered. She protected the secret document somehow and carried it as she swam. We thought it meant we could still be saved.’
As the Germans drew closer, however, the women realised that they’d been abandoned and the only option to avoid capture was to jump into the sea or scale the cliffs to caves down below. ‘We tried to drag the wounded down into the caves too, but most were now dead so we climbed down and hid. We were there five days with no food. The Germans were right above us and knew we were starving. So they dropped ropes.’
At the top the Germans were waiting. ‘We took off our boots and let the water out,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘Then we learned that seventy-one of our
commanders had been taken off by submarine, so they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. It was only then that we cried.’
The captured doctors and nurses, along with the remaining male troops, were marched fifty kilometres back up the headland towards a staging point at the town of Bakhchisaray. There was no water on the march and temperatures soared to 40°C. Locals offered help, but anyone who tried to drink from a pond or reached to grab an apple from a tree was shot. The trail was ‘drenched in blood’, and everyone was afraid of what would happen next. News had spread fast of the German slaughter of captured Red Army soldiers. ‘I saw a man reach down to his boot, pull out a knife, and cut his own throat,’ said Maria Vlasenko.
The Red Army women knew of the rape and butchery of women in other captured units. German troops were fed propaganda describing uniformed Soviet women as ‘disgusting men-women’ and declaring: ‘This is what Bolshevism has done for women.’ These were ‘
depraved creatures
’ who had ‘betrayed their families’.
At Bakhchisaray they started shooting the Jews. The captured soldiers, doctors and nurses were lined up in front of a big anti-tank ditch with a plank across it. Germans stood all around with guns and dogs, then prisoners were picked out and marched forward. ‘It was always the Jews,’ said Ilena Barsukova. Scenes like these had been enacted all over captured Soviet territory ever since the invasion began.
The men were called first, but only because they were easier to identify. ‘I remember one who pleaded: “I am not a Jew. I’m a Ukrainian,” and then he was told to drop his pants. They said, “Ah, you’re not a Jew,” so they let him go,’ said Ilena.
With the women, the Germans could not be so sure, so they sought other prisoners to help identify the Jews among them. Non-Jews informed with a nod, or pointed with a stick. ‘Perhaps there were scores to settle,’ says Ilena Barsukova. ‘Perhaps those informers were offered beds or food if they helped. We never knew.’
Rosa Markova was one of the first to be informed on, and she was told to step forward. ‘She didn’t look like a Jew,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘She wore her hair in a braid. But they picked her out anyway.’ Semyon Adler was next. Then a third woman, Anna Brin, stepped out. ‘I think she just saw they were taking the other Jews so she decided to go with them. We said to Anna: “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been picked out.” But she insisted.’ These three then took each other’s arms and walked together to the plank, where they were shot in the back of the neck and fell into the ditch.
From Bakhchisaray they marched to Simferopol, another forty kilometres to the north-west. It was even hotter now. Of the women’s division, only
200 were still alive, and many were wounded. Those who collapsed were shot.
The women were now marched in a different line from the men, and as they moved forward they heard whispered instructions passing from one to the next. They came from a ‘leader’ up ahead. At first the instructions were simply ‘have courage’. The leader was ‘old and knew a lot’. She would look after them, it was said. Someone even knew her. She was a teacher from Odessa. She had fought in the civil war.
‘Be strong,’ came another message. ‘Look after each other. Believe in a Soviet victory.’ More information followed: ‘She speaks languages. She understands what the Germans say.’ And then people started whispering her name: Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm. ‘We were very young and knew nothing at all,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘But already we felt stronger, you know. We knew that this Yevgenia Lazarevna was experienced and would tell us what we should do.’
At Simferopol they were crammed into a small jail where the heat and filth bred infection. In the yard Yevgenia Lazarevna mingled with the women and they saw her for the first time: a tall woman of about forty, with brown-blonde hair. ‘
Devochki!
[Girls!],’ she would say. ‘Those of you who don’t know me, I am Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm. How are you girls? You’ll be all right. You are Red Army girls. We are prisoners of war. Remember that.’
‘And we believed her,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘We didn’t know what “prisoners of war” meant but we thought somehow it might mean the world outside would help us, so it gave us hope.’
Yevgenia Lazarevna chose doctors as her helpers. Maria Vlasenko’s leg was infected, so a helper came to dress the wound, but a guard saw and shouted at Maria to get up and he hit her. Klemm’s helper shouted back in German ‘Don’t beat that woman, can’t you see she’s wounded?’, so the guard pulled her bandage away and beat her all the more, knocking out her teeth. ‘Then the guard went away and came back with soup and a piece of bread and said “
Essen
” [eat] and went away again.’
Soon the women were once more marching west. After a day or so they were put on cattle trains. ‘We peeked through holes in the wagon and saw a big sign saying Kiev. It was my home,’ recalled Tamara Tschajalo, who trained in medicine at Kiev.
Many hours later they pulled up at a garrison town called Slavuta, where they were marched to a sprawling camp run by the German army for captured Soviet troops. It was filthy. The women fell sick with typhus, diphtheria, syphilis and TB, and several died. ‘They made us cut our hair to get rid of the
bugs,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘We had to boil our clothes in pots. It was the typhus that terrified the Germans so they kept away. Yevgenia Lazarevna told us that if we could just live through it for three weeks we would survive, and that was true. If someone was sick she made sure there was always a friend to hold their hand.’ The doctor, Tamara Tschajalo, nearly died at Slavuta, but Yevgenia Lazarevna nursed her back to life. ‘She told me she was immune from typhus as she’d caught it during the civil war.’
Yevgenia Lazarevna now had several helpers. Among them was Lyusya Malygina, the doctor who swam across the bloody Crimean Sea, and another was a doctor called Lyuba Konnikova. Lyuba was Jewish, but nobody had picked her out so far, and nobody had informed against her. ‘She was a hottempered one,’ remembered Maria Vlasenko. Ilena Barsukova remembered that Lyuba had ‘nerves of steel’.
At Slavuta, more Jews were shot. Another of the Odessa women, Nadia Nakonechnaya, remembered how her Jewish friend Anna, a doctor, was given away by a fellow doctor called Yusefa. ‘These two had always been in conflict back at the hospital in Odessa,’ said Nadia. ‘Anna was sure that Yusefa would tell the Germans she was a Jew.’
Another Odessa survivor, Zoya Savel’eva, spoke of a dungeon, ‘a big black hole’, somewhere at Slavuta. ‘The Jews were put in this hole for weeks and kept there in darkness. There was no food and nobody knew what was happening to them or if they were dead yet or not. One day the dead women’s uniforms were thrown back into the cells, for the other girls to pick over, in case they were of use.’ By now all the women’s uniforms were stained and ragged, but Yevgenia Lazarevna told them it was important to keep them on, to show they were prisoners of war.