Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
The next stop was Rovno, near the German border. Here Raisa Veretennikova was picked out and shot for her curly hair. Disgusted by the traitors in their midst, the women were now fighting amongst themselves, but Yevgenia Lazarevna said the treachery must stop. ‘We are all Soviet Army girls. Take care of each other and we will survive this.’ Some weeks later – it was now late autumn – the women were piled into cattle trucks again.
The next time they stopped it was December 1942. The women had been on the road for five months. Temperatures were minus forty. Still wearing their Red Army uniforms, they were lined up in ranks of five. They didn’t know it yet, but they were in Germany, at Soest in Westphalia. Here they found other Red Army women, some of them signallers or intelligence officers, others, like themselves, doctors and nurses who had also served at the front – at Kiev, Stalingrad, Rostov and Leningrad. Maria Klyugman, an experienced surgeon, had operated at the front at Cernigov.
Valentina Samoilova, the ice-cream eater from Kiev, had been posted as
an army medic to Stalingrad, where she helped her unit defend a bridge outside the besieged city. Surrounded during the final desperate defence, she and her comrades had camouflaged themselves by smearing their bodies in river mud, but the bridge was lost and all were captured. Valentina was shot in the leg and left for dead, but the Germans took her body, still smeared with mud, and threw her on a freight train piled with corpses. At the next depot a crane lifted the bodies off and Valentina was picked up on a giant hook. ‘And then I wriggled and someone saw I was alive. They said: “Look he’s alive” – because they thought I was a boy – but a German doctor came and found I was a girl, so I was put on the train west. It was snowing and very cold and eventually we arrived in Soest.’
It didn’t take long to realise that the camp at Soest was different from all the others; there was a sports hall and a huge railway junction nearby. The guards were Gestapo, not soldiers. The site had recently been turned into a marshalling yard for thousands of slave labourers brought from the East. Each day streams of Russian civilians and Ukrainians poured off the trains and were marched to the sports hall.
Many of the civilian women had been swept up at random by Nazi units passing through eastern Ukraine. Evdokia Domina was harvesting when she was scooped up by German soldiers and put on a train. ‘My mother didn’t even know I had gone.’ Alexandra Dzyuba and her friends were lured into their village hall, where the Germans had promised a film show, but when they went along all were arrested. ‘My father took a horse and tried to follow our train to snatch me back at the next station but the Germans beat him back with their guns.’
In the sports hall German employers – factory
Meister
– moved amongst the captured women with whips, picking who they wanted, some for farm work, but most to work on munitions. Watching these selections, the new arrivals did not realise at first that they too would be ordered to make enemy munitions. To date the Germans had killed all Soviet prisoners or locked them up in the worst conditions. Recently, however, the urgent need for workers had led to a change in policy, and Red Army captives were to be
used for slave labour
too.
‘When they tried to take us off to work we didn’t understand at first and the first fifteen who were chosen just started to go,’ said Tamara Tschajalo. ‘Then Yevgenia Lazarevna got word to them not to move. “Stand firm,” she said. “We must not do this work.” And they came back and stood together with the rest of us in line. Now we thought we were bound to die, but we were prepared.’
Tamara remembered Klemm’s words: ‘She told us we were prisoners of war, and under international law the enemy had no right make us work in the
war factories. This advice was sent amongst the women and we obeyed. The Germans threatened us with beating and took us to the Gestapo chief, who made us stand in cells for three days. But we didn’t complain and sang our battle songs.’
When Yevgenia Lazarevna’s turn came to go before the Gestapo chief she told him, to his face, that he had no right under the Geneva Conventions to force prisoners of war to make arms for their enemy. All along the journey from the Crimea, she had talked to the women about how soldiers had suffered in the past. She herself had served as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War and knew the rules, agreed since then under the Geneva Conventions, about how prisoners were to be treated.
‘Remember you are prisoners of war, girls,’ she told the women again and again, insisting that they kept their uniforms intact as best they could, as this was the only proof they had of POW status. ‘You have rights,’ she told them, but she must have known this wasn’t true. Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Conventions, and as far as the Germans were concerned, the Soviets had no rights at all.
*
And yet Klemm may have judged that even the Gestapo would think twice about shooting dead 500 uniformed women, doctors and nurses, standing on German soil. In any case, it must have been clear to her that many of these women would refuse the order whatever happened. Lyuba Konnikova knew little of the rules of war, but she knew she hadn’t marched all the way from the Crimea ‘just to make guns to kill my comrades at the front’. So when the
Meister
first appeared in front of her Lyuba picked up a piece of metal and threw it at one of the German guard dogs, but the guards said nothing. Klemm told Lyuba later ‘not to show her anger’, Maria Vlasenko recalled. ‘She always cautioned the fiery ones.’
And she cautioned the woman from Stalingrad too, though she didn’t yet know Valentina Samoilova’s name. Valentina remembered:
We were called out in groups into some sort of sports hall and they said to us: ‘You go to this factory, you go that way.’ So I asked this man: ‘Is your factory for military work?’ And the factory owner said: ‘Yes.’ So I told him: ‘We are military prisoners, we will not work in munitions,’ and for half a day they all tried to get us to do so but we refused. We thought we’d all be killed.
Even Valentina, caked in mud, had kept her uniform intact, and when her turn came to appear before the Gestapo chief, he stared at her for some time.
‘I was pale-skinned with blonde hair and he asked if I was a German girl. I said, in German: “No, I’m Ukrainian.” He asked me: “Why don’t you work?” I said I was a good worker but would not work in a German military factory. He kicked me so hard that I fell to the floor.’
In the sports hall Valentina noticed that someone among the Red Army women was giving signals about how they should all behave:
A woman I didn’t know approached me and said I should keep calm. She was older. I heard she was from Odessa. This was Yevgenia Lazarevna, but at the time I didn’t know her. I listened to her advice. She said: ‘You are very young. We do not need victims, we need fighters.’ She said I should wait for a signal from her before doing anything more. We had to move as one, that was her message.
Yevgenia Lazarevna’s authority swiftly spread beyond the Crimea group to all the Red Army women present. If they were to protest it must be ‘as one’, recalled Valentina:
She told us we mustn’t ‘break the circle’. That was the expression she always used. Nobody must ‘break the circle’. We must stand together and then we’d be all right. And suddenly we had the feeling that maybe we would not all be killed after all. That was the start of our organisation. And we sang our Soviet songs: ‘We will fight for Stalin.’ This silenced the Germans. They didn’t know what to do. They seemed to have no orders. Their orders were to make us work, but now that we refused they were shocked. They didn’t dare shoot us.
Three nights after the protest began the Germans withdrew the orders to work in munitions factories. The Russians were marched to a waiting train and herded into cattle wagons. Buckets were placed inside; the wagon doors nailed shut and covered with barbed wire. They travelled for five days and five nights, stopping only briefly at stations where water and bread was handed in through apertures. At night it was pitch-black inside, but in the daytime cracks let in shafts of light that slanted across the bodies, huddled up against each other for heat. Temperatures outside rarely rose above freezing. Many of the women were sick with typhus and TB. No one knows how many were dead when the train rolled up at Fürstenberg station. It was 23 February 1943 and Valentina was twenty-four. The girl they had hooked off the Stalingrad corpse train arrived at Ravensbrück on her birthday.
F
or a second there was pitch-black stillness. Suddenly from outside came a bashing at wagon doors, which were thrown open and bodies steamed in the freezing night air. The women looked out into lights, but before they could move, figures in capes jumped into the wagons, took hold of their arms and legs, shouting and kicking, and hurled them outside. Everywhere there were dogs. Some said there was snow on the ground. It was certainly clear and cold. Valentina Samoilova remembered:
From the train
we marched, five in a row. I was weak and someone put out a hand. I thought it was to help me but it was to hit me. ‘Russian pigs! Russian bandits!’ Nobody could understand why they were being beaten. We hadn’t learned yet that this was just the way they behaved. It was as if they expected something from us. Perhaps it was because we were still in uniform.
That each woman should preserve her uniform, even in these conditions, seems remarkable, but nothing was dearer to them than these simple khaki clothes – skirts or trousers and jackets, piping on the shoulder to identify a medical or signals battalion, and a red star on a green cap to identify them as Stalin’s own soldiers.
Word was passed down the line that they should fall in, and the column started moving, but it was so long that those at the back had no idea what was happening at the front. There were even brighter white lights up ahead; they’d never seen such lights in the Soviet Union and they were dazzled.
Valentina remembers being forced to run towards the light, and then she realised she was running towards giant gates. Those who fell were shot. Everything seemed so big. The women with the black capes were giants.
Inside the camp gates an SS officer shouted orders and pointed towards a building, but few of them understood German. Suddenly they were pushed forward to scramble through open windows. ‘So we thought, what is this place we are entering through windows, but we couldn’t think for long because the next thing we were ordered to undress and to put our uniforms in a pile. Everything we held dear was taken from us.’ But Valentina held on to her Komsomol (Communist Youth) card by clenching it between her teeth. ‘Then they looked us over and poked at us and made us lie down.’
Each woman was examined all over, hands thrust inside them, searching, as the SS looked on and shouted: ‘Filthy bitches, Russian whores.’ Among the SS officers standing there was Fritz Suhren and his deputy Obersturmführer Edmund Bräuning. The camp’s most senior officers had come to the bathhouse in the small hours to hurl abuse and stare at these Soviet women who had come from Leningrad, Stalingrad and other cities that already spelt humiliating defeat.
Ludmilla Voloshina says the SS laughed when they found jewellery hidden in a woman’s vagina, but everyone knew they’d made it look like that. Some remembered being given pills to swallow. Valentina spat hers out.
Then came the shower, and after that they were drenched in a slimy disinfectant then rinsed. Hair was chopped – not shaved, but roughly chopped with scissors so that it stood up in tufts. They looked for their uniforms but they’d gone. The SS laughed and told them their uniforms were burned, so they had no choice but to put on the striped camp clothes. ‘I looked at the others with their tufts of hair and they looked like flowers on a stem,’ said Valentina. ‘And someone said, Valentina you look like a flower too. We were very young.’
As the women marched to their blocks they were beaten and kicked. Yekaterina Boyko said:
One tall blonde took her belt off and hit me over the head and a dog bit me. I fell over and woke up wet and didn’t know why this was happening. We lined up and they shouted a number at us and the woman with the number was standing next to me, so I said that is your number, but it was too late as they started beating her and they beat her till she fell unconscious and I stood and watched, boiling inside.
Looking back, Maria Vlasenko thinks: ‘It was as if we might have horns.’ The Ravensbrück SS had certainly been prepared for trouble, which was why
Suhren brought the Red Army women into the camp at night and forced them to climb into the bathhouse through the back windows, so that no one would see them in their uniforms, which he then tricked them into taking off.
Suhren’s ploy was almost certainly carried out on orders from above. As the Germans’ confused reaction to the Red Army women’s protest at Soest showed – and as Yevgenia Klemm had hoped – there were some in Nazi circles who were sensitive to the dangers of ignoring the Geneva Conventions when it came to this group of women POWs. Nobody had baulked at massacring male Soviet POWs, especially as it happened away to the east. But these female uniformed combatants – medics to boot – were on German soil and any violation of their status as POWs would be harder to explain, should Geneva choose to take an interest.
To date, Himmler had easily rebuffed questions about his camps from the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and the ICRC had declined to get involved, arguing that the prisoners were civilians and therefore not covered by their mandate. The presence of these Red Army women, however, might draw more searching questions from Switzerland. Himmler didn’t want that, so Suhren was instructed to disguise who they were by removing their ‘war status’.
By the time the women reached Ravensbrück, the only evidence of that ‘
war status
’ was their uniforms, so Suhren made sure these were removed on arrival at the camp.