If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (54 page)

Keeping more prisoners alive obviously meant more doctors, and as SS medics were increasingly being sent off to the front, it made sense to use qualified prisoners instead, which explains why the Red Army medics were suddenly called up. But the Red Army doctors in Ravensbrück were not so sure they should take the work; it wasn’t only the Poles who saw the
Revier
as ‘a place of crime’. Lyuba Konnikova declared that she would refuse. ‘
I didn’t want to do it
,’ she said later. ‘We knew that in the
Revier
people were beaten, maimed and killed with injections. We knew that Rosenthal and Schiedlausky kicked people with their boots.’ Yevgenia Klemm told them, however, that there were also good reasons to take the work: they could use their skills to save lives and smuggle out medicines. In the hospital they would make contacts across the camp and gather intelligence.

And conditions in the hospital were improving rapidly in the summer of 1943. In response to Himmler’s edict more medicines were available and the
Revier
had expanded from two blocks to six. Soon after the Red Army women started work there, the hated doctors Schiedlausky and Oberheuser left Ravensbrück, and Dr Rosenthal was dismissed and later put on trial, accused of having had sexual relations with the prisoner midwife Gerda Quernheim, on whom he had carried out
at least two abortions
.

At the end of August a new doctor arrived at Ravensbrück. It was said he preferred to cure than kill.

Percival Treite had none of the usual traits of a concentration camp doctor; he wore a white coat instead of an SS uniform and carried a stethoscope rather than a whip or a stick. At thirty-two years of age, he was a fair, slender
figure. He didn’t hit or kick his patients and rarely wasted his breath on verbal abuse. Treite even had a correct and businesslike air about him – more suited to the faculty of medicine at Berlin University, where he had just completed his medical studies, than to the
Revier
of a concentration camp. He also seemed to be interested in practising his skills.

Treite’s demeanour was as much to do with his
family background
as his professional training. For an SS man, he had an unusual family tree: when asked to trace his roots for the SS genealogical record, an English branch showed up. His upbringing was also unusual: raised a Salvationist, he marched from his earliest days with the army of God.

It was Percy’s German grandfather, a devout Baptist called Carl Treite, who forged the family’s English ties. In the 1890s, living in northern Germany, Carl fell in love with a young Englishwoman, Louisa Foot, from Southampton, whom he met while she was staying in Germany as a children’s governess. As Carl would later say, ‘God then led me across to England’, where they married, and the couple settled in Lewisham, in southeast London, and came under the influence of William Booth, founder of the quasi-military Salvation Army. Booth wore a uniform to preach to the poor outside the Blind Beggar pub, and soon Carl Treite was also urging London’s down-and-outs to ‘suffer for the Lord’.

Eager to take the message back to his homeland, Carl and Louisa, now with three small children, including Percival senior, returned to Germany, where Carl’s sermons on the virtues of discipline and the sins of alcohol were at first reviled. By the time he died, however, the Salvation Army had branches in many German cities, and Percival Treite senior settled in Kiel, where he became a Lieutenant Colonel and founded the German Salvation Army’s first brass band. The young Percy and his sister Lily marched with the band and followed every tenet of the faith, which, before Hitler, included pacifism and a belief in the sanctity of human life.

By the mid-1930s Percy’s mother and his sister had left Nazi Germany to live in Switzerland, where an uncle founded another Salvation Army mission, but with a medical career in mind Percy stayed behind in Berlin. Having joined the Nazi Party and the SS – admittedly belatedly – he went on to specialise in gynaecology at the University of Berlin. A first-class surgeon – he had ‘good hands’ – Treite then travelled widely, studying under eminent professors, spending time in Prague and in Bern. By 1943 he was close to securing a professorship in medicine in Berlin, but before he could complete his practical surgical experience in order to qualify, he was ordered to take up a post at Ravensbrück. The appointment was a setback in his career, but he took up his job with enthusiasm and
reorganised the
Revier
.

Treite immediately established an infectious diseases block for typhus,
scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as a block for skin diseases and one for dysentery. He even requested a pathology lab and mortuary to be built under the main
Revier
block, arguing that it was important to know the causes of death. A system of bandaging stations out in the blocks was an attempt to curb the growing problem of swelling legs and boils and to reduce the queues at the main
Revier
.

To rationalise the use of hospital beds, Treite set up a system of
Bettkarten
, bed cards. Those lining up to see a doctor might be given a
Bettkarte
for a number of days. At the end of every bed hung a temperature chart with arrows pointing up or down so it was clear when the patient was well enough to go back to work. A system of pink cards was another innovation: women too old or frail to carry out hard labour could apply for a pink card, which allowed them to work in their block. The system formalised the status of ‘knitters’ already permitted to work in their blocks, and also fulfilled Himmler’s latest instruction that instead of being killed, bedridden prisoners be found useful work.

Within a few weeks of Treite’s arrival the
Revier
had been transformed. A new
Oberschwester
(head nurse) called Elisabeth Marschall took charge, and the team of camp nurses, dressed in brown uniforms and white scarves, were told to smarten up. Treite ordered that all the nurses be taught basic hand-washing techniques and wear a thermometer on a string round their neck.

Even Milena Jesenska, in the
Revier
office, was impressed. Treite befriended Milena from the start; recognising the name, he discovered that her father was the same Professor Jan Jesensky under whom he had studied oral surgery at the University of Prague. Soon Treite was treating Milena too, who fell so sick in the summer of 1943 that she was sure she was going to die. ‘
After her illness
she examined her face in the sickbay mirror and announced that she looked just like the little sick monkey belonging to the organ grinder who used to pitch his cart outside her house in Prague,’ said Grete Buber-Neumann, who since her return from the bunker had again shared a mattress with Milena in Block 1.

In August Milena’s Czech friends gave her a magnificent birthday party in one of their blocks, ‘as if they too thought it would be her last’. A table in the Blockova’s room was laden with presents. ‘All those who loved her were there – the Czech dancers, writers, and musicians – and they had made gifts such as little handkerchiefs embroidered with prisoners’ numbers and tiny hearts made of cloth bearing the name Milena. Already very weak, Milena was moved to tears.’

Shortly after this Milena told Treite of her illness. According to Grete:

He immediately treated Milena with the greatest civility and examined her and diagnosed an ulcerated kidney, saying he would operate, which he did with the greatest skill, and for a while she regained some strength. She felt confidence in him when he told her that during his student days in Prague he had attended her father’s lectures and he transferred his respect from the father to the daughter.

Under Treite the
Revier
quickly became the most international place in the camp. The Czech nurse Hanka Housková was taken on as the ‘miracle interpreter’ because she spoke six languages. Soviet doctors worked on several wards, while Czechs ran the pharmacy. The X-ray room had Polish radiographers, and Yugoslavs worked in the pathology lab. On the prisoner staff too were a Belgian midwife and a French nurse. Even the
Oberschwester
, Marschall, spoke French.

Treite was always scouting for new talent. Sometimes he would walk onto the Appellplatz when a new transport came in and shout for doctors to raise their hands. If a woman impressed him, as happened with Zdenka Nedvedova, he would wait until she was out of quarantine, and then walk over to her block and have her brought to the
Revier
before her transfer to a subcamp.

Zdenka Nedvedova arrived in August with one of the first groups of prisoners to be transferred to Ravensbrück from Auschwitz in order to work in a new subcamp. The daughter of an eminent Czech musician and philosopher, she too had studied at Prague, where she qualified in child medicine. She was arrested in 1940 for anti-fascist activity and sent to Auschwitz, with her husband, who died there of TB.

Although inmates knew a lot about Auschwitz by now, the appearance of the Auschwitz prisoners on the Ravensbrück Lagerstrasse stirred horror. Many had survived a recent typhus plague, which had devastated the Auschwitz women’s camp. ‘
Even the SS guards
watched us silently, shaken by our appearance,’ Zdenka said later. ‘We were thin and bald, with enormous frightened, absent eyes.’ For Treite, however, the fact that Zdenka had survived typhus made her a better prospect for his hospital: she would be immune and could work with infected prisoners.

For Zdenka, Ravensbrück came as a pleasant surprise. Above the camp walls, she saw treetops. Inside the camp looked clean. ‘It was very different from the bareness of Auschwitz. I thought: this is not a camp, this is a sanatorium.’ In quarantine the Auschwitz women were astonished by the running cold water and food ‘provided in reasonable quantities’. They were even more astonished to learn that in Ravensbrück old women knitted woollen socks in their blocks, and there was a hairdressing salon and a fashion boutique for
the women SS. At first sight, there seemed to be fewer of the horrific medical practices she had seen at Auschwitz – such as sterilisation experiments – happening here.
^*

Most incredible of all, to Zdenka, was the camp
Revier
, and when she saw the prisoner doctors’ accommodation she couldn’t believe her eyes. Treite had not only revamped the hospital itself, he had insisted on the best conditions for the prisoner staff. Hygiene in particular was to be of the highest standard, especially as these women were to work alongside him. Zdenka recalled:

Bedding was regularly washed and medicines seemed to be in good supply. I got two sets of underwear and a proper dress, and we could even have a hot shower. And we all looked smart in our dark blue outfits with white mottling and short sleeves, while the SS doctors wore white coats and the sisters, white headscarves. The hospital was heated and we slept on clean camp beds and had a washroom and our own nice dining room and a small garden where we could sunbathe naked in the summer. This was a momentary joy.

Not all the prisoner doctors responded in this way to their luxurious quarters. For some the gulf between their privileges and the misery outside was too much to bear. The revulsion of Lyuba Konnikova at the contrast evidently showed on her young face, as
Oberschwester
Marschall accused her of insolence, calling her a ‘
Bolshevik cow
’ and gave her the filthiest work. Refusing even to acknowledge that at just twenty-four years of age Lyuba could be a doctor at all, Marschall told her to mop floors in the dysentery block and empty bedpans, and once she’d done that she had to take the
Oberschwester
her lunch.

While Lyuba’s reaction was understandable, when she reported back to Yevgenia Klemm the older woman urged her not to lose hope. The compromise forced upon the Soviet doctors would bring benefits, said Klemm. Just by working in the
Revier
they had already saved lives and managed to smuggle medicines out for use in the block. Maria Klyugman had even had the chance to sew up one of the Polish rabbits’ legs, performing an operation under anaesthetic and removing large bone splinters from the wound.

More important, perhaps, was the intelligence the Soviet doctors had
gathered and brought back to Klemm. Through the hospital network, Maria Klyugman was now in regular contact with Maria Wiedmaier, the German communist leader, who smuggled her newspapers, and Maria Petrushina, one of the ‘Moscow family’, had secured a job with the plumbing gang, which along with the ‘
Sturmkolonne
’ – as Hanna Sturm’s carpentry gang was now known – was the best informed.

Klemm’s increasing knowledge became the life-blood of the Soviet block, as Zoya Savel’eva explained:

She could tell us what was happening at the front, and who was about to arrive in the camp. She came to talk to us at night: everyone would clamber around her and she would pull out a whole newspaper as if by magic, and explain the contents to us. Sometimes she read the cards. The girls would run to her and say, “Come on, Yevgenia Lazarevna, show us the future,” and she would laugh and do it.

Did she believe in the cards, I asked.

‘Perhaps. She believed in many things,’ said Zoya. ‘She was not a straightforward person. She believed in God.’

‘But she was a communist?’

‘Yes, that too. But mostly she believed in knowledge. You have to understand that knowledge was everything to us. We knew nothing, but Yevgenia Lazarevna had the knowledge and the belief. She told us we would survive and get back home, and how it would all unfold.’

And however torn some of the doctors were at having to work for the SS, the prisoners themselves were delighted.

Another change that struck Grete Buber-Neumann when she emerged from the bunker that summer was that the
Revier
had lost its terrors – largely because prisoner doctors were working there. Though some of the women ‘shamelessly’ favoured the sick of their own nationality or political group, ‘most did their best with great devotion in extraordinarily difficult circumstances,’ said Grete. Inka, a Czech medical student, had treated Grete for an attack of boils. Grete had feared to go to her at first because she was a staunch communist ‘and was bound to consider me the scum of the earth’, but Inka was ‘friendliness itself’ and treated Grete with great care.