Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
Like those before them, these mothers had almost no milk, but still they came each day and queued outside in the corridor, sobbing as they waited to see their babies and try to feed them. ‘The pretty little face the mother had known at first was soon transformed into the face of an old person,’ said Marie-Jo, ‘the body covered in ulcers and sores. The mother was powerless to do anything.’
A Frenchwoman prisoner in Block 11 described how she would hear mothers come to the
Kinderzimmer
to see their babies, and try to identify
them amongst all the others. ‘
They would count them off
, in all languages. They stood at the bunk saying: “One, two, three, four, five – that’s where I left him, or her, so that’s mine.” And in all the languages came the same expressions of despair.’ A mother described placing her hand on her dead child. Another remembered picking up a dead baby by mistake. ‘I remember the feeling of contact with the frozen face. It is a feeling I will never forget.’
The rule remained that at night the babies should be left alone, and they were always locked inside the
Kinderzimmer
. Sister Helen, the SS nurse, insisted that a window be left wide open, even in the winter. Hanna Wasilczenko, the mother of Witold Grzegorz, was horrified when she heard that the babies were left alone at night, so she stole the
Kinderzimmer
key – apparently with Zdenka’s help – and broke in one night to see her baby boy. ‘
It was a dreadful sight
. At first it was quite dark but when I managed to turn on a light I saw vermin of all sorts jumping on the beds and inside the noses and ears of the babies. Most of the babies were naked because their blankets had come off. They were crying of hunger and cold, and covered in sores.’
In these conditions the babies lived for a few days or perhaps a month. Vitold Georg lived for sixteen days before dying of pneumonia. After thirty days, the first 100 babies born were all dead. ‘
They died without crying
. They were simply dead,’ said Marie-Jo. Back in the
Revier
, Zdenka informed Treite of the conditions in the
Kinderzimmer
and pleaded each day for milk for the babies, suggesting he should come and see for himself, but he never did.
As the deaths continued to mount it was
Oberschwester
Marschall, rather than Treite, whom the prisoners increasingly blamed for the growing horror. She had long incurred a particular loathing in the
Revier
. According to Sylvia, who knew her better than most, Marschall was one of those ‘that had accepted without question that all these women in the camp were a burden on the fatherland. Germany was everything to her and the Führer was going to make Germany rule the world.’
At the same time, said Sylvia:
The
Oberschwester
, with her rounded figure and attractive face, her plump well-kept hands and neat uniform, had a mask of amiability and could give the impression of an elderly and good-natured nurse. I surprised her once, finding her with the baby Nicholas in her arms – a Russian, so one of Germany’s deadliest enemies too. But there she was prattling to the baby, who of course understood nothing but the friendly tone of her voice. Nicholas smiled and the Matron Marschall smiled back at him.
Some time in October 1944 word got out that Marschall was storing large quantities of powdered milk in her personal cupboard in the
Revier
– milk
stolen from prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. The news caused outrage among the midwives and the nurses. Every inmate knew that when Red Cross parcels reached the camp they were ransacked by the SS, but it was Zdenka Nedvedova who found out that Marschall herself was hoarding dried milk, as well as semolina flakes and porridge in quantities that would have saved many babies.
As this news spread, Zdenka plucked up the courage to ask Marschall to give the milk to the dying babies, but Marschall refused. She even refused to come to the
Kinderzimmer
to see things for herself, saying that Sister Helen was in charge. According to Marie-Jo, Sister Helen loved the newborn babies and used to come quite regularly at first to make sure things were done properly. ‘She had a tiny white headscarf and used to say how pretty the babies were, but as they became thin and lined, they started looking like little old people. We told her once the rats were attacking them and we asked for poison to keep them down. So she just laughed and left the room.’
In late autumn 1944 a small amount of milk powder was given for the babies. Zdenka and the nurses were overjoyed, but the quantity provided was so tiny that it almost made things worse. Furthermore, there was no means of doing the feeding. Nobody making up the Red Cross parcels had thought about feeding babies, so they did not send teats. The women managed to smuggle two bottles and one teat from the camp’s clothing stores, but that was all. There were now at least forty babies to feed.
Zdenka had the idea of stealing Treite’s plastic surgical gloves, ‘so we cut them and made the fingers into teats,’ said Marie-Jo, ‘and when the mothers came to feed we just had to make them wait’. Ilse Reibmayr said that when the mothers learned there was the chance of powdered milk they ‘became like animals’ and when the small amount was produced ‘they battled and fought and screamed. It was not their fault. They were forced to watch their children getting weaker; they were forced to watch them die.’
I asked Marie-Jo how she and the other baby nurses managed to carry on, and she gave a sad smile. ‘You see, we believed – we hoped – that we might save some of them. We thought the war would be over soon and so we had to try and keep these babies alive until then.’ She picked up an old ledger smuggled out of the camp, and said she was going to show me ‘something terrible’. It was the birth book, which Zdenka had compiled. It recorded every birth and death in the
Kinderzimmer
.
Each time a baby died a procedure had to be observed, Marie-Jo explained. First, she or Zdenka had to take the body to the morgue, which was underground, and ‘atrocious’ – ‘You know the Germans were indoctrinated. They saw us all as vermin.’ When they had passed through the
morgue they had to fill out a form, showing the baby was dead. ‘Zdenka then took the pieces of paper and wrote the names in the book, before taking the forms to the camp office.’
She turned to the birth book and traced her finger across a page, showing the names of babies born. There were 600 names in total born between the months of September 1944 and April 1945. Of these, she explained, forty survived, ‘but most of those were taken to Belsen in February 1945, where they also died’.
Zdenka had managed to smuggle the book out at the end, and she had also smuggled some of the forms. Green forms were for the dead babies, blue for those deported. ‘But not all died,’ said Marie-Jo. ‘Babies were born right up until the end, and we did save some. We saved three little French babies. There were little Polish babies and Russians who lived too.’
A
fter the shock of arrival, waiting for hours in the stinking alley, the French women who came from Paris in late August spent ten days in quarantine blocks. With them were the five British SOE women, as well as the American Virginia Lake, who had all arrived on the same trains. Crammed in with 600 others of various nationalities, the group were bawled at ‘by servile German and Polish women anxious to preserve their privileges’, as Virginia Lake remembered the quarantine Blockovas.
Some among the new French arrivals tried to boost morale, urging the group to stay strong. One young French woman, Jeannie Rousseau, told them they’d soon be free. ‘
Do you know that feeling
of delivering good news? It was like that,’ she said, looking back. ‘We had come straight from Paris with news that the war was over.’
Even in quarantine Violette Szabo was already talking of escape, as her SOE training had taught her. All the SOE women were trying to stay in the background, hiding their identities, trusting nobody, keeping their aliases. They knew that if the German police identified them as secret agents or ‘commandos’ they could expect to be shot, but if they could merge into the crowd as ordinary French resisters they stood a greater chance of survival.
One of the British group, Yvonne Rudellat, was recognised on arrival in the camp by a group of French women from the
Prosper
resistance circuit, whom she had worked with in France.
Her friends could see
that Yvonne was unwell – her hair had gone quite white. They tried to make contact and offered help, but she pretended not to know them, saying she had a
different name. On leaving quarantine they were sent to shovel sand. Guards hosed them with water, so they shivered in sodden summer clothes. Lilian Rolfe, another of the SOE girls, could barely hold her spade. The others noticed she was ‘easily discouraged’ and already physically extremely frail.
Old-timers watched the group with dread. They knew that paradoxically the newest arrivals were probably worst equipped to survive the camp. Such was the chaos, and so fast were conditions collapsing in September 1944, that it had never been harder for newcomers to gain a foothold. Physical stamina had never mattered more. As the Polish military instructor Maria Moldenhawer – five years in the camp – would later recall: ‘
Ravensbrück was by this time
divided into two worlds: there were those who had been a long time in the camp and had had time to better themselves, and those who arrived now and struggled pathetically to keep their heads above water.’
Marching back and forth to work, the Paris arrivals stared in disbelief at the corpse carts, the beggars squatting around the kitchen block and the crematorium furnaces billowing smoke.
Most astonishing to the group was the scene on the Appellplatz, where a fat SS man on a bicycle circled round lines of women every day, lashing out with a whip. This was Hans Pflaum, the new slave labour chief. They learned to call him the cattle merchant, and this was his cattle market, where he selected prisoners for the satellite camps. There was talk among the group that they too would be sent to satellite camps soon; most hoped for the chance, thinking anything would be better than this.
The Ravensbrück
satellite network
had nearly doubled over the past year. By October 1944 the women’s camp was sending slave labour to as many as thirty-three subcamps scattered over a vast area of Germany.
Once on the periphery of Himmler’s camp empire, Ravensbrück had grown in importance and was now crucial to Germany’s fight back, supplying labour to some of the most valued arms factories in the Reich. Some of the satellites were so far away that they’d been placed under administrative control of men’s camps like Buchenwald, Dachau and Flossenbürg, but Ravensbrück still supplied the female labour and the guards. It was to serve these subcamps that the Frenchwomen had been brought here, along with all the other slave labourers now pouring in.
In mid-September the camp filled with another transport of fresh slave workers; this group were mostly fair and all wore neat blue dungarees and matching blue headscarves. These Dutch prisoners had come from the concentration camp of Vught. On 4 September, just as Canadian troops were about to liberate them, the women had been driven out of the camp gates
and put on trains to Germany. After ‘quarantine’ in the tent many of the Dutch were selected for a subcamp at Dachau, while others were chosen for the Siemens plant at Ravensbrück.
Of all the Ravensbrück munitions factories, Siemens & Halske had always been the most important. By the autumn of 1944, Siemens employed 2300 Ravensbrück women at their main camp plant, as well as more than 150 civilians, and an unknown number of women slave labourers were working at subcamps too. In September the company was again looking for fresh workers to replace those expended; Siemens had a contract to make parts for the V2 miracle weapon that Himmler had promised would win the war. As always, young women with slender fingers were in demand. For many months Siemens had also been employing teenage girls imprisoned as delinquents at the nearby Uckermark Youth Camp, where the company had built a factory outpost in early 1944.
From the cattle market at the main camp incoming girls of fifteen and upwards were now also being snapped up. Some came to work at Siemens with sisters or mothers, some had lost mothers, and many were torn from mothers on the Appellplatz and then marched up the hill. ‘We saw them crying quietly calling for their mothers,’ said Anni Vavak, the Austrian-Czech prisoner who was now a senior Kapo at Siemens.
The new Dutch transport also contained nimble hands. Some even had relevant experience, having worked already at a Philips factory near Eindhoven, so they too were selected for the plant. To the Dutch, Siemens certainly seemed preferable to working out of doors, especially as winter was coming, so the astute nineteen-year-old Margareta van der Kuit volunteered.
Margareta’s skills were quickly identified by a Siemens
Meister
who promoted her to work for him in a clerical job. Like others before her Margareta tried to tell this German civilian – a man called Seefeld – about the horrors of the main camp in the hope he might help.
He looked at me and said, ‘But you have all done something wrong haven’t you, something illegal. That is why you are here,’ as if that justified it to him. So I said, well Herr Seefeld no we haven’t done anything wrong, but he didn’t understand. But he was not a bad man. He said to me, ‘Well van der Kuit, when you are free go to Berlin and tell them I sent you and you will get a good job.’
Also among the Dutch chosen in September for the Siemens plant were Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie. The daughters of a watchmaker from Haarlem, the women, both devout Christians, were arrested for their
part in hiding Jews. Corrie was fifty-two and Betsie fifty-nine when they arrived in Ravensbrück, and Betsie was in poor health. At first the sisters were pleased to be joining the so-called ‘Siemens brigade’, as it meant marching out of the vast iron gates and ‘into the world of trees and grass and horizons’.