If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (8 page)

On broader questions regarding treatment of prisoners, however, it was quickly evident that many guards – particularly those on outside work gangs – were following Koegel’s lead, not hers. From her office Langefeld could see the women brought in daily from the sandpit with bleeding legs and arms. And even from her apartment she could hear the women’s screams.

Edith Fraede let her dog snarl and snap at the women somewhere between the gates of the camp and the sandpit – or
Sandgrube
, as it was known. If a terrified prisoner dropped her shovel, Fraede would kick her on the ground or pick up the shovel and hit her across the back with it. Fraede was about
thirty years old, big and blonde. Rabenstein, however, usually waited until the work was underway before she lashed out, but by then Britta would already be straining on his leash.

In the early days the dog-handlers couldn’t control their animals. They were new to the job and in the spring and summer it was always hard as the dogs were
often on heat
. So if a prisoner fell or made a dash for the lake to get a drink, the dogs would pull so hard that the guards simply let them off the leash.

At this time the sandpit lay just outside the camp walls, near the lake, and close to the site where the SS houses were being built.

As soon as the gangs reached the pit they had to line up and start shovelling. By nine, the sun was already beating down and sweat rolled down their backs. They had to fill a shovel from one pile and drop the sand on another, until all the sand had been moved. Then they shovelled it back again, as guards shouted, ‘
Schnell, schnell
, lazy bitches.’ Another gang threw the sand one or two metres up a hill. ‘Full shovels, full shovels. Filthy cows. Scum. Bitch. Filthy cows.’ The shovels were too short or too long, or bent and broken.

Sometimes a gang had to pile the sand in a wagon and heave the wagon onto makeshift tracks. The wagon often jumped the tracks and the women would try to stop it tipping, but when it fell it spilled the contents and they’d have to fill it again. As the temperature rose the guards yelled and swore even louder; they’d beat the women on the back again and kick those that passed out.

Other gangs unloaded coke and stones from a barge on the lake. The women heaved sacks on their backs, while up the hill another gang pulled stone rollers to flatten land for road building. There was one giant roller and one smaller one. The handles had ropes attached and the women grabbed a rope and pulled. At least the road-rolling had a point. There was no point in shovelling sand.
^*

Soon the prisoners hated the sand. The Jehovah’s Witnesses thought the work was designed especially for them,
‘to make them give up their God’
, but many noticed it was the Jews who suffered most: they seemed weaker, and were less used to hardship, others said. By midday the women in the
Sandgrube
were sunburned on their arms and brows and their mouths were parched. When sand got inside their wooden clogs it burned the soles of their feet and rubbed on blisters. The
Sandgrube
was soon spotted with blood.

Rabenstein and Britta supervised the unloading gang. Standing up the
hill, they watched prisoners heave sacks of coal or stones and pile them into carts at the edge of the lake. The women pushed the carts up the hill to a dump, but to get there they had to cross a makeshift bridge made of planks, and often the older women fell off the planks and into the water. When this happened the guards would yell and kick the fallen woman. One day a woman hit Rabenstein on the head with a hoe to get her own back. She was sent to the
Strafblock
and not seen again.

Sometimes Rabenstein would select a group of women at random, line them up behind a heap of stones, and kick them with her boots. Or she would tell a prisoner to shovel soil from a massive pile by tunnelling from underneath until the pile started caving in. The prisoner had to keep shovelling till eventually the pile collapsed on her and she was buried alive. Rabenstein considered this a game and called it
‘
Abdecken
’
– ‘roof falling’. Afterwards, the prisoner, bruised and suffocating, was pulled out by friends.

Standing on a chair inside her wooden cell, Marianne Wachstein saw a similar ‘game’ enacted outside her window:

I looked out
and saw the following: a weak young woman – I later heard her name was Langer, sick with lupus, and with a piece of flesh sewn on her nose – had refused to shovel sand. They hit her hard but she still refused to pick up the shovel. They dragged her, holding her tight, to a well and sprayed her with a strong stream of water wherever it hit her. They put her like that into a heap of sand with only her head uncovered. They threw sand on her head and face. She constantly tried to break loose. This game went on so long that I got down from the small chair several times and sat down.

Wachstein noticed women guards were watching, and one of the commandant’s top men watched too.

Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, soon began to get the measure of the camp. Not all prisoners were sent on outside work gangs; Hanna’s skills – she was a locksmith and a glazier as well as a carpenter – were too valuable to waste on pointless toil, so she was used as a handywoman, which allowed her to snoop inside offices and blocks, and she collected things – an old newspaper, or a knife perhaps – which she smuggled back to her block. Her best early discovery was a dog-eared copy of
War and Peace
. Goebbels had long ago banned all Tolstoy’s books, along with other seditious works by authors such as Kipling, Hemingway, Remarque and Gide. They were usually either burned or used as lavatory paper, and Hanna had probably picked the book from a latrine’s supply. She hoped to find a chance to read it with her comrades.

Given that every minute of the day was now regimented by blaring sirens
and rules, talking to friends was hard. There were no corners, no hidden alleys for prisoners to slip into unseen. Inside the barracks, the women were so tightly packed together, and so carefully watched – always kept constantly on the move – that individual contacts or formation of small groups was virtually impossible, which was precisely the intention of block living.

The doctor Doris Maase loathed the constant company of riff-raff, but she phrased her misery carefully in her censored letter home: ‘
I wish I could be
built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn’t bother me as much, but I just can’t help it. It may sound paradoxical but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people.’

Prisoners known as Blockovas had been put in charge of blocks and ordered to enforce discipline. Sometimes, just before the lights went out, if her Blockova was not close by, Hanna Sturm tapped on the bunk below where her communist friend Käthe Rentmeister lay, and Käthe would alert another comrade, Tilde Klose, who lay below her. The women would exchange words about Hanna’s latest find, or if the Blockova was in a good mood she might even allow a little conversation from time to time.

One or two of these newly empowered Blockovas – mostly green and black triangles – behaved like tyrants from the start; certain names – Kaiser, Knoll and Ratzeweit – were already known amongst the political prisoners from Lichtenburg as trouble. But most of these first arrivals had been in prisons together many years and had learned to get along, whatever their backgrounds. A different-coloured piece of felt on their striped jackets wasn’t going to turn them into enemies overnight.

On Sundays there was some respite. Not everyone had Sundays off work: the Jewish block, Block 11, and the
Strafblock
prisoners had to labour as usual. There was also a Sunday
Appell
at midday and cleaning to be done. But in the late afternoon the prisoners all went for an obligatory ‘walk’ – a sort of forced recreational stroll along the Lagerstrasse, done to music. The guards in the gatehouse plugged the public address system into German radio and marching songs blared out, which at least meant the women could chat freely, as the minders couldn’t hear.

After the marching it was sometimes possible to lie quietly on a bunk, and to wash clothes and be ‘normal’. There was a Sunday dollop of jam, a square of margarine and a sausage. Prisoners lucky enough to have received money from home could spend it in the camp shop, which was situated inside the staff canteen, and stocked biscuits, toothpaste, and soap. During this ‘free time’ Hanna’s group tried to get together at the back of the block to read their book; one read out loud while another was lookout. They couldn’t believe their luck at
finding Tolstoy
in a concentration camp.

On Sundays prisoners also read letters from home and wrote back. A
letter was allowed once a month, and in these pre-war days as long as no mention was made of politics or the camp the women could still write at length. In her letters home, Doris Maase talked about how she’d been reading books too. Doris was working as a nurse in the
Revier
, where she also spent the night. It was still possible to receive packages from home, including books, and there was even a camp library of sorts – a collection of approved books, including several copies of
Mein Kampf
.

‘Today I try to have Sunday,’ wrote Doris to her sister in June 1939. ‘I’m reading Beyond the Woods by [Trygve] Gulbrannssen.’ Doris’s husband, Klaus, was in Buchenwald, so the two wrote censored letters back and forth, reading between each other’s lines. At least, as an inmate of Buchenwald, Klaus would know something of what Doris was going through; of course she could tell him nothing of the brutality she saw.

We know from her later testimony that Doris used to watch through the
Revier
windows as the work gangs were taken to the gate, led by an SS officer who walked them deliberately through a large pond, so that they’d start work soaking wet.

In June, Olga Benario’s comrade Sabo (Elise Saborowski Ewert), her coconspirator from her Brazilian days, suddenly buckled and collapsed as she worked in the
Sandgrube
. Sabo had been raped and tortured in a Brazilian jail, and had never recovered. Fraede kicked her but Sabo could not get up and was eventually brought into the
Revier
, where Doris was there to help. ‘Maase, where is Maase?’ was the shout heard every day around the bandaging station. ‘There are so many things I can hardly talk about, so much is waiting for you,’ she wrote in a letter to Klaus.

On another Sunday Doris’s letter to her sister enthused about good news from home – ‘At first I could not believe that something this pleasant still exists – I almost feel as if I’d been there’ – but her attempt to sound cheerful couldn’t hide her fear for her relatives on the outside. Doris’s father, also a doctor, was Jewish and she knew that as war approached, his side of the family would be increasingly at risk; new laws were making any form of normal life in Germany impossible and Doris’s father had been barred from practising. Though her mother was not Jewish – which explains why Doris received better treatment than other Jews in the camp – the pressure on those in ‘mixed marriages’ was increasing, with couples forced to consider separating or emigrating.

At one point Doris asks: ‘Are the parents relaxing as they should? I imagine roses blooming there and every day something else to harvest in the garden,’ but by the next letter she has learned that her mother and father are ‘crossing the Channel’ and she hoped for news.

‘As for me, I’m fine,’ wrote Doris to her sister, and it is almost tempting
to believe her, because she went on: ‘I wear my hair long and neatly knotted and I’m noticeably blossoming inside and out’ – though what she meant by ‘blossoming’ is impossible to say. We know from her later testimony that by late June temperatures in the
Sandgrube
were soaring and the women Doris was treating had burned skin, sores and boils. Worrying the prisoners even more were the terrifying screams now coming from the
Strafblock
. The prisoners had recently discovered that Olga was being held in one of the stifling wooden cells. Doris wrote in a letter home: ‘My darlings, it’s
so
hot.’

It was Ilse Gostynski who first discovered that Olga was in solitary confinement. Ilse had the job of emptying the cell buckets, and managed to pass a few words with Olga, whom she had got to know at Lichtenburg and whose story had made a deep impression. Ilse remembered Olga as ‘
a young woman
from Munich, very beautiful, very intelligent. In Ravensbrück, she was treated badly, she got almost nothing to eat.’

The cells were made of thin wood, just two metres long by two metres wide, and had no ventilation. Olga had nothing except a straw mattress and a bucket. Ilse made sure that Hanna Sturm knew about Olga’s plight and Hanna managed to get together biscuits and bread for Olga, which Ilse smuggled in next time she emptied the buckets. Comrades sent messages. If Zimmer had seen her, Ilse would have been locked up too. ‘I left some sweets for her or a slip of paper with comforting words from her fellow prisoners … She was in a very bad way,’ Ilse recalled.

Not long after finding Olga, Ilse was told she was to be released, so Olga’s go-between was gone.

Perhaps the most startlingly ‘normal’ aspect of the camp was that even as the brutality increased, prisoners were regularly being freed. Ilse’s English contacts had secured her a visa. On being told she could leave, she was sent first to the
Effektenkammer
, where the clothes she arrived in were retrieved, along with her valuables, and then she was free to go. The same day Ilse was on a train to Berlin, and within a week or two she was on another train heading for the Hook of Holland, from where she caught a ferry across the Channel to Harwich on the Essex coast. Here she was met by communist friends, the ones who had secured the papers necessary for release.

Safely in England, Ilse told her friends about Olga Benario and urged them to reach her husband’s family in Brazil; Ilse believed her own case would give Olga’s family hope that they could secure her release too, but they had to secure a visa before war broke out. A few months after arrival in England, Ilse, as a German, was declared an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man.