Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
On the evening of the evacuation, those selected to leave gathered at the gates: men, women, Jews and non-Jews, Kapos and non-Kapos. Children were told they couldn’t leave, but some came. Just before the gates opened the guards handed every prisoner a loaf of bread and told them to get in line, women at the back.
This was not the first death march. In the early years of the war the Nazis force-marched Jews into the ghettos and Red Army soldiers into the camps. In the summer and autumn of 1944 they marched many thousands of Hungarians to Germany. But this forced march of some 60,000 enfeebled, terrified Auschwitz survivors, including 20,000 women, out of the camp gates into the snowy night, with Russian artillery sounding just three miles away, surpassed all others in horror.
Lydia held on tight to Aniko. It was vital not to lose each other as the crowd now began to move. The guards shouted: ‘
Alles antreten
’ – Fall in, line up. Get out. The dogs barked. An air-raid alert sounded and for some minutes all the lights went out, plunging the camp into darkness. People thought of hiding, but what was the point if the camp was going to blow up? As the prisoners moved away they knew the Red Army was close, as they could see ‘Stalin’s candles’ – the Soviet Katyusha rockets – lighting up the skies.
The line shuffled out down the snowy road, the men in the front, the women at the back, with SS on all sides, carrying rifles. The temperature was plummeting. Alina Brewda remembered the guards ordering them to run, prodding with bayonets. While some ran, others stumbled. Before long they saw the first dead men lying in the snow, shot for falling over. Soon they saw women shot as well. Allegra kept slipping as snow got stuck on her wooden shoes. When Alina couldn’t keep up, stronger runners either side picked her up under the arms and carried her, so she ‘ran’ between them barely touching the ground.
Now they slowed a little. The SS had calmed down as they put more distance between themselves and the Russians. Guards started to overtake on motorbikes or in cars. The factory workers’ group tried to stay together, but soon they got mixed up with the massed ranks from Birkenau. Sisters, cousins, friends, all feared losing each other. They knew it meant death to be left alone amid the trudging crowd.
On the first day, the guards allowed them to rest a few times and relieve themselves on the side of the road. But they were afraid they’d fall asleep, squatting there, and freeze to death. They’d eaten their loaf of bread and anything grabbed before leaving. ‘So we ate the snow,’ said Maria Rundo, who noticed groups of male corpses, in prison stripes, near where she stopped. ‘They’d had their skulls cut open right across the top of their heads with a knife, and their brains scooped out. We supposed the SS did it with long sticks, with some kind of wooden ball attached to the end. There were SS on the march who were armed with such sticks.’ After this Maria tried not to look at the ground at all. ‘I pretended it was all a fairy tale and watched the sunset and sunrise instead.’
Shots rang out repeatedly behind them, as the SS executed any stragglers. The marchers now trampled over corpses strewn along the road, shot where they slipped and fell. Lydia saw a blue-eyed boy under her feet and stepped over him. One girl and her mother carried an exhausted younger sister until they couldn’t carry her any more. ‘So we sacrificed her and she died.’ They knew the guards had killed her, because they heard the shot seconds later.
After three days they lost track of time. In Lydia and Aniko’s factory group the marchers reckoned they were already down from 500 to 300. Sometimes they seemed to be trudging with thousands, sometimes just with a small group, separated temporarily from the billowing crowd.
Mostly they tried to sleep at night in barns, but often there was no room, and many lay down in the road to freeze to death. Some even managed to flee, reaching nearby farms where Poles hid them. Others were found and shot. Once the guards sent Lydia and Aniko to a small barn with soft dry hay where they slept for a few hours. They thought of hiding in the hay and asking the Polish farmers for asylum, but next morning the Germans came and stabbed the hay with bayonets, shooting anyone they found. On another occasion they rested in a cowshed where peasants were milking the cows. The peasants gave the marchers bowls full of warm fresh milk.
Allegra remembered another night when the SS marched them to a barn with one guard carrying a can of gasoline. Everyone thought the SS were going to burn them all to death, ‘but I was too tired to worry’. So she lay down in the barn and to her astonishment found her cousin Berry next to her, whom she hadn’t seen since their arrival at Auschwitz. Berry had worked
at ‘Canada’, the warehouse where the clothes and personal belongings of the gassed were sorted. She gave Allegra some spare warm clothes she had brought with her from ‘Canada’.
‘We vowed we wouldn’t let anyone separate us again, and for the next days we marched in line holding each other.’ More and more stragglers were being shot. At one point Allegra told Berry she couldn’t go on – ‘Let them shoot me.’ Berry urged her on. Further ahead, they reversed roles, Allegra encouraging Berry. At one point a friend called Diamante joined the girls and carried Berry some of the way.
After two or three days the SS broke up the endless column, as they marched the men down different roads towards Mauthausen, Buchenwald or Gross-Rosen. The women kept on towards Ravensbrück, 420 miles northwest of Auschwitz. Yet often, straying in the Polish wasteland, the SS lost the way. Word of the chaos on the Polish roads got back to SS headquarters in Berlin, so Rudolf Höss, the former Auschwitz commander, was sent out to assess the evacuation.
In his memoir Höss said he was surprised to find that already the Russian armoured spearheads were fanning out on the east side of the Oder, while on every road and track west of the river he found prisoners stumbling through deep snow without food. He first ran into men bound for the concentration camp of Gross-Rosen, ‘but most of the non-commissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea how to get there.’ On his first night out there he came across countless bodies of prisoners who had just been shot and were still bleeding.
Allegra and Berry’s group marched for another 250 miles west and then north, passing through Prague and on into Germany, where shelling was intense. They spent one night in a field with dead bodies and dead horses and the next day the guards herded them onto train wagons. Just before the train left:
I spotted loaves of bread on the ground. I don’t know how I gathered the strength to run and steal two loaves and run back to Berry to give them to her. I picked up a blanket from a dead person and we climbed into the open train car, keeping the bread hidden. We covered ourselves with the blanket and during the night, while the train was moving through the snowfall, we ate the bread and also ate the snow from on top of the blanket. We travelled this way through the night and the following afternoon we reached Ravensbrück.
Alina Brewda, the Jewish doctor, was put in a covered train that went north-west through Hamburg and then doubled back to Berlin, where they
saw mile after mile of ruins ‘and rejoiced’. Guards loaded Lydia and Aniko’s group onto open cattle wagons in Loslau in Silesia, with only standing room. Aniko had developed a septic sore, caused by the string of her makeshift bag, which had cut into her flesh.
‘We were snowed in,’ Lydia recalled. ‘We were standing sardines. Falling was impossible, although we couldn’t feel our frozen numbed feet, which had no strength to support us. Have you ever heard of human beings dying upright? That’s what happened on the death trains.’
Lydia and Aniko stood near the front of the wagon where the SS guard sat on a bench with his German Shepherd dog at his feet. The dog got up, and Lydia crawled under its belly and lay there for warmth. She was sure the guard would tell the dog to bite her, or he’d shoot her. But he just complained ‘My dog has no space’ and told her to get out of the way. ‘We travelled this way through the night and the following afternoon we arrived at Ravensbrück.’
The Auschwitz women arrived at Ravensbrück in different groups over several days towards the end of January 1945. Walter Schenk, the crematorium chief, recalled there were so many dead amongst them that the furnaces couldn’t cope so the Fürstenberg crematorium was used to burn the corpses as well. More transports kept coming.
‘Half-frozen dead-on-their-feet women’ fell out of the trucks, said Lydia of her trainload. There were untold numbers of dead, taken straight off for burning. At the gates the guards made what Lydia and Aniko thought at first was going to be a selection. Instead, ‘a small ugly woman at a control table, whose cheeks and lips were red with lipstick, just directed them on through’. Lydia said: ‘We kept guessing, would they gas us or shoot us?’ The sisters feared Aniko’s wound was now so septic that she would certainly be taken away for killing. ‘I want to go to mother,’ she whimpered.
The guards sent almost all the women to the tent at first, to crouch in the mud. Allegra was soon allocated a barracks and grabbed a plank ‘bed’ of four narrow boards, sensing ‘if I had to sit in the mud one moment more I’d die’. The bread came round, she looked away for a split second and a girl snatched one of the boards. ‘I began to hit this girl, pulling the board and screaming at her: “I’m not going to die.” Berry … screamed at me, “You’re killing her,” and I said again: “I’m not going to die.”’
Alina Brewda was among those new arrivals forced to sleep out in the snow. Zdenka Nedvedova, the camp’s Czech doctor, who had arrived from Auschwitz herself six months earlier, came to look at the death-marchers:
Everything was white with snow when they poured in – thousands of them; so many that the guards couldn’t sort them out or separate them from other prisoners who went in among them and asked what had
happened and looked for missing friends. They told of their terrible journey and how they’d left Auschwitz burning behind them. When we went to bed they were still out there and when we woke up they were still there too – halos of frost around their faces.
Lydia and Aniko were ‘shovelled’ into the tent, where Lydia tried to protect Aniko’s septic hand as the soup was distributed to the surging crowd. A ladle splashed soup into the bowl tied on a string around Lydia’s waist, and the two girls shared it.
Aniko now seemed close to death from her abscess, and the guards and Kapos shunned her because of the stink from the wound. Someone sent her to the
Revier
, where she was operated on and came back with a clean bandage, but the tent was so filthy that they soon grew lice-infested, ‘like at Birkenau’.
After several days, when they thought they’d been abandoned to die, Lydia and Aniko were suddenly called to be registered. They weren’t worried that this meant selection, as in that case surely the SS would have selected them at the gates. Lydia was made to stand on a measuring device. ‘Why were they curious suddenly to know my height?’ Then the girls received their new camp numbers on a slip of white cloth: 99626 for Lydia and 99627 for Aniko.
Soon after, the SS sent Aniko and Lydia to ‘a place in the woods called the
Jugendlager
, Youth Camp’ and set them to work filling straw mattresses. ‘There was something odd about this Youth Camp that we couldn’t grasp,’ said Lydia.
Some little women in grey were hurrying about in silence. Who were they and what was their business? And as we were not severely guarded, I opened a door, out of curiosity. A large room was crammed with old women sitting on the floor. I asked where they came from and one of them said Budapest. I looked around, horrified, thinking of my grandmother, whom I’d left in Budapest. I hurried out and opened the nearby door. It was a very small room containing several naked corpses.
Lydia and Aniko stayed only a few days at the Youth Camp, where they received an extra bowl of soup each day. Years later Lydia learned that they had filled straw mattresses for Ravensbrück’s new extermination camp.
A
s Lydia Vago watched women die at the Uckermark Youth Camp, Cicely Lefort and Mary Young were hearing rumours that the new camp was a far better place to go, with a well-equipped sickbay and good treatment. Some even called it a sanatorium. Sylvia Salvesen, the Norwegian
Revier
worker, and others said they’d heard such talk before; any change at Ravensbrück had always been for the worse. Then a new rumour started; the slum blocks heard that at the new camp they wouldn’t even have to work or to stand for morning
Appell
. In the middle of January, with temperatures dropping to minus 30, women were now volunteering to go.
Cicely Lefort and Mary Young appeared outside Sylvia’s window at the
Revier
. They needed to talk. They had put their names on a list for a new camp, they said. As Sylvia knew, the two were living in one of the most overcrowded blocks. The Norwegian woman had recently befriended them, particularly Mary, who was very frail. Aged sixty-two, her slight frame was bent with exhaustion, her legs were swollen and she was running a high fever.
Cicely, the SOE woman, once athletic, tall and sinewy, was also now bent and skeletal. Treite had operated on her in the autumn for stomach ulcers and swollen legs, but now she had acute diarrhoea. They’d heard ‘
excellent’ reports
about the new place; if only they could avoid roll-call they might be able to hold out. It would only be weeks now, wouldn’t it? Didn’t Sylvia agree it was a good idea to go? asked Cicely. ‘She blurted all this out in a rush, nervous and excited. Her eyes were terror-stricken and she was nervous of my answer.’
Sylvia tried to warn them, but they didn’t want to listen, and nor did hundreds of others who also saw the Youth Camp as their only chance to hold
on until the liberation. By mid-January General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s second Belorussian Front, advancing through East Prussia, along the Baltic coast, was just 400 miles from Ravensbrück. In the west the Allies had smashed the Wehrmacht’s counter-attack in the battle of the Bulge and were driving on towards the Rhine. Nothing scared the women more than the prospect of dying in these last few weeks, before their liberators arrived.