Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
On 1 February French POWs turned up and reported that the Russians were only ten miles away. According to the French, the Germans now planned to evacuate all the prisoners at the last minute. In the sickbay, Suzanne Guyotat heard that all those in the hospital would be left behind and the building blown up. Others scoffed at the idea that the Germans would bother evacuating them now. That evening the French held a ‘liberation banquet’ and invited two of the French POWs. ‘I woke up two or three times that night. I was too happy to sleep and every time I woke I ate a little lunch of jam and crackers,’ recalled Virginia. Next morning the women learned that a German patrol had come upon the banquet and shot dead the two French POWs as they sat at a table.
That day the prisoners roamed wider, and found the guards’ living quarters, which were in total disarray – empty liquor bottles, make-up, maps and
clothes strewn everywhere. On 2 February news came that the Russians were only four kilometres away. Virginia tried to make crêpes with the food she had stolen, as it was the ‘
Jour des Rois
’, a French holiday, but Janette had terrible dysentery and was unable to eat. Outside, women were digging graves for the shot Frenchmen, when a new commotion erupted. The girls ran inside to warn the others: ‘It’s the Germans. The SS from Ravensbrück. They’ve come to get us. They’ve ordered us to line up outside.’
Outside the prisoners saw the Ravensbrück men rampaging around like madmen. Having come to round up prisoners, but scared now of capture by the Russians, they were venting their terror on the women. One guard shot a young girl called Monique as she walked back to the block to retrieve something she’d forgotten. Others were shot simply for not moving fast enough towards the gates. The women who came into line were now marched off away from the Russian advance and back towards Ravensbrück, 200 miles to the west, but some stayed behind.
Suzanne Guyotat and about twenty others in the
Revier
couldn’t join the exit march. As Suzanne had feared, the SS tried to blow up the
Revier
, but in their panic to escape they botched it; most of the women survived. For two more days ‘we lay there, poor women freezing, moaning, shivering and dying,’ said Suzanne. ‘One beautiful morning – it was February 3rd – three Russians appeared outside our block. Where had they come from, these victors, dressed in their marvellous fur hats? They moved forward cautiously, bicycles in their hands.’ Over the next days the Russians cared for the women, fed them, warmed them, and reassured them. One even made a wooden cross for Suzanne to put on the grave of a dead friend.
The Königsberg death-marchers reached Ravensbrück a week later, and the sight of these starved, dying women, packed in a mass of tangled bodies, some swollen and disfigured, others emaciated and shrunken, would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Many died on the journey, and the guards shot stragglers. Trucks brought the survivors on the final lap, arriving at intervals over the course of two days.
Mary Lindell was walking up the Lagerstrasse when two trucks pulled up and guards dumped bodies on the ground. At first she wondered why they didn’t take the dead straight off to the crematorium, then she saw some were still alive. The guards started whipping them to make them move. Next day another truck came and some eighty women fell out. Their yellow skin stretched over bone and their eyes stared bright, they shivered in the cold. None of them could walk without help. Virginia Lake – a bag of bones herself – looked at her friend Janette and saw ‘a shapeless heap lying in her own filth, unable to talk and no longer reacting to hunger or cold’.
The French heard that compatriots had returned from Königsberg and came to find old friends, only to recoil at the sight of ‘
the remains of
that charming convoy of French women’, as Denise Dufournier put it. These were the same women who had breezed into Ravensbrück six months earlier, all optimism and elegance, with their Hermès scarves. Now ‘we were shocked at their haggard eyes’.
Many died as they lay on the Lagerstrasse, but it was the sight of the living that caused most distress. Loulou Le Porz hardly recognised her friend Nicole de Witasse, the young French Red Cross ambulance driver who had so nearly escaped during the train journey to Ravensbrück: ‘That youthful, spirited girl I had known was now a wizened old woman who could barely move and had very little time to live. I have never forgotten the sight. The only consolation was that her parents would never see her like that.’
The onlookers learned that the Russians had almost liberated these Königsberg women. The stronger among them told the camp women here how they had heard the Russian guns, and as they marched away they had turned back to see the camp on fire. Now the Ravensbrück women understood that the same fate – forced evacuation – awaited them.
The memory of those Königsberg faces would haunt the camp women for another reason too. Everyone knew by now that the French convoy had been sent to the punishment camp because of the protest they had staged against making arms at Torgau. Loulou Le Porz was one of those who felt Jeannie Rousseau had made a tragic error of judgement by starting the protest that brought such terrible results. ‘She was unusual – impulsive,’ said Loulou. ‘Of course – it is all very well to have courage but you must know how to use it.’
The guards herded the Königsberg death-march survivors into the tent and left them to die. Virginia Lake had first peered inside the tent on arrival in September, and seen its horrors from afar again on return to Ravensbrück in October. Now, on her third arrival, she was herself shoved into the stinking structure and left to seek inches of space for herself and for Janette.
Over the months the tent had changed. A partition now ran down the middle and there were bunks along one end, and lavatories of a sort, but the filth and overcrowding was worse than ever. Virginia and Janette tried to occupy a cranny in one corner where a Polish Blockova had marked out an area for herself and her entourage of hangers-on. The Blockova kicked Virginia and Janette away.
Corpses lay everywhere, covered with whatever came to hand. Everyone had dysentery and few had the strength to reach the lavatories. At night the situation grew ‘frightful, unimaginable’. Women needing to reach the buckets crawled in the dark and groped over bodies. They were usually too late and the filth around the exit was atrocious. ‘The Germans ordered holes to be dug
about three feet in diameter outside the tent, and women would be found squatting around the same hole.’
Virginia watched her friends grow weaker every day. ‘I knew I was like them. Janette was obviously dying. Her once bloated body was now a limp rag.’ Virginia appealed to the Polish Blockova to let her take Janette to the
Revier
. This ‘husky brute of a woman’ refused, so Virginia and a French friend managed to drag Janette there anyway. Virginia said goodbye as Janette lay on a stretcher in a corridor, surrounded by corpses.
The sadness, the tragedy and the horror of it all shocked me. Janette’s eyes, which shortly before were expressionless, now seemed to glow with adoration as she gazed up into my face. I knew she loved me. I wondered whether she realised that she was dying. She was not suffering now. She was no longer cold, nor did she feel her hunger.
Virginia told her she was in the infirmary now, would be cared for and would soon be home with her mother. ‘Good night. Sleep well,’ she said, and left to go back to the tent.
The days dragged on. ‘We were weak and listless and drugged by the horrors that surrounded us.’ The Polish Blockova and her crew barred others from using a washroom of sorts at one end of the tent which also had a stove; she looked at her fellow tent dwellers as if they were ‘untouchables, liceridden, filth’. One of the German hangers-on stole from the prisoners and struck them with a heavy rod if they came too close, as she didn’t want their lice.
One day this German spotted Virginia’s wedding ring and demanded it. Virginia’s knuckles were so swollen that she couldn’t pull it off. The woman goaded her until, in tears, she blurted out to another Austrian woman: ‘I’m American. Does she steal the wedding rings of Americans too?’ The Austrian said something in German to the thief, who looked at Virginia ‘as though she had seen me for the first time’. She told Virginia she could keep her ring.
Several days later, the guards moved Virginia and a group of her Königsberg comrades into a regular block where the dire conditions seemed blissful compared with the tent. They were even sent to the bathhouse for a shower, although in a final humiliation, Virginia’s head was shaved.
There was no call to leave the block now, and no
Appell
. The women lay listless on bunks, growing weaker every day. ‘We were losing our friends one by one and were on the borderline of life and death,’ said Virginia. They tried to hold on, forcing themselves to get up at least once a day to wash and forage for food. A friend from early days smuggled some extra soup to Virginia.
On 26 February, about a week after Virginia’s arrival in the new block, the Blockova bawled: ‘Will the American who was at Königsberg come immediately.’ Virginia climbed down and a woman gave her new clothes. Two days later – on 28 February – the Blockova announced that Virginia d’Albert Lake was ‘wanted at once’.
Terrified, Virginia was led across the camp to the office inside the bunker. Prisoner secretaries sat at desks and smiled at her with interest. One offered a seat. A woman guard entered, smiled, and explained something in German. Virginia didn’t understand a word. A male SS officer then led her out of the gate to another office building where two women in Nazi uniform were sitting. To Virginia’s astonishment, the higher-ranking of the two inquired in perfect English for her name and date of birth. The younger woman said: ‘Tonight you will be happy. You are going away.’
Virginia was led to the
Revier
, where she was briefly examined, and on to the
Effektenkammer
, where staff were throwing clean clothes at German women busily undressing and dressing. The staff told Virginia to discard her dirty clothes in a bin and put on clean clothes that were handed to her; they didn’t have the big black crosses that marked prisoners’ clothes. Outside, the guards called the German women prisoners away, and Virginia understood they were being freed. She then found herself back in the bunker office, along with the English-speaking Nazi woman. The woman asked courteously: ‘Sit down, won’t you, there, beside the stove. You will have a short time to wait. Your train leaves at four-thirty.’
‘But where am I going?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think you’re going to a Red Cross camp near Lake Constance.’
The Nazi woman spoke of how she’d been at Auschwitz until recently, and of her fear of the advancing Russians. She told Virginia it would have been better if the Americans were heading this way, and she turned and shook her fist at a portrait of Hitler on the wall. ‘To think that that man is responsible for all of this.’ Virginia asked the officer where she learned her English. ‘In New York,’ she said. ‘I spent several months there with relatives of mine. America is a wonderful place.’
A door opened and a girl entered with two guards. It was Geneviève de Gaulle. Virginia had seen Geneviève before, and recognised her straight brown hair, dark eyes and easy smile. She learned that they were travelling companions; their release was part of an exchange for German prisoners of war.
Geneviève had been summoned earlier that day from her privileged bunker cell and told she was being set free. Like Virginia, she was given new clothes, including her own woollen coat from Paris, taken from her on the
day she arrived at Ravensbrück, almost exactly a year before. Geneviève described later how during the earlier formalities in the camp office she also met a mysterious female Nazi officer who told her she loved Paris and asked her to sign her photograph album.
Now in the bunker office Geneviève saw two SS officers, as well as ‘
a terribly emaciated
woman who looked very, very old’. On the woman’s shaven skull, tufts of hair protruded here and there. ‘She looked like Gandhi at the end of his life.’ The two prisoners exchanged glances but didn’t dare exchange words. Geneviève then took Virginia’s hand and together they descended the three steps outside the bunker. Dawn was breaking. Flanked by SS officers and a female guard, they walked out of the gate and into the wind and snow.
W
ithin an hour of leaving Ravensbrück, Geneviève and Virginia, along with three SS guards, boarded a train at Fürstenberg, and by evening they were in Berlin, struggling across the smouldering city, sheltering in subways blocked with fallen timbers before catching a train on south. Two days later they reached Munich. It was midnight and the small group were once again stumbling across craters and rubble and staring up at carcasses of buildings, silhouetted against the night sky. Soon they were on a train bound for Ulm, but bombing raids halted the train and the group were forced to walk several miles, bypassing ruined tracks.
They stayed overnight at an inn where Germans huddled around a radio. Virginia recalled the radio announcer saying, ‘A formation is over Ulm. Ulm is being bombed. A formation is leaving Ulm. The formation is over …’ and suddenly the building shook violently, chairs overturned and people ran terrified for the door. Virginia ‘felt no fear’ and didn’t move. Getting up, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and thought: ‘
What ugly creature
is this? A woman, yes, but neither hips nor breasts; great lustreless eyes staring out of a grey countenance.’ Over the days, the SS guards grew friendlier, and one night one of the women guards shared a room with Virginia and Geneviève and showed them family photographs. At night ‘she locked the door and put the key under her pillow’.
After a week on the move, the two women were delivered to an internment centre at Liebenau, near Lake Constance, where aliens – mostly Americans and British women and children – were held for the duration of the war, living in pleasant buildings set in rolling hills, with good food and
care. Writing to her husband, Philippe, Virginia said: ‘My own darling, how strange to be able to write to you. Last June seems so far away that you and my past life seem like a dream.’ Geneviève was visited by delegates from the Geneva Red Cross, of whom she requested a few small ‘luxuries’ including ‘underwear (not wool); a tailored suit (not too warm); a dozen handkerchiefs; six pairs of stockings; soap, vitamins and cigarettes’.