If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (98 page)

Yes, she could have helped. She was near us when the selections happened, but she did nothing.

Anise started to cry. She had never talked about the camp at all ‘until Faurisson’, she said. Robert Faurisson, a British-born academic who lectured at the University of Lyon, wrote articles in the 1970s questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers and saying there was no proof of a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. In support he cited the records of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which didn’t mention a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. Faurisson’s claims caused uproar around the world, and pain amongst Ravensbrück survivors, in particular those who had seen family and friends taken off to be gassed.

By the 1970s Germaine Tillion was busy studying African tribes again, so Anise Girard took on the task of refuting Faurisson. ‘We were terribly tired as old deportees; we had wanted to forget and drive all that out of our lives, but when we read what Faurisson said we had to do something.’

If the International Red Cross files that he saw did not mention a gas chamber, it came as no surprise: Himmler fooled the ICRC over the gas chamber at Ravensbrück and much else besides. The facts were confirmed before the post-war Hamburg trials. Johann Schwarzhuber, the SS officer who conducted the gassing, described the gas chamber and outlined how the killing happened.

Later more SS evidence emerged. Fritz Suhren, who in early statements confirmed the existence of the gas chamber but denied any personal involvement, escaped just before the Hamburg trial. Recaptured, he appeared before a French court at Rastatt in 1949, where his role was proven. Suhren was even shown a ‘Mittwerda list’ with his signature at the bottom. The list, dated 6 April 1945, with 450 names of women selected for gassing, had been obtained by prisoners and secretly brought out to be used in evidence.

Other witness testimony later came to light, some of it given by survivors of the men’s camp who had worked in or around the gas chamber. Because these survivors lived behind the Iron Curtain after the war, their evidence was at first almost unknown in the West, but it added important new details. Anise discovered the evidence of Emanuel Kolarik, a Czech prisoner who did odd jobs around the gas chamber – cleaning and moving bodies. He said that during his work he often spoke to the men who performed the gassing. These were the Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz imported by Schwarzhuber to form the Ravensbrück
Sonderkommando
.

In the yard
beside the building the women were given a small towel and a piece of soap and taken into the left side of the building, where they had to undress. They were told that they had to wash well, as this was important in the camp where they were going. In the gas chamber the SS shouted to them: ‘Wash well, there’s no hurry.’

According to Kolarik the men of the
Sonderkommando
took the dead bodies out of the gas chamber by dragging them with hooks. ‘Many of the dead had obviously tried to escape or fight their way out at the last minute, because the dead women’s fists were clasped tight, holding clumps of hair, and bodies were clinging to each other so that the workers couldn’t disentangle them.’

On his way to do repairs near the gas chamber, Kolarik saw a Jewish worker picking up dead bodies and piling them up outside the crematorium like logs ready for burning. The worker wore an apron made of sacking as protection, and in the apron pocket he had some bread. ‘This prisoner was so desensitised that he ate the bread he had in his apron while he went off to collect a new body. This spectacle made me vomit.’ Kolarik called his boss over to show him the scene – an SS man – and he vomited too.

Anise also unearthed evidence suggesting that there may have been a second gas chamber at Ravensbrück. Both she and Germaine had always wondered how it was that the primitive wooden gas chamber described at Hamburg by Schwarzhuber and others had managed to kill so many, given its small capacity. Furthermore, the wooden structure was reportedly destroyed in the very first days of April, and yet there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that gassing went on longer than that. Other testimony shows that it went on until late April, so where?

It was Anise Girard who first drew attention to the little-known testimony of Walter Jahn, the electrician from Dresden and prisoner in Ravensbrück men’s camp, who testified at the trial of Oswald Pohl that he had designed a concrete gas chamber for Ravensbrück, but the construction
was delayed. Jahn’s design was quite different from the makeshift wooden gas chamber that we know was used. His chamber, he said, commissioned by Schwarzhuber and Höss, was sited near the north wall, disguised as the
Neue Wäscherei
– the new washroom. Jahn said it was even inspected by Höss, Suhren and Pohl at the end of February, and again in March, and he implied that it did function.

‘
I did the electrical equipment
myself, including the signalling side,’ said Jahn. The entrance looked quite harmless, ‘like a waiting room’, but inside were two ‘bathing rooms’ with about thirty spray heads. In the middle was an exhaust with fan-extraction. The extractors cleared the poisoned air. Victims were taken out and thrown into a grave and their belongings removed by truck.

Since it came to light, Jahn’s testimony has always caused controversy, as no sign of such a gas chamber has ever been discovered and survivors didn’t mention such a building, leading to speculation that either Jahn was lying or his gas chamber was never used. It remains possible though that the camouflage was so effective that the building was not identified as a gas chamber. The site has never been excavated for signs of such a structure, nor has digging been done to find the mass graves that Jahn spoke of. Thus Jahn’s testimony cannot be ruled out. And even if his gas chamber was never used, it could have been part of a plan to gas far more extensively at Ravensbrück than has hitherto been supposed.

The truth about Jahn’s gas chamber will probably never be known. But we do have overwhelming evidence about other gassings at the camp. Particularly in the final weeks, scores of prisoners saw a mobile gas chamber – described as a gas van, a gassing truck and even a gassing railway carriage – partly concealed in the woods. Some prisoners said there was more than one gassing vehicle.

Karolina Lanckorońska spoke of a motor bus. It arrived in late March and was stationed in the woods close to the camp. ‘
The motor bus
was painted green; the windows were painted and the wheels were quite close to one another.’

In a report to London, based on interviews with the survivors straight after the liberation,
a British diplomat
said the women he interrogated spoke of ‘
two gas chambers
’ – one of them ‘a converted train wagon, brought in from Auschwitz’. Countless Polish survivors spoke of ‘
gas vans
’ and ‘gas lorries’. Irena Dragan’s account of bandaged women gassed in a lorry at the Youth Camp was one of the most vivid. Other prisoners at the Youth Camp talked of hearing ‘the continual drone of the vehicle engines at night … and a desperate crying’. The prisoner secretary Erna Cassens, a German communist, said she heard that a gas van was used when the gas chamber wasn’t working
well. ‘It became known that women were loaded onto railway wagons on a spur in the woods. In the sealed wagons gas was introduced. After a certain time the wagons were opened and the bodies of prisoners unloaded and taken to the crematorium.’

Mary O’Shaughnessy believed the gas van was ‘a railway wagon parked on a siding somewhere in the woods’. Immediately after the liberation, the Polish radiologist Mlada Tauforova described finding such a railway wagon in the woods, and she made a report on it to the Soviet authorities. Maria Apfelkammer described seeing inside ‘a gas wagon, in the shape of a long bus’. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, was ordered to dismantle one of the gas trucks. She said later that she didn’t have time and it fell into Russian hands. Zdenka Nedvedova also saw the gassing trucks after the SS had gone: ‘We found abandoned vehicles near the Youth Camp – something like removal vans – that had a mechanism allowing exhaust gases to be pumped inside.’

There are other reasons to believe that gassing trucks were used; for one thing, the expertise was here. The transport chief, Josef Bertl, had learned how to gas Jews in trucks while based in Lublin in the first days of the war. Among the new SS chiefs who arrived at Ravensbrück in the winter of 1944–5 was Albert Sauer, who had also used gassing trucks in Poland. Suhren was commandant of Sachsenhausen when experiments in the use of mobile gassing trucks were carried out there. All these men knew each other from previous postings and would almost certainly have pooled ideas on how to kill, especially as in March and April the numbers dying were still not high enough. Fritz Suhren told a colleague that he’d received direct orders from the Führer ‘
to liquidate the entire camp
’.

For the best advice on mobile gassing, Suhren could go to Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange, who pioneered the technique. Ordered to oversee the murder of Poland’s mentally ill at the start of the war, Lange operated a fleet of three-ton trucks, converted so that up to 100 people could be poisoned at a time as the truck’s carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were fed into a cabin at the back. Lange was later posted to Drögen, the security police headquarters near Ravensbrück. In March 1945 he and Suhren may well have discussed how best to gas women in trucks. Perhaps Lange still had some of his trucks with him at Drögen. The fleet were said to have been returned to Berlin, but this wasn’t far away.

In her diary for every day of March, Germaine Tillion noted ‘
la chasse, la chasse
’ (the hunt), and Loulou Le Porz remembers that this was what it was like. ‘It became dangerous to be out on the Lagerstrasse. It was “
la chasse à l’homme
” [manhunt]. Winkelmann or Pflaum would just appear with a lorry
and say
Allez hop
, and you’d be taken. We certainly went out as little as possible during “
la chasse
”.’

After the mass selection of 2 March the rules of
la chasse
kept on changing. In the first week of March it wasn’t only the women herded into the wired-off death zone who had reason to fear selection. Now lorries drove down the Lagerstrasse, pulled up outside a block where Winkelmann had been selecting, and Neudeck, Koehler and Rapp jumped out to pile his victims straight into their truck. Blockovas and Stubovas were told to help, as was anybody passing by.

In early March, three of the painting gang, Denise Dufournier, Christiane de Cuverville and Claire Davinroy, passed by Block 11 where a truck was loading women. Seeing the French trio, the guards ordered them to help carry the victims, and they dared not refuse. The terrified women pleaded with the French girls to tell them where the truck was going and all three denied knowing.

As they stood back and stared in horror at the loaded lorry, the trio became aware of SS eyes lingering on them too. ‘
We sensed something unusual
,’ Denise said, ‘as if the guards could not resist the idea of grabbing us too.’ Glancing at each other, the three walked rapidly away.

By the middle of March selections were no longer confined to the sick blocks; they happened in ordinary blocks too, and at any time. A guard might simply turn up outside a block, shout ‘
Appell!
’, and the women had to line up before Winkelmann, sometimes with Schwarzhuber or Pflaum at his side. Selections were even made in the privileged blocks. Sixty-four-year-old Gemma La Guardia Gluck, now grey and frail, was picked out from Block 2, at which she ‘
screamed like a child
’, crying out: ‘I don’t want to go up the crematorium chimney!’ Hearing her, Gemma’s Blockova reminded Fritz Suhren who Gemma’s brother was, and she was taken off the list.

Selections took place at the Siemens plant too. Margareta van der Kuit remembers an SS officer coming to the new living barracks:

Everyone had to stand
outside and the officer called out numbers. Those chosen were often older women, whose daughters were also working at the Siemens camp. The daughters were very worried about where their mothers were going, so the officer said they would be taken to somewhere where they would be better off and where they wouldn’t have to work so hard.

Basia Zajączkowska, the Jewish woman who survived the Kielce ghetto, said: ‘
We had a selection
once – they sorted out older people who had injured legs and those who were generally well. Those sorted out were sent back [from Siemens] to Ravensbrück to the crematorium.’ A Yugoslav prisoner
called Vida Zavrl said Siemens prisoners had to line up and lift skirts in front of a commission who noted the numbers of those selected. Anyone judged incapable of working was now in danger of gassing, said Yvonne Useldinger, the Luxembourger at Siemens: ‘Grey-haired prisoners began to colour their hair, but when it rained at roll-call the colour ran down their faces.’

As part of the drive to empty the camp, selections for subcamps – those further west, away from the Russian front – were also stepped up. Large numbers were taken to subcamps attached to male concentration camps as well. Between January and March, 2000 Ravensbrück women were transported to Buchenwald subcamps alone, and more went to subcamps of Dachau and Flossenbürg. Pflaum entered the painting gang’s block one day calling everyone out for a transport to Berlin to dig ditches. The painters climbed up into the attic of their block, while others flattened themselves under bunks as the ‘cattle merchant’ raged around the block beating prisoners out of the door. Survivors of the ditch-digging transport returned two weeks later, telling how many had died of exhaustion or had been killed by bombs.

Given the danger of
la chasse
many prisoners started trying to get out to a subcamp, expecting to be safer, only to find that the chances of survival at these camps were in some ways worse. Wanda Wojtasik and Krysia Czyż, the Polish rabbits, assumed the numbers of dead prisoners and managed to slip in amongst a column of women heading to the tiny subcamp of Neustadt-Glewe, where they found prisoners starving to death instead of being gassed. Cut off from all sources of supplies, the camp received no rations and the prisoners were fed on soup made of potato peelings. ‘There were no beds, and a floor with a vast number of dead bodies jamming it solid,’ said Wanda.