by Paige Bowers
When the six-acre compound opened on May 15, 1939, 867 women filed through the entrance after standing at attention for two hours in the hot sun. Five years later the population had swelled to nearly twenty thousand. Living conditions had declined dramatically, between the filth, disease, decreased rations, and overcrowding. Fürstenbergers had once watched the rare daytime convoy march through town with curiosity. By 1944 the sentiment had changed. Children threw rocks at the new prisoners, and adults spat at them as they passed. These women were traitors as far as some natives were concerned, and the SS would give them what they deserved.
* * *
In the early morning hours of February 2, 1944, the crowded train bearing Geneviève de Gaulle screeched to a halt in the cold darkness. Exhausted, hungry, and disoriented, Geneviève attempted to get her bearings as the muffled sounds of terse, spoken German and barking dogs grew nearer. Soon the cattle car was unlocked, and the door slid open to reveal SS guards yelling orders. Some of the women hastily grabbed their belongings and jumped from the train without understanding what they were told. Others tumbled out, and when they hit the ground, they were beaten with billy clubs.
“Hurry up, hurry it up, by rows of five, you dirty bitches!” the guards shouted, motioning to the remaining women in the cars.
“What are they saying?” some of the stragglers asked as they nervously gathered their belongings.
“They want us to hurry,” Geneviève told them. “And line up in rows of five. Rows of five! Quick!”
They continued to leap from the train car, reaching for each other as if their lives depended on it. The guards beat them, kicked them, and cursed them as they ran past the lunging, barking dogs to get into rows of five.
“Hurry, bitches! Rows of five!” they ordered.
The young helped the old when they stumbled. Strangers comforted each other as they broke free from their captors’ blows. Neighbors grabbed stray bags for pregnant prisoners and hustled each other along as they found their place in the steadily growing line.
“Rows of five, you bitches!” the SS guards yelled as more captives staggered past them with their luggage. “Rows of five!”
Once the train was emptied of 958 women and their heads were counted, the convoy was ordered to march for two miles through a charming little village and then a forest of snow-kissed pines. Icy winds whistled through the branches and kicked up whirls of snow that lashed the captives’ cheeks. It felt like a never-ending hike, Geneviève thought as she pushed herself to keep going. She did not know where she was, but she tasted the salty sea air on her lips and assumed that they must be somewhere near the Baltic coast. When the group plodded out of the shadowy woods into the stark white light, a sixteen-foot-high gray wall with a large iron gate stood before them.
It had to be a mistake.
“We’ve arrived at a concentration camp,” someone in the convoy gasped.
“It can’t be true,” others whispered.
“Someone will come along and take us somewhere else,” another woman said as she trudged through the gates with the rest of the group. “This cannot be for us.”
Geneviève surveyed her new surroundings—the high-voltage fence on the inside of the perimeter wall, the low-slung gray confinement blocks in various states of disrepair, the gaunt women shuffling past them with shaved heads—and felt like she had entered the gates of hell. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” she thought to herself, echoing the inscription on hell’s gates from Dante’s famous epic poem The Divine Comedy. A cluster of emaciated women in blue-and-white striped dresses lumbered past her, carrying heavy vats of hot liquid. When they looked up from their toil, Geneviève was shocked to see the hollow-cheeked, dead-eyed expression on their faces.
“Eat your food,” one of them warned as she struggled past in wooden clogs. “They’ll take everything from you.”
Although Geneviève knew she should have felt compassion for these wraiths, she was overcome with despair as her comrades whispered nervously about the “monsters” or “creatures” who had given them the advice. These women looked defeated, Geneviève thought. Would they all be broken down in the same way? What kind of person does this to a fellow human being?
The air-raid siren began to wail, and guards hustled the women into a barracks that was not yet completed. They squeezed into the building like Métro commuters at rush hour as the floodlights at the camp were switched off during the bombardment. “We had the impression that it would be impossible for one more woman to enter the barracks, but they kept coming,” Geneviève later wrote. “Some of us fainted but did not fall, because we were so squeezed in against each other.” They remained that way for the rest of the alert.
At daybreak they were taken in groups to a building where they were told to strip naked and put all their possessions into brown paper bags. They stood nude among strangers, as female camp workers moved through the group, searching each of them between the legs with toothbrushes or dirty speculums, rifling through their belongings, checking for lice, and shaving the occasional head. They were helpless to prevent guards from peeling away layers of themselves: their dresses, their furs, their hair, their eyeglasses, their food rations, their dignity. SS doctors walked past the prisoners, laughing as the rough inspections continued. Many women cried in humiliation.
When it was over they were sent to the showers, then handed a blue-and-white striped dress, a white kerchief, a pair of culottes, and some basic wooden clogs. They were also given a colored felt triangle to sew onto their uniforms, point side down. Red was for political prisoners. Black was for social outcasts. Purple was for Jehovah’s Witnesses, while green was for criminals and yellow was for Jews. By the time Geneviève de Gaulle arrived at Ravensbrück, 80 percent of the camp’s population wore a red triangle, including her. A gifted seamstress, Geneviève sewed the triangle onto her left sleeve, then stitched a piece of cloth below it that had her prisoner number—27,372—printed in black ink. The group was known as the 27,000 because of those digits, which were an indicator of how many women had come before them.
They were taken to Block 31 for quarantine, where they remained for the next few weeks to prevent possible illnesses from spreading through the camp. Those who arrived sick didn’t receive medical treatment, and their condition deteriorated after the initial stresses and confusion they faced. Many ailing prisoners died in a matter of days. Those who remained struggled to make sense of the new rules they had to learn, an effort complicated by the fact that most directions were given in German.
The SS ran Ravensbrück in tandem with a select group of prisoners who could be trusted with some of the camp’s day-to-day responsibilities, from taking roll to meting out punishments. Some of the most promising inmates were conscripted to work as block seniors, or blockovas. Blockovas had the power to decide who could see a doctor, how much food was distributed, and how they’d maintain order. They walked a fine line between carrying out the SS’s orders and gaining the cooperation of the prisoners they oversaw. Those who obliged their blockovas best got to become assistants and received extra privileges such as their own lockers, extra rations, and properly fitting dresses. Their green armbands signified that they were prisoner officials and allowed them to go anywhere they wanted in the camp at any time.
Commandant Fritz Suhren managed the camp and its subcamps and disciplined the staff and internees. Suhren, thirty-four, was a fox-faced and fearsome SS officer who distinguished himself as deputy commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp when he ordered a guard to hang a prisoner who had been selected for execution. When the guard refused his command, Suhren directed him to stand beside the prisoner on the gallows while a young inmate performed the killing instead. When he took command of Ravensbrück in 1942, Suhren strove to kill prisoners by working them hard and feeding them little. His effort was aided by Deputy Commandant Edmund Bräuning, who directed the inmates and staff on a daily basis. This was no small task. Aside from thousands of prisoners, hundr
eds of male and female Waffen-SS guards patrolled the interior and exterior of the camp, scores of stenographers and secretaries managed its prisoner files and financial records, and tens more censored incoming and outgoing prisoner mail and conducted internal investigations. Bräuning bolstered the staff numbers by recruiting women from area factories. He told them of the promising career they could have in what he termed “rehabilitation centers,” and he was persuasive enough that he’d usually gain twenty new guard trainees a visit. Bräuning, who was married and the father of three children, had begun an affair with Dorothea Binz, who by then had a reputation as one of the most sadistic guards at the camp. Prisoners recalled watching Bräuning round up prisoners from the nearby men’s camp to be hanged. As Bräuning ordered the men into a green wagon, Binz ran to him, crying, “Wait for me, wait for me, I want to come and see it!”
In all it was a confusing and disturbing environment for new prisoners, and it was compounded by the close, cramped quarters. Each block consisted of a common room for eating, a washroom, three toilets, and a dormitory filled with three-tiered bunks. The buildings were originally meant to hold five hundred captives, but now they were at more than double their capacity. Many women spent the day standing because there weren’t enough places to sit. At night two or three prisoners crowded together onto a two-and-a-half-foot-wide straw mattress to sleep. Those who couldn’t find room in a bed curled up on the floor, stretched out in corridors, or slid under sinks.
On her first night in the camp, Geneviève shared a bottom bunk with Thérèse, her cellmate from Fresnes. Thérèse tossed and turned for the next few hours, making it impossible for Geneviève to drift off despite the sleepless nights on the train. “Thérèsou,” Geneviève whispered to her bunkmate, “I can’t sleep. You stay down at the bottom and I’ll take the top spot with Nanette, who doesn’t move at all.” She climbed up the side of the bunk, sidled next to Nanette, and dozed off.
The next morning a woman delivered a vat of beet soup to the common room. After inspecting the container’s contents, the detainees decided it wasn’t worth eating and opted to nibble on whatever remaining bits of bread and cheese they had squirreled away. Others offered their scraps to the starving women who had been in confinement longer than they had. The filth and lack of personal space were as overwhelming as the whims of their block guards. Others hoped to receive messages from friends and family who might already be in the camp.
A few days after the 27,000’s arrival, a petite brunette woman with mischievous blue-green eyes slipped over to the quarantine after hearing that her mother might be among the newest set of prisoners. It was Germaine Tillion of the Musée de l’Homme network. By the time her mother, Émilie, arrived at Ravensbrück with the 27,000 convoy, she had been separated from her daughter for nearly a year and a half. The time apart was a source of great anxiety for Germaine, who spent her days fretting about her mother’s health and well-being. If word of mouth around the camp was true, Germaine had to see her or at least hear her voice. She crept over to the quarantine block to reunite with her mother, who declared through the window, “Exhilarating trip! Cologne, Dusseldorf, Elberfeld are in ruins. The end of the war is near!”
Pronouncements like that stirred hope among the women, who had begun to realize that their arrival here was no mistake. To cheer each other up, they told stories, recited poetry, sang songs, and prayed together in secret. They reassured each other that they would be back in France before Christmas. It was difficult to laugh under the circumstances, but they joked about their shaved heads and clunky shoes and tied their kerchiefs in countless different ways in an effort to make their drab uniforms look more chic. Germaine visited the quarantine area every day to check on her mother and to give ethnography lectures to the internees through the window. During one talk, she explained that they were all part of an economic system that was designed to be lucrative for Himmler. Any prisoner who was unable to work was a drain on the camp’s economy, so the only way to maintain profitability was to kill the unproductive. Geneviève had been listening intently to Germaine’s discourse and took great comfort in it because the daily cruelty had begun to chip away at her faith and will to resist. Now that Geneviève understood what she faced, she could fight it.
The French prisoners began defying camp orders. Soon after the 27,000’s arrival, Himmler was scheduled to inspect Ravensbrück. The block guards ordered the prisoners to clean. When the French would not follow commands, the incredulous guard yelled, “Himmler is coming and the whole camp trembles, but you French just laugh.”
It did not take long for the French to learn that Ravensbrück was no laughing matter. One morning the prisoners had been standing in the bitter cold for more than an hour during roll call when a guard couldn’t account for a woman who was on the official prison register. The numbers didn’t add up, so they would have to start the count again and keep going until they got it right.
This was how the day began and ended. When the first siren jolted them awake at 3:30 AM, the prisoners knew they only had so much time. They scrambled to make their beds in a tightly tucked military style, fluffing and smoothing their pillows so that the edges created right angles. They placed their blue-and-white checked blankets on top of the pillow so the checks ran in a perfect straight line along the edge of the bed. Then they scurried through the crowded barracks, fighting to fill their tin cups with a black, coffee-like drink before shoving their way into the filthy latrines. If they were lucky they had time to grab a morsel of gray bread before the second siren, which signaled the beginning of roll call. In rows of ten they gathered on the large, sandy square near the front of the camp, standing up straight and facing forward with their hands at their sides. They could not move or talk until all prisoners were accounted for, a feat made only more challenging by the icy winds that stung their ears and whipped through their cotton dresses. As the SS guard slowly strolled through the ranks taking attendance, rule breakers were slapped, kicked with jackboots, lashed with whips, or attacked by dogs. Women collapsed as the counting dragged on.
When guards stopped in midcount, the women knew there was trouble. The count began again. Block guards stormed off in search of the absent captive. When they found her they dragged her out to the square and whipped her on the back four times in front of everyone. Once the count was completed, the guard brought the final numbers to Binz, who awaited them at a desk on the plaza.
Quarantine survivors from the 27,000 convoy had since been moved to the ramshackle blocks at the back of the camp. Geneviève took her place in Block 31. Gray-green paint peeled from the walls in these buildings; living structures were cramped, damp, and foul; and frigid air seeped through cracked windows. The SS mostly avoided the area, leaving Polish block guards to run it as they saw fit. Inmates who didn’t get out of bed quickly enough in the morning received sound beatings. Those who talked when they weren’t supposed to, got water when they weren’t allowed, or committed any other sort of infraction took rough punishments too. As Ravensbrück’s population grew it became harder for the block guards to maintain control and easier for prisoners to skirt the rules. The result was bedlam. Women lapped up turnip soup from the floor after starving block mates knocked over pots. Stealing, fights, and random beatings were commonplace. Open sores were more common than soup bowls, and informants scouted women for the nearby concentration camp brothels. Block guards who couldn’t rein in the chaos were replaced.
The guards were never replaced by the French. By the time large numbers of French women began arriving at the camp in 1943 and 1944, the Polish and Communist inmates had already distinguished themselves as leaders and weren’t about to give up any privileges that came with that. Not that the French were inclined to do the Germans’ bidding. Most of them were political prisoners who had been involved with the French resistance, so they were predisposed to flout Nazi authority. After their arrival the SS tried to break them of that habit. None of them were allowed to receive letters or packages for the
first few months of incarceration. All of them were divided into small groups and assigned to barracks where other nationalities dominated. By breaking them up in this fashion, the SS higher-ups hoped to keep them from sparking opposition among other inmates. They also wanted to put them face-to-face with Polish and Czech comrades who they believed still resented France for allowing Germany to invade their countries. The resentment they envisioned was not universal. One Polish inmate, Eugenia Kocwa, viewed the new captives as “the flower of the French intelligentsia.” To her, they were “overdelicate” women who were unaccustomed to the hard physical work at the camp. Although many of them had multiple college degrees and came from privileged families, Kocwa saw a population that was ill equipped to survive. “But to their last moments, they maintained a smile or a song on their lips,” she wrote. “Of all the nations represented . . . they were to me the dearest.”