by Paige Bowers
“No thank you, Commandant, but as you well know the French women are among the most ill-treated in the camp,” she said. “Their situation would be less impossible if they were all quartered in the same barracks. They’re all in dire need of medicines and warm clothing to get through the winter.”
“That’s none of your business,” he snapped, before adding that if she alone was in need of anything to let him know.
Geneviève headed to her new cell, certain that Suhren’s sudden interest in her was linked to the success of the Allied advance. She believed no one in the SS knew who she was up until her reassignment to Block 2, which was where the most-privileged prisoners were held. However, Otto Abetz, Germany’s ambassador to France, had heard in July that she might be in Ravensbrück. He requested that information about her well-being be sent to him within the next month. Abetz received a reply two months later, saying that an inquest had begun. By the time Geneviève was relocated to Block 2, Abetz was told that Fräulein de Gaulle was at Ravensbrück and receiving favorable treatment.
In Block 2 each inmate had her own straw mattress covered with a thick blanket, her own washcloth hung on a hook, and her own tin cup and bowl with a spoon. All who lived in the block had to keep themselves scrupulously clean because their jobs required them to interact with SS personnel. It was the showcase block, where visitors were provided with a well-scrubbed version of what living conditions were like at Ravensbrück. Once Geneviève was moved there, she was given a clean camp dress, a jacket, a shawl, and a pair of wooden shoes. She began working with several other inmates updating deportee records but fainted during roll call after her second day. She was taken to the infirmary, where nurses disinfected her scurvy sores, gave her vitamins, and let her rest.
After receiving the “favorable treatment” missive, Abetz was then told that General de Gaulle’s niece had been transferred to the infirmary, where she was being treated for frail health. Although she had pleurisy, there was no mention of that, but Abetz was told that Geneviève’s condition had begun to improve. Another government minister weighed in on the matter, writing, “Taking into account her relation to de Gaulle, it would be a good idea to look into the possibility of using [her] like a ransom to get more important advantages, like for example . . . an improvement for German prisoners in the hands of the French.”
Heinrich Himmler liked the idea, but he learned that General de Gaulle was not at all receptive to it. On her twenty-fourth birthday Geneviève left the infirmary to visit Jacqueline and her friends in Block 31. Her new status and uniform permitted her to roam the camp freely, whereas her friends did not have the same privileges. Despite those restrictions, Jacqueline had a surprise waiting for Geneviève when she arrived: a birthday cake Jacqueline had made by kneading together fistfuls of bread crumbs with molasses. Twenty-four twigs took the place of candles and furtively picked fall leaves served as decorations. There in her quiet celebration with friends, Geneviève savored the small bit of sweetness as she marked another year of her life.
Three days later two SS guards entered Block 2 looking for Geneviève. It was the middle of the night. She had been dreaming about walking along a moonlit road and hearing the sound of voices calling to her. She woke up as soon as she felt the warmth of a flashlight beam in her face.
“Get on your feet,” one of the guards told her. “You’re coming with us.”
The blockova stood frightened in the doorway as Geneviève’s bunkmates helped her down from her bed, handed her her tin cup and bowl, and hugged her good-bye. She had no idea why the SS had come for her or what this meant. But she had heard that they sometimes executed people in the middle of the night.
“I had good reasons to believe that I had upset the Commandant,” she later wrote. “I had written him a letter in which I had described our living conditions and explained to him the most realistic way he could improve them. . . . I imagined that the time had come that I would ‘pay’ for that letter.”
The SS took her to Suhren’s office, who immediately told her she would be taken to the bunker but that it wasn’t a punishment. The bunker, a two-story building with seventy-eight spartanly furnished cells, was a jail within the jail. Prisoners typically were sent there for serious offenses that were reported to Suhren. The commandant trusted whatever evidence was presented in the report and ordered the offending inmates to the bunker for at least three days but often for much longer. Many prisoners were whipped twenty-five to seventy-five times after their arrival, then were locked in a small, dark room that was four and a half paces long by two and a half paces wide. Everyone in the camp knew that few prisoners survived the experience. Despite what she was told, Geneviève ruminated about what usually happened in the bunker as she struggled to fall asleep on the wooden pallet that was to be her bed. There in solitary she would not work, she’d have no mattress or blanket, and she’d be given bread every three days and soup every five.
When she heard the first siren wail, she imagined her friends rushing to make their beds and scuffle through the morning routine. She worried that her sudden departure from the barracks might not have been reported to the camp’s authorities and that it would prolong roll call. On the roll call plaza, Anise stood in the darkness as heads were counted. She did not see Geneviève and feared that she had been killed. Alone in the bunker Geneviève sat in the dark, fretting about her fate. Whatever it was, she would have to confront it alone.
The sound of thumping clogs and boots signified that the crews were beginning their workday. Muffled shouts, barking dogs, and cracking whips drifted through the air, making Geneviève feel like she was drifting away at the bottom of a deep well. She imagined that the cell door would open at any minute and she would be walked toward the execution corridor and then incinerated in the crematorium ovens. Shots would ring out, her comrades would look up from their work, and before they could think about it further, she would become a halo of smoke, drifting into the sky.
In solitary there was no one to hold her hand. So many prisoners held their suffering bunkmates to comfort them as they passed away from starvation and strain. They had all come to recognize the drawn look on a woman’s face that signaled the end, and they whispered prayers to her during her final moments. Geneviève thought of the women who bravely faced the unknown. They were women like Mother Élisabeth, a Lyonnaise nun who had hidden resisters, Jewish children, and arms in her convent. Geneviève recalled how she calmly took the place of another woman who was destined for the gas chamber. Women like Élisabeth had given her the strength to go on, and she told herself to have faith, no matter how hard it might be. She told herself to believe that her friends and loved ones would find out what happened to her and that she wouldn’t just disappear into the night. But what would become of those she’d left behind? Would they die too? Or would they, through some miracle, survive?
She tried to pray.
“Our Father, Who art in heaven . . .”
“Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”
“Oh God . . .”
Her heart pounded. She was afraid. Someone else in the bunker must have shared her fears, she thought. Someone else was afraid of being beaten to death by a pickax, attacked by dogs, or thrown into a ditch like common garbage. Everyone in the camp saw it happen on a daily basis and heard the victim’s cries for help. But they knew they had to stand there and do nothing, because they would be beaten for showing any shred of humanity.
How could you cling to faith?
She heard jackboots tromping down the concrete corridor and a cell door grate opening. Someone must be receiving food. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the cell, and she groped its clammy walls. There was a shelf inside, a stool chained to the wall, a toilet and a spigot above it. She felt around for her tin cup, filled it with water, drank deeply, then fell asleep.
* * *
On the other side of the camp, Germaine and Anise were in another sort of jail. They were among the three hundred women at Ravensbrück who had bee
n designated Nacht und Nebel (NN)—or Night and Fog—prisoners in early 1944. Hitler introduced the directive on December 7, 1941, in an effort to wipe out resistance members and anyone else in occupied territories who were a danger to German security. Selected without warning or reason, Germaine and Anise were sent to live in the most isolated barracks and ordered to follow an entirely new set of rules. In theory they were to be cut off from the rest of the camp and forbidden from communicating with anyone outside of it. After vanishing without a trace, they could be executed in secret so their families would be left wondering whether they’d ever return.
Although the NN prisoners originally feared they could be killed at any moment, after a while nothing happened to them, and they learned that it was possible to sneak around the compound. They had to get past a German prisoner named Käte Knoll first. Käte was put in charge of the NN barracks because she hated the French. A green-triangle prisoner who had been sent to Ravensbrück for theft, her personality was so nasty and her reputation as an informant was so solid that the French disparaged her behind her back. They whispered that Käte was probably really there for killing her entire family.
The NN block was newer and far more orderly than the others, and prisoners in it were spared the hardest work. Germaine made the most of her new designation by studying Ravensbrück as any anthropologist might. By then she had developed a camp-wide circle of informants, a network she could not have developed without Anise, who was fluent in German and quick-witted to boot. Anise endeared herself to many of the secretaries and infirmary workers who handled paperwork on new arrivals and departures, the sick, and the dead. They passed information to Anise to give to Germaine, who scribbled what she saw into a secret notebook she had begun to keep. After analyzing everything she saw, Germaine tried to hide it in places that only she knew about, but Anise discovered one of those spots under a loose plank over her mattress. Among the findings she had concealed: a large transport of women was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland to make room for the 27,000 convoy; “idiot” prisoners were regularly shipped out, but no one knew who those prisoners were or where they went; and the French were dying faster than any other nationality. Anything Germaine couldn’t write down she committed to memory.
Women in the camp understood how important it was to share their stories and the camp’s tales with others. They knew that people needed to learn about what had happened at Ravensbrück and about the thousands of women who had been ripped away from lives, loves, and professions only to suffer there or die. When the Czechoslovakian journalist Milena Jesenska was at the end of her life, she told her story to fellow inmate Margarete Buber-Neumann, who vowed to share the account if she survived the camp too. A Communist sympathizer who worked as a translator to supplement her first husband’s salary, Milena discovered the works of Franz Kafka and wrote the author, asking permission to translate his writing into Czech. The two became lovers, but Franz broke things off when Milena could not leave her husband. Eventually Milena divorced, but she struggled to find happiness with any other man. She joined the Czech resistance after Germany occupied her homeland and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939. Sent to Ravensbrück, she died of kidney failure after four years in the camp.
Margarete had heard of Germaine’s research and wanted to share this story with her in case she died or was killed. It was just before D-day when she climbed onto Germaine’s mattress to tell Milena’s tale as well as her own story of life as a prisoner in a Stalinist gulag. Anise squeezed between the two women to act as translator, listening as Germaine and Margarete compared what was happening in the Russian camps to Ravensbrück. Anise did not believe that anything could be worse than what they were experiencing, but Germaine was convinced that Margarete’s accounts of hard labor, ever-present filth, bitter cold, and abuse were all true. She filed it all away with everything else she had heard, read, and seen.
Although the SS tried to conceal much of what they were doing at the camp, the truth was that their secrets were hard to keep. There were the talked-about beatings administered by fellow prisoners in the presence of Suhren and a camp doctor. The punishments took place in a special room on the ground floor of the bunker that was outfitted with a rack. Suhren ordered the victims to step up to the rack so that their feet could be fastened in a wooden clamp. Then they would be strapped down, and their dress would be pulled up over their head so their back and rear were exposed. The beating began once an internee’s head was wrapped in a blanket. Using a whip or a cane, an inmate began the punishment, and the victim was ordered to count each blow out loud. Many passed out after the eleventh blow, and some remember coming to as the doctor took their pulse. Survivors noticed that screaming through each lash could lessen the pain. They left the punishment room dizzy, with a backside that felt like tanned leather. Others had high-pressure hoses sprayed on them until they turned black and blue.
There were also the experiments that were being done on young Polish women. They began in June 1942 after Reinhard Heydrich, the head of Hitler’s security police, died of an infection he sustained after an attempt on his life. The perpetrators who attempted to shoot Heydrich and then bomb his car were Czech resisters. After receiving a false lead, Hitler launched a manhunt in a small town outside of Prague that resulted in the killing of every man and the deportation of every woman and child. The doctors who failed to save Heydrich’s life came under close scrutiny, in particular, Karl Gebhardt, who Hitler claimed could have used a new antibacterial drug called sulfonamide to treat the security chief’s wound. Coincidentally, German casualties had been skyrocketing along the eastern front due to the same types of infections. Although Gebhardt didn’t believe sulfonamide was as effective as penicillin, he was being compelled to change his mind. Himmler ordered Gebhardt to use young prisoners in tests to prove that the drug was a reliable treatment. The first tests, run on male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were ruled inconclusive. Himmler said the next tests would be run on healthy Polish prisoners from Ravensbrück. Although Gebhardt was opposed to the idea, Himmler said the women, who were resisters, were already sentenced to death but could be freed for submitting to testing. Gebhardt agreed to proceed with Himmler’s plan.
Late that July seventy-five of the youngest and healthiest Polish women in Ravensbrück were brought to the roll call area one morning. They lined up in rows of five as Gebhardt asked them to pull up their skirts. He wanted to see their legs, he told them, and none of the Polish women could understand why. Was there a new work group in need of women with strong legs? A tall blonde woman named Dr. Herta Oberheuser stood beside Gebhardt as he inspected the Polish women. She was said to be a specialist in skin diseases, but she was known around the camp for screaming at prisoners and ordering them to stay away from her because they had lice. A slender man with striking blue eyes stood beside her. His name was Fritz Fischer, and he was Gebhardt’s assistant.
When Gebhardt finished checking each prisoner, he sent them back to their blocks. No one heard anything about his investigations for the next few days. A week later Oberheuser selected six women from the group to stay overnight in the infirmary. The next day they stumbled back to their blocks, seemingly drugged. Four days after that, guards brought them back to the infirmary, where they were given a warm bath and brought to a clean bed. Their legs were shaved, and they were given an injection. When they woke up their legs were in plaster and the pain was unbearable. Doctors had inserted a large amount of gangrene, tetanus, or streptococcus bacteria into their bones and muscles, along with debris that would further the infection’s spread. The wounds were then cleaned and either treated with sulfonamide, another drug, or nothing at all. Again the results were inconclusive. Gebhardt was asked to test them again, this time with more bacteria. Oberheuser waited for them in the infirmary. Wearing a black cloak, she drew blood from their fingers and ears for testing. After several days Oberheuser ordered doctors to change the women’s bloody, crusted dressings. It was excruci
ating for the women, and some of them died during the experiments. Others had legs that were so disfigured by the repeated testing that they had to hop around instead of walking. They became known as the Rabbits. By the fall of 1944, they had elicited such sympathy among other camp prisoners that they were given extra food, blankets, and underwear from women in other blocks. As rumors spread that the SS would kill these young women, prisoners and block guards collaborated to protect them. Some were given new prisoner numbers to help them escape a selection for death in the gas chamber. Although the International Committee of the Red Cross had received information about the Rabbits from Allied prisoners of war, the group remained neutral about these young women. They didn’t want to offend their German counterparts. Meanwhile British radio reports spread the news about the atrocities to listeners who couldn’t believe it was true.
Some of the Polish prisoners took matters into their own hands. They devised a way to get secret messages out of the prison within the twenty-line missives they were permitted to send. One of the Polish inmates, Krystina Cinz, devised the idea while writing to her brother. In her letter Cinz recalled the way some of their favorite storybook characters sent each other letters where the first letter of each line spelled out a secret message. She composed the letter so that the first word of each line spelled “Lettre Urine,” or “Urine Letter.” Between the lines Cinz used her own urine to spell out the names of prisoners who had been shot and operated on in the camp. Then she asked her family to slip a familiar word into the next letter they sent her to signify they had received the note. To read the notes, recipients would have to iron the paper in order to make the urine letters appear in brown. Other women soon used the same technique, hiding to create the messages while their friends kept watch. When the Russians took Lublin, Poland, in June 1944, all prisoner correspondence stopped. They wrote information they hoped to share with the outside world on the back of outgoing SS mail or slipped letters written in ink into mailboxes when they went out to work for the day. No matter the method, families transcribed these messages and sent them on to London. In one instance the Gestapo found one of these letters during a house search. They threw the sender in the bunker for three weeks in an attempt to get her to implicate other prisoners. She never bowed to pressure, and the secret correspondence continued.