We still had no suspicion of what had happened in the first months of 1942, or of the National Socialist plans to exterminate the unfit. An order came down to communicate the names of all congenital cripples, bed wetters, amputees, mental defectives, and sufferers from asthma and tuberculosis. The SS overseers assured us that they were being transferred to a camp where the work was easier. A medical commission actually appeared and passed the sick prisoners in review. Then one day two trucks came to take the first shipment away. That evening a horror-stricken Milena told me what she had seen. Patients had been brutally dragged from their beds and dumped into the straw at the bottom of the trucks. From that moment on she knew where those trucks were headed.
Two days later our worst fears were confirmed. The same trucks returned to Ravensbrück and stopped at the supply depot, where they unloaded a mound of miscellaneous articles: clothes marked with the serial numbers of the prisoners who had been taken away, false teeth, eyeglasses, a crutch, combs, toothbrushes, even soap. And there was our friend Lotte in the TB ward. Milena couldn’t forgive herself. There was no time to be lost. She sent another sample of Lotte’s sputum to be analyzed. And then another. Both of course were negative. Then she informed Dr. Sonntag of Lotte’s miraculous recovery and implored him to discharge her from the TB ward. Luckily Lotte had worked in the infirmary and Dr. Sonntag knew her. That saved her.
One truckload after another left the camp and with gruesome regularity the clothing of those prisoners came back. When all those afflicted with “hereditary diseases” were disposed of, new lists were drawn up, this time covering all the Jewish prisoners. Milena and I saw only one possible explanation, yet, incredible as it may seem, our Jewish fellow prisoners with whom we discussed the lists, tried to convince us that they were only being taken to another camp. “Why would they kill us? That would be insane. Why would they want to kill strong young women who are still able to work?” One of the first to go was a young Jewish doctor, who promised to send us a message sewn into the hem of her prison garment. We found the note and read, “They’ve taken us to Dessau. We have to undress now. Goodbye.”
Compared with the horror that now descended on us, the first year and a half in Ravensbrück had been almost idyllic. Polish women were summarily sentenced to death and shot. During the evening roll call, we would hear the shots from behind the camp wall. Adding to the terror, more and more experimental operations were performed, sick prisoners were put to death with massive injections of Evipal. Anyone who was weak or seriously ill lived in fear of being murdered. But it was not until the winter of 1945 that what had once been a “model camp” became a death factory. A gas chamber was built for, as an SS publication put it, the “eradication of all racially biologically inferior elements and the radical elimination of incorrigible political opposition which obstinately refuses to recognize the philosophical foundation of the National Socialist state.”
19
THE ZEALOTS
Milena was one of the few who were incapable of becoming indifferent or letting their sensibilities be blunted. She saw the horror around her, she saw the misery, and it drove her to despair that there was so little she could do to help. Every evening she returned from the infirmary with gruesome tales to tell. She was a journalist and nothing escaped her. Despite the tension in which we lived, she never lost her ability to store up impressions. Perhaps it was her fear of violent death that sharpened her senses. Besides, we were determined to write our book, and for that it was necessary to cultivate our memories. There could be no question of closing our eyes, of shutting ourselves off.
Milena’s health deteriorated. More and more often during the midday break, I would hide her in my barracks to give her a chance to rest. Lying down in the daytime was strictly forbidden. I could count on the solidarity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But then came a harrowing incident which put an end to Milena’s friendship with those sectarians. One day in the infirmary, she noticed the name of a woman from my barracks—Anna Luck— on an extermination list. Anna was suffering from glandular tuberculosis. For days I had been keeping her in the barracks, preventing her from going to the infirmary, for fear the doctor would order a lethal injection. But the doctor was already aware of her condition. There seemed to be only one way of saving her. In a sense, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were voluntary prisoners. They had only to sign a “declaration” that they were no longer Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they would be released from camp that same day. I went to Anna’s bed, told her what Milena had seen, and persuaded her to go to the office immediately and sign the “declaration.” She got up and dressed while I disappeared into the orderly room so as not to attract the attention of the women who were cleaning the barracks, who would have tried to deter Anna Luck from this “betrayal,” as they called it.
A little later there was a knock at the door and Ella Hempel, a member of the cleaning detail, stepped in. “Grete,” she said with a look of hatred and revulsion, “I’d never have expected you to be in league with the devil. To make common cause with the SS, You advised Anna Luck to sign. How could you!”
Overcome with fury, I shouted at her, “Is that your idea of Christian charity? Sending your sister to the gas chambers in Jehovah’s name! Cold-blooded beasts, that’s what you are!”
When Milena heard about it, she flew into such a rage that the Jehovah’s Witnesses lived in fear of her from then on. We discussed the utter intolerance of these people, their lack of sympathy for anyone who did not belong to their sect, and their cowardice when given an opportunity to perform an act of true Christianity. We came to the conclusion that they were very much like Communists. The only difference was that they worshiped Jehovah instead of Stalin. The Witnesses held secret Bible-study sessions in which they turned its content on its head to make it conform to their prophecies. The Communists gave secret indoctrination courses, in which they interpreted the news gleaned from Nazi papers—no others were available—in their own way, namely, as proof that black was white (or red) and that a Communist revolution was just around the corner. Mi-lena’s parallel between Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the ears of the Czech Communists, who from then on hated her more than ever.
Some time after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the first large shipment of Russian prisoners arrived in Ravensbruck. In her eagerness to welcome the new arrivals, Paled-kova, leader of the Czech Communists and Milena’s special enemy, volunteered for the bath and debusing team. What was said that day in the shower room I can only conjecture, The Czech Communist assured the Russian and Ukrainian women of the solidarity of their Communist sisters in Ravensbrück. It may have been then that she got her first taste of their profanity and abuse. Then she probably admonished them to show themselves, by their behavior in this German concentration camp, worthy of their Communist homeland. Like all the comrades, Palec’kova’ undoubtedly nourished high-flown illusions about these Russian women. Having benefited by a Communist education, what could they be but staunch supporters of the Bolshevik revolution? In reality, they proved to be a horde of undisciplined hooligans. Many were politically illiterate, and not a few expressed their hatred of the Stalinist regime in language that would have made a sailor blush. Paleckova seems to have been profoundly shaken. She became sullen and taciturn. But for the present she continued to serve on the delousing squad. She told the women in the “old” politicals barracks that all Russians were not like the majority of the new arrivals. Soon afterward we heard that she was showing signs of mental derangement and that she often referred to Milena’s parallel between Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
When Paledkova’s condition became clear to her comrades, they did their best to keep her from being taken to the infirmary, because the mentally deranged were invariably put to death. But they were powerless to save her. When an attempt was made to give her a sedative injection, she grew delirious. The medical officer sent her to the camp prison. The Jehovah’s Witnesses who worked there told me that her condition
was hopeless: She refused to eat and stood with her back to the wall, crying out ecstatically, “Stalin, I love you.” Two weeks later, a group of infirmary workers removed her dead body, which was little more than a skeleton.
A number of Communists worked in the infirmary. Day in, day out, Milena had to listen to their conversations. Their Communist jargon, their mouthing of slogans, threw her into a rage, and she was unable to hold her tongue. She was deeply repelled by the discrepancy between their words and their actions. They talked working-class solidarity, equality, brotherhood, in short, socialism, but their actions belied everything they said. What infuriated Milena most of all was their discriminatory treatment of the sick. They didn’t ask: Are you in pain? Do you feel feverish? but: Are you, or are you not, a Communist party member? They distinguished between “worthwhile people,” in other words “party comrades,” whom it was important to save and for whom they did everything in their power, and the great mass of “worthless riffraff,” who were not worth bothering about. This was too much for Milena’s sense of justice, and she couldn’t help giving them a piece of her mind.
She was quick to lose patience in those days and not only with her political enemies. Another thing that riled her was bourgeois sentimentality. Once when she was lying sick in her bunk, a Czech woman who had just had news of her daughter’s wedding sat down beside her and gave her a long-winded report on the proceedings, not forgetting to mention her daughter’s virginity, the bridal veil, the wedding night, and the importance of fidelity in marriage. When she had finished, she asked Milena for her opinion. Did she think her daughter’s marriage would last, would she be happy, and so on? Thoroughly irritated, Milena replied, “The way I look at it is this: after her tenth man, your daughter may have learned something about the other sex, so maybe she’ll manage to live more or less happily with the eleventh.”
All Communists indulge in wishful thinking, but in confinement their illusions get completely out of hand. They took it for granted that Hitler would be overthrown by a proletarian revolution and that resistance to national socialism in Germany was growing by leaps and bounds.
When Germany went to war against Russia, a wave of optimism swept over the political prisoners, and not only the Communists. Almost all were convinced that the Red Army would conquer, that Hitler would be overthrown, and that they would be liberated. Milena made no secret of her opinion. She resisted the general jubilation because she was able to think clearly and did not shrink from unpleasant conclusions. She was endowed with extraordinary political foresight, she knew what would happen if the Red Army overran Europe. To anyone who would listen she said frankly that if Stalin were victorious the West would forgive all his past crimes and give him a free hand for new ones. National socialism and communism, she said, were indistinguishable. In their premature rejoicing, the Communists let it be known that after the liberation Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann would be stood up against the wall by the Red Army.
After Pale£kova’s death the leadership of the Czech Communists fell to Hilde Synkova and Use Machova. It was they no doubt who sentenced us to death. But they were no more presumptuous than the Communist leadership of the other nationalities in the camp. All arrogated to themselves the right to pass judgment on everyone who disagreed with them, especially on “traitors,” that is, former Communists, who in their eyes were even worse than “class enemies.” Use Machova became Milena’s special enemy. They had known each other in Prague. In Rav-ensbriick, Machova became a master of invective. And in other respects as well she showed the qualities needed for the exercise of power in a Communist dictatorship. A Czech Social Democrat characterized her in a single sentence: “She’s a chunk of rotten meat.”
Milena thought with horror of the postwar period. She told me time and time again that Czechoslovakia wouid be granted only a few years of democracy. But she also thought it possible— though here I couldn’t follow her—that her country would be handed over immediately to the victorious Stalin. “How can we escape the Russians?” she would ask. To comfort her, I thought up one escape plan after another; as she was too weak to walk, my plans always involved a lift in a car. Three years later I was to find out what it was like to be running away from the Russians.
Because of a serious infringement of the camp regulations I was moved out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses barracks and Milena and I lost our refuge. In the summer of 1942 a gang of prisoners from the nearby men’s camp put up a fence near the door of our barracks and dug a trench for new drainpipes behind it. The shutters on our barracks windows were nailed tight and we were threatened with severe punishment for any attempt to communicate with the male prisoners. All day long we heard their Kapo bellowing orders. We looked out through the cracks in the shutters. The men looked utterly miserable, and we were overcome with pity. Their striped clothing dangled from their emaciated bodies as from coat hangers. Only the Kapo, a common-law criminal, looked well fed. He had a club, and if any of the men wasn’t working fast enough, he would get a violent blow in the legs. On the second day we began to communicate with the men. They were digging close to the barracks wall, and we whispered through the cracks. To all our questions they gave the same answer: “Give us bread.” The sand had trickled away, leaving a hole under the temporary fence they had put up. We put bread into it. Then we stole margarine from the kitchen for them. Before long one of the men reported us. I was called to the office and questioned by Head Overseer Mandel,
Of course I told her that I knew nothing. Luckily for me, the same thing happened in another place, where I couldn’t have been. But the suspicion was enough and I lost my post as Block-älteste.
As an “old” political, I was transferred to No. 1, where I lived under the same roof as Milena and slept in the bed next to hers. Every night as she fell on her bunk exhausted, she would sigh—the sound still rings in my ears—: “Oh, if only I could sit by the side of the road again and not be a soldier anymore!”
Once Milena said to me more in jest than in earnest, “Be horrid to me for once. It’s so weird that we’ve never quarreled.” Not long after that we had our first and last fight. One evening we were looking at a picture postcard, a reproduction of a brighüy colored expressionist landscape that Milena had pasted on the wall beside her bed. I tried to explain certain details, interpreted spots of color as elements of landscape, discovered a mountain, a valley, and a lake. Milena contradicted me impatiently; she saw something entirely different. But I insisted on my interpretation. Suddenly she pulled the card down and tore it into little pieces. Her unexpected outburst upset me terribly and I burst into tears. Her panic-stricken reaction to my tears—”Don’t cry! I implore you, stop crying!”—took away my last shred of composure, and I began to sob uncontrollably. But when I looked up and saw Milena’s face, she seemed to be staring into the void. I stopped crying instantly and started talking, trying to pass the incident off as a trifle. But Milena said sadly, “It’s awful to see someone you love crying. It makes me think of last farewells, of my tears in cold railroad stations, the heartless taillights of trains … the end of love…. Please, don’t ever cry again….”
But what could have made her so angry? I asked her, because to me it was incomprehensible, and what really startled me was Milena’s answer. “All of a sudden,” she said, “I had the impression that we had become like other people, who keep talking at cross-purposes as though there were a wall between them, I felt that nothing either of us said could reach the other’s heart.”
What made the usual torments of our days in camp, the interminable roll calls in every kind of weather, the commands, the blows and curses, harder to bear was the overcrowding which got worse from day to day. The Gestapo brought new prisoners from all the countries the Germans had occupied. There had long been more than ten thousand of us penned into a small area. The consequences were dirt, vermin, and epidemics. In No. 1 Barracks there were three women to every two straw ticks and in other barracks more; sometimes four women had to
share a single bunk.
Milena and I took Tomy Kleinerová for our sleeping companion. Tomy, a friend of Milena’s, was one of the unforgettable characters of Ravensbrück. In Prague she had worked with the YMCA; in the camp she became a street sweeper, armed with a broom and pail. I’ve never known anyone who could laugh so contagiously. She had an inexhaustible supply of jokes and anecdotes and even in the most hopeless situations she never lost her sense of humor. She had a bad hip that made it very hard for her to walk, yet she was never heard to complain. But then came news that her husband had been executed and that hit her hard. Her face went suddenly dead. It took her a long time to find her way back to life and laughter. At the liberation she went back to Prague and founded a club for war widows. At the same time she worked as secretary of the Association of Czech Resistance Fighters. That had disastrous consequences. Communists infiltrated the association and finally took over the leadership. Tomy resisted, but in the end they expelled her. In September 1949 the Communists took their revenge. She was arrested and in March 1950 sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for “antistate activity, attempting to overthrow the people’s democracy, and association with Anglo-American agents.” For twelve years poor lameTomy endured the hardship of a Czech prison before being pardoned in 1961.
I was working in the private garden of the SS administration when Milena had her first attack of nephritis. I found her lying in the infirmary, burning with fever and terrified of being killed with an injection. To cheer her up, we stole some gladioli in the garden and smuggled them into the infirmary under our clothes, flattening them against our emaciated bodies. Milena’s pleasure was ample reward for our fear. She soon recovered, but from then on she bore the mark of her incurable illness and knew her strength was on the wane. She often complained that she had lost her capacity for spontaneous feeling, that her feelings had lost their freshness, become mere copies, memories of authentic feelings she had once had.
Milena Page 17