After her illness she would look at herself in the mirror. One day she said, “I look just like the sick monkey that begged for the organ-grinder who used to station himself outside my house. Whenever I passed, he would give me his cold little hand. Every time I saw him he looked more miserable. He’d give me a tortured look from under his silly little hat…. Those same sad eyes looked at me in the mirror today.” And she concluded with a shrug: “Oh well, life is short, but death is long….”
One day a group of male prisoners appeared in the corridor of the infirmary. They had been brought over from the men’s camp to be X-rayed, for tuberculosis no doubt. The bulging feverish eyes of one of these skeletons looked familiar to Milena. She took the risk of walking past again and nodding to him. He nodded back, and she recognized the Czech historian Závis Kalandra, an old friend from Prague. Her discovery left her no peace, she felt she had to help him. There was an SS pharmacist who often came to the infirmary and also worked in the men’s camp. He had a good reputation among the prisoners and Milena found an opportunity to speak to him and soon convinced herself that he felt sincerely sorry for the prisoners. He agreed to take a note from her to Kalandra. “Can I help you?” she wrote. “Do you need bread?” The note she received in answer said: “Milena, I beseech you for your sake and mine. Don’t write again. You’re risking our lives.”
Unexpectedly Kalandra survived the German concentration camp and returned to Prague in 1945. There he was arrested by the Communists in 1949, sentenced to death, and executed.
20
FRIENDSHIP TO THE DEATH
Milena … who has learned time and again from her own experience that she can save another through her own existence and in no other way.
—KAFKA, BRIEFS. AN MILENA
In October 1942, SS Senior Overseer Langefeld returned to Ravensbrück after a brief absence. She needed a secretary and I was chosen for the job. Prisoners with special skills, in my case stenography, typing, and a knowledge of Russian, were very much in demand. Langefeld knew me because of my work with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Milena and I thought it over at length. Might it not be wise to steer clear of this job? It was possible, because Langefeld for purely personal reasons chose not to contact me through the official employment office, which was directed by a high SS official. In the end we decided I should risk it, because the position offered opportunities for helping fellow prisoners. We underestimated the risks and had no way of knowing how badly it would end.
The prisoners thought well of Langefeld. She didn’t bellow and she didn’t resort to blows. She differed appreciably from most of her colleagues, who carried out orders mechanically and took brutal advantage of their power. Not all the women overseers and SS men in the concentration camps were evil by nature. I believe that one of the worst crimes of the dictatorship was to have corrupted average human beings and made them into its tools.
The SS needed more and more overseers to deal with the steadily increasing number of prisoners. Where volunteers were not forthcoming, recruiting campaigns were organized. An official from Ravensbrück would visit the Heinkel aircraft works, for example; a meeting of the woman workers would be called, and he would explain that overseers were needed for a “reeducation camp” (the word “concentration” was carefully avoided), He would give a glowing account of the job: excellent working conditions, much better wages than they were getting at the factory, and so on. After each of these recruiting trips, some twenty young workingwomen would take up their new duties in Ravensbrück. Many were horrified when they found out what they had gotten into. They would come to Langefeld’s office in tears and beg her to release them. But only the camp commander could do that, and most of the women were too shy to approach a high SS officer. So they stayed on. Assigned to a hardened overseer for instruction, they would look on as she meted out curses and blows. In addition, the camp commander would give them a kind of indoctrination course, explaining to them that the inmates were the scum of humanity and should be treated with extreme severity, that sympathy with them was unwarranted and contrary to camp regulations, and that any personal contact with the inmates would be punished severely. Only a few of the newcomers had sufficient strength of character to obtain their release. Most, however, were soon transformed into just such brutes as the veteran overseers. And yet, in the course of my five years of confinement I came across quite a few overseers who tried to remain human. One of these was Senior Overseer Langefeld.
It was only when I began to spend hours every day with her in her office that I found out what she was really like. Confused, unhappy, unsure of herself. She soon began to talk to me, and listen to me, and in time I acquired a certain influence on her. In one conversation, or rather in her reaction to what I said, she put herself in my hands.
One morning when she came into the office, I could see she was seriously upset. She had had a bad dream. Would I interpret it? A squadron of bombers landed in Ravensbruck and instantly turned into tanks. Foreign soldiers climbed out and took possession of the camp. I am no expert at interpreting dreams, but to me the explanation seemed obvious. I replied without hesitation: “You’re afraid Germany is going to lose the war.” As a senior overseer, a member of the Waffen SS and of the National Socialist party, Langefeld ought to have had me arrested for that remark. But she did nothing of the kind. She gave me a horrified look but said nothing. After that I knew this woman would never do anything to harm me. And this had unfortunate consequences. I lost all feeling for the danger of my situation, and in trying to help my fellow prisoners involved myself in one breach of camp regulations after another.
Every evening Milena told me what had been going on in the infirmary and elsewhere in the camp. Dr. Sonntag had been replaced by Dr. Schiedlausky, Dr. Rosenthal, a Bait, and Dr. Oberhauser, a woman. By their efforts, healthy women were turned into cripples, experimental operations were performed, and lethal injections were administered. Every morning Milena opened the coffins that had been placed in the infirmary yard. For some time she had been noticing corpses of patients who had not been murdered in the daytime but at night. She saw the marks of hypodermic needles, smashed ribs, bruised faces, and suspicious gaps in their teeth. As only one person was allowed to move about the infirmary at night—the patients were locked in their rooms—her suspicion fell on Gerda Quernheim, a nurse, who was also the Kapo of the infirmary. With the help of other infirmary workers, Milena got to the bottom of the grisly secret. Dr. Rosenthal was having an affair with Gerda Quernheim. He often spent the night in the infirmary, but not just to be with her. They would murder people together, and not only for the perverse pleasure of it. During the day they would select their victims, for the most part prisoners with gold teeth and gold crowns. Dr. Rosenthal would sell the gold in secret.
Pregnant women were sometimes brought to Ravensbrück. Until 1942, they were transferred to a maternity hospital for confinement, but from then on they were sent to the camp infirmary—a diabolical system, as soon became apparent. Gerda Quernheim functioned as midwife, and all the births were stillbirths. Once Milena distinctly heard the piercing scream of a newborn baby, and another helper, a German woman, opened the door from behind which it came. The newborn baby lay wriggling and full of life between its mother’s legs. Gerda Quernheim had been busy elsewhere, and the baby had been born without her help. An unsuspecting prisoner had notified her, and a moment later the screams ceased. Gerda Quernheim murdered all the newborn babies, drowning them in a bucket of water. Ravensbrück was no place for new life.
Milena was horror-stricken. She told me about her discoveries and urged me to tell Langefeld about the nocturnal murders and the baby killing in the hope that she might intervene. After some hesitation I screwed up my courage and spoke to the senior overseer, who was shocked into a fit of hysteria and screamed at the top of her voice: “Those doctors are criminals. They’re as bad as the camp commander.” I could hardly believe my ears. “Is that what you really think?” I asked her. “Yes,” she s
aid, “that’s what I really think.” “In that case,” I said, “how in God’s name can you go on working here? Why don’t you get out?”
Her answer astonished me. “But isn’t it important for the prisoners that I should stay here and try at least to prevent the worst?”
This I denied emphatically. I assured her that she couldn’t prevent a thing, that they would go on murdering regardless of anything she could do. Nevertheless she stayed on. This woman still had a sense of good and evil, which her colleagues in the SS had long since thrown overboard. She had no illusions about conditions in Ravensbrück, but she wouldn’t stand for any aspersions on the National Socialist leadership. Once she said in a tone of the deepest conviction, “Adolf Hitler and the Reichs-fiihrer SS [Himmler] have no idea what those scoundrels are doing in this camp.”
Langefeld took a special interest in certain categories of prisoners, certain of the German politicals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Gypsies, and most especially the Polish politicals and the victims of experimental operations, most of whom in 1942 and 1943 were chosen from among Polish women who had been sentenced to death. Like everyone in the camp and the victims themselves, she believed that the operation earned the guinea pigs, as they were called, a pardon and that they would not be shot.
One morning in April 1943 a list of ten prisoners’ numbers lay on Langefeld’s desk. These were the numbers of Polish women who had been condemned to death. That meant execution. I sat at the typewriter with a heavy heart and looked out to see who these women were who were being taken to their death. They came around the corner, two of them on crutches. Without thinking, I cried out, “Good God, they’re shooting the guinea pigs.” Langefeld leaped to the window; a moment later she picked up the phone and called the camp commander. Did he have permission from Berlin to carry out death sentences on prisoners who had undergone experimental operations? Then she turned to me: “Go out and take those two guinea pigs back to their barracks.” Her intervention saved the lives of seventyfive women who had been operated on. Its consequences for Langefeld and myself were less gratifying.
A few days later, on April 20, Langefeld had a brief telephone call, after which she rose from her desk. With trembling hands she picked up her cap and gloves. Then she came over to me and shook my hand, something she had never done before. Before leaving the room she turned to me and said, “I’m afraid for you, Ramdor is a beast.”
I sat in the office alone, doing my best to control my agitation. Then, looking out of the window, I saw Milena approaching from the infirmary. What could she be doing on the street during working hours? Why would she be coming to the camp office of all places? Something terrible must have happened, something she had to tell me about, or she wouldn’t have taken this risk. I ran down the corridor to meet her. “What has happened, Milena?” “Nothing at all. But suddenly I was so worried about you, I had to come and see if you were all right.” I implored her to get back to the infirmary before anyone saw her. Just as she was moving reluctantly toward the door, Ramdor, the chief Gestapo official in Ravensbruck, rounded the corner, coming from the direction of the camp gate. “Get back into the office,” Milena screamed at me. I rushed into the room and barely had time to sit down at the typewriter before the door burst open and Ramdor came in. “Buber,” he ordered, “come with me!” As I stepped out of the building with him, Milena was standing motionless a few feet from the door. I’ll never forget the look of consternation on her face.
Ramdor escorted me to the camp prison, the notorious Bunker. There Superintendent Binz took away my warm clothing and gave me light summer things in exchange. Then I was led barefoot down an iron stairway to a cell. The door slammed behind me. It was pitch-dark. Groping my way forward, I collided with a stool that was fastened to the floor. I sat down on it and looked about for light. I detected a faint glow under the door. I was too agitated to sit still for long. One soon learns to find one’s way in the dark. Across from the stool there was a small folding table. Along the opposite wall there was a board. That was my bunk, but, as I soon found out, it was fastened to the wall and could not be used. In the left-hand corner beside the door were the toilet and a water faucet, and to the right of the door a cold radiator. Across from the door, high up in the wall, a barred window, hermetically sealed against light and air. The cell was four and a half paces long and two and a half paces wide. Back and forth I walked, back and forth, at first cautiously, knocking my shins against the stool, then more and more confidently.
Ramdor thinks he can get me down; well, he’s got another think coming. How does he expect to do it? By keeping me in darkness? By starving me? How stupid of me not to have eaten all my bread that morning! Would they beat me? All the horrible stories I had heard about the Bunker passed through my mind. About prisoners who had been beaten to death, who had died of starvation, who had gone mad. My heart sank. I almost gave up hope. But then my courage returned, and one thought possessed me completely: Milena is outside. I mustn’t leave her alone in the camp. Who will take care of her if her fever starts up again? If only she doesn’t fall sick while I’m not there to help her! What if she should die! I heard her voice, I heard her moaning: “Oh, if only I could be dead without having to die. Don’t let me die alone like an animal.” As long as I was with her to comfort her, I thought she would get better and live to be free again. But here in the dark cell I saw clearly; I knew she was lost.
As I’ve described at length in my other book—about my three years in Siberian camps—what it’s like to spend whole weeks hungry and freezing in a dark cell, I shall speak of it only briefly here. Just as a severely sick person welcomes the sounds of the new day after a night of suffering, so I welcomed the distant sound of the hated siren. I had got through the first night, but I had no idea how many more such nights would follow. I rubbed my cold hands, beat them against my body, jumped up and down to take the stiffness out of my joints, walked back and forth in my cage, searched for a trace of light, a sign of daybreak. But the darkness remained complete. Then suddenly my intent staring brought results. Wherever I looked I saw glittering balls and ribbons and stripes—a fascinating display which held my attention for a while and made me forget everything else.
But when I heard the first sounds from the corridor, I jumped up, rushed to the iron door, and pressed my eye to the little glass spy-hole. In vain. There was a lid over it on the outside. Footsteps approached. I held my breath, heard the rattling of tin plates, I heard the cell to the right of me being opened, and then the same sound on the left. My cell had been passed over. Had they forgotten me? I wanted to call out, to scream, but then I changed my mind, knowing that in this inferno nothing was done or left undone by mistake. Ramdor had chosen to soften me up for my impending interrogation by depriving me of food and light, by leaving me to lie on the cold floor without a blanket.
After five years of confinement in prisons and camps, after the horrors of Siberia, I was more resistant than some of the others who were suffering the same torment in the neighboring cells. I didn’t scream, I didn’t weep, I didn’t hammer the iron door with my fists, I repressed all self-pity, because I needed my strength, I had to survive for Milena’s sake. But when the body is weakened, the strongest character ceases to be an impregnable fortress. After the second sleepless night, shivering with the cold and tortured by gnawing hunger, my mind would cloud over from time to time. I saw loaves of bread piled up around me, I would reach out and then … a cruel awakening! Once that day the light went on, I heard the lid of the spy-hole being lifted; they were watching me, observing my reactions.
Someone was taking pleasure in my weakness. What a ghastly thought! Wanting to hide my face from those eyes, I crept into the corner behind the toilet and hid my head.
I lost all sense of time. One hallucination followed another. All around me I saw big platters piled high with macaroni. I would bend over as greedily as a hungry animal. Every time my head would collide with the cold stone of the toilet bowl. But the tormen
ts of hunger soon passed, giving way to an overpowering desire for warmth. The ceil was full of silky, downy quilts, but whenever I tried to pull one over me, my merciful unconsciousness was shattered. And then I stopped feeling cold. All sensation went out of me. All I felt was a faint pulse beat in my throat. And phosphorescent figures moved through the darkness, approached me, bent protectively over me and vanished. An endless procession. A great sense of peace came over me.
The angry voice of the SS overseer shocked me into consciousness: “Hey there! Don’t you want your bread?” I crept to the door and took the bread ration and the mug of hot ersatz coffee. That was on the morning of my seventh day in the cell. With the first swallow of hot coffee, the first mouthful of black bread, my desire to live revived. I broke the bread into three equal chunks and ate only one of them. There would surely be tomorrows and it was best to take my precautions. This was the seventh day; from then on I was given the regular camp ration every four days—a cruel rhythm, subtle torture, a kind of semi-starvation. The midday meal consisted of five potatoes cooked in their skins with a little vegetable sauce. I had the courage to put three of them aside, one of which I ate on each of the foodless days.
Even in the darkness of the cell every minute had to be lived through. I distinguished day from night by a faint glimmer under the door. I sat huddled on the floor, staring at the thin strip of light; I crept closer and closer to it, and in the end I lay flat, pressing my lips to that faint vestige of beloved daylight.
When you live in perpetual darkness, your sense of hearing gradually takes over from your eyesight. The concrete Bunker had about a hundred cells, arranged in two tiers around a court. Acoustically it was like a swimming pool. I was soon able to differentiate the various outside sounds, to tell exactly from what direction and from how far away an overseer’s scolding or a prisoner’s sobs were coming. Beatings were dealt out on Fridays in a special room. In 1940 Himmler had introduced this type of punishment for women. Such offenses as theft, refusal to work, and lesbianism were punished by twenty-five, fifty, or seventy-five strokes. Any German woman convicted of sexual relations with a foreigner was punished with twenty-five strokes in addition to having her head shaved. The screams of the victims resounded through the building. It did no good to stop my ears; I heard it all the same, heard it with my skin, with my whole body; the pain went to my heart.
Milena Page 18