Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

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  Looming up in a clearing still a few hundred yards away was something vaguely resembling an industrial zone. It soon became apparent that it was not.

  The gigantic entrance dwarfed the uniformed SS guards and overseers swarming around those enormous gates and the yard beyond. Walls nearly four metres high hid something hideous and ably deterred escape. It was a women’s concentration camp. Guard towers attached to tall electrified barbed wire fences bound Ravensbrück concentration camp on all sides. The walls enclosing the large parade yard were lined with barbed wire fences. Attached to fences were small boxes that nearly always gave a lethal electric shock. Black skull and crossbones squares were attached to the wire, advertising the fact. Still, many women in their desperation, especially in these latter years, ran to throw themselves onto the wire, sizzling and shaking most horribly to death in seconds. A quick if agonising release.

  ‘Schnell! Schnell! Come along, you lazy scumbags, get a move on. This is not a holiday camp. You’ve got work to do. First, you need to be showered and deloused. Get into those shower stalls at the end of the huts. Ein, zwei, ein, zwei! That’s more like it.’

  The women obeyed mechanically.

  And so began the further dehumanising process of a concentration camp. From at least autumn 1944, with the construction of gas chambers, it became an extermination camp too. Thousands had already been put to death by hanging, beating, rifle butting, medical experiments, execution by firing squad or simply shot by one of the ‘officers’ in the back of the neck or head. The material I have read shocks and shocks and then shocks yet again.

  From towers as tall as trees SS-guards pointed rifles down at the women, hoping they would have reason to open fire. It was boring, standing up there for hours on end. A little shooting practice wouldn’t go amiss.

  The stench of the place floated over the group of women still outside, drifting on the pure air into the healthy forest. As Violette looked, her eyes were attracted by a flash of light. It was a tiny corner of sparkling lake. This was known as Fürstenbergsee or Schwedtsee, otherwise more aptly known as Ravensbrücksee.175 The horrors of the camp provided an awful contrast to this scenic landscape of soft hills, forests and lakes, with a church spire standing proud above the tree tops.

  SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had established Ravensbrück concentration camp as a protective custody camp for ‘criminals and enemies of the state’. He owned much of the land thereabouts and received a tidy income from the toils of slave labour farmed out to factories like Siemens and others. Siemens had large workshops there in twenty-six long barracks and two other L-shaped barracks surrounded by barbed wire. Siemens’ own personnel were separately housed in a further twenty barracks. This area was about 500 yards from the political barracks.

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  Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp in Europe, if not the world. From the lake, it sprawled to the east, the long western wall giving onto the lake itself. This wall is now known as the ‘Wall of Nations’ and has a plaque commemorating the courage of Violette, Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Cecily Lefort. Before it, at its unveiling, lay a long rose garden and when the ceremony of commemoration took place in May 1994, the day was glorious, the roses were red and in thick full-bloom covering the bed under which, we were informed, lay many women who had died because they would not submit.

  But in 1944, this place of awful shame looked so different. Parasites, fleas, lice, vermin of every kind fostered disease such as typhus, dysentery and others that ran rife. It was huge and it was horrendous. A prison for women. And their nightmare.

  The swampy marshlands had been cleared in 1939 and the prison built by 500 male prisoners to accommodate about 7,000 women in rows of long barrack huts, called Blockhäuser. In August 1944, it housed almost six times as many, some 40,000 women. No wonder it stank! And the numbers would increase over the next five months of Violette’s ‘stay’ to 90,000! This concentration camp had one of the highest fatality rates of the many concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

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  At first, in the early days, the procedures for registration were strict and thorough. As the women arrived via truck or having marched from Bahnhof Fürstenberg, the female SS guards struck, punched, kicked and slapped each one as she was herded into the camp.

  The women prisoners were kept packed tight in small rooms until the camp medics were ready. Then they were ordered to strip off. By 1944, most were quite indifferent to their nakedness; like Violette, Denise and Lilian, they had already been subjected to treatment meant to humiliate them – without success. This was nothing.

  The female guards went round checking everybody, kicking the clothes to one side, then the door opened to let two SS officers in full uniform and polished jackboots march in with great arrogance. The women were then made to run in front of the SS guards and dogs, plus a doctor and a dentist. The dogs had been trained to be ferocious, to snap and bite helping force the women to run.

  The dentist was Dr Martin Hellinger. His task was to note in his records any gold teeth he found in the mouths of the women and if they died, to remove them. It was not unknown for them to be removed while they were still alive.

  The doctor’s job was to sort out who was ‘fit for heavy work’ including road-making and tree-felling; ‘fit for light work’ and so confined to work in the camp itself, such as sifting clothes, remaking them, all kinds of sewing, preparing meals for the camp SS personnel and the prisoners and so on; or the sinister ‘no work at all’ when some were used for experimentation or led to their death.

  These categories had little bearing on a woman’s true physical and mental condition. If a woman had swollen feet, injuries, scars or perhaps was overwhelmed, too weak or ill to run, she was compelled to take a ‘recovery’ period: in fact taken to the imaginary Mittweide176 near Uckermark. This subsidiary camp about a mile from the main camp had been built around 1941 for female juvenile offenders but became gas chambers for Ravensbrück in January 1945. Before this was operational, the women were driven in the ‘Green Mina’,177 a special sealed van where they were gassed. Not transported to the camp as they had been told, but transported to eternity. Simple really: the exhaust pipe was connected to the van’s sealed loading compartment. The killing gas seeped in and did an effective job. It took fifteen to twenty minutes for a load of about fifty women to die.

  The women were given cards to indicate which category they fell in to. Receiving a yellow card either on arrival day or on routine rounds in the barracks or the sickbay – the Revier – meant unfit for work for three to six months. A red card meant totally unfit for work. In the latter half of 1944, a red cardholder was usually sent to the subsidiary camp. Opening it up for prisoners, the warders told them it was a ‘rest camp’ but in fact it was a transit camp to the gas chamber. Conditions were so dreadful that many died there from exposure and maltreatment. Very few survivors emerged.

  All the possessions the women brought into the camp were taken away and sorted by two prisoners labouring in the sorting offices. Everything was docketed, sized and divided into relevant piles of goods. Even the shorn hair was gathered, the long strands collected and matched and tied in individual bundles.

  By August 1944, the stream of new female prisoners overwhelmed prison capacity so the procedure had to be simplified. The women were no longer quarantined for five weeks, but they still had to undress and run around under inspection to see who needed ‘recovery’. They were then showered and sprayed with disinfectant rather than quarantined, then given prison garb, which by this time, was often not the striped clothes one usually sees in photos of the women in Ravensbrück. There was no longer a sufficient supply and prisoners of category two, that is, kept in the camp to work, were not able to keep up a high enough output of garments to meet the huge influx of women from July 1944.

  Instead, clothes wrested from dead prisoners and which could not be used elsewhere were dumped in the room and the new intake of women tried to ch
oose what they wanted in the scrummage. Finally everyone had at least a pair of underpants, a dress of some sort and possibly a ragged coat or cardigan, maybe even a scarf. Hair was no longer shaved; it took too long and was considered an unnecessary expense. It was just cut in chunks to look as unattractive as possible. Sometimes, one of the female SS guards, Monika or Mohneke, would cut the scalps along with the hair – she liked to hurt, liked to humiliate. However, long hair that could be used for other purposes was cut fairly carefully. It sold well once made into wigs.

  Disinfecting the women stopped too in the end. It cost money. In any case, mingling with the other women in the barrack for an hour or so would merely re-infect them. Once the women entered their hut, the foul and fetid bunk straw and the obscenely filthy blankets ensured instant infestation. So what was the point of disinfecting them on arrival?

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  In the months between May 1939 and June 1944, an estimated 43,000 women were brought to Ravensbrück. During the next nine months, July 1944 to March 1945, an estimated 90,000 more came – to a camp originally designed for 7,000. Regardless of the number who died, it was still hugely overcrowded. Every woman a filthy, hungry, suffering remnant of humanity.

  In February 1944, Geneviève de Gaulle,178 the niece of Charles de Gaulle, received the number 27372. She was only twenty-four when she was eventually released in April 1945. With Odette Churchill,179 Geneviève was taken by the commandant of the camp¸ Fritz Sühren, to the liberators and personally handed over, with the idea that this would improve his chances. The two names de Gaulle and Churchill were a terrific bargaining chip, he thought. He must not have understood the utter degradation he had inflicted on these women and the dreadful state they were in. Geneviève said in her book God remained Outside, ‘He looked like a fox – not very complimentary to that poor animal,’ continuing that, as she was led to the car, she was accompanied by ‘a terribly gaunt woman who seemed very old. A few stray hairs had grown again on her shaven head.’ Perhaps Odette had thought the same thing when she saw Geneviève, who had pleurisy and was very ill. They did not dare talk but they did hold hands. Two old women who were still in their twenties!

  I also met and corresponded with another ex-inmate of Ravensbrück. Christiane Césaire told me that she had been raped many times. We remained in contact and I learnt that her life had been truly difficult, so how did she retain the laughter and merriness that, to the time of our meeting, continued to fizz and effervesce into old age?

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  All the prisoners were organised into categories, each with a distinctive colour-coded triangle, as well as by nationality. Political prisoners (including British, French and Belgian Résistance fighters, those of the eastern bloc and Germany, and Soviet prisoners of war) wore red triangles. Among them were the Bettpolitik,180 there because they had had sex with a foreigner, not to be confused with the ordinary prostitutes who were among the ‘asocials’ category. Jehovah’s Witnesses,181 called the ‘people of the book’ or in German Bibelforscherinnen182 wore purple triangles. ‘Asocials’ (including lesbians, prostitutes and Gypsies) wore black triangles. Criminals (common criminals and those ‘criminals’ who broke Nazi-imposed laws) wore green triangles. Jewish women wore yellow triangles, but if a Jewish woman was also a political prisoner, she would wear a red triangle as well as the yellow triangle, sewn on the left sleeve to form a Star of David, or a yellow stripe on top of the red triangle. To signify a prisoner’s nationality, the SS made the women sew a letter of the alphabet within the triangle: F for Französin, French political prisoners, E for Engländerin and so on.

  Perhaps Violette wished to sew ‘E’ for English and ‘F’ for French in a ‘V’ for victory shape that also represented her name. There were other coloured triangles denoting various groups of ‘female subhuman species’.

  Violette and her comrades were placed in one of the ‘political barracks’: Hausbloch N. V. (Block 5). Before being frogmarched there, they had to sit on the floor and sew on their own triangle or triangles and national letter on the left side of their jacket or blouse or dress, with the needle and thread each were given.

  The political block held many highly intelligent women from several countries so the flow of conversation could be very interesting. Nanda Herbermann, whose tattooed number was 6582 (every inmate had a number tattooed on their arm), said the camp had been much more comfortable on her arrival. By the time she was transferred to the political barracks, there was still a modicum of comfort in that each woman still had a stool and cot of her own. She says it was cleaner, although fully occupied, than the admissions hut. ‘Austrian social democrats, noblewomen, a mother superior over seventy years old, writers, several witty and very lively French women, representatives of different parties, bourgeois women: everything, absolutely everything could be found here,’ she recollects.183

  Twenty-three nationalities were interned in the camp and the prosecution after the war proved that at least 80,000 women had lost their lives in this camp. They died by slow starvation, hanging, shooting in the ‘shooting corridor’ and then thrown into the ovens, dead or alive; by medical experimentation; by hard labour and lashings, beatings on the beating block; thrown into the bunker into solitary with soup every three days; throwing themselves against the electric wire fencing or finally being shoved into the new gas chambers.

  There was ‘die Rolle’, ‘die Walzrolle’, a large concrete roller that would normally be pulled by a tractor. Geneviève de Gaulle told me in 1994 how, as punishment, women were forced to push the roller in the nearby quarry until they died from the summer heat, thirst and exhaustion. Huge and heavy it was used to break up and pack down stone for infilling.

  Eighty thousand murdered women might be considered a small number compared with the 4 million exterminated at Auschwitz, but each number was a woman, or a child. Each woman and child had a family and friends back home. It is impossible to know exactly just how many women and children were inmates and lost their lives in this appalling camp since the Nazis destroyed many of the records when their rout was imminent and fleeing was the only course open to them. We do know that some women arrived with their children or gave birth while incarcerated. We also know to some extent the horrors that were inflicted upon these youngsters and newly born.

  Ravensbrück was, in actual fact, also used as a brothel. Though seldom publicly written about before the 1990s, and certainly not duly documented by the Nazi camp staff, forced sexual activities were frequent in concentration camps, including Ravensbrück. ‘Women were prepared to sell their bodies for food’ for their children. Kapos184 seduced women and gave them food in return. Prostitution was not unknown. Male prisoners who worked in the women’s sections of the camps sold food for sex, but some survivors also note that starvation causes a striking absence of any sex drive. Others confide that there was ‘everlasting talk about sex and smut [which] may be considered as compensatory satisfaction.’185

  In the summer of 1944, a section was opened up behind the cells to hold around 2,000 men, many of whom died in the same gas chambers. There had always been a few male prisoners at the camp, a couple of hundred to begin with.

  Heinrich Himmler discussed an idea with Otto Pohl of the SS Economic Division in early March 1943 that he considered ‘it necessary in the most liberal way to provide hard-working prisoners with women in brothels’. Pohl186 forwarded these instructions to the camps and at Ravensbrück brothel vouchers were delivered to male prisoners of special value, but certainly not to Jews. For SS personnel who wanted a ready flow of women to satisfy their appetites, women from Ravensbrück were cleaned up and deloused for their personal use, for which ‘services’ they paid.

  Starvation was one of the essential tools to keep the thousands of women from rioting. Just enough food to keep the women working until they dropped or died. If they collapsed and could work no longer but were not yet dead, they were still disposed of – either shot or sent to the infirmary for the doctors to experiment on. This fate was
especially true for the Polish women. All kinds of vile experiments were carried out for the professors and surgeons of the great German hospitals and German pharmaceutical companies. How interesting to have live human material to work on – all very scientific, of course, with reams of reports and controls in each group.

  On 2 March 1947, a mixed inter-Allied court in the British zone tried sixteen Ravensbrück staff members and found them all guilty, except one. He died during the trial. Eleven were sentenced to death by hanging and the remainder to imprisonment. After imprisonment, they were freed and most of them lived normal lives. Conscience? Yes, for some, and, for a few, great remorse. But others didn’t give a damn.

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  The Blockhäuser for political prisoners were built for about 270 women, but when Violette and her friends arrived there were close on 1,000 women. In the first few years, with not too many inmates, it was well organised and the women had decent enough prison garb, food and beds, but this had grossly deteriorated by early 1944.

  Women shared the infested cots with four or five others. Many did not have a bed and slept on the floor, often without a blanket, even when there was snow on the ground and the lake was frozen over. During the heatwave of the summer of 1944, there was a plague of lice and the water became contaminated. Disease was rife, especially typhus and louse-borne relapsing fever.