Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  There are those who know the ropes and those who don’t—the new Poles don’t. On the brick-throwing gang, for example, if one woman faints the others are not allowed to move her, so the bricks have to be thrown right over her to the next in line. But the German women, who are now experienced, throw fast, and if the Polish newcomer doesn’t catch it, the brick falls on the legs of the one who passed out.

  The Poles have also yet to learn how to catch the bricks but avoid the sharp edges. Soon Wanda’s hands are a mass of bleeding flesh—so bad is the pain that she lets them drop and watches the blood drip down. ‘What’s going on?’ Wanda lifts her hands to show the guard. After lunch break—watery soup in the block—the same guard quietly pulls her out of the line and sends her to carry baskets for a day or two.

  At 7 p.m. the siren sounds and they rush to queue again for swede soup. At 8.15 it sounds for bed and at 9 for silence, except that now a guard with a dog comes poking at the bodies to see who has put on extra clothes. Culprits are turfed out onto the floor and are set upon by the dog. The guard leaves for the night shouting out: ‘Alles in Ordnung.’

  In the block the girls try hard to understand the rules, if only so as not to break them. Clearly, German property is sacrosanct, so a scratched cup means a report, and probably a beating. Initiative brings the cruellest punishment. A woman makes toe warmers out of scraps against frostbite. She gets twenty-five lashes, even though now she can’t work. Another alters a dress to fit her better. She is whipped. And all rules must be followed at once: on the order you leave the block ‘like fleeing a burning building’ or else you get a dousing, which in winter means frozen clothes all day.

  But the rules have no logic. They multiply by the day. The cleanliness they welcomed at first is enforced not for hygiene but as a crazed obsession. For example, the women are told to wipe glasses with a dirty apron because the clean dishcloth might leave white fuzz. And the rules on folding blankets have now run riot. Not only are bedclothes folded and refolded, but so is everything. Much of Sunday is spent folding beds, blankets, towels, dishcloths, napkins, into ever more intricate triangles.

  Yet enforcement is entirely arbitrary, depending on the whim of the Blockova. One has a rule that says windows must be left wide open all night, so the women wake up to find hoarfrost on the ceiling, dropping onto beds and melting. Sometimes they have to yank frozen hair off their pillows. Another Blockova likes to spot-check knickers for extra padding. To do so she suddenly locks the dormitory door and forces everyone to march in front of her holding their skirts up their back.

  Another goes wild if a prisoner tries to improve the look of her hair. Often punishment is given to teach a lesson, as the camp is now so big that not all offenders are caught. So a seventeen-year-old suffers two weeks in the bunker simply because she tried to trim her fringe. The cell is freezing and her legs turn gangrenous, so she is taken to the Revier for amputation, but surgery comes too late and the girl dies.

  By the winter the new arrivals’ shaved scalps are beginning to sprout new hair. Grażyna Chrostowska, the Lublin poet, tries to make a hairstyle with her tufts, but a guard spots this and Grażyna is shaved anew as a punishment. The largest number of new rules are designed to stamp out friendship, or in camp-speak, association. The Poles, as a group, are particularly guilty of friendship and association, so they are told there can be no meetings, and one day that they can’t exchange looks through a window. They can’t shake hands in greeting, or speak to each other without permission.

  But Halina Chorąẓyna, a chemistry professor from Warsaw, knows ways around these rules, and on Christmas day she defies the ban, calling the girls together to sing Polish Christmas carols. ‘But don’t sing out loud,’ she whispers. ‘Sing inside your heads.’ They sing in silence, mouthing words in unison, and somehow it works. Halina has only been in the camp as long as the young girls, but she is already an ‘old man’ in terms of wisdom. Like many of these girls’ mothers, she fought in the First World War.

  Each day, under Halina’s direction, the women decide to do something, however small, to help each other, perhaps a smile for someone like Grażyna, who worries about her sister Pola, who is sick. Friends notice that neither girl has smiled since learning that their father died. Or another day Halina might say: ‘Befriend another who seems alone.’ On the bunk below her, Stanisława Michalik finds a new arrival, a Polish farm girl, who is in great distress. On her first night she confides in Stanisława that she is pregnant, and terrified about what will happen.

  The next day the young Pole is taken to the Revier. Later that night she returns to the block and weeps in Stanisława’s arms, saying the baby has been ‘cut out of her’.

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  By the winter of 1941 everyone in Ravensbrück knew that babies were being aborted in the Revier. The rules were that babies must not be born here. In the early days those arriving pregnant were so few that they were simply sent off to give birth in a hospital at Templin, a nearby town. Two years later, however, the number of pregnant women had multiplied, due almost entirely to the arrival in Germany of thousands of Polish slave labourers.

  Since the invasion in 1939 Hitler’s forces had rounded up Polish men and women, to work on German farms and in factories. In 1940 Himmler issued a decree ruling that any German woman who had intimate relations with a Polish man must have her head shorn in public, and then be led through the streets ‘as a warning to others’. But the stigma of public humiliation did not stop the contacts, and pregnant German women—as well as Polish slave labourers made pregnant by German men—were brought to Ravensbrück and forced to have abortions. All were given the red triangle of political prisoners, but to distinguish them from other ‘true’ politicals, the other camp women labelled them, cruelly, Bettpolitische, bedpoliticals. Like the Jews who were rounded up for having sex with Aryans, these women were also accused of committing Rassenschande.

  The abortions were usually carried out by one of the new camp doctors, a former naval surgeon called Rolf Rosenthal. Every prisoner who worked in the Revier recalled his butchery. Hanka Housková, a Czech prisoner nurse, recalled how on one occasion Rosenthal cut out a five-month foetus from a woman’s body with a medical saw. Dr Bozena Boudova, a Czech pharmacist, heard groans from the operating theatre one day and saw a dead baby with its bloody umbilical cord in a bucket.

  Rosenthal was assisted in his work by the prisoner Gerda Quernheim, known as ‘the little ferret’. Quernheim, born in Oberhausen in the Ruhr Valley, was thirty-four when she arrived at Ravensbrück in the spring of 1941. An experienced nurse and midwife, she had been arrested for carrying out abortions, which outside the camp were illegal: good German Aryans were supposed to do everything they could to raise the birth rates, not lower them. Illegal abortion would nevertheless not normally lead to a concentration camp, but Quernheim had compounded her crime by insulting the Führer during her trial.

  When she first came to Ravensbrück Gerda was assigned to the delousing gang, to shave heads, but it was when she joined the corpse gang, which collected bodies and took them to a collection point for onward transport to the Fürstenberg crematorium, that her attitude first attracted attention. Helena Strzelecka, a Pole on the same gang, recalled going with Gerda to the bunker to collect the body of a Jehovah’s Witness from a cell. ‘Actually it was just a skeleton,’ recalled Helena, ‘lying in water.’

  Under Mandl and Binz the horrors of the bunker had mounted and water torture became common. There was a tap in Cell 64, known as the death cell. Prisoners who passed out after beatings were laid on the floor and the water was turned on. They were left there lying in the water so long they sometimes froze to death. This was what had happened to the Jehovah’s Witness. ‘The guard Hasse, was playing with the keys and making fun of the dead woman,’ said Helena. ‘When they put her in the coffin Quernheim said: “Oh you stupid Jehovah’s Witness. Now you’ll go to your Jehovah.” The dentist then pulled the gold teeth out. They went in large quantities to Berlin.�
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  Within a short time Quernheim was selected to work in the Revier alongside the camp doctors. In return she was allowed to eat in the SS canteen, which was when Doris Maase nicknamed her ‘the little ferret’.

  When the new woman doctor, Herta Oberheuser, arrived, she co-opted Quernheim to help with lethal injections, which Oberheuser had continued to administer after Sonntag had left.

  The German prisoner Klara Tanke, another Revier worker, recalled that in early 1941 a transport of Dutch prisoners—mostly communists—arrived and amongst them was a dentist in her twenties, suffering from jaundice. Klara recalled: ‘She asked me for a pill to soothe her pain. I couldn’t help her. The Dutch woman complained to Oberheuser, who said: “I will give you an injection to give you peace.” Quernheim went off to fetch the syringe from the medical room and Oberheuser then administered a lethal injection. The body was taken to the room where corpses were kept.’

  Klara also saw Dr Oberheuser give a lethal injection to an eighteen-year-old woman from Bremerhaven, which was her home town. The woman was injected for ‘bed-wetting’, said Clara. Again, it was Quernheim who fetched the syringe.

  When Rolf Rosenthal learned that Quernheim was a trained midwife, he instructed her to help with abortions, which in the camp were legal because the prisoners were ‘lives not worth living’. Quernheim’s crime had now become a duty: she helped Rosenthal induce labour, and then killed the foetus either by strangling or by drowning in a bucket. In return she earned more privileges, wearing a clean white apron and sleeping overnight in the Revier.

  Ilse Machova, another Czech Revier worker, described how Quernheim disposed of the bodies at night by placing them in cardboard boxes, taking them to the camp boiler and throwing them into the furnace. Prisoners also saw her walking to the boiler in broad daylight, usually carrying a bucket. In the words of the prisoner nurse Hanka Housková:

  We often caught sight of Gerda Quernheim’s pail, covered with a woollen cloth, that she carried back and forth daily, containing the dead newborn infants. Once she carried two pails. On another occasion, we convinced ourselves that we heard the cry of a newborn child coming from her pail. After this cry we ran out to the corridor. Dr Rosenthal came along and asked what we were doing and chased us back to work.

  The identities of the mothers and dead babies were not recorded, and after the war the surviving bedpoliticals rarely wished to talk, such was the shame they still felt. The story of Leni Bitterhof, however, as she told it to an investigating police officer, was among the few Nazi police files that survived.

  In 1939, after a tip-off, police opened a file on Leni, a farmer’s daughter from Kleve, in northwest Germany. Leni lost her husband on the eastern front in 1941. According to her police interrogation, it was while her husband was away that she visited a friend who worked in an inn, and there met a Polish worker called Michał, whose wife also worked there. He smiled, but ‘I didn’t return the smile.’

  When, two years later, they met again on the street they stopped to talk. A week later Michał visited Leni’s flat, where he kissed her. ‘Also the Pole touched me immorally during the fondling, which I did not resist.’ She went on: ‘After prompting [by the police] I admit that we had sexual intercourse during this meeting.’ There were further visits. The couple had sex, and ‘I have to admit I gave the Pole coffee and bread on two occasions.’ Once she went to the cinema with Michał and his wife, and afterwards ‘they went home to their place and I went home alone’.

  Leni did not hear from Michał again for some time, though she sent him a Christmas card, by which time she knew she was pregnant with his child. ‘I knew that Michał was the father. I did not have sex with other men.’ Michał gave her a bracelet, ‘which I hereby give to the police’. In return for the bracelet, Leni gave Michał a little handkerchief. ‘I owned the handkerchief and did not buy it especially for Michał.’

  She told Michał about her pregnancy, and he promised to divorce his wife and marry her. But Leni was soon brought to Ravensbrück, where the baby was aborted, probably by Rolf Rosenthal.

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  In the winter months of 1941–2 the Polish Verfügs were given pickaxes and told to break up the frozen sand, chopping out a square, before moving it to another place. After a big snowfall, the gang was sent to pull barrows out from the edge of the lake, where they were half-submerged in mud and ice. They filled them with snow and pushed them up the muddy hillside to the SS houses at the top, then dumped the snow and came back down, watched by guards with dogs.

  Wanda saw that Krysia couldn’t make it. A huge hound was straining to maul her the minute she fell, so Wanda walked behind her and didn’t see that she was crying until they reached the top. It was then that the barrow slipped from Krysia’s hands and a guard fell on her with a horsewhip. Instinctively Wanda stepped in and put up an arm to shield her, shouting to the guard: ‘Can’t you see the child is all in?’ The guard looked at her, astonished, and walked away. From that moment on Wanda vowed never to leave Krysia’s side.

  After six months in the camp, the Polish students were learning how to get round some of the rules. For example, the rules against friendship were drawing the women closer, into ever smaller, safer groups, and forcing them to show their friendship in new ways. In the blocks, late at night, or perhaps at mealtimes, the school-age Poles attended lessons organised for them by older women, often teachers, so that they would not be behind in their studies when they went home.

  Zofia Pociłowska, a sculptor, started making tiny little gifts for her friends, chiselling with broken sticks on anything she could find. One day, someone outside the block organised a knife for Zofia. Now she could sculpt much finer objects, like a crucifix on a piece of coal, or a Mother Mary on the end of a toothbrush, the size of a thumbnail. Overnight, Zofia became the most popular woman in the block. Everyone wanted a sculpture of their own, which they could admire and hide in a crack in the wall. The most sought-after sculpture of all was a ring engraved with the prisoner’s camp number.

  Grażyna composed more poems and ‘gave’ them to her friends—though she had no paper, so to record them safely she composed at roll call, standing in the centre of her rank of five and thinking up lines that were passed along to those closest, and each remembered a line or two—‘Rambling bird, passing birds, why are you flying here? This is no path for you; it is a camp, a place condemned and forgotten by God’—as the count went on. Janina Iwańska, another friend from Lublin, could remember the whole lot. Sometimes they managed to organise scraps of paper to write the poems down.

  Then came a move to stamp out Polish friendships another way, by splitting up the Polish group and sending them to different blocks. Wanda and Krysia’s new block was ‘full of prostitutes and thieves of every nationality, coarse, screaming harridans’ who ‘spat on our sheets and stole our few treasures’, as Wanda recalled it later. Two weeks later the girls were transferred to Block 11. Here women, many of them Gypsies, performed what Wanda called ugly and inhuman acts of lesbian love.

  Sitting in her Kraków apartment, overlooking the central square, I asked Wanda about the ‘inhuman acts’. A portrait of Pope John Paul II stared down on us from the wall, and Wanda stared too, saying nothing. She asked if I had travelled all the way to Kraków to ask her that. But there was a time when Wanda Wojtasik was haunted by the ‘inhuman acts’ of lesbian love as much as she was by other acts the camp was known for. In her memoir, published in 1948, she said that Block 11 was where she ‘lost her innocence’ and where this thing called ‘LL’—lesbian love—acquired ‘a grotesque human reality’.

  It would take Wanda ages to get to sleep. ‘At first I couldn’t believe what was happening and watched wide-eyed, torn between curiosity and despair.’ Wanda managed to shield Krysia from seeing some of what took place. Krysia, she says, was ‘a quiet, pretty, graceful girl, not only innocent but also naive and credulous’.

  Wanda wondered, however, ‘whether one day we will be like that too’. A n
ote was pressed into Wanda’s hand by a Gypsy called Zorita, who was tiny and very thin. ‘If you want to, come to the corner of Block 12,’ it said.

  Zorita had seemed like a gentle girl, with great black velvety eyes. Only now did I understand the meaning of those inviting glances. My first reaction was to laugh. So I was to play the man, was I? But it was horrible, and sad. I wanted no part in it. But sometimes I would accidentally catch Zorita’s eye, and what I saw there made me frightened. I recoiled at first and felt pity.

  Propositions came ‘thick and fast’. Wanda found herself in demand as ‘woman and as man’ as lesbianism ‘spread like a plague’. She would have none of it, she said, but it destroyed her faith in the innocence of even simple human gestures. And Krysia saw, ‘of course she did. How could she not see those awful scenes when they were actually being enacted by our own bedside? She cried for a long time that first night and never again came to say goodnight to me in bed, at least not in the same way as before.’

  Other Polish women, asked today about the lesbianism they encountered, talk more easily than Wanda Wojtasik. Most say they were propositioned at some time. And some talk, like Wanda, of a time when lesbian sex seemed to explode in a wave of promiscuity throughout the camp—but only amongst the Germans, Gypsies and the Dutch, they insist, never among the Poles.

  ‘There were these women,’ said Maria Bielicka, ‘and it was a shock to all of us students as we knew nothing of these things. We were brought up so very strictly.’ But it was not as dramatic as some made out, suggests Maria. ‘It happened rarely at night as women were too tired. Mostly at weekends. But discreetly. They kissed. Licked each other. Touched each other. Whatever they normally do. There were many couples. It was their kind of friendship but not one that we could understand at that time. And in any case we had more important things to worry about.’

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