Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

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  Of all the new ‘central directives’ imposed on Ravensbrück in the first half of 1942, the most hated were those that set new hours and quotas for the sewing shop. This workshop, in the industrial area at the back of the camp, had long been one of its most dreaded workplaces. The noise of machines was deafening and the air always thick with dust. Stretching down the room were conveyor belts, with lines of women sitting alongside at sewing machines, making uniforms for the Waffen-SS as well as clothes for the camp prisoners.

  At any moment the shop-floor boss, an Austrian called Gustav Binder, nicknamed Schinderhannes after a notorious Rhineland outlaw executed in 1803, might come raging out of his office and throw a stool, or perhaps a shoe with needles still protruding, that would catch a woman on the face.

  After Himmler’s visit the ordeal intensified. The factory barracks were enlarged, the prisoners worked eleven-hour shifts, and for the first time there were two shifts—day and night. There were new quotas too, which the Ravensbrück textile bosses—Fritz Opitz, the manager; his deputy, Josef Graf; and Binder, the shop-floor man—were required to enforce. All were qualified tailors, trained at Texled’s Dachau headquarters. One of the four biggest SS enterprises, Texled was professionally run, used the latest equipment and relied almost totally on camp slave labour so was highly profitable. Oswald Pohl located the main Texled sewing shop at Ravensbrück because garment making was ‘women’s work’.

  Fritz Opitz, the boss, set out in late April for the Texled HQ at Dachau to take instructions on the new quotas. Opitz, however, though a master tailor, could barely read or write, so Graf, recently invalided back from the Russian front, and Binder worked out the schedule. Binder sat at a sewing machine and sewed each section of each garment himself, while Graf stood by with a stopwatch. In this way they worked out the minimum time it took to sew, say, a cuff or a seam.

  They set the quota at two and a half minutes per shirt, which meant a minimum output of 180 garments each shift, given precisely fifty-seven women on each of the ten belts, working for eleven hours starting at 7 a.m. and finishing at 6 p.m. The night shift would start at 7 p.m. and finish at 6 the next morning, and all prisoners had a half-hour break in the middle. Binder then ‘trained’ the women to work the quotas, and he began with the night shift. With windows blacked out at all times, the women sat at their machines, their feet clad in special cotton slippers, ready to press the pedals.

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  ‘Tonight we are going to produce 180 shirts,’ says Binder, who stands next to the first woman on the line and counts out the seconds on his chronometer as she sews her section of shirt. When she fails to meet the target, he hits her across the face and she falls off her stool. The other 600 or so workers tremble and watch Binder, his face flushed, shaking, pouring with sweat. He has a rustic complexion and a thick neck. He pulls the woman back to her seat and she sets her machine running to try again while he takes up his chronometer. After two, three, four more failed attempts, the woman has been battered so hard she can barely sit up, but on the fifth attempt she succeeds. Binder does this for each of the women on the line.

  And for a while the quota is met, so Binder delegates supervision to deputies and retreats behind the swing door leading to the office where Graf sits, and where a prisoner plots production on a graph, based on the count of shirts, trousers and jackets at the end of every shift. If the lines climb, Binder and Graf can report with pride to Opitz that the quotas are achieved and Opitz can report to Dachau. These men are not answerable to the SS commandant, and though they carry whips they don’t wear SS uniforms, because they pride themselves on being tailors, not mere SS guards.

  But it is always touch and go, as the timings are so precise that the belts must run continuously, so it is essential that the cutting supervisor, the German prisoner Maria Wiedmaier, a communist and Ravensbrück old-timer, keeps the sewers supplied with fabric. It is also essential that broken needles or snarled threads are dealt with swiftly, so another prisoner, a Czech called Nelly, has the job of running round the machines changing threads and broken needles. She has to move fast so that the sewer can finish her garment section before the next one comes along the belt.

  And as each sewer adds to the work of the one before, there can be no pause, apart from the half-hour stoppage. Extra toilet breaks are allowed, but on a rota basis: a guard who has all the 600 prisoner numbers on a list calls out the numbers one by one throughout the shift, but never reaches the end, so that some numbers go uncalled for days and the woman may have to urinate where she sits. And this is punished, often with standing to attention out of doors for up to four hours, often at night in the freezing cold, and after April, shoes and winter clothes (socks and jackets) are taken away and the women wear just thin cotton.

  But a belt will often stop suddenly in the middle of a shift when a woman falls asleep at her machine. Binder has timed the tasks by his own performance, unaware that a half-starved prisoner will take twice as long and soon lose strength. The instant he hears the belt stop, Binder is out of his office and hurling scissors at the sleeping woman. If he misses he stands over her, grabs her by the hair, lifts her up and smashes her face down onto the machine until her nose pours blood.

  Binder and Graf sometimes come onto the shop floor together, both drunk. They pick out an elderly woman, accuse her of some crime, then start to beat her, and throw her across the table so that she falls to the floor on the other side. On one such occasion a young woman, maybe a niece or a daughter, tries to help the older woman, but the drunken tailors grab her and Binder kicks her in the stomach with his metal-shod jackboots. Now she too falls, clutching her stomach and screaming. As work resumes, the girl is left lying there. Eventually she is removed to the Revier, from which word comes that she has died.

  It is in the final hour of the night shift, when the women should be looking forward to a rest, that the worst fear spreads. Everyone knows that the garments are being counted; they know what will happen if they miss the quota. So when all the machines finally stop and silence falls they turn their eyes, 600 sets of them, towards Binder’s door. Suddenly Schinderhannes comes charging out of his den, face scarlet, eyes glaring, fists clenched, shouting abuse. All eyes follow him as he rampages from one woman to the next, grabbing their hair and smashing heads against sewing machines, until he himself is completely exhausted.

  The whole workshop will be punished for missing the quota—probably by having to stand to attention for several hours before returning to blocks for sleep, or by a new, higher quota that is even more impossible to achieve.

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  Some machinists managed better than others. When Grete Buber-Neumann joined the sewing shop she noticed a young Ukrainian girl who occasionally looked across from her machine and smiled. During the midnight break the girl, Nina, taught Grete Russian folk songs that they sometimes sang together as they worked—the machines were so loud that nobody could hear. And there was one supervisor called Siepel, a Hungarian, who tried to help by going around showing the women how it was done. The women learned to love him, only to find one day he had left for the front.

  One day the prisoner supervisor, Maria Wiedmaier, took Grete aside and offered her a better job in the workshop office. Maria had the power to do this now, as she was so favoured by Binder for helping him reach the quotas. Many of the German communists had a servile attitude to the SS, said Grete. The work seemed to give these prisoners a purpose, and they ‘put their heart and souls into war work’. Perhaps this is not too surprising, as the German prisoners also had loved ones at the front, and families at home in bomb shelters.

  Maria Wiedmaier worked so hard that Graf was heard to comment one day: ‘What would I do without her?’ Binder thought so highly of her that he even called her as a witness at his trial. He clearly still felt pride in his work at Ravensbrück, boasting in court of his famous ‘140 pairs of trousers a day’.*1

  ‘And is it true that the same task was carried out in the same
way, according to the same rules, in the same two and a half minutes, every day?’ asked Stephen Stewart,*2 the chief prosecutor. ‘Jawohl,’ said Binder.

  After Binder was sentenced to death, his wife made an appeal saying it was he who was under pressure, not the prisoners: they kept on trying to sabotage the work. The prisoners had ‘maliciously damaged hundreds of clothes so that it was impossible for my husband to fulfil the quota’. Could the court spare his life for her sake, and the sake of their two children? But Binder was hanged, along with Graf and Opitz.

  There was, however, an element of truth in what Martha Binder said. One of the unintended consequences of Himmler’s decision to harness prisoners to the war effort was the incentive it gave for sabotage. There had been no point in sabotaging sand shifting, or coal unloading, but damaging the garments to be worn by German soldiers was worth the risk.

  Most prisoners in the sewing shop were far too exhausted, too terrified of the consequences, or both, to even consider sabotage, and workers on the conveyor belts were far too exposed to risk it. In the cutting area, however, under less stringent supervision, Katarzyna Kawurek put properly cut pieces of uniform in the waste, which infuriated Binder. ‘He could never match the right number of items in each pile,’ said Katarzyna, ‘but he never guessed that anyone might be putting them in the waste.’

  And it was precisely Binder’s own stupidity that made the sabotage possible. His insistence that the same procedures happened ‘in the same way, on the same day’ applied also to the way he checked finished clothing. Every day the same parts of a garment were checked and others overlooked. So Wiktoria Ryczko, who sewed buttons onto the uniforms, observed that although Binder always checked the strength of the sewing, and women got hit on the head and face when it wasn’t strong enough, he never checked the positions of the buttons. So she sewed on her buttons securely, but in positions where they wouldn’t do up.

  Another Pole, Krystyna Zaremba, discovered how to waste thread by making deep cuts through whole spools. ‘The more damage we did the better we felt, and it helped us survive the horrible days in the camp.’

  The most effective sabotage was in the fur workshop, which opened in early 1942. Arctic conditions during the Soviet winter of 1942 had crippled German soldiers with frostbite, and Ravensbrück now became the main workshop for warm army clothes. Angora rabbit fur, farmed in the hutches outside the camp gates, was already used for making caps and gloves, but a far larger source of fur was now available. In December 1941 Himmler ordered the confiscation of all fur owned by Jews, and also ruled that ‘fur of all kind, sheep, hare and rabbit, must be made available for the Waffen-SS factories at Ravensbrück, near Fürstenberg’.

  The order also stated: ‘It is important also to examine the items to make sure nothing is hidden or sewn inside’—a reference to the vast amounts of hidden cash and jewellery concealed in the pockets and linings of the clothes.

  By early 1942 sumptuous coats, mufflers, hats and gloves bought in some of the most fashionable stores from Paris to Prague poured into Ravensbrück. ‘It was a kind of history lesson in German conquests,’ said one of the fur workers. ‘Sometimes we had the whole of Europe lying on our work table. We could read the labels from every city.’ There were ‘beautiful furs, embroidered as if from a museum’.

  The SS were likewise impressed, particularly the general manager of the textile factory. Fritz Opitz ‘took the money and gold from the clothing and fur coats of Jewish women and children and lived like a king’, wrote Maria Wiedmaier. ‘Drunk on his riches, he barely hid his debauchery, then afterwards there were orgies with the women guards in the rooms of the SS.’

  Another woman, Maria Biega, remembered seeing Opitz ‘laden with Jewish furs’ as he thrashed a worker, a Polish grammar school teacher, across the face ‘so that her blood spilled all over the fur-shop floor’. Graf, the sewing shop manager, joined in, beating the woman with a rubber truncheon.

  The fur-shop night shift was considered the most gruelling of all, but it was best for the saboteurs: with SS eyes on the loot there was less attention to quotas. The furs were hand-sewn, which created more chances to spoil garments than on the machines. The workers, many of them young Poles, were supervised by an asocial prostitute who walked along the table ‘lifting our chins up with her foot if we started to nod off’. According to Irena Dragan, one of the fur-shop Poles, the prostitute’s legs were covered with boils and open sores.

  The fur was not always so sumptuous, and often arrived stinking and vermin-ridden, having been packed away for months. And for some of the workers the horror of this was too much to bear. One young woman asked Irena to poke her with a needle so she could ‘wake up from the nightmare’. But others were carefully sewing loose stitches, knowing the anoraks would fall apart. Sometimes they put notes inside them telling the soldiers they were fighting a losing war.

  Women often worked together, agreeing to destroy the finest fur by cutting it into tiny pieces, which they called poppy seed or macaroni, ‘but we had to be very careful because of German women working with us’, said Irena. Others worked in groups of up to twelve, taking advice from veterans like Halina Chorąẓyna, the Warsaw chemistry professor, who calculated how to give the anoraks special treatment by piercing the fur in such a way that it would fall apart.*3 They packed a well-made anorak on top, with the sabotaged ones beneath, so as not to be spotted.

  One day there was an order to make anoraks for the Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring himself. They were to be made of selected silver fox fur. ‘We’d given the fur special treatment so that from the outside the anoraks looked very good.’ But when the prisoners beat the fur—which they always did before collection, so as to soften it—it fell apart a little too easily. ‘The Germans were furious, but they thought they had made a mistake in beating such delicate fur, and somehow we got away with it.’

  On occasions when they didn’t get away with it the punishments were harsh, ‘but it didn’t stop others from doing it again and again,’ said Krystyna Zaremba, though by the summer the night shift had started losing some of its most courageous saboteurs.

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  Stanisława Michalik remembers the blood-red sunrise on the morning of 18 April 1942. ‘Even today when a day like this dawns I feel terribly sad.’ Wanda Wojtasik remembers it was a ‘beautiful sunny day’ and that soon after morning roll call, and certainly after the night shift returned, a guard entered Block 11 and called out a series of prisoners’ numbers. The women called were to go nach vorne—out front, near the office buildings. Neither Stanisława, Wanda nor Wanda’s best friend Krysia were on the list, but several of their close friends were, including the sisters Grażyna and Pola, and others who had been in Lublin Castle.

  Many of the Polish survivors said later that when this first summons came they had no idea what was going to happen to those called out. The call nach vorne could have simply meant a punishment or a ‘report’, said Wanda Wojtasik. It was unusual for so many names to be called at once, and there was a certain nervousness that all the names came from the Sondertransport, but most thought that if those called were to be shot it would have been done directly on arrival, not after keeping them alive for six months. Nevertheless, the word Sondertransport had always sounded sinister and had never been explained to the women. And among the group were many who, on arrest in Lublin, had been brought before Odilo Globocnik’s puppet police court and then supposedly sentenced to death.

  This spurious legal process, which usually took place in the country of arrest, appears to have been triggered in certain cases where a captured man or woman was considered by Nazi occupiers to be particularly dangerous or to have played a significant role with a paramilitary resistance group.*4

  The choice of those to be ‘tried’, however, was itself often random; among this Sondertransport were women who didn’t know if they had been sentenced or not. Later it was learned that some of them simply had the words ‘Fanatical patriot, not to be returned to Poland’ writte
n on their files. In any case, there was no conceivable logic to explain why the women on this first list had been called out and others not. In fact, throughout the life of the camp nobody ever found any logic to explain why some women were called for execution on a particular day while others, who might have expected it, never were.

  Some of the women in the block even had cause to hope that those summoned were about to be released. In January that year a group of ten resisters had been called out from a different Polish block and sent back to Warsaw to be freed—or so it was said. Maria Bielicka, who was in that block, remembered the events clearly because among the group was Władysława Krupska, the woman who had first betrayed her.

  By April, however, when this new summons came, neither Maria nor any of the other Sondertransport women had yet learned that the group sent back to Warsaw in January had in fact been shot. They only found this out some weeks later when more Poles arrived from Warsaw and told the prisoners what had happened, including the heartrending story of their near-escape.

  On the way to Warsaw the lorry carrying the ten prisoners had broken down and the women were left unguarded briefly while the driver went for help. Several wanted to escape but Władysława Krupska persuaded them not to, saying they were bound to be caught, and would not then be freed. On arrival in Warsaw all the women—including Władysława—were shot.

  Whatever confusion reigned amongst their comrades, it seems that the women listed for 18 April had little doubt what would happen. As the day went on, more were called. Stanisława Młodkowska was sewing on buttons next to one of them, Zofia Grabska. Zofia had just returned to work after several days in the Revier, where she was treated for swollen legs and arms. ‘She was looking in a little mirror she’d somehow got hold of, and she was complaining that her family would no longer recognise her as she had got so thin and pale,’ Stanisława recalled.