Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Nobody experienced post-war censorship more painfully than Antonina Nikiforova, another Red Army doctor, who arrived at Ravensbrück in March 1944. Antonina worked as a pathologist in the Revier, and collected material in the camp that she hid and hoped to use in a book. After the war, however, SMERSh confiscated her materials and her manuscript, which even today cannot be found in Russian archives.

  Yet Antonina never gave up. Soon after her first manuscript was confiscated she asked all her comrades to write to her with their memories. With the help of these letters she began writing again, but her work was still censored. She carefully preserved the letters, however, though refused to allow anyone to read them until after her death, which came in 1994. They have only recently found their way to the Ravensbrück camp archives, waiting to be read. From four large boxes the voices of Red Army women whose accounts seem lifeless in official texts come spilling out—chatting, mourning, reminiscing, lying, accusing, laughing, and telling stories that dart back and forth, like the letter from Anya Munkina, who had lost an arm at the front, and had a special job in the camp mopping floors. Gladdened to hear from Antonina after the war, Anya writes:

  I am crying for joy, I’d like to meet and hug you and talk of the concentration camp. Your work was terrible—I think a lot about you, especially in that dungeon, you and a corpse in front of you and you are working without any mask. During the day everyone goes in her direction and me I grab my mop and clean the courtyard and try to find a piece of beetroot or a potato. In the evening in the barracks it was cosy—every woman trying to warm the atmosphere with her heart. I listened to the newspaper readings by Yevgenia Lazarevna. After listening to her voice it was nice to fall asleep, if a bit frightening. Soon I was separated from my friends and sent to Bergen-Belsen. That was a real lice-ridden hole where I contracted typhoid and dysentery. I had no hope of seeing the sun again.

  Ilena Vasilievna (who gives no surname) tells Antonina: ‘I bear no grudge that you don’t remember me—there were many of us. You helped me and two other Polish girls to leave for work. That is why I’m still alive.’ Digging deeper, there are more mentions of Klemm. ‘She cured my typhus by rubbing me with bark.’ One letter from a cousin of Klemm’s said that after the war, when she returned to Odessa, Yevgenia Lazarevna didn’t want to talk about the camp ever again. ‘She was nervous when it came up, so I tried to avoid the topic. But I heard her once saying that at the camp they put rubber pants on people and beat them. And there were things a thousand times worse than that.’

  With Antonina’s names and addresses, it was possible to find more women who’d known Yevgenia Klemm and to learn something of her life. She was born in Odessa, probably around 1900. Her father was thought to have been a Serb, her mother Russian. Some said she was Jewish, others not. As a schoolgirl she developed a passion for history and trained to be a history teacher in Odessa. In the early 1920s she joined the Bolshevik revolution by serving in field hospitals, mostly on the Polish front, which was where she nursed a wounded Latvian called Robert Klemm. They fell in love and on return they married, but soon after Robert died of TB. There may have been a son, but nobody was sure.

  In the 1930s Klemm became a teacher trainer at the Odessa Pedagogical College and won the highest accolades. Her pupils adored her. Olga Khohkrina explained why:

  In class she painted pictures for us of the past with her descriptions, and would produce marvellous materials so we lost ourselves in history. I remember a lesson she gave on greater Russia and she was using materials on the Tartars and the Cossacks to such effect that she had pupils in tears. There was a lesson on the Mongolian invasion when she described things in such a lyrical way that her pupils were open-mouthed. She would tell us that knowledge gave strength and understanding. She had an ability to inspire love and respect. It was a gift.

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked.

  Very humble. She gave the impression of having no interest in material wealth. She would often invite her pupils to her flat and warm them with a cup of tea. It was very cold and she was very poor.

  And I think she was an idealist who wanted to play her part. She told me when she was a nurse in the civil war she had fallen sick with typhus and nearly died. When the Second World War broke out there was no need for her to volunteer again, as our teachers were all evacuated to safety, but she joined up again.

  I wondered what sort of communist Klemm might have been. ‘The romantic kind,’ said Yevgenia Vladimimova, another former pupil:

  I think that as a young woman she was probably attracted to the cause in a devoted but humanitarian way. Like so many young Russian men and women she probably became intoxicated with the Bolshevik dream. She would have seen it as a way to build a better world. I think a lot of people saw it like that at first. I remember hearing that when Lenin died she played Liszt for hours.

  During the first weeks in Ravensbrück, Yevgenia Lazarevna’s gifts were badly needed. Women in the rest of the camp were impressed by the Soviets’ discipline, but inside the block many were sick with typhus.*1 The SS took several to be shot, to prevent infection. Others were simply terrified. One of Antonina Nikiforova’s correspondents wrote:

  I found the camp so eerie with its black streets, the female guards in black cloaks and their wild dogs and orders, with all the people dressed in striped clothing and mostly with shaven hair that I am not even going to try to describe it on paper. Our terror—my terror—consisted at first in the fact that we did not know the language and didn’t even know what Konzlager [concentration camp] meant.

  At least the journey had ended. On arrival in the block Tamara Tschajalo found a space on a mattress next to Yevgenia Lazarevna and immediately fell asleep. And they were together under one roof where they could try to heal their wounds. Yevgenia Lazarevna went amongst them late at night, showing what position to lie in to ease the pain. She also chose helpers to tend to the needy, among them Alexandra Sokova, a poet and teacher, and Maria Klyugman, the surgeon from Kiev. It was significant perhaps that at least two of Klemm’s helpers, Sokova and Klyugman, were Jews, as was Lyuba Konnikova, and there were several other Soviet Jews who had remained unidentified to the SS.

  The treachery of the last six months was not forgotten. The SS had already removed their spies: the Red Army women who had pointed out Jews to be shot on the journey were put to other dirty work. But much bitterness remained. One woman writing to Antonina said: ‘I don’t see Lyusya any more and I don’t want to see her, the same goes for Vera Bobkova, especially when I think how they grabbed the clothes of the Jews in Slavuta after their death.’

  In the block Klemm urged the women to heal these wounds too. ‘Don’t let the fascists divide us. That’s what they want. Keep clean and tidy, it is possible even in the worst conditions. We are civilised people.’ Some women still had periods. ‘We were given nothing—not even underwear. It was a great problem for some girls but soon none of us had them of course. We washed a little bit with icy water, that’s all,’ said Ekaterina Goreva.

  The Red Army women were cut off from the camp outside, so Klemm tried to gather information. Messages smuggled in through the Polish Blockova brought contact with the camp communists. Czech doctors, sent to the block to identify typhus sufferers, made themselves known to her. The Czechs explained who else was here—the nationalities and numbers—how the camp was organised and what slave labour was done. They even smuggled in a German newspaper.

  At night Yevgenia Lazarevna gathered the girls around her in groups and read the newspaper to them. Interpreting the Nazi news, she said the Red Army was breaking through outside Moscow and German casualties were high. She told them what she learned about the camp: they were to be fenced off for several weeks, but then they would have to work. Women here sewed clothes for the German army. There was a big factory making electrical components for weapons—the Siemenslager.

  Klemm said that while in quarantine they must all learn German. ‘Girls,’ she said. ‘For now we’re surrounded
by wire, but one day the Germans will take the wire down and then you will have to mix with women of other nationalities. You need to learn their language. This will help you in the struggle to come.’

  All German-speakers were asked to raise hands and Klemm organised the block into eighty groups of three or four prisoners, each with a leader, and each leader took the day’s lessons from Klemm. Among the crammed bunks the learning began. ‘And she would tell Vera Bobkova, “Vera, keep in mind that the German sentence is built like this and that,” and Vera would whisper what Klemm had said to her small group,’ Ilena Barsukova recalled.

  Klemm also befriended the younger women, some as young as sixteen and seventeen. She asked where they came from and what they had been through, and whether their parents were alive. ‘We will stay together, girls. You are with me.’ She remembered their stories. And she would know at once who were the daughters of commissars or kulaks,*2 or whose father might have served under the tsars, and she understood the different camp ‘families’ as they were already calling themselves—the Moscow family, Leningrad family, Odessa family.

  Sometimes she’d ask the girls about their favourite recipes and tell them hers. And then she’d read a poem that Alexandra Sokova had written and talk about it. Or she’d talk to them about the women who had been prisoners under the tsars and how they’d suffered and survived. ‘She told stories of the past so we would forget the present,’ said Tamara Tschajalo.

  Lyusya Malygina, the doctor who dived into the Black Sea, organised a group to look after Klemm herself. Older than most, her legs were swollen, and her bout of typhus years ago had left her partially sighted in one eye. Her helpers dressed her sores and made space for her in the washroom. Some said these women were an elected committee, but most said they simply wanted to take care of her and help. ‘She was the mother I missed,’ said Tamara Tschajalo.

  As their quarantine time drew to an end and the women tried to see beyond the wire, they noticed a new building rising behind the wall: a giant chimney. They saw how a wagon, pulled by six women, would pass by each morning piled high with bodies. And they saw new arrivals marched towards nearby quarantine blocks. They made up nicknames for the guards, ‘black ravens’ who all had ‘extremely beautiful clothes’ with belts and shoes ‘of finest leather’. One guard in particular would come up to the block to shout at them. Lyuba Konnikova, ‘the fiery one’, called this guard ‘the beautiful blonde’.

  Prisoners outside still peered towards the Soviet block and saw the shorn heads of the women, ‘always held high’. Sometimes they heard them singing. Looking back later many survivors would say—in fact many would insist—that the Red Army women wore uniform while in the camp. Perhaps the growing disorder outside simply served to emphasise the order of the Red Army when they first arrived.

  —

  The winter of 1942–3 was hard and long, leaving the women exhausted and diseased. Early in the year longer shifts were instituted. On 20 January 1943 Richard Glücks, the new chief of Himmler’s camp administration office, wrote to all commandants requiring them to ‘exhaust every opportunity to maintain the prisoners’ ability to work’. The dearth of German labourers had reached crisis point. Although slaves were being herded from the East, they were not enough. Even Ravensbrück prisoners deemed too old or sick to work were now to be used to knit socks for soldiers.

  Himmler had promised industrial chiefs that he could fill the shortfall in labour with concentration-camp workers. A network of new satellite camps was planned, each with a factory where prisoners would work.

  Ravensbrück, designed originally for 3000, now held 18,000 women, and more were arriving every day. Not only did they come from the East, but numbers from the West were mounting too. In April 250 Frenchwomen arrived and were given numbers in the 19000s.

  More barracks went up, but no amount of building could keep pace; each time more women arrived everyone was packed tighter. Where sand wore away, cinders were spread on the walkways. A new painting gang was formed and shabby blocks painted green. The sewage system overflowed, and a new prisoners’ plumbing gang was formed, as well as a new delousing gang. All over the camp, placards declared ‘Lice = Death’. Prisoners were regularly forced to stand outside naked, even in the snow, while clothes and blankets were burned and blocks fumigated with gas.

  When Langefeld was sacked, her favoured Blockovas—experienced hands, who knew how to keep control—were thrown in the bunker, including Grete Buber-Neumann, who was given several weeks’ ‘dark arrest’. With these women gone, Ramdohr, the Gestapo chief, asserted his own form of control by posting spies to penetrate deep inside the barracks. According to the German communist Maria Apfelkammer, Ramdohr would walk straight into a block and ask: ‘Is anyone interested in their freedom?’, at which point one or two women would break ranks and follow him—his new Lagerspitzel (camp spies). ‘Then we never spoke to them again,’ said Maria.

  These new Spitzel would never be posted back to their own block, however; instead they’d be sent to another and do their spying there. Prisoners working in the camp office would know who the spies were, as they’d have to adjust the paperwork. They’d try and warn women in the new block, but the camp offices were penetrated too, so this was dangerous. Spitzel informed on people for anything, particularly organising. With the growing overcrowding, organising thrived, as there were shortages of everything—straw for mattresses, bowls for soup, and even clothes.

  By early summer 1943 the camp had entirely run out of striped prison clothes. Dead women’s clothes replaced them. Each week trucks arrived from Auschwitz delivering the clothes of the Jews, removed before they entered the gas chambers. These garments were given to new Ravensbrück arrivals, so that when Grete Buber-Neumann eventually emerged from the bunker she noticed prisoners ‘strolling up and down the camp streets dressed in coloured clothes of all kinds and not in stripes. The Gypsies in particular were as bright as tropical birds, with all sorts of coloured scraps.’ She also noticed that ‘the regulation step the SS had taken so much trouble to teach was disappearing too’.

  For the prisoners the worst effect of overcrowding was the increased torture of Appell. Whereas once they rose at 6, now it had to be at 4 just to get through the count, which could last three hours or more. And such was the size of the camp that the new chief guard would often appear down the Lagerstrasse on a bicycle, black cape billowing behind her. This was the ‘beautiful beast’. The Soviets would soon find out her name was Dorothea Binz.

  At about the time of her promotion, Binz paid a visit to her home village of Altglobsow driving a horse and carriage. The villager Ilse Halter remembers her appearing on the main street, her black cape flaring out behind her, with a dog and a whip. ‘She thought she was very grand,’ said Ilse. ‘I think she came back to show us all how well she had done. People were scared of her by now.’

  ‘Why were you scared?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they all did such terrible things up there,’ and Ilse paused. ‘You know what they did? You have read about it? They threw babies into the air to shoot them’—she made a throwing gesture with her arms.

  I asked where Ilse had heard that. Did she believe it?

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, I believe it.’

  —

  In mid-April 1943 the wire around the Red Army block was taken down and the women were marched outside for their first Appell. ‘It was 4 a.m. It had been snowing. We lined up outside in ranks of ten and tried to stand close to each other like a flock of sheep does in cold weather,’ wrote Tamara Limakhina, one of Antonina’s correspondents.

  The Soviet women were then lined up again for the labour-gang selections, and feared they might be posted to Siemens to do munitions work, but like all newcomers before them, they were sent to the Sandgrube. If these Soviets were to be put to useful work, their strength and spirit must first be broken, and the best place for that was the sandpit. On the first day Nina Kharlamova slipped and her trolley, full of wet sand,
stuck in the mud and tipped over, so a guard set about her with a truncheon until she filled the trolley again. But it again stuck and tipped over, and this time Nina was kicked and beaten to the ground.

  The Soviet women worked longer shifts than other prisoners and were not allowed to enter their block until after the evening Appell, so that after twelve hours’ labour they had to stand outside in the cold and rain until after nightfall, their wet clothes clinging to them.

  When they were let back in, Klemm and the poet Alexandra Sokova were waiting for them. As older prisoners, they had been put to work as knitters inside the block. Yevgenia Lazarevna found scraps of rag to wrap Nina’s sores and blisters, and told the women to look out for each other: ‘Don’t put yourselves in danger. Look for small things you can do to help us all. If a guard is eating breakfast, steal a newspaper and bring it back.’ And she told them not to believe the Germans when they told them they had lost the battle of Stalingrad. ‘She knew before any of us that we won,’ said Nina Kharlamova.

  The Red Army doctors were left toiling in the sandpit for many weeks, but some of the other Soviet women were soon sent to the sewing shops, where they encountered Gustav Binder, whom they called the Giraffe. ‘Suddenly from machine to machine there is a whisper: “Giraffe is coming,” and every woman now trembles, turns pale, and shivers low over her machine,’ wrote Tamara Limakhina, recalling the scene for Antonina Nikiforova.

  There is complete silence. You can only hear the noise of the machines. Then on the threshold emerges this tall SS with the long neck of a giraffe. Having slowly scrutinised all the working women he goes to the table where there is a pile of finished items and he takes a pair of trousers and starts scrutinising them and all the women’s hearts are beating like a bird’s in a cage and in everybody’s head there is a thought: now he is going to beat up someone. Then he screams ‘Kolonnenführerin [squad leader], what’s that, what’s that?’ pointing to the item.