Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  At about the same time, Germaine Tillion, the French ethnologist, secretly observed Dr Treite as he personally selected an infant for death. Germaine was lying in the infectious diseases ward, still recovering from diphtheria, when to her surprise Treite came in. The SS rarely entered the ward for fear of infection, but Treite showed no fear and went over to a cot where a two-year-old Jewish child lay. The boy—a Dane, presumably separated from his parents—had arrived with the recent transport; one of Zdenka’s helpers had been caring for him. Treite picked the child up gently to examine him. Believing he was unobserved, Treite ‘showed affection to the child and even gave the little boy an apple’, but next day the boy was gone, and Germaine later learned that Treite had written his name, that very day, on the list for Auschwitz.

  Around the main camp it was soon common knowledge that a transport was due for Auschwitz, so when news emerged that all holders of pink cards, regardless of age, would be selected, panic broke out and prisoners who had begged for pink cards clamoured to give them back.

  So certain were the rabbits about the transport’s destination that they decided once again to tell the world. This time their revelations were smuggled out before the crimes described had even been committed. Krysia wrote home on 28 January announcing that ‘Transports of the sick are being organised, their destination is most probably the gas chambers.’ Once again she pleaded for the information to be passed on so that it could be broadcast.

  ‘The list has already been drawn up,’ she wrote. ‘There are 1000 persons on it.’ She even gave the categories to be killed, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish children, women with venereal disease, and a large number of working women too, including the exhausted. All nationalities were on the lists, including French, Russians and Poles. ‘It is impossible to get anybody off the list,’ said Krysia, though many were trying.

  In the final days each nationality tried to save their own. Sylvia Salvesen pleaded with Treite’s secretary to strike all Norwegian names off the list or paste white paper over them, writing other names on top, but the secretary wouldn’t do it and told her to speak to Treite himself.

  I went to Treite and begged him to spare them. He fobbed me off saying that he had nothing to do with it and it was the Oberschwester who decided. So I went to her and she asked me what work the three did. I said they knitted. ‘All the knitters are to go whatever happens,’ she said, and told me to go away. From that moment on nobody wanted to knit.

  German communists clubbed together with Austrians and Czechs and warned trusted party Blockovas what was to happen. They managed to take fifty pink-card communists off the lists. ‘Difficult decisions had to be made about who to save and who should go instead,’ recalled one of the Germans, Hildegard Boy-Brandt. When the Germans in the Revier asked Treite to remove names, he replied that 800 had to go whatever happened, and suggested they try to replace some with ‘asocial elements’. ‘This was a terrible responsibility,’ said Hilde.

  People came with names of other older women or names of idiots, or criminals, and asked the doctors to swap them. So we did this gruesome thing, and the only thing to say on our behalf is that we rescued some valuable human beings. Had we not done so there would have been even bigger misery. But still it isn’t possible to describe how this made us feel. There were many desperate scenes in the hallways of the Revier. Many Gypsies were among those selected and their relatives would come along and ask to go with them. And we thought, good heavens, we can’t let these healthy human beings leave! But they begged so heartbreakingly: ‘Please let me go’—let me go with my daughter, aunt and so on. When the whole process came to an end we were in a very bad state.

  Time was running out to complete the list, as the transport was due to leave at the end of January, so Treite and Marschall scurried to fill in gaps, sometimes by just picking people from a transport of new arrivals. ‘Dr Treite appeared to be doing the selections against his will, but Marschall appeared to be enjoying it,’ said Sylvia Salvesen. Carmen Mory watched as Treite and the prisoner Eugenia von Skene discussed how to complete the list that was still one short because a Czech had just been removed. ‘So Treite said, “Let’s pick one of the old criminals,” and he went along to the records room, picked up a file, read out the medical history of a syphilitic German woman and said, “She’ll do.” ’

  Terrible scenes unfolded on the Lagerstrasse. Germaine Tillion recalled: ‘One day a woman we called Vercingétorix [after the Gallic chieftain] was selected as she stood right next to me.’ The following day Germaine looked out of a window of Block 27 and saw a woman coming out of Block 28 fighting with a guard. ‘She held her arms above her head like someone on a Greek vase.’ Germaine’s friend Anise Girard saw a very young Russian being pulled along by camp policewomen ‘literally torn apart by despair’. Another Russian, Marina Smelyanskaya, was seen by friends running towards the Red Army barracks screaming out that she’d been selected for the black transport. Olga Golovina recalled pulling Marina inside the block and dyeing her hair with carrot juice ‘so she looked less like a Jew’, said Olga. ‘Then we hid her in the attic of the block. At night she came down and slept between me and Katzia Goreva. Just before dawn she went back up into the attic.’

  In the Revier, the Red Army doctors got word that as many as ten Soviet names had been put on the list at the last minute, including Zoya Savel’eva. Now it was Zoya’s turn to run screaming into the block, and as news reached Yevgenia Klemm that other Red Army women were on the list she resolved to act. The women of the Soviet block were called together, and a protest against the selections began.

  ‘First we lined up in the block and marched out towards the front of the camp. We carried our sick along with us and went together,’ said Olga Golovina. ‘We shouted: “We don’t want our sick to be transported.” ’ Some said the Red Army women were then chased back to their block, where they barricaded themselves in, ‘and we all stood there shoulder to shoulder refusing to respond to the numbers they called out,’ said Leonida Boyko. SS men with guns as well as women guards managed to break down the doors. ‘They beat us and slapped our faces.’ Leonida went on:

  They finally managed to drag out the ‘named’ women as the rest of us started chanting for the head of the camp. He finally came and asked, who speaks German? ‘I do,’ said Klemm. ‘You can’t treat us like this, we are prisoners of war. There are recognised conventions on proper conduct for prisoners of war. Not one law in the world allows you to kill and burn alive sick and weak human beings. We are protesting against this black transport.’

  Fritz Suhren seemed taken aback, then ordered the women out of the barracks ‘before I shoot you like dogs’. At this the women came out, but called a three-day hunger strike to continue their protest. Most of those on the list were taken away, but Zoya Savel’eva stayed hidden at the top of one of the bunks.

  The Soviet protest failed to halt the transport, but it certainly helped to cause a delay: the departure was put back by eight days. The destination of the transport may also have been altered due to the protest, because now the SS began to tell the prisoners that the transport was going to Lublin, and not to Auschwitz at all. ‘I give you my word of honour as an officer that the transport is going to Lublin,’ Treite told Carmen Mory. At Lublin the women would be ‘cared for by the Polish Red Cross’.

  A German woman berated Suhren on the Lagerstrasse, telling him she had lost six of her sons at the front, ‘and now you are going to gas me’. Suhren gave her his ‘word of honour’ that the departing women were simply going to a better place at Lublin in order to be replaced by younger workers. ‘You’ll even be able to write to your families and tell them where you’ve gone,’ he said. What neither Treite nor Suhren declared was that the better place was Majdanek concentration camp, on the edge of Lublin, still working in January 1944 as an extermination camp.

  On 3 February 1944 about 900 selected women were finally gathered together on the Lagerplatz. Most had no idea that they had been
chosen for the black transport, or why. A French schoolteacher from Brittany, Yvonne Le Tac, was collected that morning from her work gang—filling mattresses with straw—and made to march with the others to the station. Yvonne was never told why, but it was probably simply because she had grey hair; she was sixty-two years old. Those who couldn’t walk were carried by stretcher. Rita Sprengel recalled that several of the Siemens women were ‘sent to Lublin with the sick transport’.

  Some women passed out on the way to the station. Two prisoners helped to load them, and when these prisoners came back they said the women were loaded up sixty to each cattle truck with no food and no buckets or WCs of any sort. The trucks were sealed and the trains moved off in the snow, towards Majdanek.

  Krysia’s report on the transport was posted to her family in Lublin a week later. From what she wrote it seems that the prisoners in the camp were still not certain that Lublin really was the destination, nor does it appear that Krysia yet knew about Majdanek. Her report stated:

  On 3rd Feb 44 an international transport of 945 women—elderly, ill and generally unable to work, left allegedly to Lublin (to be checked). There were 110 Polish women (many names we didn’t know). They added Russian Red Army women, some disabled from the war. The Red Army women tried to protest but were threatened with decimation. Some of the women were sick, but many were healthy. Many had TB but would have been curable. We managed to get some off the lists. They left, 30 to each freight train. We know of 40 who passed out on the way to the station.

  Krysia named one of the Poles on the transport as Kiryłło Rozalia (no. 7702), who had asked before she left that her family in Lublin be told. Krysia gave Rozalia’s address, adding: ‘She was ill but curable.’

  In the weeks that followed, more news reached Ravensbrück about the fate of the departed women. Two guards who had travelled with the prisoners returned soon after and reported that the journey had taken at least three days and the train had to stop several times due to heavy snow. When the wagons were opened at Majdanek, scores were already dead, some of them frozen to the wagon floors. How many died on the journey nobody knew, nor did they know what became of the survivors.

  Later came more news, sometimes from survivors of the transport who found themselves sent back again to Ravensbrück. One prisoner learned what happened to her mother from one of these same returnees. She said:

  The worst of all for my mother and the other women was the journey. All through the journey snow had blown into the carriages. When the trains had to stop the women had to march on foot in the deep snow. There was nothing to eat. After a long and awful march they arrived at Lublin. My mother was at her end. They killed her straight away with an injection.

  Still more reports arrived stating that after some weeks in Majdanek survivors of the train journey were taken on to Auschwitz, where most disappeared and were presumed to have been gassed. A small number deemed still fit enough for work survived and worked at Auschwitz; one or two of this group were also returned full-circle to Ravensbrück. These women were able to confirm that most of their comrades taken on the Majdanek train had indeed then been gassed at Auschwitz.

  During this time news had come of a different kind concerning the Majdanek transport. New prisoners were still arriving each week from Poland, among them more members of the underground. These women told friends in the camp that they’d heard a broadcast on English radio about a transport of women from Ravensbrück being sent off by train to be gassed. The broadcast went out on the underground radio station known as SWIT—Dawn Radio.

  The news of this broadcast taking place sent a thrill through the camp, particularly among the secret letter writers. In her letters home, Krysia Czyż had pleaded for her information about ‘these criminal acts’ to be broadcast on English radio, and here was the first evidence it had happened. As German intelligence was known to monitor such radio stations, some of the Poles believed the SWIT broadcast might have contributed to the SS decision to delay the transport, and to the change in destination from Majdanek to Auschwitz, in order to mislead the outside world.

  The precise date of the broadcast isn’t known, and nor has the transcript been unearthed. However, a small number of SWIT transcripts, filed away as secret after the war, have recently come to light in British archives. Amongst these are others concerning Ravensbrück, including one transmitted two months after the Majdanek transport. The Ravensbrück material is based as usual on information smuggled by the rabbits, and was transmitted from the SWIT studio in the Buckinghamshire village of Milton Bryan to Polish underground cells, listening in secret.

  On 3 May 1944, at 19.10 hours, SWIT broadcast ten items of news. Number three on the list was headed: ‘Roosevelt’s Telegram: “Roosevelt in his telegram to the President of the Polish Republic stated that the determined fight of the Poles against the invader was an inspiration to all Nations fighting for a better world.” ’ Other items concerned Spain’s neutrality and new reports of ‘destruction by the Germans of Polish culture’. Item number eight is headed ‘Vivisection in Ravensbrück’:

  In the concentration camp for women in Ravensbrück, the Germans are committing new crimes. The women in this camp are being submitted to vivisection experiments and are being operated on like rabbits. The authorities have made lists of all women who had to submit to such operations. It is feared that these records are being kept for the purpose of murdering these women so as to obliterate all traces of their crimes. These fears are substantiated by the fact that the camp is surrounded by trenches and mounted machine guns. At present there are close on 3000 Polish women in the Ravensbrück camp.

  The report goes on with a ‘Warning to Criminals’:

  For the fate of the women in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück all Germans are responsible: SS officers and doctors of the administration of the camp. The prime responsibility therefore falls on the Commandant of the camp Hauptsturmführer Suhren; his Adjutant, Obersturmführer Bräuning; Kriminalassistent Ramdbehr [sic] and the chief woman guard Binz. All these we are warning solemnly that if any mass murders are committed, or if the vivisection experiments continue, they will be held responsible—they and their families. We have established their identity and we are finding out particulars about their families. May they remember that their days are numbered. We shall find them even if they were to hide under the earth. None of the hired assassins of Ravensbrück will escape justice. We shall wreak such vengeance that future generations will remember it. These crimes shall be avenged with a red-hot iron.

  * * *

  * Revier workers noticed that Treite’s patients were also dying because of simple mistakes during operations. Treite was using more and more untrained assistants. One gave a patient an anaesthetic one tenth of the correct solution and the other gave a solution ten times the normal strength. Both patients died. Bozena Boudova also noticed a rise in demand for lethal serum: ‘I saw Dr Treite in the pharmacy filling a syringe with this solution.’

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 21

  Vingt-sept Mille

  On 1 February 1944 a crowd of women gathered on a station platform on the outskirts of Paris waiting for a train. It was cold, but the women were dressed in woollen coats or ski costumes; some even wore furs.

  Denise Dufournier, a young Parisian lawyer, carried a rolled-up blanket taken from her prison cell, tied with plaited cord. Her friends Suzanne Hugounencq and Christiane de Cuverville carried kitbags made of canvas ripped from a mattress. Some women had packed their bags with lace pyjamas, powder compacts and eau de cologne, smuggled into Parisian jail cells by their families. Denise and her friends packed sausage, cheese and bread to eat on the journey. The three had become friends over months of imprisonment in the Paris prison of Fresnes. Now they stood on the platform guessing when they’d be back home.

  The Allied landings were expected in May at the latest, so they’d definitely be back by Bastille Day, 14 July, said Christiane. A general’s daughter, she had joined a resistance
cell at seventeen without telling her parents; when her mother found that Christiane was arrested she marched into the Gestapo’s Paris headquarters declaring, ‘My daughter is not a terrorist. I want her back.’

  Neither she nor any of the others were given a chance to tell their families they were leaving for Germany. Denise had lost both her parents when she was very young, and after living out the first phase of war with her brother Bernard, a French diplomat, in neutral Portugal, in 1942 she suddenly decided—against his advice—to return to France and join the resistance. Along with several other women here on the station platform, she worked with the Comet Line, an underground escape network that guided stranded Allied servicemen out of France, usually over the Pyrenees. She was arrested in the summer of 1943.

  Though anxious, the mood was not gloomy. The women were pleased to be out of French prisons, and the worst they expected in Germany was hard labour, which they hoped would be in the open air. Anyone observing the group might have thought they looked more like a happy band leaving on a camping expedition than a group of prisoners going to a concentration camp. Most knew next to nothing about the camps, and those who did certainly didn’t believe they’d be taken to such a place.

  An opera singer from Orléans struck up with a Scottish ballad and even the ‘groupe de comtesses’ maintained their esprit de corps, although several recoiled in horror at seeing a crowd of French prostitutes gather on the platform. The women had been arrested for infecting the Gestapo with VD, the countesses said.

  As they waited, more women arrived. Geneviève de Gaulle was here, niece of the Free French leader. An elegant, reserved young woman, Geneviève was working on an underground newspaper in Paris when arrested, though of course the General knew nothing of it. Convent girls barely out of school, mostly resistance lookouts or couriers, stood beside older sisters who had cycled up to 50 miles a day delivering secret messages. Several members of the Prosper resistance circuit were here; the circuit had been run from London by SOE, the Special Operations Executive, but had been infiltrated by the Germans and decimated.