by Sarah Helm
On 15 August Virginia Lake, a thirty-four-year-old American, stood on a packed bus crossing the Place de la Concorde. A month earlier she had been helping Allied airmen reach safety, but now, along with scores of other women resisters, she was part of a convoy heading for the Gare de Pantin. The French bus driver told Virginia he’d been ferrying prisoners to the station all day long and was sick of it. It was as if every prisoner in Paris was being evacuated that day, he said.
‘And the Allies? Where are they?’ she asked him.
‘They’re doing well,’ he said. ‘They’re at Rambouillet,’ mentioning a town just forty-five kilometres from Paris.
At the Gare de Pantin, the prisoners were packed sixty to a truck. Red Cross workers passed out parcels and assured them: ‘You’ll never make it to Germany. It’s impossible. You’ll be liberated before then.’ As the train rolled out carrying a total of 400 women as well as 2200 men, including 168 Allied pilots, a blizzard of notes sailed onto the tracks, to be collected by passers-by.
So frequent were the stops and detours that the prisoners hoped they wouldn’t make it to the border. During one stop they were forced out of the train and made to march miles past the bombed tracks. A young French resister called Nicole de Witasse saw a chance to escape and dived into a pile of straw, but was soon found, beaten, and brought back.
Villagers called out: ‘Bon courage! Vive la France! ’ Once again a stationmaster called for the driver to stop, but it did no good. Soon, peeking through the slats, the prisoners read German signs and wept. Their guards relaxed. Four hours later, the train reached Weimar and stopped. The married women were told they could say goodbye to their husbands, who were sent on to Buchenwald. Soon after all the women were put on a train north to Ravensbrück, which arrived on 21 August 1944. On 25 August, Paris was free.
—
The sun was hot as the women were marched towards the camp. Through the gates they saw rows of gnome-like women and enormous bottle-green barracks standing on black dust.
They’d been crammed inside trucks for fifteen hours and cried out for water, but were told there was none. ‘Typhus, typhus,’ said the creatures: the water could not be drunk. A small jug of ersatz coffee was distributed, but there were no cups, so the new arrivals delved in their rucksacks for cups or bottles, or frantically emptied jars of jam or sugar that they’d packed and held them out for a drop of brown liquid. Other prisoners looking on saw the spilt sugar and jam and tried to scrape it off the ground.
As night fell the new arrivals had still not been allocated blocks. The camp was in chaos, and the women were being squeezed down a narrow side alley and pushed up against a line of open latrines. Virginia looked up at the wire behind her and saw a skull and crossbones sign, warning of live current. An overpowering stench came from under her feet: she was standing above the mortuary.
There were hundreds of others squashed into the alley, and they cried out in different languages: Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, Serbo-Croat and many more. As night began to fall all these prisoners were pushed on further into the camp. Ahead they saw what looked like the top of a giant tent.
A new group, some dressed in fur coats, pushed their way through the alley, then slumped exhausted to the ground and lay moaning. Others—mothers with children—sat on expensive leather suitcases and stared in disgust at those around them or wailed. The word went round that these were Poles. The French stared at the Poles and the Poles stared back. One or two could speak each other’s language. The Poles had come from Warsaw, the French learned, and the Poles learned that the French had come from Paris. Paris was about to be liberated, the French said. Warsaw was burning, said the Poles.
At the beginning of August, as the French had been waiting for the Americans to liberate Paris, the Polish resistance army saw their chance to rise up and seize their city, but the revolt had been crushed. Himmler’s SS divisions moved in and set the city on fire, slaughtering as they went. A sixteen-year-old girl called Krystyna Dąbrówska was here in the alley; three weeks earlier she had watched her home in Warsaw go up in flames. Krystyna’s father, a doctor, escaped through the sewage system; her brother was shot. She and her mother were then herded onto a train and sent west along with thousands of others to work as Hitler’s slaves.
On her first night in Ravensbrück Krystyna eventually found a place to sleep, after descending some steps and curling up where it was warm. When she woke in the morning she found she had slept in the morgue. Others on Krystyna’s transport from Warsaw slept their first night in the giant tent.
—
The tent seemed harmless enough when it first appeared in the middle of August, its clean white canvas flapping in the breeze. Denise Dufournier and the painting gang watched it go up, amazed. Was it to be a circus, perhaps, or an exhibition centre? they joked. Nobody expected prisoners to live in it. In fact, it was an old army tent and Suhren claimed later that he had found the last of its sort in Germany—such was the demand for them in other overcrowded camps. When the tent arrived Suhren even helped bang in the pegs himself.
The tent was put up on a piece of waste ground between blocks 24 and 25. In winter it was a swamp and in summer a rubbish tip, infested with flies. Then word got around that this was a temporary measure to put a roof over the heads of new arrivals, and there was certainly a need for that, as every inch of space inside the walls was now used up. In most blocks women slept three to a mattress, but in the large slum blocks as many as seven squeezed onto two adjoining mattresses. The day rooms were packed with prisoners lying on tables, benches or on the floor. In the Gypsy block the women crouched on the basins ‘like perched hens’, said Sylvia Salvesen. The mortuary was always so full that dead bodies were piled up in the washrooms of the blocks until the corpse cart came to take them away.
The surge in arrivals had been overwhelming and had begun to accelerate long before the Warsaw women arrived. As the Russians drove on across Poland, Hitler had ordered that every Nazi camp and prison that lay in their path must be emptied: no prisoner of the Reich must fall into enemy hands. As a result thousands of prisoners had been put on trains west to camps further behind German lines, all of which now overflowed with new arrivals. Although the Russians were still miles away from southern Poland, evacuation transports from Auschwitz had already started, and the Polish ghettos were being cleared too, some of the Jews held in them sent on west.
At the same time throngs of German prisoners were still reaching Ravensbrück—housewives heard doubting Germany’s victory, prostitutes found wandering the ruins of Dresden, more Bettpolitische. Then came the latest transports from France, ahead of the Allied liberation. And evacuees from the concentration camp of Vught, in southern Holland, were also expected soon.
All summer long Fritz Suhren had tried to make more space, building new blocks, squeezing more in here and there, but by mid-August the camp infrastructure was crumbling. He didn’t even have the staff to process arrivals. Under strict camp rules no prisoner could be admitted without filling out forms and being issued with a number, which was why the French and others had had to wait in alleys before they could be processed.
Then, when the Warsaw influx began, the camp bureaucracy finally collapsed. The tent alleviated things, but it was not big enough to accommodate an entire city’s womenfolk. In the space of a few weeks between August and October 1944 more than 12,000 Warsaw women and children would be put on the road to Ravensbrück.
—
By the end of August Suhren had refused to admit more. Those awaiting registration were kept in a vast seething mass outside the gates, exhausted, hungry and sick. The ground on which they sat and lay was soon a field of mud, excrement and human detritus.
The camp Poles were eager to glean whatever news they could from the new arrivals, and Krysia Czyż and Wanda Wojtasik, now strong enough to walk, had been assigned to guard new anti-aircraft ditches, dug outside the camp walls as bomb shelters, which gave them a chance to observe the Warsaw women
, whom they found in a desperate state. After ten hours in cattle wagons, the newcomers had been left in the sun without food or water. Krystyna and Wanda took buckets of clean water for them, asking: ‘What news of Warsaw?’ The answer kept coming back ‘There is no Warsaw. There is nothing left.’
Whole families arrived, and soon children were everywhere, running off into the woods, or trying to get food from SS villas. Still more kept coming and each transport appeared to bring with it more and more paraphernalia. Women sat with heaps of possessions piled around them, packed in suitcases, boxes or giant trunks.
Asked why they had brought these things the women said they had been told by the Germans to ‘bring everything’ and they had also been promised safety. Others had looted the riches themselves. Inmates of an entire civilian prison arrived along with nuns from several convents. Some women brought pet dogs and Grete Buber-Neumann noticed one woman with a canary in a cage. As the squalor worsened the SS feared the spread of disease, and more effort was made to get the women inside, so they could at least be disinfected and await their registration in the tent. But given the numbers involved, and the amount of baggage to be processed, the usual shower and disinfection procedures were impossible.
In the first instance the women were quickly searched for valuables before being sent to the tent, and seeing this many then tried to bury what they had in the ground, or to hide jewellery and other valuables in orifices. Most luxury apparel and jewellery were eventually stripped off the women by the guards, but such was the quantity of goods that whole piles of personal effects were left outside the bathhouse.
‘There were badges and brooches and images of Our Lady and the Polish eagle, powder boxes, watches and evening dresses, prayer books, pots and pans, silver spoons, whole lengths of expensive material, mirrors, eiderdowns and violins, beautiful silk underwear and peasant kerchiefs—all higgledy-piggledy,’ said Karolina Lanckorońska. Prisoners passing by stood staring in astonishment at the finery, and many helped themselves.
—
When the first group were herded inside the tent, they were told that this was Block 25. Like any other block, it was assigned a Blockova and two Stubovas—both of them Polish camp veterans. The tent was cordoned off and strictly patrolled by camp police, as if what happened here was all a secret, but the tent was to become the worst-kept secret of all. Soon brown liquid started oozing from under the flaps, and at night came screams and moans.
One of the tent Stubovas, Halina Wasilewska, made sketches of the structure and notes of how it looked, keeping a grid of who arrived and when. The original tent, she said, was an army tent about 10 by 40 metres and 3 metres high, held up by a pair of central posts, which meant that the walls kept drooping lower and lower. There was no lighting and no source of water. With no access to latrines or lavatories, wooden boxes were put around the tent perimeter, with buckets inside. The first 900 occupants arrived on 23 August. Problems began at once because they had not been taken to the bathhouse first. They were all filthy and lice-infested and had to lie in the same clothes they had worn in the cattle trucks and outside the camp gates.
The women were ravenous, but food distribution was almost impossible, as camp utensils were not provided, so they had to eat from their own dishes if they had any—often just jars or tins—but with no chance to wash anything, the pots turned rancid from the food left on them.
Only after two days were the women taken off to the bathhouse for a shower, and now any last belongings they had managed to cling to were taken away, and they were put in cotton camp dresses. But then they were sent straight back to the tent and forced to sit or lie on the same stinking straw. Every day the SS guards would come to carry out random searches for more valuables, snatching the last rosaries, photographs and wedding rings. In mid-September the days were still hot and stuffy but the nights were starting to grow cool. Rain started to pour through open sides and the wind pulled the tent poles so that the structure swayed and the whole tent very nearly collapsed.
Although the tent was supposed to be a no-go area for the rest of the camp, other inmates stared at it with growing disgust, saying: ‘They’re for the corpse squad’, though many others tried to help. When the word spread that the women inside were starving, prisoners from the kitchens and the offices tried to get inside to give out soup and bread. The Austrian prisoner Anna Hand was horrified by what she found. ‘The strong snatched bread from the weak and many prisoners got none at all. There were 1000 women in there, crammed like sardines in a space so small that many could only squat. Some were already being trampled to death.’
All this time, at the gates, more women from the Polish capital continued to arrive, along with transports from other places too. A group from the Łódź ghetto were put in the tent, along with the latest arrivals from Auschwitz. It was still the Warsaw women that flooded in fastest; the city now seemed to arrive area by area, as if methodically snatched from the flames and transplanted here. It seemed that the whole of Warsaw had been scooped up—rich and poor, educated or not, women from old people’s homes, children from orphanages, teachers, countesses and more; all milling around, trying to find mothers, sisters or children separated on different trucks or, more likely, killed in Warsaw’s flames.
The behaviour of some of their Polish compatriots horrified the political Poles. Wanda and Krysia observed that many wanted to please the Germans, believing that they really had been brought here for their own protection. ‘They seemed to have no understanding of their predicament,’ said Wanda. With the latest contingent came wagonloads of goods looted by the Germans from ransacked houses, churches and offices in Warsaw. So lavish was the haul that special warehouses were opened just outside the walls, and prisoners assigned to sort it out. One woman recognised her own curtains from her apartment in Warsaw.
The sight of the Warsaw women caused more and more consternation among other prisoners, particularly the Russians. Antonina Nikiforova stared in disbelief at the fur coats and the cases full of gold.
They had brought everything because Hitler had promised them houses. They had put themselves under the protection of the fascists and thought they had nothing in common with us, so they looked at all of us with disdain.
I saw nuns with big flowing black robes and gold crosses shining on their chests…They lay down on the ground, their arms over the cross, refusing to take them off. But soon all the camp understood how you take off the robes and crosses of the devout. The SS pulled them up with a kick and tore them off. A few days later you couldn’t tell them apart from the other prisoners. Only once or twice you would notice a woman raise her eyes to the heavens murmuring a prayer, and we knew this was a ‘sister’.
In the later transports from Warsaw came more and more women with young babies and children. The sight of women with babies in the camp enraged some of the SS men. Sara Honigmann, a Polish prisoner, saw a group of Warsaw women standing near the bathhouse one morning. One of them was carrying a baby. ‘The deputy camp commandant strode over to the young woman, grabbed her baby from her arms and beat it against the camp wall. The mother collapsed on the ground weeping.’ After this another SS officer remonstrated with the first, who drew his gun, and the commandant himself had to settle the disturbance.
Karolina had won permission from Dorothea Binz to walk among the crowds, and she found many women so distressed about what had happened to them that they couldn’t even answer questions. Often they’d been forced to leave children behind, or seen them killed. One woman told Karolina that she had left behind two children as the Germans had snatched her away without them. Another whispered to Karolina that she had seen the same woman’s son blown up by a bomb.
For Suhren the arrival of the children presented another logistical problem. Since the winter of 1943, when the special Jewish group arrived from Belgium and Holland, the camp had always held a few young children, and more had arrived with a Gypsy transport in July. But for the most part, careful screening prevented young children f
rom boarding the trains that headed for Ravensbrück because they were no use for work.
The groups of Jewish prisoners now being transported here from Auschwitz were the most carefully screened of all: any very young children would certainly have been picked out on first arrival at the Auschwitz ramp and sent for gassing, probably by Josef Mengele, the doctor best known for his experiments on twins.
In September a sixteen-year-old girl called Pola Wellsberg, a Polish Jew, arrived at Ravensbrück. She had faced Mengele at Auschwitz just two weeks before. Imprisoned first in the Łódź ghetto, her parents and four brothers had all been sent to the Chelmno death camp, but Pola and her younger sister, Chaya, survived because they were sent to a ghetto factory to make soldiers’ shoes. When the ghetto was emptied in August 1944 she and her sister were taken to Auschwitz, where everyone from Łódź was lined up before Mengele. He pointed to each of them so that one group, chosen for the gas chamber, formed to his left and the other, chosen for work, to his right. Pola and Chaya were sent left, ‘but I was pulled out at the last minute,’ says Pola. She was judged fit for work, which was why she was sent on to Ravensbrück.
Regina Minzburg was also at Łódź before being sent on to Auschwitz, where she too was selected to live—‘We were on our way to the gas chamber when they suddenly decided to pick out 500 more to work. I was fourteen but they thought I could work.’ But most of the Warsaw women had undergone no such preselection. These women often came straight from their homes with their goods, chattels, grandparents and children—and many of them were pregnant too.
Faced with this ever-growing crowd—many of them women who couldn’t possibly work—Fritz Suhren’s options were limited. At other camps thousands had been turning up from Warsaw too. The commandant of Stutthof Camp, which was overwhelmed by new arrivals, received an order from Richard Glücks, head of the camp inspectorate, on 14 August 1944 that Warsaw women with children under fourteen should not be admitted to the camp—they should not be ‘recorded on the lists’. The order almost certainly meant that the Stutthof arrivals were taken off and shot. It seems highly probable that a similar order was sent to Fritz Suhren.