Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Virginia recalled that one of the Anglo-Americans suggested their group should volunteer for the forest work gangs, said to be slightly less cold because the trees broke the wind. The long trek out took them through snowdrifts that clung so that they walked on snow platforms and kept wrenching their feet. Denise’s foot had turned gangrenous, making the walk impossible, so she stayed in the block.

  The forest work meant delving down to the base of tree stumps felled earlier and digging out the roots. As many as six would combine on a single great tree, disappearing as they dug down and piled earth up around them. It was gruelling labour, but it was also sheltered, and they could talk as they attacked the frozen soil. Several of the French remembered Violette working down among the roots, chatting away. Jeannie Rousseau, the Torgau protest leader, said Violette still had ideas of escaping, but couldn’t figure out how. ‘She never complained, that girl. She seemed unchanged by the work, unlike her two friends, who were in a terrible state.’

  By midday the women were listening out for the distant motor of the soup truck. Its arrival meant a fight for a place in line against a ‘herd of thundering Poles and Russians’. A female guard they nicknamed ‘La Vachère’ often kicked the pot so that the soup spilt. Back at work they talked about food: ‘How thick was your soup? Shall we save our potatoes to make a sandwich tonight? Is it better to eat slowly? I wonder what tomorrow’s soup will be like.’ Then they wondered if they could snatch some sugar beets on the way back to the camp.

  One day the women met French POWs on the road home; soon presents were being smuggled to them again—biscuits and chocolate—as at Torgau.

  Then in mid-January Violette, Lilian and Denise were called out and told they were going back to Ravensbrück. Lilian, who was still in the Revier, was told to be ready to leave next morning at five. ‘She was very thin by now, and very weak,’ recalled her friend Jacqueline Bernard. Christiane Le Scornet says Violette was warned the previous evening too. Violette said: ‘ “It is King George who has asked for us. I will go and see him when I get back and demand a plane. I’ll come and rescue you myself.” Violette believed sincerely that she was going back to be liberated. She left with Lilian and Denise. I was so happy for them.’

  According to Jeannie Rousseau, ‘La Vachère’ called the British names out at the morning Appell and Violette, Lilian and Denise marched off to a waiting truck. Jeannie also remembered that the trio thought they were going to be liberated. Violette may really have believed that the message she gave to their POW friends at Torgau had reached London, which had then negotiated a prisoner exchange with the Germans. She knew that her SOE comrade Odette Sansom was being held in the bunker as a hostage, along with Geneviève de Gaulle. And since the start of the New Year, there had certainly been talk of prisoner exchanges involving a group of French parachutists held in the main camp. Some of this talk may well have reached Königsberg with newly arriving prisoners.

  Jeannie Rousseau remembers that they spoke of an exchange having been organised. ‘They thought they were going to Switzerland first, but I wasn’t so sure. There were some not very nice men who had come all the way from Ravensbrück to take charge of them. I didn’t like the look of it much. And I thought, they’re going to be shot.’

  Julia Barry, the Guernsey woman, saw Violette, Lilian and Denise as soon as they arrived back at Ravensbrück, because the guards took them straight to the Strafblock, where she was on duty. ‘They were all black and in rags,’ Julia said. ‘Lilian could hardly move and was terribly ill. So was Denise; only Violette was any better. They hadn’t eaten food for weeks, or washed.’

  The women were now held in the atrociously overcrowded Strafblock, where seven prisoners shared two lice-infested mattresses. Julia Barry did what she could for the British women. She fetched clothes, soap and towels from her own block and asked Mary Lindell in the Revier to get medicines. Mary in turn alerted Yvonne Baseden, the other SOE woman, who was suffering from TB and was now in the Ravensbrück Revier. Yvonne heard that while away at the subcamp, Lilian in particular had ‘changed a lot and had been very ill’. She also gathered that the women were hopeful of an exchange, or at least of a transfer to another camp.

  But Yvonne, more than most, had reason to fear the worst for her friends. As well as the mass shootings that were part of the extermination programme, regular executions of ‘dangerous’ prisoners were continuing, ordered by the Gestapo in Berlin. Just a few days before the British girls’ return, four French women were executed at Ravensbrück, probably by hanging. These too were secret agents; they worked for De Gaulle’s underground organisation BCRA (Bureau Central des Renseignements et d’Action), and had parachuted into occupied France from French bases in North Africa. Their cases had always been closely linked to those of the British SOE women, and they had even been chained together for part of the original train journey to Ravensbrück.

  On arrival the British had been taken to subcamps, while the French four had stayed here at Ravensbrück, where Yvonne had befriended one of them, Jenny Silvani. Like the British girls, the French had expected to be shot as spies, but nothing happened. Then, in early January, perhaps in view of the growing optimism about the end of the war, the French women decided to complain about their treatment. Jenny visited Yvonne in the Revier and told her that a comrade, Suzanne Mertzisen, had been to see Suhren to request the right to receive Red Cross parcels. Suhren took a courteous tone. ‘I understand she was very well received by the SS officer and they said they would see what could be done,’ Yvonne recalled.

  Two days later Suzanne was recalled to see Suhren, this time with Jenny Silvani, who returned to Yvonne full of optimism. They were once again ‘very well received and Jenny told me that the SS seemed to have received orders from Berlin about them on a blue telegram that was lying on the officer’s desk, but she had no idea what the orders were. They were told that their demands had been considered and they would hear more about them but they should be available for call.’

  A week later Jenny went to see Yvonne again, saying they had been recalled a third time. ‘This was the last time I saw her. I heard a day later that the four girls had been seen standing in their striped dresses in front of the SS office, guarded by an armed SS guard, which was most unusual. They were taken away by lorry and I heard later that they had been hanged.’

  Although no one had witnessed the hanging, it was ‘more or less confirmed’, said Yvonne, when their clothes came back. Amid the mountain of dead women’s clothes at the Effektenkammer, someone found Suzanne Mertzisen’s grey jumper. It had no trace of bullets or blood. A German who worked there took one look at it and held her hand against her neck to signal ‘hanged’.

  Lying in the hospital, Yvonne obviously took a very personal interest in all this, as she knew she’d suffer their fate if anyone found out that she too was SOE. She believes that it may have been the French women’s decision to ask for better treatment that brought about their execution, and that of the British women. Going to Suhren drew attention to all of their cases. Execution orders lying gathering dust in Berlin, or perhaps destroyed in some Gestapo office hit by British bombs, were then checked and reactivated. As Yvonne saw it: ‘I can only believe I escaped their fate because I had arrived at the camp with a different transport from Dijon, and under different circumstances, and because during my whole stay I remained as unobtrusive as possible.’

  Julia Barry said the British women stayed in the Strafblock for three days and then a camp policewoman summoned them to the office. They were too sick to be moved. Violette could go, said Julia, but not the other two. A few minutes later the same policewoman came back with an assistant and Lilian and Denise were carried on stretchers, not to the office but to the bunker. Violette walked. They were taken not to the hostage cells where Odette and Geneviève de Gaulle were held, but to the punishment cells below. In her testimony, Barry said she didn’t see the three of them again, ‘but a woman came to me from the bunker the next day to say that the fol
lowing day they were shot’. Two of the women, Lilian and Denise, had to be carried on stretchers to the place of execution.

  Despite Barry’s claim that they were shot, French evidence after the war suggested that, like their French comrades, the British women may have been hanged. Curiously, there was no indication that their clothes came back at all, blood-stained or not. But the French asked, if the French ‘spies’ were hanged, why not the British who were executed just a few days later? Further, on Himmler’s order, hanging had by now become the preferred method for executing saboteurs and spies, supposedly to act as a new deterrent.

  A year after the war Johann Schwarzhuber was arrested by the British and was interrogated about the fate of the SOE women by Vera Atkins, their staff officer, who had been searching for them ever since they went missing in France. Schwarzhuber told Vera that the three women’s names had figured on a list drawn up by the Gestapo in Berlin of women to be executed. He was told to recall them from Königsberg. One evening in late January 1945 they were taken out to the small courtyard near the crematorium and shot. ‘Suhren read out the execution order, they were shot by Corporal Schultz, using a small-calibre gun in the back of the neck. Present were Dr Trommer and Dr Hellinger, the dentist.’ Prisoners in the Schreibstube heard that Dorothea Binz was present as well.

  In his statement Schwarzhuber said the women’s clothes were burned with their bodies. He was not pressed to explain why the clothes were not returned to the Effektenkammer for recycling, as always happened. ‘All three were very brave,’ he observed, ‘and I was deeply moved. Suhren was also impressed by the bearing of these women. He was annoyed that the Gestapo themselves did not carry out these shootings.’

  Schwarzhuber’s comments were obviously an attempt to present a picture of the killings as properly carried out, according to some sort of military procedure—‘Suhren read out the execution order.’ The tragic facts of these women’s final days, however, were all too clear. At least three high-ranking SS officers looked on while these stricken women were dragged from their stretchers and either shot or hanged, we don’t know which. Alongside Lilian and Denise stood Violette, who just three days earlier had said she was hoping to be freed ‘by King George’.

  —

  At Königsberg in the last week of January ‘we were watching ourselves die’, said Virginia Lake. Women came back from the airfield with wild and haunted expressions on their faces. ‘They were fighting not to lose their minds. It was as if they were struggling to hold on…just a little longer until relief would come.’

  By 30 January the Red Army was so close to Königsberg that the guns could be heard in the camp. All the civilian staff packed up overnight and left, as refugees poured westwards on the roads around the forest. The German guards were more and more jumpy, while the prisoners—particularly the Russians—rejoiced. The Russian prisoners talked of welcoming the Soviet soldiers with garlands; the French planned sumptuous dinners to celebrate their liberation. News came that the French POWs nearby had been evacuated and marched west ahead of the Russian advance. Perhaps the guards intended to evacuate the Ravensbrück subcamp women too, some said.

  On 31 January the head woman guard drove off in a car with large bags and a young officer from the aviation camp. The commandant also left, as did all the other guards. Late that night the Russian prisoners broke loose and set the aviation camp on fire. Poles, Ukrainians and Russians now streamed through the camp, plundering. The French looked on, wondering what to do, and then joined in. Prisoners of all nationalities ransacked the SS quarters, grabbing everything in a mad race for spoils. Virginia and her group found wood and coal to burn in their block. Women swarmed through the kitchens, finding rooms piled to the ceiling with crates, cans and sacks of food. Sporadic German military patrols came into the camp and made half-hearted attempts to take control, but the looting continued. The French and Americans sat down to a meal of bread, spread with margarine and jam.

  On 1 February French POWs turned up and reported that the Russians were only ten miles away. According to the French, the Germans now planned to evacuate all the prisoners at the last minute. In the sickbay, Suzanne Guyotat heard that all those in the hospital would be left behind and the building blown up. Others scoffed at the idea that the Germans would bother evacuating them now. That evening the French held a ‘liberation banquet’ and invited two of the French POWs. ‘I woke up two or three times that night. I was too happy to sleep and every time I woke I ate a little lunch of jam and crackers,’ recalled Virginia. Next morning the women learned that a German patrol had come upon the banquet and shot dead the two French POWs as they sat at a table.

  That day the prisoners roamed wider, and found the guards’ living quarters, which were in total disarray—empty liquor bottles, makeup, maps and clothes strewn everywhere. On 2 February news came that the Russians were only four kilometres away. Virginia tried to make crêpes with the food she had stolen, as it was the ‘Jour des Rois’, a French holiday, but Janette had terrible dysentery and was unable to eat. Outside, women were digging graves for the shot Frenchmen, when a new commotion erupted. The girls ran inside to warn the others: ‘It’s the Germans. The SS from Ravensbrück. They’ve come to get us. They’ve ordered us to line up outside.’

  Outside the prisoners saw the Ravensbrück men rampaging around like madmen. Having come to round up prisoners, but scared now of capture by the Russians, they were venting their terror on the women. One guard shot a young girl called Monique as she walked back to the block to retrieve something she’d forgotten. Others were shot simply for not moving fast enough towards the gates. The women who came into line were now marched off away from the Russian advance and back towards Ravensbrück, 200 miles to the west, but some stayed behind.

  Suzanne Guyotat and about twenty others in the Revier couldn’t join the exit march. As Suzanne had feared, the SS tried to blow up the Revier, but in their panic to escape they botched it; most of the women survived. For two more days ‘we lay there, poor women freezing, moaning, shivering and dying,’ said Suzanne. ‘One beautiful morning—it was February 3rd—three Russians appeared outside our block. Where had they come from, these victors, dressed in their marvellous fur hats? They moved forward cautiously, bicycles in their hands.’ Over the next days the Russians cared for the women, fed them, warmed them, and reassured them. One even made a wooden cross for Suzanne to put on the grave of a dead friend.

  —

  The Königsberg death-marchers reached Ravensbrück a week later, and the sight of these starved, dying women, packed in a mass of tangled bodies, some swollen and disfigured, others emaciated and shrunken, would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Many died on the journey, and the guards shot stragglers. Trucks brought the survivors on the final lap, arriving at intervals over the course of two days.

  Mary Lindell was walking up the Lagerstrasse when two trucks pulled up and guards dumped bodies on the ground. At first she wondered why they didn’t take the dead straight off to the crematorium, then she saw some were still alive. The guards started whipping them to make them move. Next day another truck came and some eighty women fell out. Their yellow skin stretched over bone and their eyes stared bright, they shivered in the cold. None of them could walk without help. Virginia Lake—a bag of bones herself—looked at her friend Janette and saw ‘a shapeless heap lying in her own filth, unable to talk and no longer reacting to hunger or cold’.

  The French heard that compatriots had returned from Königsberg and came to find old friends, only to recoil at the sight of ‘the remains of that charming convoy of French women’, as Denise Dufournier put it. These were the same women who had breezed into Ravensbrück six months earlier, all optimism and elegance, with their Hermès scarves. Now ‘we were shocked at their haggard eyes’.

  Many died as they lay on the Lagerstrasse, but it was the sight of the living that caused most distress. Loulou Le Porz hardly recognised her friend Nicole de Witasse, the young French Red Cross ambu
lance driver who had so nearly escaped during the train journey to Ravensbrück: ‘That youthful, spirited girl I had known was now a wizened old woman who could barely move and had very little time to live. I have never forgotten the sight. The only consolation was that her parents would never see her like that.’

  The onlookers learned that the Russians had almost liberated these Königsberg women. The stronger among them told the camp women here how they had heard the Russian guns, and as they marched away they had turned back to see the camp on fire. Now the Ravensbrück women understood that the same fate—forced evacuation—awaited them.

  The memory of those Königsberg faces would haunt the camp women for another reason too. Everyone knew by now that the French convoy had been sent to the punishment camp because of the protest they had staged against making arms at Torgau. Loulou Le Porz was one of those who felt Jeannie Rousseau had made a tragic error of judgement by starting the protest that brought such terrible results. ‘She was unusual—impulsive,’ said Loulou. ‘Of course—it is all very well to have courage but you must know how to use it.’

  The guards herded the Königsberg death-march survivors into the tent and left them to die. Virginia Lake had first peered inside the tent on arrival in September, and seen its horrors from afar again on return to Ravensbrück in October. Now, on her third arrival, she was herself shoved into the stinking structure and left to seek inches of space for herself and for Janette.

  Over the months the tent had changed. A partition now ran down the middle and there were bunks along one end, and lavatories of a sort, but the filth and overcrowding was worse than ever. Virginia and Janette tried to occupy a cranny in one corner where a Polish Blockova had marked out an area for herself and her entourage of hangers-on. The Blockova kicked Virginia and Janette away.