Inside Ravensbrück

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From The New Yorker, May 5, 1945:

Ravensbrück is not in the prewar “Baedeker” of northern Germany. It will figure, however, as a very important name in any postwar handbook that stars places for their exceptional interest as historical Nazi torture centers. Ravensbrück has already become famous as the Straflage, or punishment camp, for women of all the occupied nations, is at this writing still in German-held Germany, and has more than thirty thousand inmates. In exchange for four hundred stout German women, three hundred of the healthiest French women that could be found were recently selected by the Ravensbrück Kommandantur and returned to Paris. Only eleven of them died on the homeward journey, which took nearly two weeks.

I talked to one of the younger survivors, the friend of a friend of mine. She had been part of the French bourgeois resistance movement. In May, 1943, she had been arrested by the Gestapo in her parents’ comfortable flat in the St. Sulpice quarter of Paris. Her job in the resistance was the passing on of orders transmitted to her, as they were to hundreds of others, by the de Gaulle Free French of London, via the radio, in a surrealistic code that produced announcements like “Message for Colette. The China pears are dancing in my grandmother’s garden.” Somebody in France, perhaps under torture, gave both the code key and the code names to the Germans. The young woman was identified, thrown into the suburban prison of Fresnes, and, in March, 1944, shipped in a freight car, as a political deportee, to Ravensbrück. Colette—that is not her name—was twenty-five and, according to her friend, was a big-boned, attractive, still adolescent-looking brunette, individualistic, healthy, strong-willed. I saw her three days after her arrival in Paris on April 14, 1945. Her sorrowing blue eyes looked like the eyes of someone who has almost died. She said she had always been thin; her torso now seemed to consist only of her broad shoulder bones. Her black, curly hair looked lifeless, but, by whatever laws of chance account for the survival of anything in a Nazi camp, it had never been shaved. Her mind seemed quiet and clear. Her only trouble was loss of memory, which embarrassed her; she had suffered intermittent amnesia because she had been starved. She had lived through constant and humiliating horrors, some of which “on ne peut pas nommer.” What she remembered most explicitly and chose to talk about were the thirty thousand women she had lived among in Ravensbrück.

Thousands of women dwelt and died at Ravensbrück, in terror, confusion, pain, and despair, without even knowing where they were. They were on a flat, featureless marshland lying between Stettin and Berlin. The camp is made up of twenty-five buildings, each of which was intended to house five hundred but in the past year has been crammed with twelve hundred. While Colette was there, the women slept four to a single bunk. They had to lie on their sides, the feet of two of them in the faces of the other two. Even the thirty to fifty who died every day afforded only a temporary relief, when their bedfellows carried them off to the pile of corpses which accumulated each night on the cold tile floor of the washroom and which crowded the living the next morning as they cleaned up for the first, pre-dawn roll call, in which there were always newcomers to take the places of the dead. The first call came at 2 or 2:30 a.m. Dressed in their blue-and-white striped prison dresses, with their numbers on their sleeves and a red triangle for political deportees, green for common criminals, and black for slave laborers who had refused to work, the horde lined up out of doors, in the cold and dark, to be counted. They were speechless and motionless, even when the woman next in line fainted or fell dead. It took about two hours for the counting call, which conveniently overlapped with the work call, which ended at 6 a.m. with orders telling what battalions were to do what labor for the day. The calls were supervised by uniformed women guards—superior Germans called Offizierinnen, who were the bosses, and inferior Poles called Blokowas, each of whom supervised a Blok, or house, and Stubewas, each of whom was merely in charge of a Stube, or room. Since Hitler had declared the Poles to be subhuman, the rank they had been accorded was apparently calculated to humiliate the other Europeans, who actually minded only their cruelty. The Poles, terrified at the prospect of losing their jobs, all too humanly terrorized the prisoners as a means of holding onto those jobs, and they outdid the Offizierinnen in lashing the wavering women with the straps all the guards carried. Some of the straps had a heavy rubber weight at the tip.

. . . .

Whatever the women worked at, they worked an eleven-hour day without a breathing spell, except for the noon meal. If they paused even for a deep sigh, they were lashed or kicked by the women guards. The women around the age of forty stood it all best. The young became desperate. The old, usually bewildered mothers, arrested as hostages because they had sons or husbands in the resistance, perished fast. Colette came back after work, at six-thirty, to a camp that stank of dysentery and death. In wintertime, the plumbing froze. The toilets were clogged to their brim. It was always at least eight o’clock before she could find a place to wash in the washroom, less crowded than it was mornings, when the dead were also there. Washing every night was an act of morale which kept the more intelligent women going. Colette said that it was at first her will and then her hate that kept her alive. She had never hated anybody before.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker