*
On top of all this, I had a secret understanding with the newly arrived Dr Maria Kujawska, who was about to take charge of the hospital block, that as soon as I joined the medical staff she would submit a request for my transfer, as a student nurse, on the strength of my language skills. ‘I can teach you everything you need to know and you can help me with my work . . .’ Maria Kujawska, with her two daughters and a group of about fifty Polish women, appeared in the camp in January 1944. The crime for which these women were being punished was having chanced to be in Yugoslavia when the Germans occupied the country. They were arrested at night and told they would be sent back to Poland. On the way, they were separated from their husbands and boys, who wrote later from Dachau concentration camp, while the women came to us. In this group were two cousins of mine, Zofia Potocka and Róża Tyszkiewiczowa with their daughters, together with Marysia Kujawska. For a long time we entertained the illusion that efforts at foreign intervention, which we knew were under way, would succeed in rescuing the whole group from Ravensbrück. It was only when I learned that the wife of the Camp Commandant, Suhren, was wearing my cousins’ diamonds, that I knew there was no hope for them.
Almost the entire group went out to work in the Neu-Brandenburg factory. Dr Kujawska and her daughters, meanwhile, began a campaign for more humane treatment of the sick. To the end she believed in the eventual triumph of Good over Evil, and in the ideals to which she had vowed allegiance the day she qualified as a doctor. She was a woman of such conviction, but at the same time so naïve, that she was simply unable to believe in Evil. I was afraid for her and restrained her whenever I could see that there was not the slightest hope of success.
‘What do you mean? How can you suspect a doctor – even a German one – of approving the terrible things that are happening here? I am going to tell him all about it. Things have got to change!’
Only after long weeks of perilous struggle to save the abnormal and the insane, of whom a few dozen were kept in small cubicles without clothes and almost without food, and only after the Oberschwester had described her as ‘bitten by this humanitarian bug’ (Humanitätsfimmel ), did Dr Kujawska become dejected – amazed that people could be so evil. She was further appalled when they began murdering the ‘madwomen’ and when she came into contact with their executioner, Carmen Mory.43 This woman – prisoner and Swiss spy – made a shattering impression even on me with much less faith in humanity. She had hair and eyes as black as a raven, a very wide, thin-lipped mouth and a heavy jaw. At first sight, the expression on that face – neither human nor animal – gave me such a surprise that I could not recall where I had seen it before. It was only later that I retrieved the prototype from my memory of the she-devils painted by Hieronymus Bosch, that tragic caricaturist of the Flemish Renaissance.
But even Carmen Mory could not for long shake or frustrate the faith and energy of Maria Kujawska. She constantly dreamed of turning the sickbay into a true haven for the sick, and I dreamed about helping her achieve it. I was growing impatient, for I was still living in that terrible block and there was still no order to release me and thus clear the way for my transfer to the hospital block. (...)
I will never forget one evening conversation I had with Marysia Kujawska. She called for me and took me over to her sickbay. There in her ‘study’ she came straight to the point.
‘You’re making anti-Communist propaganda among the young people.’
‘With all my strength,’ I replied.
‘You simply must not do it! You see what’s happened. For some time to come, we have got to coexist with Communism and the Soviets. It certainly won’t be easy, but we must find a modus vivendi, and it’s therefore not permissible by any means to incite the young to hostility against Russia or its system.’
I was well acquainted with Marysia and I knew that her intentions were of the purest. I also knew, however, that honourable people who are unable to imagine Evil can be very dangerous. I therefore answered gently, but inflexibly. No use. Finally, when Marysia insisted ever more forcibly, I told her calmly that, as an academic teacher, I had special duties to the young, which I intended to fulfil – to the end. We parted without resolving our differences. We went on seeing one another as before, but relations between us had changed. [ Maria Kujawska, while still working in Poland in 1945 and 1946, sent me by three separate routes identically worded copies of the following message: ‘Karla, I apologise with all my heart. You were right – not one hundred but one thousand per cent.’ Today, when she is no longer alive, I think with immense gratitude of her touching gesture (K.L.).]
*
Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla was one of the camp ‘characters’, of whom we each of us cherish a radiant memory. For those on whom she bestowed friendship, that friendship will remain a moral privilege. Zdenka embodied in herself traits of character sufficiently rare, even singly. She was very intelligent, very good and very energetic. Moreover, she had a merry disposition and the sunny smile rarely left her pretty face. Personally, she was very unhappy for she had lost her beloved husband in Auschwitz, but she thought it improper to burden others with one’s private pain. It was only later, when we became very close friends, that she sometimes spoke to me about him, revealing then a soul torn by suffering. She was a convinced Communist who had no idea what Communism was really like, but put her own noble theory into practice in the light of her shining ethics. I often told her that if everybody in the world was her kind of Communist, it would be paradise on Earth. She was the only Czech doctor who recognised no national or class differences of any kind. Her sole concern was for the patient as such, and she devoted her whole strength to saving her. She commanded a great deal of respect among the Germans, who were impressed by her iron devotion to her work and her inflexible attitude. She helped me to save both French and Jewish women.
Salvation depended above all on raising the patient’s temperature, which had to exceed thirty-nine degrees for the patient to be eligible for a ‘bed-card’ in the hospital block, and so come under the care of the prison doctors. (‘Bed-cards’ were no longer allowed in the prisoner blocks.) Zdenka fought hard for patients to be granted the bed-card, because it assured them of a couple of days bed-rest with no roll-calls, and the sick person had some hope of being treated by her fellow prisoner, the Czech doctor. The French women in particular often became ill, having little resistance to the Ravensbrück climate, so different from that of their homeland. I often thought that this was another reason for their dislike of the Poles, who were always so healthy. The French women felt bad physically, which weakened their morale still further. It was completely wrong, though psychologically understandable, that they were galled by the superior resistance of the Poles, whereas one or two of the French prisoners would go down with pneumonia after every roll-call in the freezing weather. (...)
(Not long after my release, I was to find out just what kind of ‘problems’ Madame Leroux had in mind. I, in the West, and Niuta Bortnowska in Poland, were both accused, in widely differing quarters, of having collaborated with the Germans in the maltreatment of fellow prisoners. Separated as we were by the Iron Curtain, it was some time before we both realised that this was simply a question of revenge for our respective ideological influence on the young. Whereas I had to suffer ‘only’ slander and defamation, Niuta was put in prison. She was rescued by our friend Zdenka Nedvedova, Communist par excellence, who made a special journey from Prague to obtain Niuta’s release from jail in Warsaw.)
***
In the late autumn a transport of some fifty Greek women arrived. It was a troublesome situation, because they knew no language but their own. We were struck by the way they pointed out the P on our sleeves to one another. They behaved very cordially towards the Poles, but in a respectful and disciplined way. They appeared to be rather simple women, with the exception of one whose orders they obeyed like lightning. Her name was Sula and she was a nineteen-year-old law student from Salonika. Her refined figure, innate pride of bearing, purity of profile and the proportion of her features were all clearly reminiscent of her immortal ancestors. Later we learned that she was the commander of a small military unit, captured, fully armed, in the Greek mountains. Sula was also their interpreter because she was said to ‘know’ French. In fact, though she spoke it almost fluently, she understood very little. The trouble was her very strange pronunciation, but I eventually got used to it. She never complained, although she and her companions in their summer dresses had to parade for roll-call, turning blue with the cold, in that Mecklenburg autumn.
One day, to please her, I recited a few lines of Homer. Sula’s reaction was unexpected. She threw back her beautiful head of black hair. Her eyes shone with inexpressible pride, as for a moment she felt herself to be the representative of the eternal heritage of Greece. She stood in front of me and began to declaim long passages from the Iliad. The throngs of women around us fell silent. Squabbling and yelling ceased. They did not understand the words, but they gazed with admiration at the tall figure of the girl and at the expression on her face of both solemnity and ardour. They clearly sensed that this voice, and these lines in a foreign tongue, had nothing in common with the world of humiliation and ugliness surrounding us. We listened to the monumental hexameters of that heroic poem and, for the time being, it seemed to us that everything around us that bore the seal of our captivity had ceased to exist.
Another time, Sula explained to me that the Greek women felt at home in Ravensbrück because they were under Polish leadership. They had been told by the instructors in their military organisation that the Polish people had made the greatest sacrifice for the common cause and that only the Poles had offered total resistance to the invaders. They also knew that Poland had suffered immense human losses through the sacrifice of so many of her sons and daughters. At first, I did not know quite what to say to all that, especially in view of the language difficulties. Finally, I quoted to them the one sentence by Thucydides that I happened to know by heart from a speech of Pericles: ‘The whole earth is the graveyard of enlightened men.’ Sula gave me a long, intense look, then ran back into the block, from which she later emerged, accompanied by two other Greek women. I understood that she was explaining to them that although the Poles, away to the north, lived so very far from the Greeks, they nonetheless knew who Pericles was and what the freedom of Athens had meant for the world. She then recited the most important extracts from the speech, which two and a half thousand years later had still lost none of its power, proclaiming the love of Freedom and Fatherland as the greatest cultural values of humanity.
Almost all the Greek women were then detailed for transport to other places. Only a few sick were excluded – among them Sula, who happened to be unwell at the time. When we returned to the block, she threw her arms round me and begged me to ‘wangle’ a place for her on the transport. That was something I had not expected. So many women of all nationalities were constantly wanting to dodge the transports at any cost, in order not to cast bullets to kill their own brothers – and here was Sula keen to go! Seeing that I could not understand her, the girl gritted her teeth and whispered the single word ‘sabotage’. Her eyes narrowed and at that moment, to my surprise, I saw a flash of totally alien ferocity on that noble face. A moment later she added that she must go at all costs, because she was under orders. It was just not permissible to separate her from her comrades . . . They were good and courageous women, but there were certain things they did not know. In this case, the honour of Greece was at stake . . . It proved possible to grant her request.
In the evening, just before the transport moved off, and when the staff were no longer on hand, the Greek women said goodbye, in honour of the Poles, by singing their songs of freedom. Tears poured down their cheeks, but their voices never faltered as they sang those songs full of nostalgia and passion.
***
In the process of ‘bestowing’ black triangles on two Gypsies, mother and daughter, I asked how they came to be in Ravensbrück.
‘What do you mean, how?’ retorted the old witch of a mother. ‘Because we’re Gypsies, what else! Don’t you know that all Gypsies are locked up, regardless of what tribe they belong to. Don’t you know anything about us? Our tribes are known by their professions. We belong to the highest tribe. We’re horse-dealers.’
‘And what do the other Gypsies do?’ I asked.
‘The others? Don’t talk to me about that lot. They’re scoundrels!’ The black eyes of the two women blazed with hatred and contempt.
‘But what do they actually do?’ I wanted to know.
‘They just play the fiddle,’ she muttered grudgingly. I was sorry that Kreisler or Menuhin could not have heard her.
(...)
On one occasion I remember, when we were conveying somebody’s remains to the mortuary as usual, I was set upon with wild shouts by some people from another Leichenkolonne55 consisting of some German women, but mainly Gypsies. The air was thick with dreadful abuse, most of which I could not understand. Finally, I managed to ask them what it was all about, since ‘There’s never been any trouble between us before.’ This provoked renewed uproar. ‘You bloody So-and-So, we know you well! You always put the hands of your corpses like this – ’ (here they placed the claw-like hands of a corpse as though for prayer, ‘or like this’ (hands crossed). ‘We know what that means, we know very well!’
This was followed by another torrent of abuse. In the midst of this appalling hubbub, I was overcome by a strange sense of calm. I waited for a little, then said very quietly but distinctly: ‘You cannot imagine how happy I am, how immensely pleased I am that you know what this is all about. There is nothing in the world of greater importance, and it is a great joy to know the meaning of this sign.’ Silence. They stood there motionless, as though thunder-struck, gazing at me in shock. Then they lowered their black eyes to stare fixedly at the ground, and their black locks hung over their foreheads. Silence. Then I wished them well and returned to the block with my colleague, carrying our door. From then onwards, the Leichenkolonne treated me with the greatest respect, not devoid of a certain fear. Later, thinking it over, I wondered whether there had not been, in the life of those unfortunates, a moment when, through the narrowest of cracks, they had glimpsed the radiance of the Truth?
***
Once I heard footsteps on the cinder-track below my window. I leaped on top of my cupboard and saw the remarkably elegant silhouette of a dark-haired young woman. This tall, slender girl with the hands and feet of a thoroughbred, a narrow face and aquiline nose, was dressed with unusual care and great good taste. In these hideous surroundings her appearance was so altogether unexpected that at first sight I was flabbergasted. It was only when she passed underneath my window for the third or fourth time that I called out in a prompter’s stage whisper: ‘Madame!’ There could not be the slightest doubt about the newcomer’s nationality.
She stood still. I tapped softly on my window and stretched out my hand. ‘I am Polish. You must be French. How long have you been here?’
She listened as though dumbfounded. Later she told me that these were the first words of French she had heard in many months. They had given her a great thrill, all the more so because – not knowing a word of German – she had been able to communicate only in dumbshow. Two days later, by mistake, Binz allowed us both to go for a walk at the same time. We chattered away to our heart’s content. Christiane Mabire had been the private secretary of French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, and for this she was being punished. She combined in one personality the elegance of a French lady of fashion with the cultural distinction of a French intellectual. We quickly became good and sincere friends.
Christiane had a large number of serious books, so I asked Binz for permission to borrow some of them, since I did not wish to expose Christiane to the risk of additional penalties for clandestine lending. Binz went to see Commandant Suhren about it and returned in a state of shock, after being told that we were not even allowed mutual awareness of one another’s existence. This prohibition of course reinforced our wish for closer contact. On walks we could meet one another only under the supervision of Binz, who kept an eye on us, stretched out on a deckchair. We each had half the garden ‘corridor’ at our disposal. Meeting in the middle, we always exchanged a few words, but far preferable to this bizarre quadrille were our walks alone and unsupervised beneath the window. On these occasions, we could converse freely and exchange notes. Christiane was particularly fond of Latin texts referring to the Germans. I remember how delighted she was when I passed out the window to her a card with this sentence by Caesar: ‘Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam, quae extra fines cuiusque civitatis fiunt; atque ea iuventutis exercendae ac desidiae minuendae causa fieri praedicant.’ It seemed to me then and, unfortunately, even more so today that those words of Caesar explain a great deal to us, first and foremost perhaps the immense success of Hitlerism among the Germans.
Unlike me, Christiane did not receive any parcels, so I was able to give her something from time to time. Once, by mistake, I mixed up two packages and Christiane received, among other things, an onion intended for the Poles. When I went out for my walk the next day, she was already waiting at the window.
‘Mon Dieu! Un oignon cru! I thought at first it was a hyacinth one could plant in a glass bowl. But, no! It’s just a common onion! What am I supposed to do with it?’
‘Simply eat it – all of it!’ The intelligent eyes stared at me through the bars of the window with obvious incredulity.
‘How do you mean – eat it?’
‘Just eat it, that’s all! It’s very healthy. Specially good for the teeth because of the vitamin content.’ At that point we had to interrupt the conversation at the approach of authority.
That afternoon Christiane stood under my window in floods of tears.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, fearing some calamity.
‘It’s just that I had so much faith in you, I ate the whole onion at once and now, strangely, my eyes won’t stop smarting.’
But this encounter between the elegant Parisian and the less refined Polish onion was not her only worry. Another time, she complained to me about not knowing why she had been given a Jewish name. I discovered that they were now calling her Frau Müller, but she was certainly not Jewish. I had to explain to her at length that Müller and my own pseudonym Lange were just ordinary, very common German names, roughly corresponding to, say, ‘Madame Durand’ in France. The reason they had taken away our proper names was to obliterate all trace of us, so that we would become like the mysterious Man in the Iron Mask. This comparison amused her and appeared to set her mind completely at rest.
***
Some of the lower cells were occupied by male prisoners, sent here for punishment by the neighbouring small prison for men, which had no Bunker of its own. Among them was a very young lad from Silesia, who obviously spoke perfect German. Boguś was serving his term, but meanwhile he succeeded in charming both Binz and Mewis. He convinced them that he could do any work required, that his speciality was interior decoration and that the Bunker needed repainting. The two German women, always thirsting for male company, were so carried away by the sight of this curly-haired youth that finally – with the Commandant’s approval – Boguś, or ‘Gottlieb’, started painting the cells. From then on, whenever I was walking alone, Gottlieb tried to make contact with me. As for me, seeing that he was on excellent terms with the Supervisors I made a point of avoiding him. Then Boguś began to supply me with valuable information about any Polish women who ‘landed’ in the Bunker, and gave me their cell numbers. I therefore decided to risk it and to adopt Boguś as a second line of contact.
(...)
On the world scene, the Germans were losing all along the line, withdrawing in Russia while Italy was toppling. As far as my own fate was concerned, I fully realised that my chances of survival were diminishing from one day to the next. I was talking about this with Boguś one day and I asked him to let the Polish women know if I was taken away. Boguś was much concerned about this possibility and the next day came up with a concrete proposal. What he had planned was nothing more or less than a joint escape! I dismissed the idea and urged him to forget such a crazy notion. Boguś then explained that the project was not impracticable, but that it would have to be carried out during an air-raid when the electric current that travelled through the wires along the walls would be switched off. We would escape through the window, after having earlier sawn through the bars, then dash to the wall. After that it would be plain sailing. However, it seemed to me that our troubles would begin only later, for want of documents. But Boguś thought not and pointed out that nobody was going to ask two people speaking fluent German for any papers in the middle of an air-raid.
Although at the beginning I had not wanted to hear a word more about all this, daily persuasion by this honest, as well as clever boy gradually began to take effect. Slowly I grew accustomed to sharing this hope and started getting ready for the road. It is easier for a prisoner to get drunk thinking about freedom than drinking alcohol. In one of the cells at my disposal were stored some long, very narrow corridor rugs. Like a latter-day (forty-five-year-old) Juliet, I thought of stitching together a portable ladder for scaling the wall. In the middle of all this, Boguś went somewhere for two days with an SS man to buy paint. He returned very depressed and did not admit till the following day that, in the course of a three-hour journey, their identity had been checked four times. So escape was an utter impossibility. But not until the plan ceased to exist did I realise, despite everything, the extent to which I had been pinning my hopes on it. I knew then that, for me, there was no way out and I experienced that sense of peace and relaxation that comes with the closeness of death.
(...)
Once I asked her what happened to children born in the camp. She replied with total composure that it was a nasty subject, but since until recently under German law no child could be born in a concentration camp, the child had to be deprived of life before or directly after normal birth. Because the law had recently been changed, the unpleasant job of disposing of the bodies was no longer necessary.
Thereupon, I resolved to make use of the information I had obtained from this German girl, so gentle and well mannered in her dealings with me, and see that it reached the right quarters.
Then Boguś produced a new project. He was being sent out every day to somewhere in the Ravensbrück district on a painting job of some sort. Having managed to lay his hands on some official-looking paper, which he extracted from a drawer in the absence of the ‘Calf’ and inscribed with a fictitious name, Boguś wanted to escape to Poland and tell the full story of what was going on here. It seemed an idea worth taking seriously, particularly in view of the fact that fourteen gun emplacements had recently been built around us with machine carbines trained on the camp itself. It looked as though not one of us would emerge alive at the end of the war – now inexorably approaching. I then decided to write a report on a handkerchief, which the lad sewed into the lining of his jacket, and I gave him a contact in Kraków. I explained to Mewis that the paintwork in my cell was badly in need of touching up and should be put in Ordnung. As a result she immediately sent me Boguś. As he came in, the look on his youthful face betrayed strong emotion. He knew what was coming. Presently, in a low but firm voice, he repeated after me the words of our oath, placing his fingers on my little crucifix with the figure of Christ. It sounded so strange to be reciting that oath in the Ravensbrück Bunker!
Two days later Ramdohr ordered the arrest of Boguś, who managed to whisper through my cell window that I was not to worry. He had burned the handkerchief, but would remember the oath. At the same time, the ‘Calf’ was removed from the Bunker.
It had become clear to me that if I wanted to get a message through to my commanding officer, I would have to do it by my own efforts. So I set to work in the old way using the dot code with a Polish-Latin dictionary, which I had acquired at some stage with that purpose in mind, since it had such small print. I encrypted a message of 180 words, mainly on the ‘rabbits’ and the executions, on the morale of the Polish women in the camp and the fourteen newly built bunkers. I had to complete the work in a hurry, because Mewis informed me one day that she thought it would not be long before my wish would be fulfilled and I would find myself back in the camp at last. I then made strenuous efforts to see with my own eyes the implements of torture being used in the Bunker. That was not easy, because the rooms in which they were stored were kept very securely locked when not in use. Colleagues in the camp, and later Boguś and Gerda, had described for me three pieces of apparatus. In the first room stood a wooden horse (known as the ‘goat’) for floggings; in the second, the ‘coffin’ with closing ventilation holes and ‘wolf’s claws’, metal teeth of some kind that penetrated the prisoner’s body. Unfortunately I succeeded only once, while out for a walk, in seeing inside one known torture chamber, through a door left ajar. When my Supervisor returned to the camp for a moment, I hurried back to the Bunker and went into the room. There was a wooden horse, on which was something like a saddle, with straps so arranged that it was obvious how the bodies would be forcibly restrained crosswise. I spent so long studying this apparatus intently that I missed the second room and saw neither the ‘coffin’ nor the ‘wolf ’s claws’, tools that were reserved for Ramdohr’s use during interrogations. (The ‘goat’ was also used for normal camp punishment, when the noise of rhythmical strokes and groans could be heard.) I had to make a quick exit at the sound of ‘authority’ approaching.
***
The Jehovah’s Witnesses found themselves in the camp because of their conscientious objection to war-work of any kind. In a totalitarian society at war they had therefore to be eliminated. In the camp they worked as cleaners, or in the laundry, or simply exchanged gossip. In dangerous situations they displayed courage and a fanaticism peculiar to sectarians – yet worthy of unstinted admiration.
(...)
On the seventh day there was another SS visitor from Berlin. I heard about it from the girl Jehovah’s Witness who had been told to clean up my room for a ‘hoher Besuch’. She scrubbed with passion, and with equal passion attempted yet again to convert me to ‘the true faith’, promising that judgement was close at hand and happiness attainable, even here on Earth. The main thing, however, was that I must finally renounce my allegiance to ‘the worst thing of all’ – that was to say, Catholicism. Tired out by my fast, I simply lay there quietly this time and said nothing.
‘I am so sorry for you,’ the apostle went on as she dusted, ‘just as I am sorry for my husband. He is a good man, but he won’t believe. Like you, he is damned. You are both going to hell, and that is a real pity.’ (...)
Apart from the Soviets, we had four or five Jehovah’s Witnesses in our block. After demonstrating opposition to Himmler himself, the Witnesses had been punished by being beaten and split into groups distributed among the various blocks. Our group included two strict observers who did not recognise the camp’s roll-call. We had to carry them out and place them in the first rank, where they lay with eyes shut, then carry them back to the block when roll-call was over. I remember once, not being able to bear the gaze of an old woman who lay for hours in the slush, I found a stool somewhere and sat her on it, with the help of a colleague, but she slid back into the snow. Without opening her eyes, she shook her head angrily in my direction. From then on, I did not touch them, but during evening roll-call in the bitter cold I gazed at the innumerable stars above – for us, perhaps, the most perfect symbol of God’s perceptible and infinite wisdom, sparkling in the same way on the fanatical sectarianism of the ecstatic Witnesses as on the stolid atheism of the wild women from Asia.
***
Such was the role played by a Czech group: not very numerous, but closely linked with the Russians and Ukrainians, and ill-disposed towards Poles. This fact surprised me in camp conditions. I did not understand till I realised that the cause of these attitudes was ideological. The Czechs constituted a centre for Communist propaganda. As a result, they adhered closely to the Russians and Ukrainians and openly opposed the Poles, who were the largest national group in the camp and decidedly anti-Communist. Just then, news reached us of Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad. The Czechs went mad with delight. The Poles thanked God that Hitler’s end was approaching, but not without uneasiness at the steady increase in the strength of Communist propaganda in the camp from that day onwards. We told ourselves repeatedly that Poland under Allied protection could have nothing to fear from Stalin. The advance of the Red Army, however, aroused within us a concern that we ourselves preferred not to admit to, but which nevertheless deepened with every passing day.
***
Many of the French women in Block 27 were also ill disposed towards the Poles. I now know this was a frequent phenomenon in concentration camps, though at the time I racked my brains about the possible causes for this attitude in my new block. French consciousness of their own intellectual superiority, which nobody of any importance or seniority denied, transformed itself in many of the women into a kind of Herrenvolk complex, which was very difficult for Poles to stomach, especially after the events of 1940. I soon came to understand that wartime happenings exerted a profound influence on many of the French women, who regarded the Poles as being to blame for the war and, by the same token, responsible for the French finding themselves in Ravensbrück.
Their attitude to their fate was radically different from ours. A politically active Polish woman was fully aware, from the first moment of her engagement in the underground struggle, that she might very probably pay for this activity with her life or, at least, suffer confinement in prison or a concentration camp. Much as a Polish woman might blame her fate if arrested by accident or oversight, no Polish woman, seized for political activity, would ever – absolutely never – complain. The French were different. Almost all of them grumbled and wailed, thereby weakening their own morale. These women, spoiled by years of comfort and well-being in their daily lives, did not realise that the only way to survive in Ravensbrück was to grit your teeth and clench your fists. When one of their number, Doria Dreyfus, a woman of unusual strength of character and an ardent lover of France, told them as much one day, they called her ‘brutal’.
‘Brutality’ was the reproach also directed against many of the Polish women. One reason for this was that, to our regret, many Poles in the camp were acting as block- or room-leaders, team-leaders or, unfortunately, policewomen. The last in particular (but also some other functionaries) were not chosen from among the Polish ‘politicals’. Some of the policewomen were not Poles at all, but of German origin, Volksdeutsch, and by their disgraceful behaviour while bearing the initial P brought dishonour on the name of Poland. The French women had forgotten (or wished to forget) with what enthusiasm they had been received by the Poles when they arrived in Ravensbrück, and how the Poles always shared their food parcels with them. Parcels received by the French were few and modest. Above all, they had forgotten how generously Poles working in the kitchen helped the French with food supplies for the block, at great risk to themselves.
Perhaps this unpleasant tension might not have become so acute, had it not been for the fact that the Polish women, almost the only prisoners with a knowledge of languages, were giving orders to the French. In any case, I was painfully conscious of the situation and I had no patience with their ironical ill-will and constant opposition.
(...)
Something peculiarly hideous now ensued. That was the way in which the French women started dying. They perished without a struggle, no death-throes, often in their sleep. Increasingly often at dawn, just before roll-call, a neighbour would come running up with the news: ‘Madame XY has died!’ ‘When?’ ‘I don’t know, we were still chatting together at dawn. Then I got up and now I’ve just found her body, already cooling off!’
I rushed up to the front of the parade to alter the total number of prisoners that I had already given in advance of the roll-call. One was not allowed to write simply ‘1 dead’ for, as a matter of principle, it was forbidden to die in the block. That was what the sickbay was for. One was therefore required to write ‘1 kommandiert’. In fact, one was allowed to add the word ‘tot’ in brackets. That was regarded as the ideal solution. Some blocks failed more than once to report a prisoner’s death in time and had to parade for roll-call with the corpse.
Once, I remember, on a Sunday, old Madame de Ganay died. She had been a long-term prisoner, always disciplined and kind-hearted, reminiscent in bearing and disposition of those noble French ladies at the time of the French Revolution. She had all her wits about her and asked me not to let her be carried to the sickbay, because she wished to stay with friends till the end. I knew that her state of health was already such that the sickbay would have to receive her, though she had no temperature. However, a person with only a few hours to live would certainly not be given a bed. In all the block sickbays, the sick ended up half-naked on the floor. The French women begged to keep Madame de Ganay with them in the block. I knew that at 2 p.m. there was to be a general roll-call at which all prisoners, alive or dead (sickbay patients excepted) must be present. On top of that, the sick who had not been taken to the sickbay in the morning would not on any account be received later. I hesitated, deeply undecided, and went to fetch Dora Rivière, a French doctor friend of mine. Dora examined the sick woman and expressed the opinion that she would probably not live till two o’clock. So I decided to risk it and keep the old lady with us. At one o’clock she was still alive and I began to reckon with the probability that I would have to carry her to roll-call, when, at onethirty precisely, the Supervisor came running in from the camp office, bellowing the order for a general roll-call . . . But Madame de Ganay had already been ‘drafted’ – to heaven.
It was hardly surprising that the whole group was stricken with premortal fear, so to speak. Even the toughest among them were finding it very hard to keep going. But the dauntless Zimmerdienst, Simone Lahaye above all, and others struggled to the very end to maintain the group’s morale. It is one thing to look death in the eye, but quite another to be in constant contact with corpses. To make matters worse, fresh transports were arriving with French women from prisons where they had been for a year. These women, for the most part older people with lowered resistance, both physical and psychological, paraded for roll-call two or three times, caught pneumonia or dysentery (or both together) and died off like flies in the autumn. In the group were two or three English women who had been captured in France. They were a particular headache, because whenever they fell ill, they categorically demanded the special treatment and nursing that they required. To all the explanations and reasoned persuasion of Simone and me, pointing out that we were in Ravensbrück and there was nothing to be done, they always replied with one and the same sentence: ‘But I am British . . .’ They, too, died in the end.
The arrival of still more Franco-Belgian transports led to serious problems in relations with the Red Army women. These girls, having been treated from the beginning with special esteem, were now – as the victors of tomorrow – becoming daily more audacious. When the French arrived tottering with exhaustion, the Russian women, who each had five or six blankets, refused to part with even one each for the French. I had to insist on a reasonably fair distribution. Once again, when I told them one at a time that I was not a Communist, but I still considered it wrong for one person to freeze while her neighbour had six blankets, the Russians agreed with me. However, once they were together, not only did they threaten me, but they frightened the French as well. Only Simone was not afraid of them. Her bearing and courage had won her great authority, but she, too, was exposed to her undisciplined colleagues.
The blankets were no help. The French went on dying. The corpse (or rather the skeleton) had to be stripped naked in the block, and the number – the only thing of any importance – had to be written on the deceased’s chest with an ink pencil and the remains taken to the mortuary. No stretchers were available. So the dead had to be carried in an old blanket, like a sack, or more often on a (rarely washed) closet door. As far as possible I used to deal personally with the remains in order to spare the closest colleagues of the deceased. Besides, I still remained physically stronger than the majority of the French women. So I had no alternative.
I was once told that a Madame Thierry had died, but there was no need to write her number on her chest. It seemed she got up an hour earlier, washed herself, wrote the number on her skin, then lay down again and died. ‘She was certainly not psychologically weak,’ I reflected. ‘There are various kinds of heroism.’ And I took the remains of Madame Thierry to the mortuary. Strictly speaking, the sickbay was supposed to certify every death, but with 120-30 people dying every day, that was impossible. It therefore depended on the conscientiousness, intelligence and experience of the block-leader to avoid the ultimate catastrophe – namely, the inclusion of a living person with the corpses. Apparently, that had happened more than once.
(...)
I had now been appointed room-leader of a Red Army block. There were in the block some 500 women, mostly young, of whom the great majority were very fit and strong. They had been taken prisoner by the Germans on the Russian front. They occupied a part of the camp, as it were, separate from the rest and their situation was in many respects different from that of the other prisoners. In the first place, they were held in high esteem by all nationalities in the camp, with the exception of the Poles. This bestowal of homage on often somewhat uncivilised girls by practically all the Häftlinge, with the Czechs at the forefront, was for me the first indication of just how far the camp had become ‘Communised’ by the autumn of 1943. The ‘Soviets’ accepted the homage and the gifts, but paid little attention to the other groups, while maintaining close solidarity among themselves. The Poles they treated with concealed ill-will, which, in exceptional cases, was displayed openly.
As a rule, one was only aware of the infinitely alien uncouthness of these girls, whose most pronounced characteristic was mistrust. This was by no means restricted to the Poles, but applied to all the women prisoners in general. In the course of a longer acquaintance, it became clear that this distrust was most marked among themselves. If one of the Soviets happened by chance to be alone with one of us Polish room-leaders, our exchanges were often quite straightforward and even almost sincere. But if anybody else approached during the conversation, the tone immediately changed, the smile disappeared and terse answers (either evasive or downright rude) were accompanied by a scowl. If there were three people, that was already a crowd and, at that moment, all individuality was lost. The Soviets hardly differed in any way one from another. They were even physically alike, and their reactions were identical to those of their leaders. During any conversation with whomever it might be – regardless of whether the subject was trivial or serious, whether there existed between them and a given person harmony or conflict – there was always a ringleader who was the one to say no, to whom they listened and whom they followed unquestioningly. One sometimes had the impression that privately, they might not agree with her, but that she held them in the grip of some iron compulsion, some incalculable terror. Once I noticed that a group of them were debating something, from time to time casting glances in my direction. Presently, one of them broke away and came over to me. Bustling about the table that I was in process of washing, she asked as though casually: ‘Pani Karlo, wy religiozna?’
The question surprised me, but I was afraid that a simple affirmative answer would not lead anywhere.
‘Yes, I am a believer. I was not always one, but I have been for many years now and I am very happy.’
‘What’s that you have under your dress on a little string?’ she asked, pointing to my neck. I drew out the tiny cross with the figure of Christ. She studied it closely.
‘And that’s your God?’
‘No, it’s only His image.’
‘But if it isn’t God, why do you carry it round with you?’
‘Because, you know, here they are probably going to kill us all.’
‘That’s so,’ she said with simple dignity.
‘Well, when I come to die, I shall hold this in my hand and look at it.’
While I had been speaking, the others who had sent the girl over to talk to me had themselves come closer and stood behind her listening. Finally, she replied to me almost in a whisper: ‘Life must be easier with it than without.’ Suddenly she seemed to jump slightly, having only just noticed that her comrades were standing behind her. She turned round, scowled at them and quickly ran away. The others dispersed, pretending not to have heard those words – so very unseemly . . .
Once, I had to go to the sickbay to fetch one of them (a doctor, or rather, a hospital nurse) and bring her back to the block. She was supposed to visit another camp or factory an hour later. When I told the girl what it was about, it was quite clear that she did not at all like the idea of this lonely outing, but she gritted her teeth and followed me. We picked our way through the camp in total darkness. Suddenly something held me back: two powerful arms embraced me and my companion’s flat face was pressed against mine. She implanted several robust and noisy kisses on both my cheeks. I was so astounded at first that I failed to react at all.
Then, the girl began to talk to me in a whisper: ‘Miss Karla, we may never see one another again, but I shall not forget you because I recognised you for what you are – a human being.’ She repeated it twice: ‘Wy czelowiek’and went on: ‘I wanted to tell you so much, very many things, but . . . it is impossible, I cannot. With us, it’s completely different from what you imagine . . . It’s not the way they say. It’s completely, utterly different . . . but I cannot talk about it.’
She was very excited. I embraced her, stroked her, murmured a few warm words and we walked on. When we entered the block she was as stiff and solemn as usual – like all the rest. Finally, having packed up her odds and ends and said goodbye in the hall to everyone and me in a cool, official manner, she went on her way.
Michelangelo in Ravensbrück
Karolina Lanckorońska
