Ravensbruck

On Tuesday morning, SB and I arrived by overnight train to Berlin and, soon after dropping off our bags at our hostel, headed out on the one-hour train from Hautbahnhof to the little town of Furstenberg. Furstenberg, situated near two lakes, is a very quaint, small town and popular set off point for bike rides and hikes along the nearby forest trails. It is also a kilometer from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, which is where we were going.

Ravensbruck concentration camp was primarily a women’s concentration camp that opened in Germany in 1939. Among the 130,000 women, children and men who were held there, was my grandmother, her three friends, and, as we recently found out, the aunt of our Polish friends in the USA. While it was functioning, the camp held Jewish and Roma/Sinti women (most of whom were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1942) and political prisoners from all over Europe. The camp functioned primarily as a work camp, where the prisoners were forced to work from early morning to night on meager rations and allowed to die of starvation or illness if they were not hardy enough. Over time, however, the camp also built a gas chamber, to which the sickest prisoners were sent.

My grandmother survived, as did the three women she met there who became her lifelong friends. Our friends’ aunt did not, and I found her name in a book honoring all prisoners who had died there. We had met our Polish friends in California many years after moving there from Poland, yet strangely, as my mom and I researched this trip to Ravensbruck, we found out that their aunt, Zofia Gapinska, had shared the same transport train to Ravensbruck that my grandmother had been on. Zofia’s number was 11235, my grandmother’s 11314, her friend Janina’s was 11310 and Maria’s was 7888. Maria’s number is lower because she arrived in 1941. My grandmother, Janina, and Zofia all arrived on May 31, 1942 on the Lublin-Warszawa transport. Zofia died sometime in the Winter of 1944 or 45, but the records aren’t clear since the Germans destroyed many records before the war ended. My grandmother and her friends -- all sick and near starvation -- were liberated by the allies in April of 1945. It is strange to think that Zofia must have known them, and that 60 years later, our family would befriend Zofia’s family in California.

When SB and I got off at the Furstenberg train station, we made our way through the quaint streets of this pretty German town towards the camp on the other side of the small lake. It was a bit surreal to walk these streets, to know this town had existed while people suffered so badly not very far away, and later, to be able to see clearly the town’s rooftops and church spires from the concentration camp grounds. After we returned from the camp, we also found out that the station we got off at was the same one that the prisoners stopped at, except they were loaded off the trains at night and forced to march to concentration camp through the nearby woods. As we sat at the train station at the end of our trip, I could not imagine what it felt like to have been them, to get off the train, scared and hungry, and pass that quaint little town on the way to their miserable imprisonment.

The grounds of the camp have been well preserved, and the museums are well done. On our way to the camp we walked passed the guards’ living quarters – about 6 or so German-style two story buildings-- that now function as a hostel. At the camp, the SS headquarters had been turned into a museum, which showed in detail the experiences of 12 women from different countries that had been at Ravensbruck. Some had been imprisoned because they were Jewish or Roma or Sinti, some because they were communists or Jehova’s witnesses, some because they had helped Jews hide or escape, some because they spoke against the Nazi regime, and some because they were resistance fighters, like my grandmother.

The old buildings in which the women lived have all disappeared. There were 30 or so of these “blocks”, and women were crammed three to a wooden plank cot, several cots high, and there was one little heater in the entire building. What remains respectfully preserved however, is the haunting Rollcall area, which I remember my grandmother had described extensively in her diaries. It is a large open area where women were forced to stand at attention at 5 am for several hours, in the rain and snow if that was the time of year, waiting to be counted, while the guards with dogs walked around looking for the sickest and weakest to cull from the crowd. If a prisoner was found to be missing, everyone was forced to stand at rollcall, sometimes for 12 hours at a time, until they were found. Then, the entire block would suffer for it, whether with increased labor or denied rations for the day. One of the war’s most notorious guards, nicknamed “the Stomping Mare”, worked at Ravensbruck as the head guard. She was famous for her vicious punishments and for grabbing children by their hair to throw them onto gas chamber transport trucks; she earned her nickname by finding enjoyment from stomping old women and babies to death with her heavy boots.

After the roll call, the women would set out to their daily jobs, whether it was building roads and ditches or working at the large Siemens factory on site, returning for rollcall in the evening before going back to their blocks late at night for a few hours of sleep.

There was a block for TB patients, who would receive the fewest rations and no medical care, basically being left to die. There was an infirmary, as well, and some of the prisoners who happened to be nursers or doctors would be allowed to work there to help other prisoners. The infirmary however, was also where many women (mostly Jewish and Roma) were sterilized and where the infamous Nazi medical experiments took place. In Ravensbruck, 74 women --all Polish-- were experimented on by Nazi doctors. One of them was my grandmother’s friend Maria Kusmierczak (#7444); she herself had been a doctor before the war started. The experiments involved forcing women to drink infected fluids and then giving them sulfa drugs to test their effects, cutting limbs to cause infecton or doing surgeries without anesthetic,

Next to the living blocks was the prison, from which most women did not return, and next to that, the shooting wall, where earlier in the war (when bullets where plentiful and the camp served primarily as a work camp) women would be executed once their expiration date came up. As one woman described in her memoirs, the prisoners never knew when they would be called up for their death sentence, but every morning after rollcall, some women’s names were read and they would be taken away to be shot. After the war, my grandmother found her file, which stated that she was scheduled for execution in August of 1945, just a few months after she was rescued.

Past the prison was the crematory and the gas chambers. While many of the women were initially either executed at the wall or shipped off to Auschwitz in larger numbers to be killed more systematically (most of the Jewish prisoners were shipped away by 1942), as the war progressed, the camp began to serve more and more as a death camp. The gas chamber was built for the sick, old and weak, and by 1943 the crematorium began to run day and night. Women living at the camp described the ashes falling into their hair and clothes and the pervasive smell of burnt flesh. It was the job of the Jehova’s Witness prisoners to dump the ashes from the crematorium into the small scenic lake the separated the camp from the town of Furstenberg. Eventually, when the camp was full and more prisoners arrived, they were just forced to live in tents until they died. When Auschwitz was about to be liberated by the Allies, prisoners from there were sent to Ravensbruck, and then, once the crematorium was overwhelmed, bodies were buried in large pits in the forest next to the camp. In an increasing zeal to kill as many people as possible before the liberation of Ravensbruck, thousands were forced on a death march as the Allies approached the town of Furstenberg.

One of the most interesting things I learned about the camp, however, was not all the tragedy that was there, but the amazing bravery and solidarity that the women who lived and died there displayed. I remember that my grandmother had talked about the secret drawings women made to document what they saw, many of which can be seen at the museum now, and of the little dolls they made from rags for the children in the camp. Women who worked in administration constantly fudged numbers and statistics to move the sickest women to easier jobs or to switch the numbers of women who were sentenced for death with the numbers of those who had already died, so they could become anonymous. Women who worked in the infirmary would change the vitals of the sick, so that they would not be sent off to the gas chambers if they looked like they weren’t going to survive, and those who lived in the blocks would donate some of their meager rations to the women who were transported to the tents, given no food and left to die. Those who worked in the Siemens factory or the ammunitions factory would sabotage the radios and bombs they built, so as not to contribute to the war effort, and the women who worked in administrative jobs would fudge the productivity numbers so that weaker women would not be culled from their jobs if they were working too slowly. As prisoner Friedl Burda, who was forced to work in the ammunitions factory, wrote about her sabotage work: “…Afraid? Look, we were perfectly aware that we were risking our lives. But making the effort made it worthwhile. I told myself – rather my life for a good cause than for a bad one. The sabotaging, that was where I can definitely say: I made the war a little shorter.”

Visiting Ravensbruck was obviously an intense experience, but a worthwhile one. I’m not sure I could ever visit a concentration camp again, but I think that every person should see one in his or her lifetime. The level of evil that “civilized” people are capable of is appalling, but the courage of those who are confronted by it at least gives you something good to focus your mind on.