I remember well one of Milena’s numerous protegees, because I helped Milena to carry out her plan. This was Mischka His-panska, a young Polish woman and a gifted painter. Her artistic talent was known to us from some of her drawings. She was a timid, delicate girl, and every day on outside work, hauling stones and shoveling sand, was a threat to her health. Out of regard for her talent, Milena resolved to help her, to make it possible for her to draw undisturbed. So she stole paper and pencil from the infirmary and forged an inside-duty card for her. My part of the plot was to hide Mischka in a corner of the Jehovah’s Witnesses barracks. There she would sit at the window, doing bitterly realistic drawings of daily life in Ravensbruck and portraits of fellow inmates. Mischka, I felt, was in special danger because her propensity for self-pity seemed to invite illness.
The rhythm of our days was determined by the howling of a siren. It startled us out of our sleep in the morning, ordered us to roll call or to work, ordered us to fall in or fall out, and finally signaled the end of the camp day. We detested the “howler,” as we called it. It was operated by one of the SS overseers; she alone had the right to press the button which was situated outside one of the three infirmary barracks. Several times I had heard Milena say, “How I’d love to press that button, just to see what would happen.” I had imagination enough to describe the inevitable consequences, but that didn’t discourage her. One morning she got up in the dark, crept over to my barracks, and whispered to me, “This time it’s going to be me that makes everybody jump out of bed.” A few minutes later the siren howled. I pulled the blankets up over my head and shook with laughter. That was typical of Milena. Just once she wanted to be “the flounder,” as in the fairy tale of The Fisherman and His Wife. Actually there were no consequences, because no one imagined that a prisoner would dare to do such a thing. The SS overseer, the official button presser, said nothing, probably for fear that she had overslept and would be punished for it.
When deprived of their freedom, the weak often take flight from reality. Some began to live entirely in the past, spoke of nothing but their homes, and suffered from a kind of split personality which made it difficult or impossible for them to adapt to camp life. Others tried to escape the reality of the camp by reverting to childhood and behaving like irresponsible children. I was struck by the change in the inmates’ reaction to horrible news. When the prisoners heard about death sentences and experimental operations, or about sick women being shipped to the gas chambers, their shock and consternation were shortlived; soon they would be laughing again or joking about the trivia of everyday life.
If a prisoner succeeded in adapting to camp life, in coming to terms with the loss of her freedom, her personality would undergo a slow change. The most dangerous stage, through which almost all prisoners passed, was resignation, acceptance of their fate. At this stage, prisoners lost their sense of solidarity and with it their self-respect and their hostility to their taskmasters. Some became submissive to the point of identifying themselves with the SS and became their willing tools. One of the most depressing aspects of concentration camp existence was the way certain prisoners came to revel in the exercise of power. In a matter of days, prisoners given authority over others would change beyond recognition. Dejected victims became domineering, self-assured tyrants, who made life hell for their fellow prisoners.
In this third stage of concentration camp existence, the memory of freedom paled; one had to think hard to recapture it. When I thought of freedom, I still saw a grassy path through the woods, sprinkled with bright spots of sunlight. When I spoke of this to Milena one day, she said, “What an incurable girl scout you are. I am an inveterate city slicker. My idea of freedom is a little restaurant somewhere in the Old Town of Prague.”
Some ten years before she ever saw the inside of a concentration camp Milena wrote in one of her articles, “I don’t know who said that people were made better by suffering. But one thing I do know for sure: it’s a he.” Ravensbrück confirmed her in this opinion. Most prisoners showed no sign of betterment, let alone ennoblement through suffering, and too much suffering could make beasts of them.
The asocials included numerous mental defectives, some of whom would not have been acceptable to any community, let alone a community of prisoners. One of these was a woman named Zipser, who was incapable of adapting to camp life and whose only response to her hopeless situation was hatred. She grumbled, she plotted, she denounced. Everyone, the SS as well as her fellow prisoners, hated and despised her. As a special humiliation, the SS assigned her to the cesspool gang, which was made up chiefly of Gypsies. On the very first day, Zipser, offended and angered by her demotion, picked a quarrel with the Gypsy women, who were total strangers to her. The Gypsies were not prostitutes, as she was, but passionate, spontaneous children of nature. Infuriated by her constant attacks, they soon avenged themselves in their own way. One day, they pushed her into the cesspool and held her under with poles until she suffocated. The SS overseer looked on without lifting a finger. Later on, when the crime became known, all the participants were arrested. Too much suffering had made murderers of these simple, primitive women.
But they were not the only ones who were transformed into monsters by camp life. Those with a sentimental, hypocritical streak were also susceptible, especially if they had power over others. Women who wanted to please everyone, including the SS, and were eager to make things as easy as possible for themselves, could easily become criminals.
In the political barracks there was a woman who had been taken into “protective custody” by the Gestapo for “malicious mischief.” By gossip and defamation she had made enemies in the apartment house where she lived, including some National Socialists, who had denounced her, whereupon the Gestapo had sent her to Ravensbrück. But confinement did not improve her; on the contrary, it provided her with a rich field of activity. She came to be hated by everyone in her barracks, especially by the Blockalteste, a sentimental political with “a heart of gold.” A Blockalteste had no easy time of it in any case, and if among her four hundred charges she had a troublemaker like this embittered old woman, it would have taken strong nerves and strong moral principles to make her overcome her personal dislike and treat the woman fairly. These qualities were lacking in her, and in the end, to make things easy for herself, she became an accessory to murder.
The old woman, who suffered from rheumatism and hated everyone, had only a small space in the barracks that she could call her own. This was her bunk with its straw tick. She took meticulous care of it, kept it spotlessly clean, and defended it against any encroachment. One morning she failed to get up. Since her companions ignored her, it was only when she soiled the tick she had taken such good care of that anyone noticed she was sick. Like thousands of prisoners, she suffered from diarrhea. When it became known that she had soiled the floor on her way to the latrine, she was showered with abuse from all sides. Not a word of sympathy for the old woman’s sufferings. Only hard words. And as far as her diminished strength permitted, she snapped back. The Blockálteste decided it was time to get rid of this “asocial element.” She sent her to the infirmary. A hint to one of the assistants sufficed to have her given a lethal injection, thus ridding the barracks of her disturbing presence.
I can only wonder whether Milena, after her bitter experience in Ravensbrück, would have been so hopeful as to write, “I do not believe that hypocrites do better in life than forthright people, and I do not think the world is so evil that only the wicked can succeed in it.”
In the infirmary, Milena kept the card file of the VD patients and gave them their pills. The greater number of them were asociáis, prostitutes, or so-called “bed politicals,” who had been arrested for cohabiting with foreigners. All the asociáis were despised by the Ravensbrück authorities, and those with venereal disease were regarded as the scum of humanity. AH, especially the syphilitics, could expect the worst. Dr. Sonntag used them as guinea pigs in his barbarous experiments, and many died. Samples of the new arrivals’ blood were sent to Berlin for examination. The results came to Milena’s office. Her courage and generosity can be appreciated only if it is taken into account that in the demoralizing concentration camp atmosphere there were few who saw fit to put themselves out for others, least of all for asociáis. Since she regarded the asociáis as neither more nor less than human beings in need of help, she had no compunctions about falsifying results and entering positive cases of syphilis as negative. In especially severe, infectious cases, she would arrange for surreptitious treatment. Every time she intervened in this way to wrest victims away from the SS, she risked her own life. If her forgeries had been discovered, she would have been lost. Not only did she do her best to save these women’s lives, she also befriended the poor creatures, talked to them, and listened to their troubles. In many of them she discovered sparks of humanity.
Our friend Lotte, a German political, already had four years in prison behind her and was in very poor health. Milena knew that sufferers from tuberculosis were released from the camp. In the winter of 1942 she had a wild idea. She would help Lotte obtain a discharge. With her consent she put her name on a positive sputum specimen and had her moved to the tuberculosis ward. A certificate of discharge was duly made out and signed by Dr. Sonntag, and we all eagerly awaited the outcome. Every evening we stood by the window of the TB section and talked with Lotte. We already thought of her as a free woman.
We still had no suspicion of what had happened in the first months of 1942, or of the National Socialist plans to exterminate the unfit. An order came down to communicate the names of all congenital cripples, bed wetters, amputees, mental defectives, and sufferers from asthma and tuberculosis. The SS overseers assured us that they were being transferred to a camp where the work was easier. A medical commission actually appeared and passed the sick prisoners in review. Then one day two trucks came to take the first shipment away. That evening a horror-stricken Milena told me what she had seen. Patients had been brutally dragged from their beds and dumped into the straw at the bottom of the trucks. From that moment on she knew where those trucks were headed.
Two days later our worst fears were confirmed. The same trucks returned to Ravensbrück and stopped at the supply depot, where they unloaded a mound of miscellaneous articles: clothes marked with the serial numbers of the prisoners who had been taken away, false teeth, eyeglasses, a crutch, combs, toothbrushes, even soap. And there was our friend Lotte in the TB ward. Milena couldn’t forgive herself. There was no time to be lost. She sent another sample of Lotte’s sputum to be analyzed. And then another. Both of course were negative. Then she informed Dr. Sonntag of Lotte’s miraculous recovery and implored him to discharge her from the TB ward. Luckily Lotte had worked in the infirmary and Dr. Sonntag knew her. That saved her.
One truckload after another left the camp and with gruesome regularity the clothing of those prisoners came back. When all those afflicted with “hereditary diseases” were disposed of, new lists were drawn up, this time covering all the Jewish prisoners. Milena and I saw only one possible explanation, yet, incredible as it may seem, our Jewish fellow prisoners with whom we discussed the lists, tried to convince us that they were only being taken to another camp. “Why would they kill us? That would be insane. Why would they want to kill strong young women who are still able to work?” One of the first to go was a young Jewish doctor, who promised to send us a message sewn into the hem of her prison garment. We found the note and read, “They’ve taken us to Dessau. We have to undress now. Goodbye.”
Compared with the horror that now descended on us, the first year and a half in Ravensbrück had been almost idyllic. Polish women were summarily sentenced to death and shot. During the evening roll call, we would hear the shots from behind the camp wall. Adding to the terror, more and more experimental operations were performed, sick prisoners were put to death with massive injections of Evipal. Anyone who was weak or seriously ill lived in fear of being murdered. But it was not until the winter of 1945 that what had once been a “model camp” became a death factory. A gas chamber was built for, as an SS publication put it, the “eradication of all racially biologically inferior elements and the radical elimination of incorrigible political opposition which obstinately refuses to recognize the philosophical foundation of the National Socialist state.”