Milena … who has learned time and again from her own experience that she can save another through her own existence and in no other way.
—KAFKA, BRIEFS. AN MILENA
In October 1942, SS Senior Overseer Langefeld returned to Ravensbrück after a brief absence. She needed a secretary and I was chosen for the job. Prisoners with special skills, in my case stenography, typing, and a knowledge of Russian, were very much in demand. Langefeld knew me because of my work with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Milena and I thought it over at length. Might it not be wise to steer clear of this job? It was possible, because Langefeld for purely personal reasons chose not to contact me through the official employment office, which was directed by a high SS official. In the end we decided I should risk it, because the position offered opportunities for helping fellow prisoners. We underestimated the risks and had no way of knowing how badly it would end.
The prisoners thought well of Langefeld. She didn’t bellow and she didn’t resort to blows. She differed appreciably from most of her colleagues, who carried out orders mechanically and took brutal advantage of their power. Not all the women overseers and SS men in the concentration camps were evil by nature. I believe that one of the worst crimes of the dictatorship was to have corrupted average human beings and made them into its tools.
The SS needed more and more overseers to deal with the steadily increasing number of prisoners. Where volunteers were not forthcoming, recruiting campaigns were organized. An official from Ravensbrück would visit the Heinkel aircraft works, for example; a meeting of the woman workers would be called, and he would explain that overseers were needed for a “reeducation camp” (the word “concentration” was carefully avoided), He would give a glowing account of the job: excellent working conditions, much better wages than they were getting at the factory, and so on. After each of these recruiting trips, some twenty young workingwomen would take up their new duties in Ravensbrück. Many were horrified when they found out what they had gotten into. They would come to Langefeld’s office in tears and beg her to release them. But only the camp commander could do that, and most of the women were too shy to approach a high SS officer. So they stayed on. Assigned to a hardened overseer for instruction, they would look on as she meted out curses and blows. In addition, the camp commander would give them a kind of indoctrination course, explaining to them that the inmates were the scum of humanity and should be treated with extreme severity, that sympathy with them was unwarranted and contrary to camp regulations, and that any personal contact with the inmates would be punished severely. Only a few of the newcomers had sufficient strength of character to obtain their release. Most, however, were soon transformed into just such brutes as the veteran overseers. And yet, in the course of my five years of confinement I came across quite a few overseers who tried to remain human. One of these was Senior Overseer Langefeld.
It was only when I began to spend hours every day with her in her office that I found out what she was really like. Confused, unhappy, unsure of herself. She soon began to talk to me, and listen to me, and in time I acquired a certain influence on her. In one conversation, or rather in her reaction to what I said, she put herself in my hands.
One morning when she came into the office, I could see she was seriously upset. She had had a bad dream. Would I interpret it? A squadron of bombers landed in Ravensbruck and instantly turned into tanks. Foreign soldiers climbed out and took possession of the camp. I am no expert at interpreting dreams, but to me the explanation seemed obvious. I replied without hesitation: “You’re afraid Germany is going to lose the war.” As a senior overseer, a member of the Waffen SS and of the National Socialist party, Langefeld ought to have had me arrested for that remark. But she did nothing of the kind. She gave me a horrified look but said nothing. After that I knew this woman would never do anything to harm me. And this had unfortunate consequences. I lost all feeling for the danger of my situation, and in trying to help my fellow prisoners involved myself in one breach of camp regulations after another.
Every evening Milena told me what had been going on in the infirmary and elsewhere in the camp. Dr. Sonntag had been replaced by Dr. Schiedlausky, Dr. Rosenthal, a Bait, and Dr. Oberhauser, a woman. By their efforts, healthy women were turned into cripples, experimental operations were performed, and lethal injections were administered. Every morning Milena opened the coffins that had been placed in the infirmary yard. For some time she had been noticing corpses of patients who had not been murdered in the daytime but at night. She saw the marks of hypodermic needles, smashed ribs, bruised faces, and suspicious gaps in their teeth. As only one person was allowed to move about the infirmary at night—the patients were locked in their rooms—her suspicion fell on Gerda Quernheim, a nurse, who was also the Kapo of the infirmary. With the help of other infirmary workers, Milena got to the bottom of the grisly secret. Dr. Rosenthal was having an affair with Gerda Quernheim. He often spent the night in the infirmary, but not just to be with her. They would murder people together, and not only for the perverse pleasure of it. During the day they would select their victims, for the most part prisoners with gold teeth and gold crowns. Dr. Rosenthal would sell the gold in secret.
Pregnant women were sometimes brought to Ravensbrück. Until 1942, they were transferred to a maternity hospital for confinement, but from then on they were sent to the camp infirmary—a diabolical system, as soon became apparent. Gerda Quernheim functioned as midwife, and all the births were stillbirths. Once Milena distinctly heard the piercing scream of a newborn baby, and another helper, a German woman, opened the door from behind which it came. The newborn baby lay wriggling and full of life between its mother’s legs. Gerda Quernheim had been busy elsewhere, and the baby had been born without her help. An unsuspecting prisoner had notified her, and a moment later the screams ceased. Gerda Quernheim murdered all the newborn babies, drowning them in a bucket of water. Ravensbrück was no place for new life.
Milena was horror-stricken. She told me about her discoveries and urged me to tell Langefeld about the nocturnal murders and the baby killing in the hope that she might intervene. After some hesitation I screwed up my courage and spoke to the senior overseer, who was shocked into a fit of hysteria and screamed at the top of her voice: “Those doctors are criminals. They’re as bad as the camp commander.” I could hardly believe my ears. “Is that what you really think?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I really think.” “In that case,” I said, “how in God’s name can you go on working here? Why don’t you get out?”
Her answer astonished me. “But isn’t it important for the prisoners that I should stay here and try at least to prevent the worst?”
This I denied emphatically. I assured her that she couldn’t prevent a thing, that they would go on murdering regardless of anything she could do. Nevertheless she stayed on. This woman still had a sense of good and evil, which her colleagues in the SS had long since thrown overboard. She had no illusions about conditions in Ravensbrück, but she wouldn’t stand for any aspersions on the National Socialist leadership. Once she said in a tone of the deepest conviction, “Adolf Hitler and the Reichs-fiihrer SS [Himmler] have no idea what those scoundrels are doing in this camp.”
Langefeld took a special interest in certain categories of prisoners, certain of the German politicals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Gypsies, and most especially the Polish politicals and the victims of experimental operations, most of whom in 1942 and 1943 were chosen from among Polish women who had been sentenced to death. Like everyone in the camp and the victims themselves, she believed that the operation earned the guinea pigs, as they were called, a pardon and that they would not be shot.
One morning in April 1943 a list of ten prisoners’ numbers lay on Langefeld’s desk. These were the numbers of Polish women who had been condemned to death. That meant execution. I sat at the typewriter with a heavy heart and looked out to see who these women were who were being taken to their death. They came around the corner, two of them on crutches. Without thinking, I cried out, “Good God, they’re shooting the guinea pigs.” Langefeld leaped to the window; a moment later she picked up the phone and called the camp commander. Did he have permission from Berlin to carry out death sentences on prisoners who had undergone experimental operations? Then she turned to me: “Go out and take those two guinea pigs back to their barracks.” Her intervention saved the lives of seventyfive women who had been operated on. Its consequences for Langefeld and myself were less gratifying.
A few days later, on April 20, Langefeld had a brief telephone call, after which she rose from her desk. With trembling hands she picked up her cap and gloves. Then she came over to me and shook my hand, something she had never done before. Before leaving the room she turned to me and said, “I’m afraid for you, Ramdor is a beast.”
I sat in the office alone, doing my best to control my agitation. Then, looking out of the window, I saw Milena approaching from the infirmary. What could she be doing on the street during working hours? Why would she be coming to the camp office of all places? Something terrible must have happened, something she had to tell me about, or she wouldn’t have taken this risk. I ran down the corridor to meet her. “What has happened, Milena?” “Nothing at all. But suddenly I was so worried about you, I had to come and see if you were all right.” I implored her to get back to the infirmary before anyone saw her. Just as she was moving reluctantly toward the door, Ramdor, the chief Gestapo official in Ravensbruck, rounded the corner, coming from the direction of the camp gate. “Get back into the office,” Milena screamed at me. I rushed into the room and barely had time to sit down at the typewriter before the door burst open and Ramdor came in. “Buber,” he ordered, “come with me!” As I stepped out of the building with him, Milena was standing motionless a few feet from the door. I’ll never forget the look of consternation on her face.
Ramdor escorted me to the camp prison, the notorious Bunker. There Superintendent Binz took away my warm clothing and gave me light summer things in exchange. Then I was led barefoot down an iron stairway to a cell. The door slammed behind me. It was pitch-dark. Groping my way forward, I collided with a stool that was fastened to the floor. I sat down on it and looked about for light. I detected a faint glow under the door. I was too agitated to sit still for long. One soon learns to find one’s way in the dark. Across from the stool there was a small folding table. Along the opposite wall there was a board. That was my bunk, but, as I soon found out, it was fastened to the wall and could not be used. In the left-hand corner beside the door were the toilet and a water faucet, and to the right of the door a cold radiator. Across from the door, high up in the wall, a barred window, hermetically sealed against light and air. The cell was four and a half paces long and two and a half paces wide. Back and forth I walked, back and forth, at first cautiously, knocking my shins against the stool, then more and more confidently.
Ramdor thinks he can get me down; well, he’s got another think coming. How does he expect to do it? By keeping me in darkness? By starving me? How stupid of me not to have eaten all my bread that morning! Would they beat me? All the horrible stories I had heard about the Bunker passed through my mind. About prisoners who had been beaten to death, who had died of starvation, who had gone mad. My heart sank. I almost gave up hope. But then my courage returned, and one thought possessed me completely: Milena is outside. I mustn’t leave her alone in the camp. Who will take care of her if her fever starts up again? If only she doesn’t fall sick while I’m not there to help her! What if she should die! I heard her voice, I heard her moaning: “Oh, if only I could be dead without having to die. Don’t let me die alone like an animal.” As long as I was with her to comfort her, I thought she would get better and live to be free again. But here in the dark cell I saw clearly; I knew she was lost.
As I’ve described at length in my other book—about my three years in Siberian camps—what it’s like to spend whole weeks hungry and freezing in a dark cell, I shall speak of it only briefly here. Just as a severely sick person welcomes the sounds of the new day after a night of suffering, so I welcomed the distant sound of the hated siren. I had got through the first night, but I had no idea how many more such nights would follow. I rubbed my cold hands, beat them against my body, jumped up and down to take the stiffness out of my joints, walked back and forth in my cage, searched for a trace of light, a sign of daybreak. But the darkness remained complete. Then suddenly my intent staring brought results. Wherever I looked I saw glittering balls and ribbons and stripes—a fascinating display which held my attention for a while and made me forget everything else.
But when I heard the first sounds from the corridor, I jumped up, rushed to the iron door, and pressed my eye to the little glass spy-hole. In vain. There was a lid over it on the outside. Footsteps approached. I held my breath, heard the rattling of tin plates, I heard the cell to the right of me being opened, and then the same sound on the left. My cell had been passed over. Had they forgotten me? I wanted to call out, to scream, but then I changed my mind, knowing that in this inferno nothing was done or left undone by mistake. Ramdor had chosen to soften me up for my impending interrogation by depriving me of food and light, by leaving me to lie on the cold floor without a blanket.
After five years of confinement in prisons and camps, after the horrors of Siberia, I was more resistant than some of the others who were suffering the same torment in the neighboring cells. I didn’t scream, I didn’t weep, I didn’t hammer the iron door with my fists, I repressed all self-pity, because I needed my strength, I had to survive for Milena’s sake. But when the body is weakened, the strongest character ceases to be an impregnable fortress. After the second sleepless night, shivering with the cold and tortured by gnawing hunger, my mind would cloud over from time to time. I saw loaves of bread piled up around me, I would reach out and then … a cruel awakening! Once that day the light went on, I heard the lid of the spy-hole being lifted; they were watching me, observing my reactions.
Someone was taking pleasure in my weakness. What a ghastly thought! Wanting to hide my face from those eyes, I crept into the corner behind the toilet and hid my head.
I lost all sense of time. One hallucination followed another. All around me I saw big platters piled high with macaroni. I would bend over as greedily as a hungry animal. Every time my head would collide with the cold stone of the toilet bowl. But the torments of hunger soon passed, giving way to an overpowering desire for warmth. The ceil was full of silky, downy quilts, but whenever I tried to pull one over me, my merciful unconsciousness was shattered. And then I stopped feeling cold. All sensation went out of me. All I felt was a faint pulse beat in my throat. And phosphorescent figures moved through the darkness, approached me, bent protectively over me and vanished. An endless procession. A great sense of peace came over me.
The angry voice of the SS overseer shocked me into consciousness: “Hey there! Don’t you want your bread?” I crept to the door and took the bread ration and the mug of hot ersatz coffee. That was on the morning of my seventh day in the cell. With the first swallow of hot coffee, the first mouthful of black bread, my desire to live revived. I broke the bread into three equal chunks and ate only one of them. There would surely be tomorrows and it was best to take my precautions. This was the seventh day; from then on I was given the regular camp ration every four days—a cruel rhythm, subtle torture, a kind of semi-starvation. The midday meal consisted of five potatoes cooked in their skins with a little vegetable sauce. I had the courage to put three of them aside, one of which I ate on each of the foodless days.
Even in the darkness of the cell every minute had to be lived through. I distinguished day from night by a faint glimmer under the door. I sat huddled on the floor, staring at the thin strip of light; I crept closer and closer to it, and in the end I lay flat, pressing my lips to that faint vestige of beloved daylight.
When you live in perpetual darkness, your sense of hearing gradually takes over from your eyesight. The concrete Bunker had about a hundred cells, arranged in two tiers around a court. Acoustically it was like a swimming pool. I was soon able to differentiate the various outside sounds, to tell exactly from what direction and from how far away an overseer’s scolding or a prisoner’s sobs were coming. Beatings were dealt out on Fridays in a special room. In 1940 Himmler had introduced this type of punishment for women. Such offenses as theft, refusal to work, and lesbianism were punished by twenty-five, fifty, or seventy-five strokes. Any German woman convicted of sexual relations with a foreigner was punished with twenty-five strokes in addition to having her head shaved. The screams of the victims resounded through the building. It did no good to stop my ears; I heard it all the same, heard it with my skin, with my whole body; the pain went to my heart.
Two Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom I knew well, worked as cleaning women in the Bunker. Every morning the light went on and a Witness with a livid, expressionless face would hand me a dustpan and brush to clean my cell with. The corners of her mouth were drawn down in a mask of sympathy. A few minutes later she would come back for her dustpan and brush. Then, before I had time to say a word, to ask her for a piece of bread, for instance, she would put the light out and close the door. Yes, the Jehovah’s Witnesses carried out their duties to the letter. They were prepared to take risks for Jehovah, but not for a fellow prisoner.
And yet one morning, before the usual distribution of bread— I had just completed a supplementary punishment of three food-less days for talking with the woman in the next cell, and I was lying half unconscious on the floor—the shutter in my door opened and a voice whispered breathlessly, “Grete, come quick, I’ve brought you something from Milena.” I crawled on all fours to the door and pulled myself up. The woman pulled a small, squashed parcel out of her dress. “Take it quick. Milena sends you all her love. But hide it for the love of God.” The shutter closed. I sank to the floor, the tears streaming down my cheeks. Milena hadn’t forgotten me. She had sent me a handful of sugar, some bread, and two buns from a package she had received from home.
Dreams played an important part in concentration camp life. Strange to say, cheerful dreams were much more frequent among prisoners than among free persons. My own dreams, I might add, were often in color. But in the darkness of my cell I had dreams of a kind that were new to me, daydreams in which I escaped, not out into the camp but into true freedom. I was running with pounding heart through the narrow twilight streets of Berlin; I was in a hurry, because the train would soon be leaving for Prague, where Milena was expecting me. I went into a dismal shop, where in addition to great heaps of books there were reproductions of our favorite paintings. Brueghel in soft colors, impressionistic landscapes bathed in tremulous light. I leafed and rummaged and picked out one thing after another. Delighted with so many riches, I finally bought everything I could lay hands on. In the next shop I bought a fur-lined dressing gown. The fur was cinnamon color, made up of small pieces, some lighter, some darker, like the miraculous fur in the fairy tale.* I felt its warmth and softness and knew that it had curative power, that it would make Milena well again. I ran to the station with my treasure. The train was waiting, but I rushed to the newsstand and bought an armful of beautifully colored magazines. There were station sounds all around me; I breathed in the travel smells I loved so much. And then it all vanished. The light went on, the cell door was opened.
Early one morning about two weeks later, the shutter in the iron door was opened again and the same Witness handed me a small parcel. Her face was convulsed with fear, I could see she was frantic. “Grete,” she whispered, “I beg you, let me tell Milena that you don’t want any more packages, it’s too dangerous. Please, can I tell her that?” In the face of such terror, I could only consent. “Yes,” I said, “I forbid Milena to send me anything more. I don’t need anything.” It was enough for me to know she was alive.
Later, at the end of my fifteen weeks in darkness, Milena told me how she had put pressure on the two Witnesses. Several times she had approached them on the camp street and begged them to bring me some bread. They had refused and left her flat. Then one evening she went to their barracks. She found out where their bunks were. On the third tier. She had trouble getting there with her bad leg but this time they could not escape. Again she implored them. You had to be really hardhearted to resist Milena, but they were unmoved. Milena reminded them of all I had done for the Witnesses over the last two years. That too had no effect. Then she resorted to the language of Jehovah, the God of vengeance; she gave them a sermon on Christian charity and described the torments they could expect in the next world if they persisted in hardening their hearts. Whimpering, they promised to bring me the food she gave them.
One day I was taken from my dark cell to the prison office, and there stood a smiling Milena with Ramdor. My knees began to shake. I could think of only one explanation; now the beast had arrested Milena too. She guessed what I was thinking: “No,” she said, “I haven’t been arrested. I’ve only come to see how you were getting along. Everything is all right.” Then I was brought back to my cell. For weeks I looked for an explanation. Could Ramdor have forced her to spy for him? Had she given him some information under questioning and been allowed to see me as her reward? No, that was impossible.
Even under normal conditions nothing is more dangerous to a concentration camp inmate than self-pity, than constant worry about his own personal fate. This is especially true in a dark cell. Terror gives way to apathy. I knew that if I was to survive I had to pull myself together and keep busy. I systematically divided the day into periods, each devoted to a different activity: walking, crawling, gymnastics, telling myself stories, reciting some of the countless poems I had had to learn in school, singing songs. In telling stories I took great pains not to leave anything out, and if I forgot a stanza of a poem I was reciting, I tried to make up one of my own and was very happy when I succeeded. But my storytelling was to take a dangerous turn.
I started retelling Maxim Gorki’s story “A Man Is Born.” The author tells us how as a boy he used to walk along the shore of the Black Sea near Sukhum, over roads and paths which I myself was to see forty years later, but under entirely different circumstances. One day, as he sat leaning against a tree at some distance from the path, waiting for the sun to rise over the sea, he saw dark forms against the light and heard the voices of people passing. It was a group of peasants, one of them a young woman, who along with many others had fled from the famine in the Orel district and found work near Sukhum.
The sun rises over the horizon and the boy follows the group. The path twines with the shoreline, and he soon loses sight of them. But then he sees something yellow in the bushes to one side. Coming closer, he hears moans and screams of pain. He runs to the woman’s aid. He bends over her, sees her enormous quivering belly, sees her convulsed face, and realizes that she is in the throes of childbirth. He wants to help her, but she repulses him, crying out, “Go away! Have you no shame?” In her need, however, she accepts his assistance, and he helps a new citizen of Orel into the world. He bathes the infant in the sea and puts the wriggling little fellow into the mother’s arms. Then he makes a fire and makes tea for her. At the end of the story the boy and the peasant woman follow the other peasants; in one arm he carries the baby, with the other he supports her.
In retelling this story, a strange transformation occurred in me. I couldn’t drop it. A daydream took over, and the story went on. I slipped into the skins of the protagonists. I myself became the boy and the peasant woman, walking along the Black Sea shore that I knew so well. From that point on I was two people, two fugitives from reality. We found a hut on the edge of a dense forest. A friendly place, though not much larger than my cell; it, too, had no window, but it had a door that could be opened. Now that there were two of me, I took twofold pleasure in our refuge. My days now had a bright morning. I went to the open door, looked out over the glittering sea, and breathed the salt air. A happy ending in every respect. The owner of the hut, a hunter, became our protector. There was plenty of food, we were glad to be alive, we lay in the sun and swam in the limpid water of the Black Sea. There was nothing vague about the paradise I dreamed up; I relished every detail, every hour, every minute of the day. I lost all sense of time and reality, I no longer knew if it was morning or evening; I would stay awake at night, because we were expecting a visit from the hunter at midday and a meal had to be prepared for him. So why bother about my bread ration when the table was groaning under the choicest dishes?
The boy and the peasant woman loved each other, an idyll of tender happiness. If only my neighbor wouldn’t call me back to reality by knocking on the wall between us. What were these people to me? I shut my eyes and the boy took me in his arms again.
One Sunday the cell door opened and I was released from the Bunker. I hated the daylight and the ghastly reality. I wanted to shut my eyes again and go back to my fantasies. I would have been lost without Milena’s help. She understood the danger I was in, because mentally deranged inmates were put to death. She got me into the annex of the infirmary with a Czech Block-dlteste. Whenever she could get away from her work, she came to see me. Over and over again I would tell her about the life of my heroes by the seashore, and she would listen with infinite patience. In this way she enabled me to return slowly to the reality of concentration camp life.
It was only then that I learned how she had come to visit me in the prison and what a risk she had run for my sake. For three weeks she had waited patiently for my return. She was afraid they might leave me to die there, and her fear grew from day to day. And then she made a heroic decision. She requested an appointment with Ramdor. Surprisingly enough, he agreed to see her. Possibly he expected her to denounce someone. He received her in his office, and she came right to the point. “I would like to speak to you about my friend Grete Buber. She is in the Bunker.” It is unlikely that any other prisoner could have finished that sentence without getting at least a slap in the face. But Ramdor must have been affected by Milena’s magic. He gave her a look of consternation but let her go on. “If you promise me,” she said, “that Grete Buber will leave the Bunker alive, and that is in your power, I can do you a great service.” Ramdor muttered something on the order of: “What the confounded … !” And Milena went on. “Horrible things are happening in this camp. If nothing is done to stop them, you can say good-bye to your career.” That was too much. Ramdor pushed his chair back from the desk and went red in the face. “Who do you think you’re talking to!” he blustered. “I beg your pardon,” said Milena, “you don’t seem to understand. I’ve only come here to help you. My asking a favor of you is something else again. If you’re not interested in what I have to tell you, I beg your pardon. Just send me back to the infirmary.”
It’s a wonder that Milena wasn’t taken directly to the Bunker. But she brazened it out, and in the end Ramdor gave her an opening. “What are these horrible things that are happening?” he asked. Milena kept him in suspense for as long as possible. “Serious criminal offenses,” she said. “Both prisoners and members of the SS are involved. But before I give you the details, I want to know whether you are prepared to meet my conditions?” “What is this impertinence? Do you think you can blackmail me?” “Of course not, Herr Kriminalassistent. How could I, a mere prisoner, think anything of the kind? But I thought that you, as a German, would know the meaning of friendship. Tell me, would you abandon a friend in such a situation?”
Ramdor turned to face her. She had succeeded in touching some chord in this scoundrel and was quick to follow through. “Can you tell me if Grete Buber is still alive?” “Of course she is.” “Can I see her? This very day?” “Take it easy. Don’t go too far.”
Milena started telling him what kind of person I was. Ramdor made his next mistake. He listened, and that enabled her to go on with her seduction program. When at last he had given her his word of honor to keep his promise, she told him what crimes were being committed day and night in the infirmary. Of course this was nothing new to Ramdor and of course he did not find it revolting. He himself was a murderer. But this was a threat to his career. It would have been his duty to expose Dr. Rosenthal, because in the eyes of the Gestapo it was a crime for a member of the SS to sell the gold teeth of the dead for his own private profit. So Ramdor stepped in and before long the medical officer and his mistress were arrested.
But what would have happened to Milena if Ramdor had chosen to cover Dr. Rosenthal? She would have been shot that same day. Of that she was well aware, but it did not deter her. Buoyed by the momentum of her onslaught, she forgot the burden of her sick body. But when she got back to the infirmary, her weakness gained the upper hand, and she was paralyzed with fear that Quernheim would come and kill her with one of her lethal injections.
Some months later Ramdor tried to blackmail Milena. He came to the infirmary, sent for her, and asked her to spy on one of the prisoners. “Herr Ramdor,” she said, “you’ve come to the wrong address. I am not a stool pigeon.” Ramdor gulped. And then he made the astonishing remark: “I can’t deny it. You really are a decent person.” And Milena shot back: “Yes, I am. And I didn’t need you to tell me.”
After my release from the Bunker, I found out what had become of Senior Overseer Langefeld. On the day after my arrest, she was allowed to go to her office. On the way, she had a conversation with Milena, who rushed up to her and implored her to save me from death. Though Langefeld promised Milena to do everything in her power, she knew that her own hour had struck. That same day she was put under house arrest and separated from her child. She spent the next day in strict isolation in her apartment. Her only thought was to let someone know what was happening to her. Late that afternoon she heard a column of prisoners singing as they marched past on their way back from work. She leaped to the window, opened it, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Help!” The SS man who was guarding her dragged her away from the window.
The next day the order for her arrest arrived from Berlin. She was taken to Breslau, her last place of residence, and tried by an SS tribunal. The charge against her was that she had been “a tool of the Polish political prisoners and had shown sympathy for Polish nationalists.” The hearings went on for fifty days, at the end of which she was acquitted for lack of proof and dismissed from Ravensbruck.
* “Thousandfurs” in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.