If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm

Author:Sarah Helm [Helm, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408705384
Amazon: 1408705389
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2015-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Hanging On

It wasn’t until early April that the Mecklenburg sun provided any warmth, and even then it was not felt at the Neubrandenburg subcamp until late in the day. ‘We still shivered for hours in the morning in sleeveless dresses as we stood in the wind,’ recalled Micheline Maurel, ‘but it was warm and clear later. And the sky, Neubrandenburg’s one real beauty, was superb.’

The sunniest place was behind the delousing barracks. Crouching here, just where the heat of the wall met the warmth of the earth, Micheline’s friend Odette remarked: ‘Yes really, I think I’m getting used to this. I think now that maybe I could even hang on for two months if need be.’

Close by, the women found mushrooms, which they picked and crunched together with sorrel and dandelion, and ate, imagining lashings of olive oil. Russians watching on were puzzled about the French delicacy, so they rooted up the lot, and when the French went back for more there were none left – the Russians had been selling them in exchange for bread.

The talk of two more months was spread by new arrivals who said it might be as short a time as that before the Americans and British landed in France.

By the spring of 1944 prisoners were pouring into Ravensbrück in astonishing numbers. In March alone, 4052 women entered the camp – three times the rate of the previous year – raising the population to 20,406, the size of a large town. Poles rounded up ahead of the Red Army advance still comprised the largest group, and if proof were needed that the Soviets were getting nearer it came with the arrival in March of prisoners from Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin. So close was the Red Army to Lublin that Hitler ordered the camp to be evacuated and prisoners transported further west.

In April another big convoy arrived from Paris, 500 strong. Once again the newcomers brought hope that the British and Americans were to land any day on the continent – another ‘ball of oxygen’. Knowing that Allied armies were closing in, both to the east and the west, gave some prisoners new strength to hang on.

Micheline Maurel remembers that the kindness of a stranger helped her find strength. One evening, when the prisoners were being served soup with semolina – which, unlike the cabbage soup, she could drink – a woman came up to her and said: ‘“Micheline, I think this is a soup you can eat. Here, take mine too.” She emptied her bowl into mine and went without food that day.’ The woman knew Micheline’s name, but Micheline didn’t know hers, just that she was ‘a French prostitute – a group that kept to themselves’.

A stranger helped Denise Dufournier to ‘hang on’ too. Twice Denise had escaped selection for a subcamp, but the third time her luck ran out; she was called for the required medical inspection, which she was bound to pass. As she awaited the results at the Revier,

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