Lindell's List by Peter Hore

Author:Peter Hore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750969451
Publisher: The History Press

20

THE LIST OPENS

In the first few weeks after her move to the Revier, Mary’s work was in the treatment room. She cleaned and dressed minor wounds, boils and carbuncles as best she could with the little equipment and materials available. She had time to see how the Revier and the camp worked.

There was a small number of German doctors who more or less held themselves aloof. Preliminary inspections of patients were carried out by prisoner nurses who, if necessary, referred new cases to prisoner doctors or to the German staff of the Revier. In accordance with German practice, the German doctors’ diagnoses were conducted from a distance, the patients standing naked before them while they listened to the verbal reports of more junior staff. Generally a patient needed to have severe symptoms before admission to the Revier: only a temperature of 39 degrees was considered severe.

The matron, or Oberschwester, of the Revier was Elisabeth Marschall: later she would be found guilty of selecting which prisoners would be shipped to Auschwitz, selecting others for execution at Ravensbrück and helping to organise medical experiments.

Most women in the camp were severely weakened by the poor diet, hard work and the lack of rest. Epidemics of dysentery and typhus swept the camp. A major contributory factor that enervated the women was the roll call, or Appel, held twice daily. At 4 a.m. the women were roused from their sleep for a meal made of ‘a dark liquid resembling coffee’ and were issued a bread ration which had to last the day. They were made to stand to attention outside in all weathers while the Germans checked and rechecked the numbers on parade, compared to the number of dead bodies left in the blocks, and reconciled these numbers to their previous tally. After the day’s work, the women were made again to parade while their numbers were checked and rechecked. Appel could take thirty minutes or several hours, and the punishment for being caught talking or moving was being beaten, sometimes to death, at the whim of one of the guards or of the Kapos. Sometimes the Kapos behaved more violently towards their own, their fellow prisoners, than did the SS guards themselves. Each woman on parade tried to keep still, not even to shiver in the early morning cold, and make no eye contact with a guard or even a Kapo.

As Mary had already found out, even the prisoner doctors and prisoner nurses in Block 3 had to parade and be counted, but because they were fewer in number and the conditions inside their hut were better, there were fewer miscounts and Appel, for them, was shorter.

Prisoners who were ill were brought to the Revier by their room leaders or block seniors, and that is how Mary Lindell began to understand that, amongst the thousands of women in the camp, she and Yvonne were not the only British. One of the block leaders was a British woman who had already been in Ravensbrück for nearly a year and a half.

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