Sarah Helm

les camps de la mort juifs montrent ce que l'humanité a été capable de faire à tout un peuple Ravensbruck montre ce qu'elle a été capable d'infliger aux femmes

Ravensbruck est souvent décrit comme un camp de travail Une expression qui amoindrit l'horreur de ce qui s'y s'est passé

How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims—already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead—did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it.

While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’

Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.

In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.

Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.

The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.

As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.

Je comprenais maintenant ce que le livre devait être : une biographie de Ravensbrück commençant par le commencement pour finir par la fin, où je ferais mon possible pour redonner sa cohérence à une histoire brisée. Le livre s’efforcerait d’éclairer les crimes des nazis contre les femmes tout en montrant en quoi la compréhension du sort réservé aux femmes est de nature à éclairer l’histoire plus générale du nazisme

From 1949 the main responsibility for investigating Nazi war crimes was handed to the new German courts. The reason the Allies cut short their trials was clear: the Cold War was under way, Germany was about to split in two and the new priority was to help West Germany rebuild so it could join in the fight against the communists. Most notable amongst the perpetrators let off the hook were German industrialists. Whatever their complicity with the Nazi horror, or their profits from slave labour, these companies were needed to help the West fight the Cold War. Not a single member of the Siemens board, or the Ravensbrück Siemens staff, was ever charged with war crimes at Ravensbrück or anywhere else where they used slave labour. Siemens’s role at Ravensbrück and other camps remained hidden until the 1960s, when investigators seeking compensation for Jewish claimants unearthed the facts. The company reluctantly paid out small sums into a fund, but accepted no liability, saying it was coerced. 

Je retrouvai Zofia Kawinska dans son appartement du dixième étage donnant sur les grues du chantier naval de Gdansk. Elle appartenait au second groupe de victimes des expériences aux sulfamides ordonnées par Himmler. Toute petite et voûtée, elle a du mal à marcher depuis la guerre. Je demande si elle souffre encore des expériences. “Un peu”, dit-elle, et elle me sert le thé avec des biscuits.

Elle se baisse pour montrer les cicatrices sur le côté de ses jambes. “Ils y ont mis des bactéries, du verre et des bouts de bois, et ils ont attendu. Elle relève la tête et me fixe de ses yeux bruns profonds, comme pour s’assurer que je comprends. “Mais je n’ai pas souffert autant que certaines. En Pologne, tout le monde est rentré avec des blessures.

A son retour, Zofia découvrit qu’elle avait perdu son père à Auschwitz. Il avait été arrêté en même temps qu’elle a Chelm, dans leur maison de famille. “La dernière fois que je l’ai vu, c’était sur le camion en route pour le château de Lublin.

uand je lui demandais comment elle avait survécu elle répondit "Parce nous croyions en la victoire". J'aurais du le savoir

Les Tziganes étaient comme des enfants à charge, se chamaillant, se battant puis redevenant à nouveau amies. Les asociales étaient cependant délabrées et incapables de tenir le coup. Plus de quatre-vingt pour cent avaient des maladies vénériennes ou la tuberculose.

Le camp l'utilisait donc comme bricoleuse, ce qui lui permettait de fureter dans les bureaux et les blocks et de récupérer des objets - un vieux journal ou un couteau, par exemple - qu'elle rapportait en catimini dans son block... Quand les livres n'étaient pas brûlés, ils servaient de papier-toilette, et probablement Hanna l'avait-elle récupéré dans une réserve pour les latrines.