Hanna
Until we arrived there, we’d never heard of Ravensbrück.
It was a women’s camp, a long day’s bus journey from Aarhus, and we were numb with exhaustion and apprehension by the time we pulled in through the gates and were ordered to get out.
A female guard barked orders at us in German, making us line up in front of a large building.
After so many hours of sitting on the cramped bus, it was a small relief to be able to stretch our stiff legs.
Then we were herded through the doors, where a reception committee of more guards awaited us.
Our names were written into huge ledgers, and the guard who stood by the desk spat at my feet, saying, “Nacht und Nebel,” when I stated my name.
I felt sorry for those who had belongings then, because they were taken from them.
At the showers, they even took the clothes those women stood up in, making them change into black-and-white-striped uniforms like the ones Liv and I wore.
Apart from our black headscarves and the letters stitched on our backs and sleeves that set us NN prisoners apart, we all looked the same now.
We shuffled forward from one room to the next as we were processed and then, at last, we emerged into the evening light.
I was glad to see our group had followed Sylvia’s instruction to try to stay together, finding solidarity in the presence of our friends as we were marched across the open area in front of the larger buildings to the rows of long, single-story barracks beyond.
The guard led us to the door of one and stood aside, gesturing to us to file in.
One or two of our group gasped in dismay at the sight that awaited us. The camp at Grini seemed almost civilized in comparison.
The length of the room was filled with blocks of bunks from floor to rafters, four beds across and three high, with narrow gangways between them to allow access.
Each bed, a box made of rough planks, was occupied by several women, crammed together like sardines in a tin.
One of the prisoners, a woman who seemed to be the hut’s leader, beckoned to us to follow her to the far end of the room.
“Where are you from?” she asked us in German, although her accent was so strong, we could hardly make out the words.
“Norway,” replied Sylvia. “And you?”
“Poland,” said the woman. She pointed at the tiers of bunks and shrugged. “Find a space where you can.”
The occupants of the beds moved over reluctantly, grudgingly making room for us.
Liv and I managed to get into one of the top bunks, with Kirsten, Sylvia, and Johanna in the beds below us.
At last, I was able to take stock of our surroundings.
The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming smell.
The air was stale and oppressive, thick with the stench of unwashed bodies.
We had all lost weight during our spell in Grini, but our fellow occupants were emaciated, their eyes huge and round in their thin faces, many with shaven heads.
A low babble of noise filled the room as names and nationalities were exchanged.
There was an atmosphere of something else too, though, and it took me a while to identify what it was.
As the lights were turned out and we tried to sleep, squashed alongside our strange new companions in a darkness heavy with summer heat and the breath of hundreds of other people, I realized what it was: despair.
The despair of the other occupants of the hut, which must surely be replicated from one building to the next across the camp.
The despair of our group, shocked to be uprooted from Norway and herded like cattle into a prison camp in a strange land.
Despair that crept over me, like a suffocating blanket, threatening to rob me of my very soul.
And the despair of my sister as she lay alongside me, her body trembling as she tried not to let the tears spill from her eyes.
I reached over and felt for her hand, clasping it tight in mine.
“Stay strong,” I whispered in the darkness.
“It won’t look so bad in the morning.” It was something Mamma used to say to us when we were children, and I felt her give my fingers a squeeze.
“Think of the mountains and the sea, the land bathed in the soft light of the midnight sun. It’s all still there, waiting for the day when we are free again. ”
I heard her breathing evening out as we transported ourselves from that prison in our minds, back to the places where we’d been happy. Slowly, gradually, the room grew still, and at last a troubled, restless sleep claimed the others around me, broken only by an occasional fit of coughing.
But I lay awake, long into that strange, surreal night, gathering my strength for whatever lay ahead.
*
Under pressure, people’s personalities become intensified, in just the same way that coal can be transformed by pressure, turning into either dust or diamonds. Those who are weak or dishonest or unkind become even worse. And those who are strong become stronger.
Sylvia was a good example of this. In Ravensbrück, she became even more of an aunt to us, making sure we stuck together, managing to procure a few extra morsels of food here and there, speaking to the hut leader to find out how the camp was run, then attempting to work the system to protect us all.
By dint of having been a doctor’s wife and therefore often called upon to help her husband in his practice, she talked her way into a position in the camp’s hospital.
There, she could sometimes procure a little extra in the way of supplies, which she shared with those in our hut who were most in need.
She told the hut leader that we Norwegians were adept at knitting and sewing and so got us allocated to those tasks, saving us from the heavier labor.
She warned us, too, about what went on at the building on the far side of the camp where tall chimneys regularly belched black smoke into the sky.
“It’s a crematorium,” she said. “They burn bodies. Be very careful not to end up there.”
She also insisted that we sew our names onto another scarf—this one a square of cotton stolen from the infirmary. “Keep a record, girls. We must tell the world who was here.”
Through one of the doctors in the hospital, she managed to smuggle that scrap of fabric out of the camp into the hands of the Red Cross, and then parcels began to arrive every now and then from Norway and Sweden, addressed to her and one or two of the others who still had friends and family at home.
By the time they were handed over, they’d usually been ransacked by the camp guards, but even the smallest pieces of soap or the most ragged of undergarments were welcome.
There were no parcels for us, of course, but we didn’t expect there to be.
Even if we’d had anyone left at home, NN prisoners were never allowed to receive anything.
As summer turned to winter, Liv’s health began to suffer again.
We had only one thin blanket to share between us on our bunk, and the sewing room where we spent our days was bitterly cold.
She came down with the hacking cough that beset so many of the camp’s inmates, not helped by long hours spent standing on the square at roll call each day.
One morning, I could scarcely rouse her, and when I felt her forehead, she was burning with fever.
In the barracks, a handcart was pulled round each morning to pick up the bodies of those who hadn’t made it through the night.
Standing in our rows for roll call, we would watch it disappear toward the brick building with its tall chimneys on the far side of the camp.
I shuddered to think of my sister’s body being added to the pile on the cart.
Sylvia quickly managed to have her transferred to a bed in the hospital, and I’m convinced that without her care, Liv might not have survived that day.
Even though my bunk bed was shared with two other women, it felt empty without Liv beside me.
A few days later, Sylvia appeared in the doorway of the sewing room one afternoon and beckoned to me to follow her to the hospital building.
“I’ve told them you have an infection and need to give a sample,” she said, handing me a glass beaker and showing me behind a curtain.
I was embarrassed to hand her back the flask of urine. “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling her calm smile, “I do this all day long.”
She glanced around, making sure no one else was about, then led me to the room where Liv lay in a bed of her own with a blanket covering her.
“She’s doing well,” said Sylvia. “I’ll try to make sure she stays here for a day or two more, although the matron is an absolute devil.
Quickly now, you have just a few minutes before she comes back. ”
Liv’s smile brightened up that winter morning for me, and I went back to the sewing room with a lighter heart, knowing my sister was a little stronger.
Sylvia continued to work miracles, even within the confines of that terrible place.
Through her family connections, she managed to have food parcels delivered by the Red Cross, and one contained a supply of Ovomaltine and a bottle of cod liver oil.
She made sure Liv got a good share of those, and they helped build her up, until she was well enough to take her place with the rest of us in the sewing room again.
The routine of roll calls, meals of watery soup with bits of turnip floating in it, hours spent hunched over our work in the sewing room, and nights spent crammed into the bunks in our hut continued all through that long winter.
I focused every shred of my strength on keeping Liv going, because although she tried not to let it show, I could see the toll that being there was taking on her.
She’d seen terrible things in the hospital, she told me.
“There are some Polish girls who are kept there. They do experiments on them. They were in dreadful pain.” Her eyes clouded as she remembered, and she would begin to disappear into herself, shaking with an uncontainable mixture of anger and fear.
I would try to distract her from those awful memories by telling her the stories Pappa used to tell us when we were little.
It was all I could think to do, transporting us back to a time of innocence, before our world had collapsed around us.
Each morning as we stood on the frost-hard ground of the square and the handcart made its rounds, I gave thanks for the determination of Sylvia and the others who looked out for us.
There were some in our barracks who seemed to give in, turning their faces to the wall, and we knew that when that happened, they wouldn’t survive.
Disease and starvation were killers, but despair was what finally took so many of our number.
The conditions in which we lived and the indiscriminate presence of death among us were great equalizers, irrespective of anyone’s nationality, class, or faith.
But there was still one thing that set a few of us apart.
In the end, it would be the black letters stitched onto our clothing that would seal our fate.