“The witness – a tall, 16-year-old boy with a child-like face – recounts his sad story as if he were an old man”, she noted in her papers. “He speaks without becoming upset, only breaking down slightly when I ask about the fate of his parents and sister”.
They were sitting in an old school building in Sweden, serving as a makeshift refugee camp. Taking her time to interview the Polish boy, the woman occasionally asked him to clarify or elaborate, gently urging him on while carefully taking notes.
His name was Genek Granek. He had been 12 when the Nazis closed the ghetto in his hometown Łódź in central Poland and initiated the week-long Sperre, clearing the ghetto of everyone unfit for work. He had seen the cars stop outside the hospital, where “patients were seized and thrown out the windows directly onto the cargo beds of the trucks,” Granek said, adding: “… among them were pregnant women, newborn infants, and people suffering from typhus, dysentery, and other diseases.”
He had seen the children from the orphanage trying to flee into the surrounding fields, only to be hunted down like rabbits. He had seen the soldiers moving from building to building, seizing 15,000 children, sick and elderly to be deported to the extermination camp of Chełmno in northern Poland.
When Granek was 14 he was herded into a freight wagon with his family and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He said when they arrived, his mother and sister “went into the baths; that much I saw. What happened after, I don’t know. I still haven’t heard from them”. A few weeks later Granek was sent on to other camps – to the mines of Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and from there to Bergen-Belsen. He had just turned 15 when the allied forces finally arrived.
To the dark-haired woman in her early thirties conducting the interview, Granek’s story contained few surprises. Luba Melchior had heard countless stories like his before. She had grown up in the Polish town of Radom, less than 150km from Łódź, and she had seen, felt and smelt the inside of several camps herself, including Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück. “His testimony is incontestably trustworthy,” she remarked at the end of her notes, despondently adding: “He is on his own now.”
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To most of us, testimonies like Granek’s are hard to fathom, however familiar they may seem. Faced with the reality of the Nazi genocide we often prefer to avert our eyes, comforting ourselves with the notion that it was a long time ago, and we all know what it was like. Neither of which is actually true.
I realised this when I first read Granek’s account almost a decade ago, the very first of literally hundreds of similar testimonies I would go through in the years that followed. The impact of his voice caught me off guard, not because of the horrible details of his story, but because of its complete absence of emotion and drama. It was the voice of a boy to whom brutality and inhumanity had become so normalised that it seemed a natural and preordained part of the world.
An archive of Nazi horrors
A few years earlier I had been appointed head of the Special Collections department at Lund University Library, and among the jumble of rare documents on the shelves was a collection known as the Ravensbrück archive. Being a historian specialising in early modern culture, I knew next to nothing about it. But according to my new colleagues it was a virtually unique – albeit strangely forgotten – collection that documented the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in unprecedented detail.
Today, after a decade of work to make it available online, the Ravensbrück archive has been placed on Unesco’s Memory of the World International Register – and rightly so, given that it was one of the earliest attempts in the world to systematically document the crimes of the Nazi regime. These previously forgotten testimonies reveal atrocities like human experimentation, child murder and the Nazi attempts to cover up genocide.
Yet they also uncover a more complex reality where friendship, empathy and tenderness could exist alongside nightmarish brutality and abuse; where prisoners could sell out their fellow inmates for a scrap of food, but also where guards could turn a blind eye in a moment of compassion.
A deal behind Hitler’s back
It all began in the spring of 1945, when the largest humanitarian campaign of the second world war was launched from Sweden – the so-called White Buses operation. Throughout the war, Sweden had carefully remained neutral, thereby narrowly avoiding being occupied by Nazi Germany. But Sweden had also drawn increasing ire from the allied countries and its Nazi occupied neighbours, since their seemingly non-committal stance could easily be taken as pro-German – not least since Swedish companies had continued to make handsome profits on trading deals with the Nazis while the rest of the world was burning.
So, when it became evident that the allies would eventually win the war, considerable pressure was put on the Swedish government to take action to save face. In February 1945, the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, a top official at the Red Cross, began negotiating with Heinrich Himmler – head of the SS and Hitler’s right-hand man – to evacuate prisoners from concentration camps in northern Germany. Surprisingly, Himmler was not averse to the idea. He had realised what Hitler still refused to accept – that the war was lost. In desperate need of goodwill from the allied countries and seeing Hitler’s loosening grip of reality, Himmler even began to envision himself as the new führer, hoping he would be made the leader of Germany if he played his cards right. As a consequence, all negotiations with Bernadotte were conducted behind Hitler’s back.
By the end of March, the rescue operation was in motion. All in all, 75 vehicles – cars, motorbikes, trucks loaded with supplies and 35 white-painted buses carrying the Red Cross’s symbol – were deployed with a staff of almost 300 volunteers, ranging from physicians and nurses to drivers and mechanics.
For weeks, the convoys travelled along barely passable roads and bombed-out villages, shuttling between camps where they, despite Himmler’s orders, often had to bribe SS soldiers to be allowed to take the survivors onboard. Eugenia Rygalska, who had spent more than four years at Ravensbrück concentration camp, later described her feelings when seeing the convoy halt outside the gates:
White, bright, joyful busses that brought freedom. How they differed from the black car, hopeless box, heading for executions. How they differed from the dark, dirty trucks that went to the gas chambers … At last, people with human faces … The camp burst out with joy and happiness. There were crowds of women, speaking (and even laughing) only about the white buses that brought freedom.
Two days later, Rygalska’s bus rolled off the small ferry into Malmö harbour, where they were greeted by medical staff and press reporters unable to hide their shock. “Almost all of them are marked by terrible abuse”, a journalist from Arbetaretidningen reported. “Many have had all their finger joints broken, are missing nails on their fingers and have large scars on their faces.” On a stretcher he saw “a man with the face of a 75-year-old”, he wrote. But when asking the staff about the survivors’ condition the reporter was informed “that he weighs 35kg and his real age is 22”.
The shock is understandable. Reports of Nazi war crimes had been sparse and most people had no idea of what the reality looked like in a concentration camp – or, indeed, of what the term actually meant. Nor did many have any idea of the breathtaking proportions of the Nazi camp system. When the war ended, there existed at least 980 concentration camps, more than 30,000 slave labour camps, and approximately 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps on German territory.
Preserving evidence
By the end of July, more than 20,000 survivors (Polish, German, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Scandinavian) had been quartered in hastily evacuated schools, museums and dance halls. To handle the situation, the Swedish government appealed for help from the public. Hundreds heeded the request, including housewives, retired nurses, physicians and academics who could act as interpreters – one of whom was Zygmunt Lakocinski.
Lakocinski was a Polish art historian and a colourful character in the small academic town of Lund. Despite his well-tailored suits and immaculate bow ties he was often considered a bit bohemian by the reserved Swedes, who found it slightly odd that people were always thronging in his kitchen, engaged in jovial discussions around the coffee pot.
But Lakocinski was a man who followed his heart rather than convention. A decade earlier he had fallen in love with a young Swedish student who was on a brief study-trip to Krakow, and he had swiftly followed her back to Lund. By the time the survivors began to arrive, they were expecting their second child, and Lakocinski had a minor position as a lecturer in Slavic languages at the university.
Whatever Lakocinski may have felt when first meeting the survivors, he was better prepared than most. Throughout the war he had used his vast social network to maintain contact with the Polish government-in-exile and stay informed about the situation in his former home country. Personal letters suggest that he had seen reports describing the brutal reality of the concentration camps well before the war ended. And quite possibly he had already realised, even before the arrival of the survivors, that the world was facing something unprecedented.
Fearing a typhus epidemic, the government proposed to seize and burn everything the survivors had worn and brought with them to Sweden, but Lakocinski was quick to intervene. Among the belongings were not only worn-out prison clothes, but also deeply personal objects and tokens from the camps: handcrafted toothbrushes; children’s toys made of discarded cardboard; tiny notebooks created from scraps of paper and pieces of cloth, containing poetry, drawings, even food recipes jotted down from memory as a reminder of a life lost. Lakocinski wrote in a letter:
The atrocities committed by the Germans during the war are unparalleled in history … the importance of preserving every form of documentary evidence of these recent events is simply beyond discussion.
But more important than collecting objects, he realised, was to document the personal experiences of the survivors – and promptly so, before the victims resolved to stay silent, forget and move on, simply as a way to survive the trauma. Many of the survivors Lakocinki approached were extremely reluctant to talk about their experiences, while others openly refused; a silence rooted not only in pain caused by the memories but also in fear that no one would believe them.
Driven by a sense of urgency, Lakocinski assembled a team of co-workers, but with an unexpected twist: they were all survivors he had met at the refugee camps. Lakocinki’s idea was that by sharing similar experiences, his co-workers would be able to break through the wall of trauma, distrust and silence, while also being uniquely equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of the testimonies.
‘Screams of children would keep us awake’
For more than a year the group shuttled between refugee camps, encouraging survivors to talk and sometimes conducting several interviews a day. It must have been incredibly difficult for Lakocinski and his team to document the harrowing stories of cruelty and loss. But perhaps the most striking feature is often their unexpectedly factual, almost detached tone. In her interview, 20-year-old Basia Zajączkowska-Rubinstein said:
On 27 June 1943, the population [of Kielce Arbeitslager] was redistributed to other labour camps … the remaining children were gathered up and given toys; once they were calm and amused, they were shot dead with machine guns.
To take this dispassionate tone as an indication of indifference would most certainly be a mistake. However traumatised many of the survivors were, the ambition of the working group was to make the witness accounts as reliable and informative as possible by focusing on facts rather than feelings, on what the survivors had seen and heard rather than how they had felt.
“The incoming transports had many corpses – people who had suffocated in transit,” 26-year-old Lajka Mandelker stated. She added:
The crematoria operated for days and nights on end. At night, I would often see naked figures being led towards the crematorium. Later, when less gas was used, we could hear the screams of people being burned half alive. The screams of children being led to the crematorium would keep us awake.
A burning rage
However, some accounts do simmer with a burning rage. The testimony of Anna Jachnina, for example; a social welfare clerk who was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 for cooperating with the Polish resistance. In 120 densely written pages – by far the longest interview in the archive – she struggled to describe a reality so otherworldly it often seemed to defy words.
Jachnina had been interrogated in Warsaw and then herded on to a freight train. Days later she arrived, aged 28, at a place reeking of excrement and rotten flesh; a place where the nights never turned dark because the sky was constantly glowing from the flickering ashes rising from the crematoria chimneys:
Gigantic torches that release columns of fire several metres in height … Long tongues of flame, writhing fantastically, stray off to the sides and take on a bloody-golden hue.
Auschwitz-Birkenau had by now grown into a sprawling, city-like complex of 40 closely interconnected camps, covering more than 35 square km and swallowing half a million lives a year. “There were periods when, over the space of a single day, 20,000 people would be gassed in the five crematoria and in the pits dug specially for that purpose”, Jachnina said.
And still, as the pace of the Nazis’ purge accelerated it was not nearly enough to keep the flood of new arrivals at bay. On her first day Anna was led into a barrack lodging almost 1,000 women and the sight of the overcrowded space was “unreal”, she said, adding:
… bunks in stacks of three, full of bizarre figures. Five, six, ten women to a bed, bundled up in rags, they sit like monkeys in overcrowded cages, scratching themselves awfully … It was like living inside a pressure cooker.
But Jachnina was fortunate: she was non-Jewish and fit for work. After a few weeks in the fields, piling stones and carting earth, she contracted pneumonia and typhus and was sent to the camp infirmary. Realising she would never survive the winter out in the fields, she started to make herself useful. “Still staggering around with legs swollen up like logs”, she said. She had started to help out at the infirmary and after a while she was allowed to stay as a nurse.
For almost two years, she cared for the sick, the wounded and the women giving birth. Time and again, she witnessed the midwife deliver a baby and send the mother off to work again, while the child was given an injection or simply “tossed out into the freezing cold” outside the barrack. “Most often, however … Nurse Klara, who delivered the babies, would drown them in a bucket herself”.
Providing actual help for the patients was virtually impossible, she said, as the rat-infested infirmary lacked both proper medicines and equipment. During the recurring epidemics of typhus, the mortality rate often rose to 400 a day, and the dead bodies were piled like firewood outside by the Liechenkommando, or “corpse unit”. When the night fell, Jachnina recalled:
… a truck would pull up with a dozen or so Jews from the Sonderkommando. These were the people charged with running the chimney [used to burn the dead]. They would work for six weeks, after which they were incinerated [themselves] and others took their place. They were often forced to burn their own mothers, wives, and daughters.
A Nazi cover up
The most degrading tasks in the camp were reserved for the Jews. They were the untermenschen, or “subhumans”, that the Nazi grandees had vowed to eradicate at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, thereby sending the genocide into overdrive. But what may have been obvious to everyone inside the camp was still not known outside, and the Nazis did their best to keep up appearances.
When Jewish prisoners arrived, Jachnina explained, they were forced to write postcards to their relatives, claiming they were fine and happily working. Then “the Jews were burned, and after a few months had passed the cards they had written were sent with altered dates to their families”.
At the infirmary, Jachnina had even witnessed a surreal PR stunt, when a Jewish woman had given birth and was then put with her baby “in a bed that had been beautifully made up with actual sheets”. Suddenly “an SS man came with a camera” and a female supervisor stood posing “at the mother’s bedside dressed in a white apron and cap”. Jachnina said:
The mother held the baby in a close embrace, gazing at it steadily and tenderly. A picture was taken and at the next Sortierung [selection] she and her baby went to the gas to die. I watched this farce myself the entire time.
Jachnina’s testimony is one of the most comprehensive and eloquent interviews in the archive. But it is not the gut-wrenching details she recounts that set her apart from other survivors – it is her seething, almost palpable anger and overwhelming need to talk, to share, and just maybe relieve some of the pain.
“I actually lived through Auschwitz”, she said when the interview was drawing to a close, unable to hide her disbelief.
I have it in my blood and brain … I still haven’t been able to shake this nightmare off.
Medical experiments on ‘slaves’
Like many survivors who were interviewed by the group, Jachnina had been transferred to Ravensbrück towards the end of the war. Though less well-known today compared to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück was one of the major concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Located 90km north of Berlin, it had opened in 1939 to provide slave labour for the many industries in the area – most notably Siemens & Halske, the company producing much of the electrical equipment needed for the German war machine.
Like most other camps, Ravensbrück had also expanded over the years into a behemoth of interconnected camps and subcamps that could provide a constant supply of new labourers for the factories. But Ravensbrück was unique in one respect; it was specifically designed for women and children. During the six years it was in use, more than 130,000 female and minor prisoners were pumped into the system. When the war ended, less than 30,000 remained alive.
The use of slave labour was as natural to Nazi ideology as it was vital to the German economy. At the height of the Third Reich, almost a quarter of the total workforce in Germany – some 15 million people – consisted of enslaved prisoners from conquered territories. But the idea of a German Herrenvolk, or “master people”, inherently superior to other races and nationalities, would also effectively dehumanise the conquered subjects, gradually removing all ethical constraints.
By 1941, the Luftwaffe began to examine the effects of hypothermia by submerging prisoners in freezing water. In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau were placed in low pressure chambers to examine the effects of high altitudes. And in the summer of 1942, a team of physicians initiated a series of experimental operations on the prisoners at Ravensbrück, some of them as young as 16.
Gustawa Winkowska, who had worked at the camp infirmary, recounted how she had seen the leading physician “tussle with a healthy young Ukrainian woman whom he was trying to force to lie down on a trolley so that she could be taken to the operating theatre”. Crying out for help, the woman was eventually subdued, whereupon “he put the prisoner under anaesthesia and then amputated her leg – which was perfectly healthy.” She added:
A similar operation was conducted on another young Ukrainian woman, who had an entire collarbone removed before likewise being given a lethal injection a few hours later.
Zofia Mączka, a trained physician who had been arrested in 1941 and assigned to the infirmary at Ravensbrück, gave a detailed testimony of the experiments. She described how Nazi doctors studied the regeneration of bone tissue, either by amputating entire limbs, or by surgically exposing the leg bones whereupon they “were broken with a hammer on the operating table” and set in various forms of braces and plasters.
Other experiments were aimed at generating new forms of antibiotics based on sulfonamides (synthetic drugs) because penicillin was not available. The prisoners were called Kaninchen, or króliki in Polish (literally meaning “little rabbits”) by the staff. They would be cut open and their wounds contaminated with pathogens to cause gangrene and other infections. Sometimes the physicians would insert rusty nails or sawdust in the wounds, which were then sewn together. When the potential cure had been administered, the wound was opened anew and the process repeated. Most of the victims “were operated on several times each, and some up to as many as six times”, Mączka said.
Mączka would later testify when American authorities prosecuted leading physicians behind the human experimentation programme at the so-called “Doctors’ trial” at Nuremberg.
British authorities also initiated the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, prosecuting only a handful of camp officers, physicians and nurses – 17 men and 21 women, out of literally thousands that had kept the system running.
Among the prime witnesses in Hamburg was Helena Dziedzicka, who had spent four years imprisoned at Ravensbrück before she was brought by the White Buses to Sweden and joined the working group in Lund, eventually conducting more than 60 interviews with other survivors from the camp.
The fact that the working group was approached by British authorities was a major acknowledgement of its efforts. In October 1946, when the documentation project was drawing to a close, the British War Crime Investigation Unit sent a team of investigators to Sweden to review the interviews (there were around 500 in total) and collect evidence for the upcoming trials, eventually also deciding to call Dziedzicka personally to Hamburg as a witness.
In her personal notebooks, compiled during the two-month long session, Dziedzicka gave a detailed account of the proceedings, describing the reactions and behaviour of the accused as well as of the prosecuting tribunal – and eyeing both sides with growing disdain.
Though relieved that the worst perpetrators were put to justice she was clearly disappointed in the objectives of the trial. “The moral effect of the camp on the prisoners was completely ignored”, she wrote. “This kind of trial should not only aim at punishing a few criminals, but also at clarifying the barbaric methods by which people were not only physically annihilated, but morally”.
Participating in genocide
In hindsight, Dziedzicka’s disappointment is understandable. The trials were clearly meant to put the matter to rest; not to make the world understand how the camp system had worked and what it had actually done to people.
The darkest aspect of the genocide was not that it had been orchestrated by a handful of Nazis, but that it was performed by thousands, if not millions of victims turned perpetrators in their struggle for survival. “The whole system in the camp had one purpose, to rob us of our humanity”, Dziedzicka said in her final statement to the court. “All our lowest instincts were nourished while the good ones were stifled”. Being a survivor did not always entail innocence.
And this may be the most painful aspect of the Nazi camp system: that it was built on the victims’ willing participation in the genocide. Time and again, the testimonies collected by the working group describe how prisoners took assignments as camp functionaries in exchange for privileges and a chance to live.
According to Jachnina, the head nurses at Auschwitz were generally recruited among the German-born prisoners and “they would rob the patients and hasten their demise by beating them without scruple”.
Tadeusz Berezowski explained that “having gold teeth meant a risk of losing one’s life”, since the prisoners in charge would kill for them, and then “share the spoils with the SS men; in return they were given free rein”.
At Mauthausen concentration camp these Blockälteste, or “block elders” in charge of a barrack, were more feared than the SS officers, Wacław Wawrzyniak said, since they “used to kill prisoners under their authority by drowning them in a barrel of water or ordering individuals to commit suicide by going ‘onto the wire’” – that is, by throwing themselves on the electric fence. “Every day, several corpses would be removed from the wire fence,” he said.
The system, deliberately designed to oppress and control by turning prisoners against each other, was surprisingly effective and drastically reduced the need for paid camp staff. In fact, one in every ten inmates at Nazi camps may have been a so-called Funktionshäftling, or prison functionary. The nurses administering lethal injections, the midwives drowning newborns, the “camp elders” selecting whom should be sent to the gas chamber – most of them were prisoners themselves, trapped in a system of Häftlings-Selbstverwaltung or “prisoner self-government”, as the SS termed it.
Empathy and tenderness survives
But while many prisoners used their privileges as functionaries to save themselves, others used them to protect and save the lives of others. In some camps, they even formed movements of silent resistance, based on loyalty, support and cooperation.
Natalia Chodkiewicz, 56, recalled how the woman in charge of her barrack had “shared her [food] parcels with me, fed me, supplied me with medicines, and defended me during selection”. Others stole food from the kitchen – “a severely punishable offence”, Chodkiewicz said – and when the small parcels had been smuggled into the barrack, the food was “divided and subdivided until each portion was merely the size of a nut” and shared among them all.
Sometimes in these eyewitness accounts, we even see compassion extending across the great divide, from the the Nazi guards to their prisoners. Krystyna Strzyżewska, aged 14, had arrived at Ravensbrück at the time when food rations had been cut to a bare minimum. She said:
There was often no soup. But we had a good aufseherka [a female SS overseer]. The aufseherka gave her lunch away to be given to the children. Every day, two young girls more received the aufseherka’s lunch. She took care of us. She dismissed us, the minors, earlier [from work], so we wouldn’t freeze.
Ewa Augustynowicz was also 14 when she arrived at Ravensbrück, and for more than six months she managed to escape “selection” by hiding from the guards, sometimes “in the toilet or behind the stove”, sometimes by sneaking over to another barrack where she knew she would be safe because the women in charge “were so good that they kept the children in their block from being taken away”.
In this barrack, Augustynowicz said, the “younger children lived in the dining room, which was heated. They kept warm there.” Some nights the adults organised games for the children, and at Christmas every child “received a present in the form of a piece of bread, a little sugar and fat, and a sweater, apron, or dress.” During the long nights there, Augustynowicz was even taught French by the older women, “secretly” since it was strictly forbidden, and hidden “on the top bunks” in case a guard would unexpectedly turn up.
More relevant than ever
Unsurprisingly, for those who had lived through the Third Reich – victims, perpetrators and bystanders alike – the reality of the concentration camps was often too painful to confront. Once the war trials were concluded by the end of the 1940s, the common response to what had happened was neither outrage nor guilt, but silence.
In Sweden, few politicians could see the need for a continued documentation project, and without funding the small working group quietly disbanded – some of them built new lives and careers in Sweden, others returned to Poland like so many of the survivors they had interviewed. None of them ever talked much about the project again, as if they didn’t fully realise what a remarkable accomplishment it had been, or – if they did – it had taken such a toll that they preferred not to think about it.
In any case, the material they had worked so hard to collect gradually fell into oblivion. Alarmed by the political situation in Poland after the war, Lakocinski even decided to close and seal the archive for 50 years to ensure that the material could not be claimed by the Soviet Union. And when the boxes were finally opened again in the late 1990s, the world took little notice.
To some extent this was undoubtedly due to the language barrier, given that all interviews were conducted in Polish. Today, however, the interviews are available online in English translation, and the attention they attract is hardly surprising. In a world where basic human rights are increasingly called into question, these eyewitness accounts serve as a reminder of how deep into the abyss one simple and alluring idea took us 80 years ago – the idea that the world would be a better place if some people were not a part of it.
But more importantly, they show us how resilient humanity can be under the pressure of ideology. And that makes them more relevant than ever.
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Håkan Håkansson works at Lund University Library, and headed the digitization of the Ravensbrück Archive in 2014-2022. The digitization was funded by numerous private donations, as well as a number of major foundations in Sweden and the United States.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
