2.4 - The Living Circumstances of Female Prisoners

The Living Circumstances of Female Prisoners

From the moment the women arrived in the concentration camp, they left their everyday life behind. The whole system, with all its psychological and physical terrors transformed their minds and bodies, so they could not be who they were before.

Bible Student Gerdina Huisman was kept in detention in seven prisons and was deported by train to Ravensbrück in the winter of 1941 where she contracted an illness. Her first impression of the Schutzhaftlager¹ she describes as a nightmare. Seeing the numbed state of the inmates was horrifying. The biggest humiliation upon arrival was that all new arrivals had to undress themselves to ‘shower’ together, under the prying eyes of the male SS guards.²

Up until the end of 1939 Jehovah’s Witnesses formed the largest group of prisoners in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. At first, 16 barracks served as accommodation. Each barrack had bunk beds of three tiers high, for a total of 135 sleeping arrangements. Also, each barrack had two canteens, a washroom with toilets and an adjoining office for the female SS Block Leader.³

In the first years of the camp Jehovah’s Witnesses were put up in Blocks 3, 5 and 7. Block 3 was an inspection block to show to visitors, it was therefore called the ‘model block’.⁴

As a former political prisoner Margarete Buber-Neumann was a Block Senior of a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in ‘model block’ 3 and got to know the Witnesses. At that time 275 women lived in her block. She said:

‘With the Bible Students my life ran very smoothly. Everything went like clockwork. In the mornings, when everyone was intent on getting her jobs done before the roll-call, no one spoke a loud word. In other blocks the Block Seniors and Hut Seniors had to shout themselves hoarse before they could get their charges out into the open and into line, but here the whole procedure went off silently and without a word from me, and the same was true of everything else – the distribution of food, lights out, and all the rest of the prisoner’s day. [ …] Nothing was ever stolen in Block 3. There was no lying and no tale-bearing. Each of the women was not only highly conscientious personally but held herself responsible for the well-being of the group as a whole.’⁵

‘All of them knew the camp rules and regulations inside out and obeyed them to the letter. One locker looked exactly like the other, and all of them were models of cleanliness and neatness. All the towels hung on the locker doors in exactly the same regulation fashion; every bowl, plate, cup, etc., was clean and highly polished. All combs were cleaned daily, and each toothbrush was carefully searched for any stain or clogging. Not a fingerprint was visible on any door. The stools were scrubbed spotlessly clean and always neatly stacked when not in use. Not one of the prisoners ever broke the regulation that feet must not be put round the legs of stools for fear of marks. Dust was removed everywhere, even from the beams across the hut, for our hut had no ceiling and we looked up straight into the roof.’⁶

Buber-Neumann further describes the group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Ravensbrück as a homogeneous religious group, who did all prescribed work with great effort, if it did not go against their beliefs. This is also clear from the description of the above mentioned ‘model block’.

In 1941 the Bible Students were transferred to Blocks 17, 18 and 19. Among them in that period, there were several Dutch women. Block 17 was made the new ‘model block’.⁷

Gerdina Huisman never had her own bed in Ravensbrück. She slept on the third level of the bunk bed, in the middle of two adjoining beds, which made it impossible to sleep normally.⁸ At that time – in the autumn/winter of 1941 – about 400 prisoners had to share one block and so it became completely overcrowded. There were not enough stools for everyone to sit on and only the older prisoners had the privilege of sitting down.⁹ Buber-Neumann mentions this situation of overcrowdedness from 1940.¹⁰ In the summer of 1942, there were busy building activities in the women’s concentration camp. But the number of prisoners grew quicker than the numbers of barracks. For a long time, three women would share a straw sack and two women would share one stool. The meagre possessions of four inmates were kept in one barrack closet.¹¹

The Bible Students were put to work on various camp details. Gerdina Huisman’s task was to unload train wagons. ’It was so cold, that my hands stuck to the metal.’¹² Sundays were usually a day off, but not if there were wagons to unload. The prisoners would frequently suffer abuse while they worked. On one occasion, another Dutch Jehovah’s Witness, Froukje Volp, was cruelly beaten up.¹³ Violence and unpredictability of the security staff were a hallmark of camp life in Ravensbrück.

The Bible Students became valued workers because of the fast-changing importance of ‘work’ in the concentration camp and to the SS ‘they were the most highly prized and most sought-after workers’.¹⁴ Because they were conscientious, industrious and absolutely honest – not to impress the SS, but because it was part of their faith – they formed the ideal work slaves for the SS. They even received special passes for going through the camp gates without the escort of guards when they went to work.¹⁵ They worked as house maids at the homes of SS officials for example. They went without guards because it was known that Bible Students would never try to flee, because of their faith. They mainly used this greater freedom to smuggle Biblical literature into the camp and to establish contact with the outside world.

Bibles found their way to the camp through the storeroom or the boiler room. Smuggling religious literature was dangerous because, if discovered, it would be severely punished.¹⁶ Jehovah’s Witnesses were completely aware of the risks and continued their resistance in the camp through smuggling.

At night and in their free time on Sundays, they conducted Bible studies and sang religious songs. During the day Jehovah’s Witnesses hid their biblical treasures behind a removable loose board of the barrack’s wooden panelling.¹⁷ A high point for their religious activities was when they held a ‘public meeting’ during the Christmas holidays of 1942 and their celebration of the ‘Lord’s Evening Meal’ in 1943.¹⁸ These were remarkable forms of religious resistance in the concentration camp, where the Bible Students made anything but a passive impression.

In the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück the Bible Students, besides other assignments, worked in the vegetable garden. They also had to feed the bloodhounds of the SS, pigs, chickens and the Angora rabbits.

Rabbit cages – work terrain of the work force for the Angora detail. (Archives of the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück (MGR), Fürstenberg)

Early in 1942 the Bible Students debated among themselves which kinds of work ought to be defined as work in support of war. They did not decide this as a group but made their decision individually. Among them three factions formed: the extremes, the doubting moderates, and the liberals. These categories were probably not made by the Witnesses themselves, but by other inmates who observed them.

‘The first group to take action were those who up to then had been looking after the Angora rabbits.’¹⁹ Jehovah’s Witnesses believed to have determined that the wool of the rabbits was used for war purposes and refused to work at caring for the rabbits. Toos Berkers,²⁰ who at that time had only been in the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück for two weeks, was sentenced to imprisonment because of refusal of work at the work force ‘Angora breeding’. The first few days she received no food or drink and she had to finish her term in complete darkness in the unheated ‘Bunker’. After that, the food in the detention centre consisted of ’three potatoes that were rotten, so you couldn’t eat them’.²¹

Inmates at work in the vegetable plot. (Archives of the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück (MGR), Fürstenberg)

The women who worked in the vegetable plot put their work down too, the same day as the ’Angora breeding detail’, because they found out that the harvested vegetables were meant for an SS hospital. They were sentenced to the ‘Bunker’ and detention in complete darkness, together with about 90 other women. The Dutch Jehovah’s Witness Froukje Volp was also among the garden workers.²² Before she was detained in the ‘Bunker’, she was forced to stand in the courtyard of the Zellenbau²³ for three days and three nights, and they threatened her, saying: ‘Oh, these Dutch women, we’ll get them, these stuffed swine. We’ll break them yet.’²⁴

There was so little room in ‘the Bunker’ that the SS had to think up another way to carry out the punishment. Margarete Buber-Neumann relates:

‘However, there were not enough dark cells to hold them all, so one wing of Block 25 was cleared, everything taken out and the windows painted over, and they were put in there. The already exhausted women had no blankets, no mattresses and nowhere to sit except on the floor. Here they received their bread ration every day and normal rations once every four days. Whilst the struggle was still proceeding a new order came from Berlin that refusal to work was to be punished with seventy-five lashes, and all these women, many of whom were between fifty and sixty, received three floggings of twenty-five lashes each. I saw them in the washroom about a month afterwards. They were like walking skeletons, and their thighs and buttocks were covered with ugly weals. Many of them looked as though they had gone off their heads. In the end they were released, but then they refused to stand at roll-calls, declaring they would stand up for Jehovah, but not for the SS.’²⁵

A few of the so-called extremes were dragged to the roll-call. Despite this, they refused to do any work that supported the war and would not attend morning roll-call voluntarily. Afterwards, the work on the Angora breeding farm was done by Czech and German political prisoners.²⁶

The different factions within the group of Bible Students were mainly caused by the various forms of work they had to perform, and because the importance of the work they did changed when the function of the camp system changed. The women had to consider whether the detail they worked in could be reconciled with their principles of faith. Thus, they had to decide individually and so the separate factions did not act as a group. Whether a Bible Student was categorised as an ‘extremist’ or a ‘liberal’ depended mostly on the work she did. That is to say, the coincidental assignment to a specific work force could make one a so-called ‘extreme’, while others, who did not have to do this work, may not even have been confronted with the issue of refusing work.²⁷

Also, during the year 1941, the two groups, the ‘liberal’ and the ‘extreme’ Bible Students, had to think about whether they would eat the blood sausage given to them. Ilse Unterdörfer discovered in the Old Testament Jehovah’s command to ‘pour out the blood on the earth’. About 25 Jehovah’s Witnesses therefore decided not to eat the blood sausage which came cold with supper for a while. Katharina (Toos) Berkers remembers that it was mainly the German Bible Students who had no objection to eating blood sausage. A sister in the faith tried to convince them: ‘Listen, it says here in Numbers: “You must not eat the blood, because it is something despicable to Jehovah, but you must pour it out onto the earth.”’²⁸ Toos Berkers convinced some of the Bible Students of her point of view and others ‘stubbornly’²⁹ clung to eating the blood sausage. It was no longer a closed unity. Two fronts, each with their own convictions, had formed.

The SS took this refusal to eat certain foods as a provocation, for which the Witnesses received punishment. The punishment differed and varied from bullying (by giving blood sausage especially to the women who had refused to eat it) to beatings and locking the women up.³⁰

The solidarity among the Bible Students was strong despite the difference of opinion on some points.

The group of prisoners developed their own way to divide tasks, for instance, giving a sister in the faith the task of sharing out the food. They also shared the content of food packages that some of them received from home.³¹

The ‘black transportations’ began under the euthanasia operation Aktion 14f13³² early in the year 1942. The women who were not fit for work were selected by doctors for transportation to the gas chambers. Many of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were physically weakened by that time and fell victim to this cruel annihilation.

The industrial killing machine of the Nazis missed the 23 female Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose names were on the transport list of May 1943. This small work force was taken by train to the so-called Ostmark,³³ to St. Lambrecht in Styria, where a Benedictine monastery was turned into an SS estate. The history of this business enterprise of the Schutzstaffel³⁴ and the situation there up until the arrival of the work force of female inmates, will be dealt with in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 – The Monastery of St. Lambrecht →

2.4 - The Living Circumstances of Female Prisoners

The Living Circumstances of Female Prisoners

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