Armageddon (81 page)

Early in 1945, after five months in Brunswick, Herszburg was transferred to the neighbouring camp of Watendstedt. He was dispatched from the compound each day to the V2 rocket component assembly line at the Hermann Göring works. The plant had been so badly damaged by bombing that there was little to do save clear wreckage: “I felt much better there.” As the Allied armies approached, the prisoners were once more loaded on to trains. They travelled for three days across the shrinking Reich to Ravensbrück. For the first time since Herszburg had entered the Lodz ghetto, a guard chatted to them as human beings. At the camp, Jews were ordered to step forward. They were astounded to be handed Red Cross parcels. Fear of approaching retribution now moved even some SS guards to a perverted hint of generosity. Next day, the Jewish prisoners were handed another Red Cross parcel and once more herded on to a train. On 25 April, they were offloaded at Wöbbelin in Mecklenburg. They were pushed into a barracks in which bodies lay uncollected, “and our block had many . . . the living and the dead shared the damp floor in close proximity.” To the very end, there was a rollcall every morning for the diminishing band of survivors.

It is interesting to contrast the policies of the rival tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler towards their captives. Both were indifferent to humanitarian issues, yet the former proved much more pragmatic. The Soviets realized that they could not allow prisoners to starve in excessive numbers if they were to extract useful service from them. Even Beria recognized that, unless German prisoners ate, they could not work. In September 1944, around 2,895 German PoWs died of starvation in NKVD camps. For the first ten days of October the figure was 1,366. The death rate caused the Russians to conclude that a marginal adjustment of rationing policy was necessary. Beria reported to Stalin: “We have taken steps to improve feeding of PoWs, to increase the productivity of their labour, with the coal industry being given first priority.”

Hitler’s servants, however, seemed content to allow their slaves to starve to death. Captain Vasily Legun weighed 189 pounds when his Yak-4 was shot down over the German lines in the Ukraine in September 1943, and 92 pounds a year later. He was imprisoned at a camp near Mühlberg with some 2,000 other Soviet aircrew. He expected to die there, like so many others. The twenty-seven-year-old son of a Siberian peasant family, Legun was suffering from a badly infected leg. The Russian doctor in the camp wanted to amputate it. But one day, beside his bed, the pilot found two American PoWs from the neighbouring compound, one of them a B-17 navigator. They opened a blanket they had brought, to reveal a jumble of wonderful things: chocolate, canned milk, marmalade. Legun wanted to eat everything at once, but the doctor warned him: “Food can be your enemy, too.” He was given a modest ration each day through the weeks that followed. He gained a little weight, and his leg healed.

The only common ground between the Russians and Americans in the camp was that neither were free to leave. Legun and his comrades wore rags, and indeed depended on seizing the clothing of the dead to cover themselves at all. The Americans possessed uniforms, received Red Cross parcels and letters from home, did no work. The Russians were employed on stone-breaking and enjoyed no contact with their homeland. In their despair, they began to dig an escape tunnel, and had advanced thirty yards towards the perimeter fence when a spring thaw came, causing the excavation to collapse. In February 1945, a large group of Russians escaped. Most were brought back and executed in front of the other prisoners. After that, the survivors waited passively for death or deliverance.

“In the camps, many people died of despair, not hunger,” said Nikolai Maslennikov. He was captured near the Peterhof outside Leningrad in 1942 at the age of seventeen, after a childhood dogged by the fact that his family’s papers were stamped with the fatal words which indicated that they were “persons of the second sort,” the brand laid upon the politically suspect. Maslennikov’s father had once visited England and bought two English suits. In consequence, young Nikolai was forbidden to join the Communist Youth Movement, the Komsomol, and was unable to follow his ambition to study aerodynamics.

His participation in the defence of Leningrad was impeded by the fact that, like many of his fellow recruits to the Red Army, he lacked arms. Most of his unit was killed without the means of firing a shot. He fled homewards to join his parents. The Germans overran their village and rounded up all young men of military age. Maslennikov began his career as a Nazi prisoner working in factories making aircraft parts. Having incurred the displeasure of his captors, he was sent to a concentration camp at Gross Rosen in Poland, home to 60,000 inmates—Poles, Frenchmen, political criminals, Russians. He quickly learned some of the rules determining survival. He moved everywhere in a group, never alone. He avoided all eye contact with the guards. Friendship was a dangerous luxury. Almost any man would denounce another in exchange for a crust of bread. He consciously sought to suppress all emotion: “I knew that it would be the end of me if I began to give vent to feelings.” Only once did he attract the personal attention of the guards, when he was deemed slow in removing his cap. An SS woman hit him with a gloved fist, breaking three ribs. All his conscious thoughts focused upon food: “We did not think about girls or our families, only about getting that tiny morsel of cheese out of the mousetrap.” Men died every day of starvation or beatings. They knew very little about the progress of the war, save that Stalingrad sent every German into mourning. “After that, Russians were treated just a little better—no worse than other nationalities.” Maslennikov was sustained by a lingering, unbreakable conviction that somehow it would all end soon.

Gross Rosen was not a designated mass-murder establishment. Like most Nazi concentration camps, it was simply a place where people died, usually within six months. It was not a site for sophisticated medical experiments, but prisoners were sometimes used for cruder research, such as testing army boots by marching interminably around the compounds while carrying heavy loads. Wholesale killings took place only occasionally. One day when prisoners returned from the stone quarries, from the window of his barracks Maslennikov saw a chain of wagons rattling past on the narrow-gauge railway to the crematorium, laden with women and children and old people. “The eyes of each bore a different expression,” he said. “I have seen them in my dreams forever after.” In the winter of 1944, there was an escape attempt in Compound 20, which housed political prisoners. A group killed a guard, threw blankets over the wire, scaled it and ran away. Most were swiftly recaptured and killed, in some cases by drenching them in cold water, which froze on their bodies. The next two batches of political prisoners who arrived at the camp were killed immediately, presumably lest they, too, should nurse ambitions of freedom.

At the beginning of 1945, when the camp was evacuated, Maslennikov was transferred to Nordhausen. Here, the rules were simple. Those who could not work were not fed at all. He was employed removing corpses from the compounds and burning them on great pyres: “You arranged a layer of wood, a layer of corpses, a layer of wood, and then poured sump oil on top.” One day, an order came that radio specialists were needed. Maslennikov immediately volunteered, certain that any hazard must be preferable to Nordhausen. His only chance, as for most Nazi captives, was to prove himself useful. He was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where it was intended that he should be employed on the assembly of radio-detonated mines. By the time his group arrived, however, American bombs had destroyed the factory. Instead, gangs of prisoners were sent into the capital, to clear unexploded bombs. This assignment offered priceless opportunities to scavenge for food in wrecked houses, yet it was also highly dangerous. There were days when whole teams disappeared, having been unlucky in their experiences with bombs. Executions were commonplace in the camp, and increased in the last weeks of the war. Compared with Gross Rosen and Nordenhausen, however, Maslennikov felt that Sachsenhausen was “not at all bad.”

Zinaida Mikhailova spent three years in Ravensbrück, because she refused to work in the Mauser armaments factory after being deported from the village near Leningrad where she lived. She was one of eight children of a peasant father, shot by the NKVD for reasons unknown in 1934. Her mother worked at the local railway station. She left school at fifteen in 1938 and found a job in the ticket office at Moscow station. She was unfortunate enough to be caught at home on the weekend that the Germans overran her village. Her papers showed her to be a Party member. This caused her to be consigned to slave labour, like all her kind. Yet while some deportees survived the war, none of those who remained behind in Zinaida’s village did so. All were killed by the Germans sooner or later.

Several women in Zinaida’s group declined to work in the munitions industry, and thus shared her journey to Ravensbrück, where 92,000 prisoners died in the course of the war. Her experience contradicted the view of many male concentration-camp prisoners, that to survive it was essential to live as an island, to trust no one. She believed that companionship, passionate group loyalty, preserved her. Each night when the guards left the compound, a little cluster of the women whose dresses bore the “R” in a red triangle that marked them as Russians gathered together, to talk or sing songs. “This was very important to us. I learned how important it is to make friends, to get on with people.” They spoke about home, and cried. They exchanged information with the neighbouring men’s compound by throwing notes over the wire.

The calendar of life in a concentration camp was like none other, because its landmarks were specially memorable encounters with death. One day became different from another because a woman was beaten until she died, or because they saw five men being hanged. Any prisoner faced the lash for possession of a book. Zinaida was once flogged and sent to solitary confinement after being denounced by a Polish inmate for writing poetry. “Yet the Jews,” said Zinaida unsurprisingly, “suffered more than any of us.” The prisoners’ day began with “dirty tea,” a muddy brew made of ersatz leaves. At
Appel,
they were counted in rows of ten, then she went to her work as a cleaner. There was soup at midday, with a slice of bread, and more soup in the evening. On Sunday, they made a kind of porridge.

“I always hoped,” she said, “because without hope you could not survive. Though I was a Party member, I also believed in God. My family all went to church. I dreamed of home, and of food, and of my boyfriend Mikhail.” Mikhail, inevitably, had been killed in action, but Zinaida did not know that, just as she and her group knew nothing about the progress of the war. By the autumn of 1944, however, they were aware at least that the Allies were advancing on Germany. This made them even more fearful, because it seemed inevitable that the Germans would kill them before their liberators could arrive.

Edith Gabor shared with Zinaida Mikhailova the experience of Ravensbrück, though the two women did not know each other. Like many Jews, Edith underwent a progression of horror which attained its nadir in the last months of the war. Her father was a wealthy Budapest diamond wholesaler. She herself trained as a furrier, because her mother believed that every girl should possess a skill. She completed her apprenticeship just as the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, when she was eighteen. Like most of the Budapest Jewish community, the family had always enjoyed close links with Germany, and indeed spoke German at home. Her boyfriend Ervin had been accepted for training as a singer at the Frankfurt Music Academy in 1939, a place which he did not live to take up. When the Nazis came, the Gabors concluded that their best chance of safety lay in making themselves useful. Her father started to repair watches for SS officers, while she was sent to work in a factory entirely staffed by Jews, manufacturing clothing for the Wehrmacht. They cut and stitched fourteen hours a day, and were soon at the edge of starvation. “We lived like animals,” said Edith. “Each day we thought: ‘What could get worse today?’ ” Her father cherished a pathetic flame of hope. He would say: “It will pass. The war will end.” He was periodically summoned to perform forced labour, but allowed to return home at night. Edith slept in the factory, sharing a mattress with a heavy woman who almost crushed her whenever she turned over in her sleep. At weekends, she was allowed home for a few hours, sneaking through the streets like a hunted criminal. The family was now restricted to a single room of their big apartment. One day, she heard that Ervin had been conscripted to “Forced Labour Unit 101.” He disappeared without trace.

Then her father was summoned. He left a large packet of diamonds in the custody of a Christian friend. “They are for you, my children,” he said to Edith and her brother. “They will make you rich.” But the diamonds were never seen again and nor was her father, last identified in a labour camp on the Austrian border. When next she went to see her mother, she found all the family furniture and china gone. There was one marvellous, terrible snapshot of hope. In October 1944 Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s ruler, announced that his country was abandoning the war. Edith’s mother embraced her in tears of joy, and said: “Tonight, I make a chicken.” But within a few hours Horthy was deposed by the Nazis. Germany’s grip upon Hungary became absolute. Mrs. Gabor sobbed once more, and sent Edith running back to the factory “overwhelmed with fear and heaviness. I felt what was coming.”

Her mother and six-year-old brother Georg were soon sent to join her in the factory, sleeping together in a bunk. Edith’s meagre ration had to suffice among all three, for her mother was too frail to work. When the SS one day separated women between sixteen and forty from the rest, her mother seemed perfectly resigned. She said to Edith: “You just go, and take care. If I don’t survive—” Edith interrupted tearfully: “No, no, you must! You must!” “If I don’t survive, do three things: bring up Georg and give him a good education and see he learns some languages; take care of my daughter’s grave”—this was a sister who had died as a child—“and visit my friend Ilona.” Then they parted for ever. “Be strong!” her mother shouted after her. Everywhere in the factory were people sobbing and saying farewells. Edith’s brother found himself pushed into a group with her mother.