Read Online If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm - Free Book Online

clerks and secretaries sat at desks, as prisoners queued to give details of their arrest, their medical history and next of kin, all of which was noted on several different files. Langefeld’s messenger then took copies of the prisoner information to relevant departments around the camp.
    There had been a variety of administrative matters to see to in the first days. Inquiries came from police departments. ‘Would the KZ [ Konzentrationslager : concentration camp] pay the price of a prisoner’s train fare?’ Hamburg police wanted to know. ‘Should Düsseldorf send on a hat?’ Letters came from the German Red Cross, passing on inquiries about prisoners received from the International Red Cross in Geneva. A daughter, Tanja Benesch, wanted news of her mother, Susi. And Langefeld was obliged to tell Max Koegel that the camp washing machines were for prisoners’ clothes and linen only; he would have to wash his clothes elsewhere.
    More prisoner jobs were given out. Hanna Sturm, an Austrian communist and a carpenter, was assigned to put up fences and bang in nails. Many disciplinary problems arose. Another Austrian called Marianne Wachstein arrived in nothing but a nightgown and didn’t know who she was.
    Hedwig Apfel, who said she was an opera singer and came from Vienna, threw her mattress on the ground on her first day and had barely stopped screaming since. A few days after the camp opened a nationwide hunt was launched for Katharina Waitz, the Gypsy trapeze artist, who escaped again, though nobody knew how.
    The Jehovah’s Witnesses caused more trouble for Max Koegel, this time by refusing his offer to set them free. In return for their release the women were told they simply had to sign a piece of paper renouncing their faith, but each one refused, repeating that the Führer was the Antichrist. It was largely because of their riot at Lichtenburg that Koegel had first requested the cell block for Ravensbrück. He told his SS superior Theodor Eicke a few weeks before the camp opened: ‘ It will be impossible to keep order if these hysterical hags can’t be broken. Just depriving them of food will not subdue them without a form of rigorous imprisonment.’
    Although this first request was refused, Koegel did secure permission toconvert an ordinary living block into a ‘punishment block’ or ‘ Strafblock ’ and several ‘hysterical hags’ were soon thrown in. The Strafblock was set some way apart from the other blocks, behind barbed wire. Prisoners might be sent there for such crimes as repeated lateness for Appell , failing to make their bed by the rules, or refusing an order. The Strafblock prisoners were forced to work longer hours, on the worst gangs, with no days off. Punishments such as straitjackets and water dousing were used.
    Attached to one end of the Strafblock , a few makeshift isolation cells were constructed out of wood. The Berlin Gestapo had requested such cells be built for holding prisoners who were still under interrogation, though other women were soon locked in solitary confinement too, among them Marianne Wachstein, the Austrian who had arrived in her nightgown. She was locked up after refusing to sign a document relating to her arrest and protesting that her human rights were being violated.
    As Marianne later explained, she refused to sign because she had no idea why she was here; twenty-four hours earlier she had been snatched unconscious from a prison cell in Vienna where she’d been locked up for ‘insulting’ the Führer. ‘ Next I remember waking up in a train wagon in my nightclothes. I pinched myself because I thought I was dreaming; it was no dream it was the truth.’
    A guard on the train first told her she was being taken to a mental asylum. ‘That made me happy.’ Then the train passed Salzburg ‘and I realised I had been abducted to Germany. I was very upset, and couldn’t stand or walk.’ A guard screamed at her and began hitting her over the head. ‘I started to