Armageddon - Max Hastings [295]
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,