Pimlico £14.99 pp366
Most accounts of Nazi atrocities in the second world war focus on the persecution of the Jews. But this memoir, written in 1946, and never before published in English, tells a different story. Its subject is the suffering of the Polish people and the dismemberment of their nation. An ardent patriot and devout Christian, Countess Karolina Lanckoronska was also Poland’s first woman professor of art history. She could have escaped to Switzerland when the Russians overran eastern Poland in 1939, but she chose to stay with her students, joined the Polish underground resistance — the ZWZ — and witnessed the mass deportation of Poles to slave labour in Russia, amid scenes of bestial cruelty.
When her ZWZ cell was infiltrated by an informer, she managed to reach German-occupied Poland, where she joined the Polish Red Cross as a nursing volunteer, and was then put in charge of the distribution of food to the prisons in the German zone. The local Gestapo commanders, whose co-operation she requested, and usually got, do not seem to have known what to make of her. They respected her courage and natural authority, but could not understand why an aristocrat with an Austrian mother, and a perfect command of German, should pride herself on being a Pole. For her part, she was puzzled by their combination of high culture and brutality. From her experience in the east she regarded the Russians as barbarians, unused to the basic norms of civilised life. The Soviet officer who requisitioned her flat thought that the lavatory was for washing his hair in, and threatened to shoot her maid because, when he pulled the chain, the water stopped flowing before he had time to rinse it. But the Germans, she reasoned, were different, and could not be excused as merely backward. Their distinguishing marks, she came to feel, were efficiency and rapacity. When news reached her of the Katyn massacre (the execution of 4,000 Polish officers in a forest near Smolensk) she knew at once that the Russians, not the Germans, were responsible, because the murdered men were buried in full uniform and many articles of value were found on the bodies. The Germans would never have allowed such waste.
While working at prison relief she continued to pass on information to the ZWZ and, on May 12, 1942, she was arrested and interrogated by Hans Kruger, the Gestapo chief in southeast Poland. When he asked her, “Are you an enemy of the German Reich?” she calmly replied, “Yes, obviously.” She felt sure, from his manner, that he had already condemned her to death, and her reply put it beyond doubt. Thanks to a powerful international network of friends and relatives, however, her case reached the desks of Himmler and, ultimately, Hitler. Kruger had boasted to her, during her interrogation, that he had murdered 25 leading academics from her native city, and his betrayal of this “professional secret” appalled the Nazi high command. He was demoted, and she spent several months in prison, on starvation rations, and in hourly expectation of death. She describes the silence that would fall when an SS officer arrived to read out the names of those who were to be shot, and the looks on the faces of the doomed women. Eventually, she was summoned to Berlin for further questioning and, when she refused to withdraw her charge against Kruger, was sent to the SS concentration camp for women at Ravensbrück.
Many accounts of life in Ravensbrück have survived, but Lanckoronska’s is singular in several respects. Schooled in self-restraint and ideals of nobility, she maintains a dispassionate tone, and her captors’ treatment of her provides insights denied to most prisoners. The instructions that arrived from Berlin seem to have been contradictory. On one occasion she was transferred, without explanation, from a hideously overcrowded, lice-infested barrack to a luxurious single apartment with fresh flowers. She found this discrimination humiliating, and went on hunger strike until she was reunited with the other Polish women. But the German wardresses remained vaguely aware of her special status and seem to have relaxed in her company. Names that have become infamous in Ravensbrück lore appear in her account almost as human beings. Gerda Querenheim, the terror of the sickbay, who threw newborn infants into the central-heating boiler, comes across, in conversation, as a “gentle and well-mannered” German girl. Dorothea Binz, executed after the war for her crimes, arrives “all sweetness and smiles” for a chat, while the shrieks of the women she has been torturing can still be heard in the background.
Consorting with these monsters required all Lanckoronska’s self-control, but was worthwhile for the information she could worm out of them. Her Christian faith was vital for her survival, and for her sense of community. Once, when it seemed she was being led to execution, a fellow-prisoner pressed into her hand a miniature figure of Christ on the cross, carved from a toothbrush handle. The words from the Lord’s Prayer quoted in her title gave her trouble, because forgiveness for what was happening seemed impossible, and she decided to omit them from her version. Later she told a priest of this, and he replied, “A lot of people did the same”. The courage of Polish women was another source of strength. Condemned to death, they would seek out a professional hairdresser and demand a really attractive hairdo. The SS execution squads told how they refused to be blindfolded, and died shouting “Long live Poland”.
Culture flourished in Ravensbrück. Prisoners wrote poems and plays, improvised theatre and music, and took a wide range of educational courses. Lanckoronska lectured on art history and classical literature, and her audience took notes assiduously, although they were likely to be dead in a few days. Among her most eager students were the so-called “rabbits”. These were young women, mainly Polish, who had been the subject of medical experiments, intended to simulate the battlefield wounds of German soldiers, and carried out by Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician and the director general of the German Red Cross. Her hope, as she lectured, was that intellectual interests would give her audience a chance to tear themselves away from the moral and physical squalor surrounding them, and even blot out for a time the suffocating stench of burning hair and flesh from the camp crematorium.
She was released from Ravensbrück in April 1945, thanks chiefly to the intervention of Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross. After a life dedicated to the service of Polish learning and culture, she died in Rome, aged 104, in August 2002. She wrote this memoir for publication in English. But when she submitted it to two British publishers, shortly after the war, they rejected it as “too anti-Russian”. A few years later, two other British publishers turned it down as “too anti-German”. Great works of art are often said to be “monuments to the human spirit”. But this remarkable book reinforces the feeling that the concentration camps were a more accurate monument to the human spirit, both in their negative and in their positive aspects. No reader will ever forget it.
SURVIVOR’S GUILT
When Karolina Lanckoronska was released from Ravensbrück, thanks to the efforts of her friend Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross, she had great difficulty in readjusting to ordinary life. In particular, her feelings of guilt about her own survival and the fate of her former campmates caused her much distress. “I had emerged alone,” she wrote, “without my sisters, into a Swiss wonderland that had not known war. I needed to go and buy a dress, shoes, a hat (!) and to eat in a restaurant. All of that seemed not only ridiculous, but monstrous, while others ‘over there’ might be going to their death.”
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