‘This is the right way, past the railway station. Ilse said we just keep driving, that you stumble on the camp rather than see it. To put it like she did, “the Nazis preferred secrecy and that suited the town”.’
Ilse Neumann, the woman who had survived three years in the camp. Markus hadn’t stopped talking about her since a colleague had heard about the proposed Ravensbrück trip and arranged a meeting. ‘Formidable’ was the main word he had used. Karen had pictured a fierce, warrior-looking woman, with more than a touch of the Amazon about her. The one waiting as they parked the car opposite the high wall and the firmly closed gates was small and wiry and wearing tweeds not unlike Andrew’s. When she walked over to introduce herself, Karen couldn’t help but notice Ilse had a pronounced limp.
‘Which one of you is Michael Wasserman?’
Ilse’s gaze swept over Michael and Andrew as if she was inspecting a cohort of rather disappointing troops. Both men straightened.
Michael stepped forward as if he was about to salute. Ilse didn’t waste time letting him speak.
‘Good. Well, it’s your name that got you all in here, so you’d best come with me and calm down the Russian.’
She nodded briefly to the others and crossed back to the gates, beckoning Michael to follow her. From where she was standing, Karen could see the fringes of the lake. She turned away, refused to follow her desperate impulse to run to it. They had all promised each other that they would go there together, that it would be the last thing they would do here. Karen knew if she thought about her mother standing by the water, about the guard stepping forward and seizing Lottie, her knees would buckle. She focused instead on the gates where Ilse was deep in conversation with a soldier who looked like he should have still been in school.
Whatever was said worked. Hands were clasped, backs were slapped and the gates were opened. The soldier gestured the rest of the party over to join Ilse and Michael and drifted away. Karen crossed the road quickly, Markus and her father trotting behind, and followed Ilse inside, avoiding the broken tree stumps and roots crawling round the outer wall’s edges. The sight that met her as they passed through the heavy metal gates was nothing like she expected and brought her to an abrupt halt. The space they were standing in was sprawling and desolate, half of it covered in cracked concrete, half of it overgrown in a tangle of weeds.
‘I thought there would be buildings, the same as I’ve seen in pictures of the other camps. Lots of prison blocks laid out like army barracks.’
Ilse shook her head. ‘There was once. When I was put in here, there were dozens of them fanned out along both sides of a wide road, bordered, for some reason that no one ever understood, with beds full of red flowers. But the Russians turned the site into a tank base in the 1950s and smashed everything down. Where we’re standing now was once the parade ground, where they did roll calls and their never-ending selections. Where most of us started and finished if you like.’
My mother was Jewish, which makes me Jewish too.
The realisation had never hit Karen before, but now she couldn’t escape it. What Ilse was describing could have happened to her. But for a trick of time it could be her standing in this frozen square, waiting to find out if her death would be quick or drawn out. Karen blinked at the realisation of how real it all was, of how the lives that had ended, and endured, here mattered and deserved to be told. Behind her, one of the men sniffed and turned it into a cough. Her own eyes were so dry they were stinging.
‘How many women were brought in here?’
Ilse began leading them further inside, pointing out where the main barrack blocks had been as they went.
‘In total over the whole war? I’m not sure anyone knows that number for certain. I’ve heard a hundred thousand mentioned, but since the Soviets took charge, no one has really investigated and there’s been no records released that I know of. All I know is that the number who survived is far lower than the number who came in. And that we came from all over Europe – France, Germany, Poland, Russia, even a handful from England. So many different languages. Add in the Romanies and all the different dialects and this place was a veritable Tower of Babel.’
‘Who was in here? Was it mostly Jews?’
Ilse shrugged. ‘There were some. More at the start, or so I was told, but the guards rinsed them out pretty quickly. We were all sorts: Jews, communists, gypsies, lesbians, prostitutes, Russian female soldiers. Every flavour of affront to womanhood you could find. I suppose that the only thing we had in common, apart from being women, was that the Nazis considered us deviants and surplus to requirements in their new vision of Germany. And we got caught.’
Ilse smiled; there was no humour in it. She gestured to a pile of broken masonry covered in weeds.
‘This is where the ovens were. I came in as a communist. If they’d known I was also a Jew, I’d have been straight in here.’
Karen couldn’t think of a single reasonable response. When her father spoke up, she was glad to hear another voice, although his wavered as thin as the sparse grass dotting the concrete.
‘Would my wife have suffered? As far as we know, she was only in this place for a couple of weeks, at the end of the war. We know about the selections and the gas chambers; there’s been rumours about medical experiments. So I’m wondering if she would have suffered here? As much as the women like you did, who were forced to cope with it longer.’ He glanced down at Ilse’s crooked leg. ‘Who were cruelly treated.’
There was a silence. Karen desperately wanted Ilse to answer with a simple no and knew that she wouldn’t.
‘I don’t know how to answer that, how you think I can measure it? Does a week leave fewer scars than a month, than a year? Is a short exposure to horror worse than a long one you somehow adjust to? This place was Hell. There is no other word for it. No one walks through Hell and comes away without burns. We suffered, all of us. But you know that, or you wouldn’t be here, looking for the parts of your wife you never quite knew.’
There was a pause. Ilse looked away from them.
‘Some suffered and died here. Some were set free. I doubt there is anyone who escaped, who still escapes, the suffering.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ilse turned round and finally looked Karen full in the face rather than flinging her comments back at the group.
‘Some of the pain is easier to spot. With your mother, perhaps, you can trace it in the choice that she made. For others, the pain is more silent, but it’s still there. No one talks, you see. No one remembers. There is a memorial here, at the lake. It is beautiful. But it is a Russian memorial, for their women, for communist martyrs. A very specific thing. The rest of us are forgotten. Scattered, voiceless, unheard. Most of us can’t even find each other. We live with our nightmares and we live with the shame of what this place did to us, what it brought us down to. It is as I said: whoever we have become, we live lives still shadowed by what happened to us here.’
Karen expected to hear pain in Ilse’s voice; the weariness in it was worse.
‘What do you want? What, if anything, could help you?’
For the first time since they had arrived, Ilse’s tough manner let in a degree of warmth as she answered Karen’s halting question.
‘No one has ever asked me that.’ She bent down and picked up a piece of the rubble. ‘We were brought together by a place. Now we need different places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in.’