Tell Me Who I Am

  I was eighteen when they took me to Ravensbrück, in May of 1944. My mother was a political commissar and I was desperate to become one as well. I was a Young Communist as well, one who adored Father Stalin and who had been a star of the Young Communist League, helped by my father, who was a political commissar like my mother.

  I’m not going to tell you what the Germans did when they invaded Russia, just that my mother and I were lucky, we had better luck than many other women, such as those who as well as being raped were then gutted in front of their husbands and their children, or those who had to watch their children being cut into pieces in front of their eyes.

  We were in a village, organizing the villagers, when the Nazis suddenly arrived... They were furious because they were losing the war. They killed the old men and women and the children, and took prisoner anyone who was wearing a uniform; in my case I was wearing the Young Communist League scarf and shirt. I still feel scared when I think today how they herded us into trucks, hitting us with the butts of their rifles. When they found out that my mother and I were Jewish, they separated us from the rest. We were the worst of the worst: Jews, Russians, and Communists. They sent us to Ravensbrück, a prison camp near Berlin.

  We slept in barracks, all of us piled up on each other on hard mattresses, with scarcely space to breathe, and enough to do with the constant battle against the bedbugs and the lice that ran all over the beds and our clothes.

  One of the camp bosses was an SS commander called Schaefer; he was a brute: short, fat, swarthy, the opposite of the Aryan ideal. But he read us sermons about the superiority of his race as he tortured us. Schaefer took a personal interest in the interrogations and liked to put all his macabre ideas into practice with the help of Dr. Kiefner.

  Dr. Kiefner was a sadist who, like Schaefer, raped many of the prisoners.

  He liked to perform what he called his “experiments,” aimed at establishing how much pain an individual could endure without dying.

  Most women in the camp were mutilated. “Can one live without nipples?” Dr. Kiefner would ask himself as he cut the nipples off a prisoner. He did it with a scalpel and no kind of anesthetic to lessen his victims’ pain.

  He was a sadist and enjoyed mutilating the genitals of the women of Ravensbrück. He disemboweled others because he said it gave him a better idea of how the human body was put together.

  “Come on, dear, it’s for the sake of science. I studied with corpses, but it’s not the same as being able to look at how human organs behave as they gradually stop working,” he would say to the woman he had chosen as his next victim.

  If any of us were sent to the hospital we would be terrified, as we knew full well that even if we came back alive, we would never be the same again. They cut off my breasts... I spent several days hovering between life and death. I was saved by the fact that one of the nurses who worked in the hospital was also a prisoner. She was not a Jew, and they made the poor woman participate in this butchery. I think she was Czech, I’m not sure, she spoke very little and she had been a nurse ever since being sent to Ravensbrück as a prisoner. I don’t know why she was there, but Dr. Kiefner never used her for his experiments. She helped us as much as she could, which wasn’t much, but she sometimes managed to steal small quantities of antiseptics and painkillers which she gave to the prisoners who had passed through Dr. Kiefner’s “operating table.”

  I suppose I survived because I was young and I wanted to live; I also had my mother, and I wouldn’t have lived without her.

  But I’m telling you what happened to me, which is not what you are here to hear about; you want me to talk about the Spanish woman. She arrived at the beginning of September 1944, she was sick and they sent her to our barracks. I remember her well. She could scarcely walk, it was clear that she had been tortured not long before. It was hard for her to open her right eye, and her face was bruised with the blows she had received. She was extremely thin and her neck and her back were scarred by the marks of the torture instruments.

  I remember the first day I saw her as if it were yesterday...

  “Find yourself a space, bitch!” The guard on duty pushed her into our barracks.

  Amelia took a couple of steps and sat down on the floor without looking anywhere, as if she didn’t see us or else didn’t know we were there. My mother went up to her and spoke to her, but she got no answer.

  “We don’t know where she’s from, she doesn’t look Russian,” a woman said.

  I don’t know why my mother was moved by the Spanish woman, but she dragged her over to our side and put her on a corner of the mattress. Amelia let her do this without showing any emotion.

  “The clothes she is wearing are very dirty, but they are good quality,” one of the prisoners said.

  From that night on Amelia slept with us. My mother had adopted her, apparently.

  We thought that she didn’t speak to us because she didn’t speak Russian, but two days after she had arrived my mother whispered to me that she had caught Amelia looking at her when she spoke to another woman, as if she understood them.

  Several days went by before Schaefer called her into his office.

  As she could barely stand up unaided, my mother decided to help her to Schaefer’s office.

  My mother came back, but we didn’t see the Spanish woman until two days later, when the door was opened and one of the guards threw into the center of the barracks what seemed to be a bundle of old clothes.

  They had raped her. This was normal when a new prisoner arrived. If she was young, Schaefer was the first to rape her, or else sometimes Dr. Kiefner himself. But even the oldest endured this humiliation, as Kiefner enjoyed putting all kinds of objects into their vaginas.

  “None of you can complain, you all get your ‘treatment’ to calm your feminine urges,” he would say, laughing.

  When they brought her she was in a very bad state, but she didn’t say anything, she just cried to herself in silence. Her tears fell and she held her jaw as if she wanted to hold back the screams that were choking her throat.

  My mother cleaned her wounds as best she could, and discovered as she did so that there were spots where they had pulled her skin away.

  They came for her on other occasions to interrogate her again. Soon we found out that a colonel in the SS had ordered Schaefer to make her talk using any means he desired. Dr. Kiefner’s nurse whispered to another patient that she had heard them say to the doctor that Amelia was a murderer, a terrorist. Apparently, she was accused of the murder of an SS officer, and of taking part in kidnappings and bombings.

  It seemed impossible that this fragile-seeming woman could have done anything like that. She was a sack of bones, and I think that even if she had been in a better state she would never have been what you might call fleshy. My mother called her “the broken doll.”

  But in spite of her state she survived. It was a miracle. And one day the SS colonel who had unfinished business with her turned up in the camp. I can still remember his name: Winkler; Schaefer grew very nervous when his visit was announced. We all thought that if Schaefer trembled before Winkler, it must mean that Winkler was even worse than he was, and so we felt all the more scared.

  Winkler left and we thought that the Spanish woman must have died. The nurse said that Winkler had locked himself in a room with her and that her screams had not seemed like noises a human might make.

  When we saw her again, she was a mass of bloody flesh and it was difficult to tell if she still had a face. She hovered between life and death for several days, and my mother thought that she would not survive. Her legs and her arms were broken, her feet had been crushed, and there was not a single inch of skin on her body that was not covered with cigarette burns. In the darkness the nurse came to our barracks. She cleaned the wounds with care and put an unguent on all the burns. Then, with my mother’s help, she tried to set the broken bones. She also brought a bottle that contained a strong painkiller.

  “I couldn’t bring any
more,” she said, “but it is very powerful, you have to give it to her bit by bit. And she mustn’t move, it’s the only way that her bones will knit properly.”

  We found out from the nurse that Colonel Winkler had left without achieving his objective.

  “This woman has her mind on the next world, she’s not here, and so even if the torturer kills her she will never speak.”

  We heard her voice for the first time that night. My mother thought that she heard a noise and put her ear to Amelia’s mouth.

  “She’s saying ‘Mama,’ she’s calling for her mother.”

  I sank into my mother’s arms, it made me stronger to have her there with me. Otherwise I could not have put up with the tortures and other humiliations that they subjected me to.

  The number of prisoners who died on Dr. Kiefner’s “operating table” grew by the day. His latest vile activity was, with the youngest prisoners, to sew up part of their vaginas, as he had read they did in some African tribes to prevent women from taking any pleasure at all in sexual relations.

  “No, you haven’t come here to enjoy yourselves, but to pay for your crimes, so I’ll stop you from feeling pleasure,” he said, as he prepared the material with which he would sew us up.

  He mutilated all of us, Amelia included, and some of us died when the wounds got infected.

  Then, whenever he or one of the guards raped us, the pain would be unbearable. I don’t know how we survived it.

  Before spring, I’m talking about February 1945, the news came that the Russians were near. We heard our guards talking about it, and the Czech nurse confirmed it to us. We were expectant, hoping that the rumor would prove to be true.

  The Germans were scared of the Russians. Yes, they were scared of us because we would respond with the same brutality that the Germans had shown when they invaded us.

  There wasn’t a single Russian soldier who hadn’t lost a brother or a father, who didn’t have a friend whose mother or sister had been raped by the Germans. So for every foot of ground that the Red Army regained, they took their revenge on the Germans without any worry or remorse.

  I think it was at the beginning of March that the man arrived in the camp, a mutilated German in an officer’s uniform. We were in the yard when they made us stand aside to let a black car drive to Schaefer’s hut.

  My mother said that the commandant was nervous, I don’t remember too well.

  We saw Schaefer open the door to the car and try to appear like a real soldier in front of the man whom another officer helped out of the car. He had previously unpacked a wheelchair, and took the officer out of the car and put him into the chair while Schaefer clicked his heels and attempted a salute.

  He was a Wehrmacht officer who had a large iron cross and other decorations on his jacket. His aristocratic bearing was impressive, in spite of the wheelchair. The stumps that had once been his legs were covered by a blanket. He was little more than a trunk.

  They took him to Schaefer’s office and all of us asked ourselves what could possibly have been the cause of this mutilated general’s visit.

  We were shut into our barracks. After an hour, a guard came looking for Amelia and told her to gather her belongings together. How ironic! We had nothing, no belongings. My mother started to cry, afraid that they would take her to another camp, or else to Colonel Winkler, who seemed to hate Amelia so much. We followed her out of the barracks, and saw the guard leading her to the terrace of Schaefer’s hut. Schaefer was there, as well as the general in his wheelchair. Amelia walked along indifferently, her eyes unfocused, as if nothing of what was happening around her were important, just as she had been since the day of her arrival at Ravensbrück. Suddenly she seemed to stand alert, there was something about the general that seemed to attract her attention. I remember seeing her run toward him, shouting “Max, Max, Max!” and then falling to the ground. The general’s adjutant ran over to her and helped her lift herself up.

  We all looked at the scene in shock, we didn’t understand anything. The Spaniard had not said a word since her arrival at Ravensbrück. When they tortured her during the night we heard her calling in the silence of the night for her mother, “Mama” was the only word she said the whole time she was there, and suddenly she was shouting this name again and again: “Max, Max, Max!”

  The adjutant took her to where the officer was seated and she threw herself on her knees, begging him for forgiveness.

  “Forgive me, Max, forgive me! I didn’t know... Forgive me!”

  The officer made a sign to his adjutant and he picked the woman up and put her in the car. We saw Schaefer clicking his heels once again in front of the general. His adjutant came back for the officer, and with the help of the driver they put him into the car. Then they left, and we never saw them again.

  As you might imagine, there was no other topic of conversation in the camp for several days afterwards. We couldn’t work out who this mutilated general had been, nor why the Spaniard had thrown herself on the ground in front of him and begged his pardon. Neither did we know where they had taken her.

  Not even the nurse could give us any idea about what had happened, just that the general had a written order for the prisoner to be set free, and that Schaefer had no option other than to release her. We learned from the nurse that when the general had gone, Schaefer called Colonel Winkler to tell him what had happened, but did not manage to speak with him.

  I suppose you can guess what happened next. A short while before the fall of Berlin, my compatriots liberated us. The war came to its end. We never knew anything more about the Spanish woman, your great-grandmother. I hope that she survived, but in those days...

  Sofia fell silent and let her thoughts wander through the past, forgetting that we were there. Avi cleared his throat to bring her back to the present.

  “Thank you, Sofia,” he said, and he took her hand and squeezed it affectionately.

  “Thank you so much, Señora, you don’t know how much, and... Well, it hurts to hear everything you went through,” I said, just to say something. I was still in shock from the story she had told.

  “Señora? Why call me ‘Señora’? Call me Sofia, everyone else does. You know what? I never thought I would ever hear anything else about the Spanish woman, and now Avi calls me to tell me that there’s a young Spaniard looking for information about Ravensbrück, that he’s the great-grandson of a woman who was a prisoner there... I never thought anything like that would happen. Has it been useful, what I told you?” Sofia’s voice had grown firm again.

  “It has been a great help; without your story, my research couldn’t carry on. You also told me that Max was alive, when I thought that he’d been killed.”

  “Who was Max?” she asked with interest.

  “He was an officer who had been opposed to Hitler before the war, a Prussian aristocrat who hated Nazism,” I explained, trying to give a good account of Max.

  “He can’t have hated it enough, as he wore the German uniform and killed people in defense of those horrible ideals.”

  “He was a doctor, so I don’t think he killed anyone,” I went on, but Sofia had known Dr. Kiefner, so it didn’t make any difference to her that the German officer had been a doctor. Her mutilated body was the proof of what some German doctors had been capable.

  “And what happened next?” she asked, so as not to argue with me.

  “I don’t know, that’s what I need to find out now, what happened next. My great-grandmother’s story is like a Russian doll, just when you think you’ve found the last layer, then there is something else to discover. I don’t know what happened, or if they survived. I just don’t know.”

  “He was a general; look in the archives, maybe they put him on trial at Nuremberg,” Sofia suggested.

  “I will.”

  “Or maybe he died peacefully in his sleep, like so many other German soldiers,” Avi Meir said.

  Sofia insisted that we have lunch with her, although in fact we ate with all the other m
embers of the kibbutz, in a communal eating area. The food was simple but tasty, and everyone was pleasant toward me. Avi was right, he had said that it was like a synthesis of the Communist ideal, a Communist utopia. If Communism had truly come into existence anywhere in the world, it was in the kibbutzim. I thought that my friends would be surprised if they found out about a place like this, and I wondered to myself how many of them, myself included, would be capable of living here, sharing everything, taking part in all the tasks of the community, without having anything that the community had not decided was necessary, based on how much money there was in the cash box and the idea that money had to be divided equally. Here no one had more than anyone else.

  But to live like this? I would not be capable of it, it was easier to talk about equality on a rhetorical level.

  Sofia whispered in my ear that if my grandmother had survived, then there would be a record of her passage through Ravensbrück.

  “They had to operate on me after the camp was liberated. The Red Cross took charge of all of us, trying to remedy some of the barbarous actions that Kiefner had committed. You know, I was never a normal woman again... The effects of not having breasts, or of having your vagina sewn up... You can’t imagine what that does to you. And your poor great-grandmother went through the same torture... I don’t know if she was as lucky as I was. Of course, the operations meant that I was hospitalized for a long time. My mother recovered before I did, and before she went back to Russia she asked an American doctor to help me get sent to Israel. She was convinced that it would be best for me. I was surprised; I was sure that we were happy in the Soviet Union, that we had to fight for the revolution, and that my mother believed all that as well, so I never understood why she would insist that I be sent here. ‘Sofia,’ she said, ‘I want one of us at least to see Jerusalem.’ I replied that we had no God, and no other homeland than Russia, but she insisted. She made me promise. I managed to come here... and I never saw her again.”