Lublin, 11 October 1945.
Halina Piotrowska, born on 28 December 1913 in Jarosław, daughter of Kazimiera née
Galewicz and Ludwik Piotrowski. Prisoner of Ravensbrück, no. 7923, operated on in course of experiments. Residing in Lublin, Beliny Prażmowskiego Street 7, flat 1.
I was arrested on 4 March 1941, on the name day of my mother, whom I have never seen since, at the house on Bartosza Głowackiego Street 20, flat 2. I was arrested by a young man dressed in civilian clothes, who spoke Polish fluently, nicknamed “Ryży” [“Rufous”] by prisoners. He used to live in Zaklików before the war.
On the way to the Gestapo headquarters, which was situated on Uniwersytecka Street, the Gestapo man attempted to interrogate me. My answer was silence. At the Gestapo, I underwent a thorough search, exceptionally brutal. They took everything from me that represented any monetary value. The investigation and interrogation were led by a Gestapo man called “Z Czubem” [“With-a-tuft”], known for his cruelty. The preface to the interrogation was a slap in the face and curses at Polish women who were “playing politics”. Next, stripped naked, they put me on the table and beat me with a rubber bat and a cane with a sharp end. I was also kicked. At the end of the first interrogation, I was punched in the head with fists, they banged my head on the wall, so that I was taken out of the room half-deaf and unconscious.
I have marks from the beating on my left thigh to this day. As a result of the head injuries I suffered terribly from ear problems for over 4 years in prison and in the camp. The doctors diagnosed blisters on my tympanic membranes, resulting in hearing deficiency.
Subsequent interrogations followed the same procedure. After the investigation at the Gestapo, which went on for several days, I was taken to the prison in the Castle. Once searched I was placed in cell no. 38 in the basement. It had an incredible stench of sweaty, dirty bodies and all the fumes coming from the bucket that several dozen women used to meet their physiological needs. Loads of ragged clothes were scattered around the dirty floor, which was covered in lice, bedbugs, and all kinds of insects. The cell held the worst kind of people. Thieves, prostitutes, criminals. Food rations were terrible – only the parcels received from our families kept us alive.
Once in a while they would arrange the sulfating and delousing of the cells, which was done extremely brutally. Women, almost naked, would parade around the male ward while the delousing took place. In winter the operation would result in severe illnesses, pneumonia etc., while in summer the women dropped like flies from exhaustion due to the stuffiness and lack of air. Persistent illnesses in the prison were typhus and typhoid fever, dysentery, and skin illnesses like scabies, etc. Executions were carried out every day. People were taken from their cells starting from ten o’clock. The foremen of the prisons were Germans. Attitude towards the prisoners was cruel and sadistic.
On 17 July 1941, a list of women to be transported to Germany was announced. After a short, brief medical examination and more than a dozen hours of standing in the prison courtyard, 156 women were loaded into cars. Any spare clothes or food coming from our families was confiscated by the prison authorities. Under the heavy escort of soldiers and Gestapo men, the transport was stopped several kilometers from Lublin station, and with the utmost vigilance, we were loaded intro trains. We couldn’t even dream of escaping, because there were a couple of armed soldiers in every wagon, who watched our every move.
The journey took 48 hours. On 23 September 1941 we arrived at Fürstenberg station, where female camp jailers, armed with revolvers, were already waiting for us; they took care of us with the help of trained dogs. We stood for several hours, inhumanely exhausted, cold and hungry. The jailers, a whole bunch of them, made sure to punch us, slap us in the face, set the dogs on us. Then roofed, black prison vans came, so-called miny, with no windows or any air inflow, which we were put into. We survived only thanks to the fact that the trip to Ravensbrück wasn’t too long.
We arrived at the camp at six in the morning and stood waiting until midnight, with no food or drinks. We couldn’t sit on the ground, because as soon as we did, jailers’ punches landed on our heads. After various formalities and having had literally all our belongings seized, completely naked, kicked and punched, we were herded like cattle into the bathrooms and then to see the camp doctor, Dr. Sonntag. The medical examination was limited to the women being beaten and kicked. Then there was a gynecological examination carried out in a brutal way, and we were shaved of skin hair.
Next, wearing camp clothes, that is dresses known as pasiaki (made from nettle), short jackets and wooden clogs, which hurt our feet mercilessly, we were rushed into the zugangs ’ block no. 15 accompanied by an appropriate level of cursing and kicking. It was a quarantine block, which lasted about three weeks. We had beds with bedsheets there. But this situation didn’t go on for long. As more and more people came, the beds were shared by five, six people. We were short of not only blankets, but also boards, which was a real pain, as there was a system of stacking beds one on top of another.
Food rations were initially regular – bitter coffee for breakfast, bread from chestnuts and sawdust, rutabaga soup, two or three potatoes. The quality and amount of food was insufficient. The situation got worse after a couple of weeks. Soup wasn’t a soup anymore, but water, sometimes not even boiled. They would give us starvation diets for no reason. For example, we didn’t get any food during our first Easter in the camp.
Women were dropping from exhaustion, hunger and excessively heavy work, which would have been beyond the capabilities of well-fed people. I worked carrying coal in wheelbarrows (even empty, they were very heavy due to the iron frames) – I carried bricks, sand, etc. My campmates worked on road construction, in various Betriebs, sewing factories – working in three shifts, day and night. We were treated brutally and sadistically at work. There was always the same pattern of punishment: starvation, standing in the cold for more than a dozen hours a day, the bunker, beating with a rubber baton, etc.
Starting from 1943, the food rations were getting smaller day by day, even though the storehouses were full of food. At the end we wouldn’t be given any bread at all, there was only a soup once a day, made from rotten potatoes and peels. We survived that period only thanks to the parcels from our families and the Red Cross – Polish, American, Swedish, Swiss. The parcels were examined carefully, all the fat products and meats were stolen by the jailers, often leaving us only dry bread. The camp authorities purposefully stole parcels coming from the American Red Cross. SS men ate the food from them. At the end, they wouldn’t give any parcels to prisoners.
As a result of the starvation and poor hygienic conditions, diseases spread at an alarming rate, mortality growing day by day. The ill were handled brutally, sadistically. Local doctors – Dr. Sonntag, Schiedlausky, Rosenthal, Oberheuser (woman) – not only didn’t treat people, but also finished them off with injections (nurse Gerta, a German prisoner, was a specialist at such injections). Staggering, sick women were beaten and kicked out of the room. Once in a while, transports of ill prisoners were arranged (at least from the camp chiefs’ perspective), and they were finished off right behind the gates. The chimney of the crematory was belching smoke all the time, so that the air was full of the odor of burning bodies. Selections were carried out more and more often.
Later, in 1944, special barracks were set up where older women (40 and over), absolutely healthy, were sent away. They were starved, the mortality rising terribly. Every day, piles of corpses were heaped beside the barracks. The more transports arrived, the more selections and killings there were.
In 1941, when I arrived, the transport consisted of around five thousand people, including the transport I was in. There were twelve residential barracks and three barracks occupied by the Revier and storage of clothes and bread. In 1945, there were 32 residential barracks and more than a dozen for administrative purposes, storage etc., the number of prisoners exceeding 160,000.
It needs to be mentioned that thousands of women, mostly Jewish, didn’t even receive numbers, they were simply not on the records. All nations were represented in the [female] camp – Poles, French, Czechs, Italians, Yugoslavians, Americans, English, Russians, Norwegians, Dutch, Jews, etc.
Executions took place almost every day. Poles, Russians, and Yugoslavians were shot. The first execution involving people from our Lublin transport took place in April 1942. 13 young girls aged 18 and more died that day. After that execution, they were killing more and more women from the Lublin and Warsaw transports. It was because these transports were so- called special transports (Sondertransport), bearing the number 7,000. It was destined to be annihilated.
In the second half of July 1942 the entire Lublin transport was called up to the Revier. Lined up in front of the Revier, the women were examined by German doctors, Gestapo men and the camp doctor, Dr. Oberheuser, [joined by] Schiedlausky, Rosenthal. In August 1942, Dr. Gebhardt and Dr. Fischer, assisted by several other doctors, taking all the necessary precautions and secrecy, started their experimental infecting operation in the Revier, performed on my campmates and on dogs. Occasionally, 10-12 women from the Lublin transport were taken (a couple from Warsaw, too). During the operation, six women died. Several were shot soon after they could walk again.
I was taken to the first surgery on 15 January 1943. I was given a sedative and moved to the surgery room. I woke up with an unearthly pain in my right leg. It looked terrible: black, bruised as if after a beating, swollen, soaked in blood. I spent two months in the Revier, then I was moved to the residential barrack, where I lay until 15 August. Medical care was limited to the wound dressing being changed by a German nurse in a way that contradicted the most primitive knowledge of hygiene.
On 15 August 1943 I was summoned to the Revier along with nine of my campmates from the Lublin transport. We knew that it meant either surgery or execution. We unanimously decided we wouldn’t have surgery. We organized a demonstration and opposed experiments on us. Several of my campmates managed to escape the Revier, [but] they avoided being operated only for some time. The camp authorities (who didn’t want to cause a commotion within the camp) decided to take us by surprise. They failed. We were well-organized and conscious, and the moral standing of our campmates from the block and almost the whole camp kept our spirits high. The block we lived in, the infamous fifteen, named a piraten block or banditen block by the camp’s commandant, was surrounded by jailers, police and SS men as a result of the constant rebellion and manifests. For a while we managed to escape. We weren’t happy for too long, though. The perpetrators found a way and captured us one by one, locking us in the bunker.
At the same time, block fifteen was punished with a starvation diet as a consequence of our rebellion. Women were deprived of any food or water for several days and nights. The doors and windows were sealed. When the block was opened a couple of days later and the women were driven out of the building for the roll call, they dropped like flies. The persecution of block fifteen began anew. Seizure of the food parcels, the bunker, searches at the block, personal searches conducted in the most disgusting ways (gynecological examination during the searches was common). The searching also meant that the jailers and police women stole everything from the prisoners. They put their hands on the food parcels and clothes sent in by the families. The recent searches were part of the daily routine.
When we were imprisoned in the bunker, they divided our group into two after conducting a search, and placed five each per isolation cell, without food. After two days, a jailer opened the door and took the first person she saw. A while later another one of my campmates was taken. We were convinced that they had been sent for interrogation and beating, since no interrogation at the camp would be carried out without beating. Finally, I come out as the third person. I could clearly smell ether out in the hall. Knowing the cruelty of the Germans, it became clear to me that our perpetrators had organized an operating room there in the filthy basement, in those incredibly unhygienic conditions. I tried to resist. I tried to break out of the jailer’s grip and run away and I fell into what was literally a blood pool. I was surrounded by SS men, doctors in white lab coats covered in blood, and German nurses. Two doctors were carrying my colleague, still in narcosis, with her legs bandaged, blood dripping from them. They threw her on the cell bed like a sack. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. Blood everywhere, and evil, cruel faces. They grabbed me by my hands and legs and threw me onto one of the beds. Two SS men held me while the doctor shot a sedative injection.
I woke up with a horrible pain, both my legs wrapped in bandages, blood soaking through the dressing and an iron splint. The pain was beyond human endurance. As it turned out later, it was an introductory operation to a series of subsequent ones, performed on the bones in order to cut out bone tissue and marrow. I lay in the bunker for two weeks in a fever, with no medical attention. I didn’t even get an injection that would soothe the pain. It needs to be mentioned that both my campmates and I were operated on while wearing dirty dresses, with our legs unwashed for two days. The dresses and underwear were cut and taken off us after the surgery.
After two weeks, we were carried into the Revier at night. The next day we learned that we had scabies. I underwent three more operations in the Revier. In the meantime, as the operations were carried out in conditions that neglected the most primitive notion of hygiene, I suffered from leg infections, erysipelas, inflammation of the veins and phlegmon. I had a temperature of above 40 degrees [Celsius] for six weeks. I survived the most severe period of my illness thanks to injections stolen by my friends working in the Revier. The last operation, the fifth in a row, was performed on me in November 1943.
After twelve months of lying in bed, I began to learn to walk again. Currently doctors have diagnosed a missing tibia bone fragment of 7 cm and marrow inflammation (in regard to both legs).
In the first days of February 1945, the remaining “laboratory rats” were summoned to the Revier (some of those operated on had died as a result of the infections, blood loss, etc., and some had been shot). We realized right away that this time it was about executing us. The camp had several dozen thousands of people at that point. The roll calls weren’t really held, there was constant chaos in the camp, and mortality reached its highest rate. A couple of thousand people were sent to other camps every day, and it was impossible to determine the number of prisoners in any of the blocks.
For us, these circumstances were an opportunity. We decided to hide. Our hideouts were various storehouses, other blocks, pallets, cupboards, etc. One day, our block was surrounded. We got cornered by jailers and dogs, but we managed to escape. The crowd of supportive people sent a couple of hundred women who were on their way to work. There was a great commotion, and the “rats” took advantage of it. A couple of minutes later, our whole group, in different clothes, different numbers, was hidden. There were various roll calls and different ruses aimed at capturing us. But they didn’t bring any results. In the meantime, several of my companions fled the camp.
On 13 February 1945, wearing a fake surname and number, I fled too, into the labor camp in Neudstadt-Glewe. The conditions in that camp [were] even worse than in Ravensbrück. Initially we weren’t given any food. After a couple of days, we started to be allotted glasses of uncooked water with a rotten potato or a piece of rutabaga floating, and literally a slice of bread, usually rotten, too. The storehouses were full of food and American parcels. Starvation, searches and roll calls lasting for hours were our every day life. The hygienic conditions were terrible. A tiny cell meant for 10 people contained 100. Various social elements – thieves, criminals and some political prisoners. All of them, looking like ghosts wearing rags, were lying around on the dirty floor, covered in lice, insects. We slept in whatever we wore during the day. Searches, inspections, starvation diets were part of our lives here, too. Every day was a tormenting nightmare.
On 2 May 1945, American soldiers entered Neustadt-Glewe. The German authorities fled in panic. We were free.