Free If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm

the sand one or two metres up a hill. ‘Full shovels, full shovels. Filthy cows. Scum. Bitch. Filthy cows.’ The shovels were too short or too long, or bent and broken.
    Sometimes a gang had to pile the sand in a wagon and heave the wagon onto makeshift tracks. The wagon often jumped the tracks and the women would try to stop it tipping, but when it fell it spilled the contents and they’d have to fill it again. As the temperature rose the guards yelled and swore even louder; they’d beat the women on the back again and kick those that passed out.
    Other gangs unloaded coke and stones from a barge on the lake. The women heaved sacks on their backs, while up the hill another gang pulled stone rollers to flatten land for road building. There was one giant roller and one smaller one. The handles had ropes attached and the women grabbed a rope and pulled. At least the road-rolling had a point. There was no point in shovelling sand. *
    Soon the prisoners hated the sand. The Jehovah’s Witnesses thought the work was designed especially for them, ‘to make them give up their God’ , but many noticed it was the Jews who suffered most: they seemed weaker, and were less used to hardship, others said. By midday the women in the Sandgrube were sunburned on their arms and brows and their mouths were parched. When sand got inside their wooden clogs it burned the soles of their feet and rubbed on blisters. The Sandgrube was soon spotted with blood.
    Rabenstein and Britta supervised the unloading gang. Standing up thehill, they watched prisoners heave sacks of coal or stones and pile them into carts at the edge of the lake. The women pushed the carts up the hill to a dump, but to get there they had to cross a makeshift bridge made of planks, and often the older women fell off the planks and into the water. When this happened the guards would yell and kick the fallen woman. One day a woman hit Rabenstein on the head with a hoe to get her own back. She was sent to the Strafblock and not seen again.
    Sometimes Rabenstein would select a group of women at random, line them up behind a heap of stones, and kick them with her boots. Or she would tell a prisoner to shovel soil from a massive pile by tunnelling from underneath until the pile started caving in. The prisoner had to keep shovelling till eventually the pile collapsed on her and she was buried alive. Rabenstein considered this a game and called it ‘ Abdecken ’ – ‘roof falling’. Afterwards, the prisoner, bruised and suffocating, was pulled out by friends.
    Standing on a chair inside her wooden cell, Marianne Wachstein saw a similar ‘game’ enacted outside her window:
I looked out and saw the following: a weak young woman – I later heard her name was Langer, sick with lupus, and with a piece of flesh sewn on her nose – had refused to shovel sand. They hit her hard but she still refused to pick up the shovel. They dragged her, holding her tight, to a well and sprayed her with a strong stream of water wherever it hit her. They put her like that into a heap of sand with only her head uncovered. They threw sand on her head and face. She constantly tried to break loose. This game went on so long that I got down from the small chair several times and sat down.
    Wachstein noticed women guards were watching, and one of the commandant’s top men watched too.
    Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, soon began to get the measure of the camp. Not all prisoners were sent on outside work gangs; Hanna’s skills – she was a locksmith and a glazier as well as a carpenter – were too valuable to waste on pointless toil, so she was used as a handywoman, which allowed her to snoop inside offices and blocks, and she collected things – an old newspaper, or a knife perhaps – which she smuggled back to her block. Her best early discovery was a dog-eared copy of War and Peace . Goebbels had long ago banned all Tolstoy’s books, along with other seditious works by authors such as