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

between each other’s lines. At least, as an inmate of Buchenwald, Klaus would know something of what Doris was going through; of course she could tell him nothing of the brutality she saw.
    We know from her later testimony that Doris used to watch through the Revier windows as the work gangs were taken to the gate, led by an SS officer who walked them deliberately through a large pond, so that they’d start work soaking wet.
    In June, Olga Benario’s comrade Sabo (Elise Saborowski Ewert), her coconspirator from her Brazilian days, suddenly buckled and collapsed as she worked in the Sandgrube . Sabo had been raped and tortured in a Brazilian jail, and had never recovered. Fraede kicked her but Sabo could not get up and was eventually brought into the Revier , where Doris was there to help. ‘Maase, where is Maase?’ was the shout heard every day around the bandaging station. ‘There are so many things I can hardly talk about, so much is waiting for you,’ she wrote in a letter to Klaus.
    On another Sunday Doris’s letter to her sister enthused about good news from home – ‘At first I could not believe that something this pleasant still exists – I almost feel as if I’d been there’ – but her attempt to sound cheerful couldn’t hide her fear for her relatives on the outside. Doris’s father, also a doctor, was Jewish and she knew that as war approached, his side of the family would be increasingly at risk; new laws were making any form of normal life in Germany impossible and Doris’s father had been barred from practising. Though her mother was not Jewish – which explains why Doris received better treatment than other Jews in the camp – the pressure on those in ‘mixed marriages’ was increasing, with couples forced to consider separating or emigrating.
    At one point Doris asks: ‘Are the parents relaxing as they should? I imagine roses blooming there and every day something else to harvest in the garden,’ but by the next letter she has learned that her mother and father are ‘crossing the Channel’ and she hoped for news.
    ‘As for me, I’m fine,’ wrote Doris to her sister, and it is almost temptingto believe her, because she went on: ‘I wear my hair long and neatly knotted and I’m noticeably blossoming inside and out’ – though what she meant by ‘blossoming’ is impossible to say. We know from her later testimony that by late June temperatures in the Sandgrube were soaring and the women Doris was treating had burned skin, sores and boils. Worrying the prisoners even more were the terrifying screams now coming from the Strafblock . The prisoners had recently discovered that Olga was being held in one of the stifling wooden cells. Doris wrote in a letter home: ‘My darlings, it’s so hot.’
    It was Ilse Gostynski who first discovered that Olga was in solitary confinement. Ilse had the job of emptying the cell buckets, and managed to pass a few words with Olga, whom she had got to know at Lichtenburg and whose story had made a deep impression. Ilse remembered Olga as ‘ a young woman from Munich, very beautiful, very intelligent. In Ravensbrück, she was treated badly, she got almost nothing to eat.’
    The cells were made of thin wood, just two metres long by two metres wide, and had no ventilation. Olga had nothing except a straw mattress and a bucket. Ilse made sure that Hanna Sturm knew about Olga’s plight and Hanna managed to get together biscuits and bread for Olga, which Ilse smuggled in next time she emptied the buckets. Comrades sent messages. If Zimmer had seen her, Ilse would have been locked up too. ‘I left some sweets for her or a slip of paper with comforting words from her fellow prisoners … She was in a very bad way,’ Ilse recalled.
    Not long after finding Olga, Ilse was told she was to be released, so Olga’s go-between was gone.
    Perhaps the most startlingly ‘normal’ aspect of the camp was that even as the brutality increased, prisoners were