This testimony was written by Ekaterina Volkova between 1985 and 1987, 2 years before her death. For 40 years she remained silent about her experiences in the Ravensbrück camp. These are her words. My name is Ekaterina Volkova. Everyone called me Katya. I am 71 years old.
And for most of my life I pretended that the years between 1942 and 1945 never existed. I erased these years from my memory, like erasing a burnt photograph. But such memories cannot be erased. They stay there, buried inside, waiting, bleeding from the inside, even when you smile on the outside. Now, knowing that I have little time left, I must tell you what happened in Raven’s basement with Bruck.
Not for myself, for those who did not survive to tell the tale. For those whose names were erased from records, whose bodies were burned without ceremony, whose voices were forever silenced. This is my story, and this is their story too. It was August 1942 . I was 26 years old and a nurse in the Red Army.
Our medical detachment was captured near Smolensk after 7 days of continuous fighting. I saw fellow soldiers being shot at the side of the road just because they dared to wear a military uniform. The Germans considered this unnatural for women. The punishment was immediate. Shot in the back of the head, no questions, no trial.
I survived that initial inspection because the officer noticed the Red Cross symbol on my torn uniform. He spared me. I still don’t know why. Sometimes I wished he wouldn’t do that. We were transported in freight cars for 11 days without enough water, without a place to lie down, breathing in the smell of urine and the despair of dozens of other women, pressed together like animals.
Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian. All were captured for minor crimes: hiding food, listening to illegal radio, helping the wounded from the wrong side of the war. When we arrived in Ravensbrück, I still believed that my medical education could save me, that perhaps the Germans needed qualified nurses, that my knowledge would be of value, how naive I was.
At dawn on August 12, 1942, two SS guards tore me from my wooden bunk in Block 10. They said nothing, they didn’t need to. Their silence was more terrifying than any threat. They dragged me through damp corridors to the concrete stairs leading to the basement of the camp hospital. A basement that was not on the official Red Cross maps.
A place that technically shouldn’t exist. The corridor was about 50 meters long. Low ceiling, rusty iron beams, constantly dripping water. There were nine heavy metal doors, unevenly distributed. Everything is painted grey, everything has small barred windows. The first four doors were open. I could see skeletal women lying on iron bunks, staring into space.
Living bodies, but with already dead eyes. But it was the last door at the end of the corridor that terrified me, although I didn’t understand exactly why. It was closed, reinforced, and marked with a number drawn in white chalk, which someone tried to erase several times, but it always reappeared. 47.
Room 47. The guard unlocked the door with two different keys. The metal creaked and then a smell appeared. A nauseating mixture of cheap disinfectant, old blood, excrement, and something chemical that burned my nostrils and made my eyes water instantly. I was a nurse. I knew the smell of hospitals, death operating rooms, but this was different. It was the smell of hell.
Room 47 was about 25 m², lit by bare bulbs that flickered constantly. The concrete walls were stained with dark brown patterns that I immediately recognized. Blood that no one bothered to clean up. In the center of the room was a metal operating table, but it was not the table I knew from Soviet hospitals.
It had thick leather straps on the sides, stained from repeated use. And underneath it there was a ditch cut into the floor to drain liquids, like the ones I had seen in slaughterhouses before the war. Surgical instruments were scattered against the wall without any organization. Saws of different sizes, rusty pliers, unsterilized scalpels, vials of strangely colored liquids, labels handwritten in German that I could barely read in the dim light. The doctor waited.
He didn’t introduce himself, didn’t offer an explanation, just lit a cigarette and casually gestured towards the table. as if I was just another lab animal arriving for processing. At that moment I realized I was not here to heal. I was here to be cut, studied, used, thrown away. I tried to speak, but my voice came out weak and trembling.
I asked in Russian what they were going to do with me . The doctor laughed briefly. Dry sound without humor. He said something in German to his assistants, which made them laugh too. Then I was roughly pushed towards the table, and it was there, at that moment that Katya, who I was, died. They threw me onto the cold metal, bound my wrists and ankles with leather straps, tied so tight they cut off my circulation.
My hands went completely numb. I screamed, not from physical pain yet, but from the visceral horror of being completely helpless in the hands of people who clearly did not see me as a human being. only laboratory material subject to disposal. What the doctor did next was methodical and documented. He picked up his notebook, flipped through the pages filled with tables and numbers, found a blank page and wrote at the top: subject 47a, origin.
Soviet, estimated age 25:30. Procedure: Experimental Bone Graft Number 12 He then ordered his assistants to turn me face down on the table. While I sobbed and pleaded in Russian, mixed with the broken German I had learned in the camp, they cut my clothes with surgical scissors, until they left me completely naked.
The doctor examined my legs with gloves, feeling the muscles and bones like a butcher assessing cuts of meat, and finally selected my right leg, marking with a pen the exact area of the tibia where he would make an experimental cut. There was no anesthesia, or rather, there was a minimal attempt.
A rag soaked in ether pressed briefly to my face, just enough to stun me, but not enough to render me completely unconscious. The doctor wanted to observe my pain reactions during the procedure as part of the data collection. As the scalpel cut through the skin and penetrated the flesh, I felt an explosion of pain so intense that my vision went dark at the edges.
I was sure I was going to pass out, but they kept me awake by splashing ice water on my face and spanking me when my eyes started to roll back. The doctor worked slowly, deliberately. cutting through layers of muscle, pushing the tissue apart with instruments that pulled and tore, exposing bone, which he then partially sawed through.
He removed the fragments, which [the music] placed in glass vials, carefully labeled, while I screamed until my voice disappeared completely, replaced by guttural moans that didn’t even sound human anymore. When they finally finished and threw me back into the cell in the basement, I could no longer feel my right leg below the knee, only a throbbing, deep pain that beat in waves in sync with my racing heart.
The wound was closed with crude stitches, without regard for proper surgical technique or infection prevention. It’s just roughly sewn, as if leather was being sewn together. I bled through the dirty bandages, staining the rotten straw of the mattress. and spent the whole night shaking violently not only from the cold, but from physiological and psychological shock, from the methodical mutilation.
In the next cell, separated only by a thin concrete wall, I could hear another woman quietly crying in Polish. And I realized with horror that I was not alone in this nightmare, that there were dozens of other women going through exactly the same methodical torture. The woman in the next cell was named Wanda Poltavska.
She was 20 years old. She was a medical student in Lublin before the war. Wanda has been here for three months and has already been through six different procedures in Room 47, each more brutal than the last. Her legs were a deformed mass of scars, infections, and poorly healed bones. She limped grotesquely, dragging her left leg, which had been cut so many times that it barely responded to nervous commands.
Through the thin wall, Wanda began talking to me that first night, using basic German, which we both knew enough for rudimentary communication. She explained that there were approximately 74 Polish women in Ravensbrück who were used for medical experiments. All are young and relatively healthy. when they arrived. Everything is now permanently marked by the atrocities committed in the hospital basement.
German doctors tested treatments for wounds deliberately infected with virulent bacteria, experimented with bone and nerve grafting techniques, and studied how long limbs could survive without adequate blood circulation before complete necrosis. They used us, Slavic prisoners, because Nazi ideology classified us as subhuman. lives of inestimable value, whose sacrifice would have contributed to the progress of German medicine and the salvation of wounded Aryan soldiers on the Eastern Front.
I listened to all this in growing silence of horror, realizing that my injury was not random or isolated, but part of an organized and officially sanctioned system. a system that turned women into laboratory animals with the same bureaucratic coldness with which it administered food rations or cleaned toilets.
In the following days, while the wound on my leg became progressively infected, producing yellowish pus and emitting a putrid odor, I met other female prisoners. There was Maria Kuśmierczuk, a twenty-three-year-old law student from Warsaw. Both of her legs were cut open repeatedly for gas gangrene tests. She could not walk without support. She had a chronic fever that never completely subsided.
There was Edviga Dzida, a twenty-eight-year-old history teacher. Doctors implanted glass fragments and wood splinters contaminated with staph and streptococcal bacteria into her legs to simulate battle wounds. They methodically watched as the infections spread and consumed healthy tissue. Barbara Petrzyk was the youngest of them all.
She was only 16 years old. She was caught distributing resistance leaflets at school. She underwent five experimental surgeries that left her legs so deformed that she could no longer bend her knees properly. She was doomed to walk like a broken robot for the rest of her shortened life. And there was Zofia Monczka, the mother of three small children whom she would never see again.
Her body was used for radiation sterilization tests. Controlled doses were applied directly to her ovaries while doctors timed and recorded how much it would take to completely destroy her reproductive capacity. Each woman had similar stories. capture for trivial reasons. The brutal transport to Ravensbrück, the gradual transformation from political prisoner to disposable medical test subject.
We formed a silent community of shared suffering, whispering encouragement to each other through the walls in the dark, sharing the tiny crumbs of bread we received as rations, cleaning each other when we lost control of bodily functions due to infection or high fever. Wanda, despite her deformed legs, became the unofficial leader of our group.
She used her strong personality and unwavering religious faith to encourage the hopes of others. She recited Polish poems from memory, organized collective prayers in whispers, reminded us that we were still people with names and stories and a dignity that no German could completely steal. But there were limits to what even the most resilient willpower could bear.
I was taken back to room 47 five times in two months. Each procedure attacked a different part of my body with methodical, scientific brutality. The second time, they cut muscle from my left thigh to test muscle grafting techniques, removing tissue that would never grow back, leaving a deep pit in my leg that caused me to limp grotesquely.
The third time, they injected tetanus bacteria directly into the open wounds on my shoulder, clinically observing as painful muscle spasms wracked my body, recording my temperature, heart rate, and the time until the spasms began, as if I were an inert chemistry experiment. For the fourth time, they tested the limits of blood loss, making controlled incisions and letting me bleed out while measuring my blood pressure at regular intervals, repeatedly bringing me to the brink of death from hypoemic shock only to resuscitate
me at the last moment with minimal blood transfusions of unknown origin. The fifth time, when I was brought in almost unconscious due to a high temperature from a generalized infection, the doctor decided that I was no longer of value for experiments. He ordered his assistants to dispose of me properly. This meant transferring me to another wing of the basement, where dying prisoners were left to die without care, piled into cells without ventilation, where the stench of decomposing bodies was so intense that even the guards avoided
entering. I was supposed to die in that slow death chamber along with six other women in various states of living decomposition, but something extraordinary happened. Wanda, dragging her mangled legs, convinced a Polish guard working at the camp to bring stolen antibiotics from the top-floor infirmary.
These were low-quality drugs and inadequate doses, only expired sulfa drugs and diluted penicillin, which the guard managed to hide in her clothes for weeks. With shaking hands and risking immediate execution if discovered, she administered antibiotics, cleaned my infected wounds with boiled water she stole from the kitchen, and spent three nights applying cold compresses to bring down my fever, which had reached 105°F.
Miraculously, I survived. My temperature gradually dropped. The infections had receded only enough to stop the progress of fatal septicemia. Within two weeks I was able to sit again, although my legs were now a mosaic of grotesque scars, poorly healed bones jutting out at abnormal angles, and atrophied muscles that responded poorly to nerve signals.
I will never walk normally again, I will never run again, I will never dance again, as I did in my youth at village festivals near Moscow, when there was still a world where young women could be happy and carefree, but I was alive. And in this underground hell of Ravens Brück, the simple continuation of biological existence was a form of resistance to a system that wanted to reduce us to disposable material.
Weeks turned into months. A group of mutilated women in a basement developed routines of survival and solidarity that defied the systematic dehumanization imposed by the Nazis. Wanda taught me Polish, and I, in turn, taught them Russian. We created a hybrid language that only we understood and used to share the stories of our lives before the war, keeping alive the memories of humanity and individuality.
Maria, despite her gangrenous legs, sang Polish folk songs in a low voice on cold nights. Her hoarse yet melodic voice echoed through the concrete corridors like a ghost of beauty amidst absolute cruelty. Edwige, who was a teacher, recited passages from classical literature from Pushkin to Mickiewicz, turning this dingy basement into a makeshift classroom where minds hungry for meaning found spiritual nourishment even as bodies wasted away from exhaustion.
But Room 47 continued to operate, processing new victims at a constant pace. Newly arrived Soviet prisoners were regularly selected and assessed according to criteria we could never fully decipher. Perhaps it’s age, perhaps it’s physical condition, perhaps it’s just a medical quirk. Some only lasted one or two operations before succumbing to infections or shock.
Their bodies were quietly removed at night and cremated without official record. Others survived months of methodical torture, becoming ghostly and phantasmagorical. In April 1943, when the Wehrmacht began to suffer significant defeats on the Eastern Front, the experiments in the Ravensbrück basement were brutally intensified.
New doctors arrived from other camps, bringing even more radical and brutal experimental protocols, and they began testing the limits of human tolerance to extreme temperatures. submerging prisoners in tanks of freezing water until they lost consciousness, timing how long it took for hypothermia to cause irreversible brain death, testing the effects of total water deprivation by keeping women without any liquid for days on end while methodically documenting the process of fatal dehydration, from the first hallucinations to final kidney
collapse, testing the effectiveness of various poisons. by introducing controlled doses of arsenic, cyanide and other toxic substances to determine precise lethal thresholds. And always, always documented everything in meticulous notebooks with tables, graphs and photographs. It was during this period of intensification that an event occurred that would forever mark the survivors as the lowest point of this abyss of suffering.
In June 1943, doctors decided to conduct a collective experiment in extreme sensory deprivation, locking 18 prisoners, including Wanda and me, in Room 47 at a time, without light, without water, without food, without toilet facilities, completely isolated from the outside world for 120 hours straight.
The stated aim was to study the psychological effects of absolute isolation in groups. Observing how the social structure will collapse under extreme pressure, whether cannibalistic behavior or violence will emerge when basic resources are completely removed. The first 24 hours were of increasing discomfort, but still manageable.
We tried to organize ourselves, ration the little energy we had, keep each other awake and mentally alert through whispered conversations and collective prayers. But when thirst really began to bite, when saliva dried up completely and tongues swelled in our mouths, when hunger turned into brutal abdominal cramps and when total darkness began to cause visual and auditory hallucinations, the cohesion of our group began to crack dangerously.
Some women panicked, screaming and banging against the walls until their bloody hands were damaged. Others became catatonic, sitting in corners and rocking rhythmically. muttering meaningless words. One tried to drink her own urine, but immediately vomited. The liquid was too concentrated and toxic to be processed by an empty stomach.
When they finally opened the door after five full days, they found four women dead from dehydration and exhaustion, three completely insane who would never regain their sanity, and the rest, including me and Wanda, so deeply traumatized that we would spend the rest of our lives in nightmares of that absolute darkness and the sound of women slowly dying inches away with no way to do anything to help them.
The chief physician took detailed notes, photographed the bodies, and classified the experiment as partially successful in his report. The war was finally turning against Nazi Germany. In the final months of 1944, with the Red Army advancing inexorably from the east and the Allies pressing from the west, Ravens Brück entered a state of bureaucratic panic.
Orders came from Berlin to destroy evidence of atrocities, burn incriminating documents, and eliminate witnesses who could testify about war crimes. Many of the mutilated women in the basement were summarily executed by lethal injections of phenol directly into the heart. Their bodies were cremated in ovens that operated 24 hours a day, producing thick black smoke that covered the camp like a shroud.
But some, including me, Wanda and Edwige, were temporarily forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation. Left locked in our cells while the guards fled and the documents burned in huge makeshift bonfires in the main courtyard. When Soviet soldiers finally liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945, they found an apocalyptic scene.
piled-up bodies, skeletal survivors wandering like zombies, and the heavy silence of a place where humanity had been systematically destroyed. I weighed 38 kg, half of my original weight. My legs were permanently deformed, making me look decades older than my actual 29 years. I couldn’t speak for three days after my liberation, only cried silently while Soviet military nurses fed me small spoons of porridge and treated my chronic infections with the best antibiotics available.
It will take years of physical recovery and decades of psychological processing before I can finally testify to what I experienced. In 1947, I went to Nuremberg as a witness at the Doctors’ Tribunal. limping to the stand with my mutilated legs exposed so that the judges and the public could physically see the consequences of Nazi experiments.
My voice trembled but did not waver as I described every procedure, every mutilation, every moment of agony, coldly documented in scientific notebooks presented as material evidence of crimes against humanity. Wanda also survived and testified. She became a psychiatrist in post-war Poland and dedicated her professional life to treating survivors of extreme trauma, turning her own suffering into a source of therapeutic empathy that would help thousands of other victims process experiences that words could barely describe.
The stories of these women, and dozens of others who did not survive to tell their stories, have become fundamental evidence for understanding not only the specific brutality of the Nazi regime, but the broader human capacity for systematic dehumanization, when ideologies classify certain groups as less than human.
When science operates without ethics, when absolute power removes all moral restraints, room 47 is equal to a trouser. was just one of hundreds of similar places scattered across occupied Europe. Each one processes human lives through the meat grinder of bureaucratic cruelty. Each one leaves scars that will last through generations.
I am dying now in 1977 at the age of 71 in a modest apartment in Moscow. My mangled legs still hurt on cold, wet days. constant physical reminders that survival does not mean escape unscathed, that witnessing atrocities leaves invisible traces deeper than the visible ones. The question that hovers over these stories is never truly how this could have happened, because human history is full of similar examples of organized cruelty and systematic dehumanization.
The real question, one that continues to echo in the decades to come and one that each generation must answer anew. How do we prevent this from happening again? The psychological and social mechanisms that made Ravensbrück possible continue to operate. Blind obedience to authority, categorization of human groups as inferior, separation between science and ethics, gradual normalization of cruelty.
All this continues to operate in modern forms, less obviously monstrous, but potentially just as dangerous. The women of Room 47 die not only when their hearts stop beating, but also when their stories are forgotten, when their scars are reduced to abstract statistics, when the specific and individual horror of each mutilation is dissolved into generalizations of war crimes that sound horrific but remain emotionally distant.
We die again every time someone denies or minimizes the Holocaust. Every time modern authoritarian regimes repeat similar patterns of dehumanization against vulnerable minorities, every time science operates without strict ethical oversight. But we also live on in every person who hears our stories and consciously chooses to resist indifference.
To defend universal human dignity. insist that science should always serve humanity instead of exploiting it. We continue to live in a collective memory that transforms individual trauma into a generational lesson, specific pain into transmitted wisdom, and we continue to live in the simple yet profound question to which each of us answered through our survival and testimony.
When faced with systems that deny our humanity, can we retain our ability to see humanity in others? Even when they treat us as disposable objects, the scars on my legs never completely disappeared, but became maps of the territory lived through, physical evidence that resistance does not require dramatic heroism.
Sometimes it’s just continuing to breathe when every cell in your body wants to give up. It’s holding the hand of another prisoner in the dark and whispering that tomorrow could be different, even when all the evidence suggests otherwise. It is a refusal to allow those who have maimed us to also maim our capacity to love, to hope, to insist that the world can and must be better than this.
This is my last request to those who hear these words. Don’t let our stories die. Do not let oblivion become a second death for those who suffered. Remember us. Remember room 47. Remember that humanity is fragile and must be protected every day, with every choice, with every action. My name is Ekaterina Volkova. This is my testimony.
This is our history, don’t forget.
