This is Catherine’s testimony, recorded in 1987. She remained silent for 42 years after the trauma that occurred in Smolensk and the Ravensbrück camp. These are her words. My name is Ekaterina. Today is October 28, 1987. I’m sitting in the kitchen of my apartment, looking at an old tape recorder, and my hands are shaking. I am 71 years old. I was silent for 42 years.
For 42 years I carried this stone inside my chest, afraid that if I started talking, I would not be able to stop. Or, even worse, no one will believe what I say. But the time has come. The world is changing, our country is changing, and I feel like my life is coming to an end. I can’t take this to my grave.
I have to leave my voice. This is not just my story. This is the cry of thousands of women whose names have been erased into ashes, whose voices have been drowned out by the barking of dogs and the roar of the hills. I speak for those who did not return. For those who returned but were never able to speak.
Before the sky turned black, I was an ordinary girl. I lived in a small village not far from Smolensk. I was only 20 years old when my life as I knew it ended forever. I remember the smell of apples in our garden. It was 1941, the last summer of my childhood. We lived simply but happily. My father worked at the railway station.
My mother taught children at school, and I dreamed of becoming a doctor. I believed that hands were given to man to heal, to bring warmth, not pain. I had a fiancé Sasha, Alexander. We were planning to get married in the fall, when the harvest was in. I still remember the warmth of his palm in my hand when we walked by the river.
He told me that we would build a house, that we would have three children. Sasha went to the front in the first days of the war. I never saw him again. All that was left of him was one letter: a triangle of yellowed paper that I kept close to my heart until even my clothes were taken from me. The war did not come to us immediately.
She crept up like a predatory beast. First there were reports on the radio, the anxious faces of parents, then the first bombings somewhere in the distance, and then they came, the Germans. It happened in the winter of 1942. The snow was white and deep, so pure that it hurt the eyes. But very soon it turned grey with ash and red with blood.
They entered the village on motorcycles and trucks. confident, loud, alien. I remember how they drove us out of our houses. Mother’s scream. She tried to cover me with herself, to hide me in the cellar, but it was too late. An officer in a long grey coat pointed at me and my sister Anya. We were separated from the old people.
I remember my mother screaming as we were pushed into the truck. I saw how my father tried to break through to us and how the blow of the rifle butt knocked him down. This is the last memory I have of my parents. Father lying in the snow and mother reaching out to us . The truck pulled away and I watched as my house, my garden, my life faded into nothingness until they disappeared completely.
We were taken to the train station in Smolensk. There was a sea of people, thousands, women, girls, teenagers. Fear smells like sweat and urine. It was there that I recognized this smell. They started to herd us, like cattle, into freight cars, red freight cars. They packed us in there so tightly that it was impossible to raise our arms.
The doors slammed shut and darkness fell. Inside, it smelled of old wood and horror. The train started moving and we rode into the unknown. We traveled for days and nights. I lost track of time. Maybe it’s been 5 days, maybe a week. There were no windows in the carriage , only narrow cracks under the ceiling through which cold light occasionally penetrated . They didn’t give us water.
It was the most terrible thirst. I saw women licking the frost from the metal bolts on the doors to somehow wet their lips. There was a woman named Olga Petrovna standing next to me . She was older, about forty years old. She was a music teacher from a neighboring town. Olga held my hand when it seemed to me that I was about to fall and be trampled.
Someone died in the corner of the carriage on the third day. The body simply sank down, but there was nowhere to fall because of the cramped space. And the dead girl continued to stand, supported by the living, swaying in time with the sound of the wheels. It was the first time I realized that death here was not a tragedy, but an everyday occurrence.
Olga whispered to me: “Katya, hold on, we have to survive. We have to tell.” She told me about music, about Tchaikovsky, trying to drown out the moans and cries around her. But I didn’t hear any music. All I heard was the rhythmic sound of wheels. which seemed to be beating out one phrase: “To the west, to the west, to death, to death.” We hardly slept.
It is impossible to sleep standing up. You just fall into a sticky oblivion, full of nightmares that are no different from reality. There was only one toilet. A bucket in the corner that overflowed on the very first day. The shame disappeared quickly. When you’re so thirsty that your tongue swells in your mouth, shame seems like a foolish luxury from a past life.
I remember how Anya, my younger sister, started to go crazy. She asked for water. She called for her mother. I pressed her hot head to my chest and cried without tears, because there was no moisture left in my body for tears . I promised her that we would arrive soon, that there would be water there. I lied.
I knew that where we were going there would only be hell. When the train finally stopped and the doors opened with a terrible screech , we were blinded by the bright light of the spotlights. It was evening or night, I didn’t understand. Cold, damp air hit my face, and dogs barked. This is the first thing I remember about Germany. Barking of shepherds.
They were straining at their leashes, baring their teeth, and the cries of the soldiers mingled with the shouts of “Raus! Schnell! Faster!” We were thrown out of the cars. The bodies of those who didn’t make it were simply thrown onto the embankment like bags of garbage . I grabbed Anya’s hand so hard that she probably had bruises. We jumped out onto the gravel.
Our legs didn’t obey us after so many days of immobility. Many fell. Those who couldn’t get up were beaten with sticks. We walked in columns along the dark road. There was a forest all around , tall black pines that seemed to watch us with indifference. They drove us forward, urging us on with shouts and blows.
Then we saw the gates and the lake. Lake Schwedzie. It was black and smooth, like a mirror of death. We came to Ravensbrück. I didn’t know the name then, but the place itself radiated evil. High walls with barbed wire wire, machine gun towers, neat rows of barracks. Everything was frighteningly orderly. German order built on human bones.
We were driven into a large square. There we were made to wait. The cold penetrated to the bones, but we were forbidden to move. Then the reception procedure began. This was the beginning of the dehumanization. We were taken to a large room that looked like a bathhouse. They ordered us to undress completely, to throw all our things in a pile.
I tried to hide Sasha’s letter, clenched it in my fist, but the torturer, a stone-faced woman with a whip in her hand, noticed this. She hit my hand with the handle of the whip. Bolzkily, my fingers unclenched, and the letter fell onto the wet concrete floor. She stepped on it with her boot.
I wanted to scream, to rush at her, but Olga, who was already standing next to me naked, hunched over from shame and cold, whispered: “Don’t you dare, Katya, they’ll kill you.” And I I remained silent. I watched as a dirty boot trampled the last words of my love into the mud. At that moment, I understood that Kat, the girl from near Smolensk, was no more.
All that remained was a body that needed to be broken. Then they cut our hair roughly with clippers, tearing out clumps of hair. My braid, which I was so proud of, fell to the floor, mixed with thousands of other hairs: light, dark, red. We all became the same. Bald, naked, trembling creatures. They took away our names. Instead, they gave us numbers and triangles.
They sewed on me a red triangle, political prisoner. and the letter R, which stood for Russian. We were not people to them , we were shücks, things, units of accounting. In the eyes of the SS men who walked between the rows of naked women, there was neither lust nor hatred, only cold contempt, as if they were looking at insects.
After the shower, which was icy, sometimes scorching, we were given clothes, alien, torn, striped uniforms. I got a dress that was three sizes too big, and wooden blocks instead of shoes. When I put on this robe, I felt it bite my skin. It was a fabric soaked in the fear of those who wore it before me. We were taken to a barracks.
Barrack number 24. Inside there was a heavy, stale smell of unwashed bodies, rotting wounds and hopelessness. Three-tiered bunks. We were told that three or four people should sleep on one bunk . Anya cried, pressed against me. She was so small, so scared. I stroked her prickly, shaved head and said: “We are together, Anechka, we are together.
” But a black emptiness was growing inside me . I looked at the woman who was in charge in the barracks, the block room. She was also a prisoner, but she looked Well-fed, cruel. She yelled at us in German, explaining the rules. Forbidden to sit on the bunk during the day. Forbidden to talk during roll call. Forbidden to be sick.
Punishment for everything: death or solitary confinement. The first night in Ravensbrück was the longest of my life. I lay on a hard straw mattress, squeezed between Olga and Anya. I heard women moaning in their sleep around me in different languages: Polish, French, Russian. It was a Babylon of sorrow. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my mother’s face, Sasha’s face, but they eluded me.
Instead, I saw the muzzle of a German shepherd and the boot of a tormentor. I realized that I had ended up in a world where there is no God, where the sky is always gray because the smoke from the crematorium chimneys blocks the sun. I didn’t know then that this smoke is people. I will find out later.
In the morning, we were woken by a scream. The siren howled so loudly it seemed to rupture eardrums. 4:00 a.m. Opel Platz. Roll call square. We had to stand there for hours, in any weather. There was a wind from the lake, piercing, icy. We stood in rows, five people. If one fell, the others had to hold her. You couldn’t break formation.
I saw an SS woman, young, beautiful, with perfectly coiffed hair, walking along the rows with a dog. Her name was Greta. I remembered this name because another prisoner whispered it with horror. Greta smiled, looking at us. She enjoyed our suffering. She stopped in front of an old woman who couldn’t stand up straight because of her swollen legs.
Greta said something to the dog, quietly, tenderly, and the dog rushed. I closed my eyes. I heard screaming and growling, but I couldn’t watch. I only squeezed Anya’s hand tighter. At that moment, I understood the main rule of this places. To survive, you need to become invisible. You need to become a gray shadow, not look into the eyes of the ranks, not show fear, not show pain.
We were sent to work. Oh, this is work. It was not work, it was slow murder. We were forced to carry stones, huge heavy boulders that had to be carried from one place to another, and then back. Without meaning, without purpose. Just to break us physically. My hands, hands that dreamed of holding a surgeon’s scalpel, were covered in bloody calluses in the first hour.
My back burned like fire. Every step in the wooden stocks caused pain. I saw a girl fall next to me. A beater immediately ran up to her . He kicked her until she stopped moving. Then he simply waved his hand, and two other prisoners dragged her body aside. I continued to carry my stone. I counted the steps. One, two, three.
If I count, I won’t think. If I won’t think, I won’t go crazy. The food was a mockery. In the morning, murky warm water, which they called coffee. In the afternoon, mis kabalanda made of rotten rutabaga and water. In the evening, a piece of bread that contained more sawdust than flour. This bread was our currency, our life.
For a piece of bread, you could buy thread to sew a robe. For a piece of bread, you could buy a minute of silence. I shared my rations with Anya. She was melting before my eyes. Her eyes grew huge in her thin face. A melancholy settled in them, which is terrible to see in a sixteen-year-old girl. In the evenings, in those rare moments before lights out, when the bullies weren’t looking, Olga Petrovna told us stories.
She didn’t talk about food, like many others. She talked about books, about Pushkin, about Tolstoy. She quoted poetry from memory. It was strange and wild to hear Yevgeny Onegin in a barracks soaked with death. But it saved us. It reminded us that we were people, that somewhere there was another world, where people loved, suffered from mental anguish, and not from hunger and lice. That’s how the first weeks passed.
The weeks turned into a month. I learned to sleep standing at roll call. I learned to steal potato peelings from the trash heap near the kitchen. At the risk of being shot, I learned not to feel disgust for the lice that covered our bodies like a solid carpet. They were everywhere. We crushed them with our nails, and this sound, a dry click, became the sound of our evenings.
But the worst was yet to come. I still didn’t know why we, young and healthy, were selected into a separate group. I didn’t know why doctors in white coats, clean, smelling of cologne, examined us so carefully, felt our legs, looked into our eyes. I thought they were looking for diseases. I was naive.
They were looking Material. Material for their experiments. One day, during morning checkpoint, Anya’s number was called. And mine too. And ten other girls from our barracks. We were taken out of the line. My heart was pounding so hard it was in my throat. We weren’t taken to work, or to the rocks. We were taken to the revir, the camp hospital.
The building looked clean and tidy. Flowers were blooming in the flowerbeds in front of the entrance. It was a deception. Behind these walls, something was happening that defies human comprehension. We were led into a waiting room that smelled of alcohol and medicine. A doctor came in, tall, blond, with icy blue eyes.
He didn’t look at our faces, he looked at our legs. He said something to the nurse, and she made notes in the journal. I felt an animal terror. It wasn’t the fear of death, it was the fear of something unnatural. They left us in the revir and told us they would give us vaccinations. We didn’t believe it. We knew that Vravens Pants They don’t treat.
They kill here, but we didn’t know that death could be long, drawn out for months, and that pain could be the only proof that you’re still alive. That night, lying on a clean sheet in the hospital barracks, how ironic, a clean sheet before torture. I looked at the ceiling and prayed. I wasn’t religious before the war.
We were raised atheists, but there, in the camp, God was needed. Or at least someone who could hear. I was n’t praying for myself, I was praying for Anya. Let them take me, I thought. Let them cut me, just not her. She’s still a child. But in Ravensbrück, prayers died before they reached the sky. The sky was covered with smoke, and tomorrow a hell awaited us that we couldn’t even imagine.
It was the end of my life as a human and the beginning of my existence as a guinea pig. A rabbit, that’s what they called us, Canainchen. I I remembered that word forever. It’s burned into my memory, like the number on my arm. I don’t know how long I spent in oblivion. It was a black, viscous hole where there was no pain, no fear, only a cold emptiness.
Waking up was like a hammer blow. First, the smell returned, the sharp chemical smell of ether, mixed with the terrifying sweetness of pus. Then the sound returned. Someone was moaning nearby, quietly, monotonously, like the whine of a beaten dog. And finally, the pain returned. It exploded in my right leg.
Fiery, pulsating, tearing consciousness into pieces. I tried to move. But my body was heavy, as if filled with lead. I opened my eyes. A white ceiling, not the dirty wooden flooring of the barracks, but a white plaster ceiling with a crack like a spider web. I tried to sit up, but nausea rose in my throat, and I fell back on pillow. I looked down.
My leg was bandaged from ankle to thigh. The bandages were white, but in one place, just below the knee, a dark, rusty stain was already appearing. I couldn’t feel my toes. I didn’t feel at all that this leg belonged to me. It was a foreign, swollen object tied to my body. Next to me, on the next bed, lay a girl. I didn’t know her.
She had blond hair scattered across the pillow and a face as gray as ash. She stared into space and whispered something in Polish. I only made out one word: Esus. Jesus. A nurse entered the room. She wasn’t one of the prisoners, but a German woman in a starched jacket. She came up to me and checked my pulse.
Her fingers were cold and dry. I wanted to ask: “What have you done to me? Why?” But my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and only a wheeze came out of my throat. She looked at me with the same expression a woman has on a chicken that isn’t laying eggs well. A mixture of irritation and indifference. She wrote something down in her notebook and left.
I was left alone with my pain and fear, which was sharper than a knife. That day I learned that I was no longer human. I had become a laboratory specimen. In the evening, the doctor came, the same one, tall, with icy eyes. His name was Dr. Gebhart. I learned his name later, but then he was just a white coat to me , an angel of death.
Other doctors followed him and Vita, young ones with notebooks. They stood around my bed. Gebhart pulled back the blanket. He didn’t ask if I was in pain. He started talking, addressing the students, pointing his pointer at my leg. I didn’t understand the medical terms in German, but I understood the intonation.
He talked about muscles, about nerves, about the tissue reaction. He pressed his finger on the inflamed area. I screamed. The scream was wild, animalistic. The students didn’t even blink. Gebhart frowned slightly, as if my scream was an annoying interruption, disturbing the lecture, and continued speaking.
They cut my leg open to see how it would heal. But they didn’t just cut it open, they injected it with dirt, shards of glass, sawdust. They wanted to imitate battlefield wounds. They wanted to test how new drugs, sulfonamides, work, or, conversely, how quickly gangrene develops without treatment.
For them, I was a piece of meat on which to write dissertations. When they left, I cried not from pain, but from humiliation. I remembered my dreams of becoming a doctor. I thought that medicine was sacred, that a doctor was the one who saves. Here, in Ravensbrück, they turned this world inside out. Doctors became the most terrible executioners, because that they knew the anatomy of pain better than anyone else.
The days turned into an endless series of torments. In the morning, dressings. This was the most terrible time. Bandages dried up like a tap. The nurses didn’t soak them, they tore them off with a jerk. The skin tore off along with the bandages , revealing bleeding flesh. I bit my lips until they bled so as not to scream, but I screamed anyway.
Then the doctors came. They took my temperature, took blood, wrote down the data. My leg swelled and turned purple. A fever set in, I was burning. My mother came to me in a delirium . She brought me cold water from our well. I drank, but the water turned to sand. I saw Sasha. He stood in the doorway of the ward, handsome, in a military uniform, but he had no face.
Instead of a face, there was a black hole. There were 12 of us in the ward. 12 rabbits. That’s what they called us Kaninchen. Guinea pigs. We were a special caste in the camp. We were given a little more food than the others because we had to survive for the experiment to continue. But this food was a curse.
Every spoonful of soup reminded us that we were being fattened for the knife. The girl in the next bunk, a Polish woman, her name was Maria. We became friends through pain. Maria was a student from Warsaw. She was 22 years old. She had had surgery on both legs. Part of the bone was removed. She couldn’t get up at all.
At night, when the guards left, we whispered: “Maria taught me Polish words, I taught her Russian. We talked about food, about cabbage pies, about cherry dumplings. We ate with the words: “This was our way of not going crazy.” Maria told me: “Katya, we must survive to spit in their faces. This hatred gave us strength.
” Anya, my sister stayed in the common barracks. I haven’t seen her for 3 weeks. This tormented me more than gangrene. I didn’t know if she was alive. I imagined her alone, hungry, frozen, on that terrible parade ground in the wind. I begged one of the orderlies, a prisoner who brought us food, to find out about Anya.
I gave her my bread for this service. Two days later she told me: “Your sister is alive. She works in a sewing factory. She is very weak, she has a cough, but she is holding on. This news was the best medicine for me. I had to survive for Anya. I had to leave this hospital on my own two feet, even if only bones remained. But the experiments did not end.
When the first wound began to heal, they performed a second operation. This time they tested nerve regeneration. They put me to sleep again. When I woke up, I realized that I could not feel my feet. The nerve was cut. My right leg had become just a useless weight. I fished out the pillow. For what? Why do they hate us so much? This was not a war.
It was pure evil, elevated to a system, carefully recorded in tables and graphs. One night, a girl died in the ward. Her name was Galina. She was very young, about seventeen years old. She developed blood poisoning. She was dying Long and terribly, in convulsions. She called for her mother. She asked for a drink. No one came.
The nurse on duty simply closed the door so as not to hear the screams. We, lying down, helpless, watched as life slipped away. In the morning, her body was simply covered with a sheet and carried away. And an hour later, a new girl was placed on her bed. The conveyor belt did not stop. I looked at Galina’s empty bed and thought: “Soon it will be me.
” My leg was burning like fire. The temperature did not go down for five days. I felt the poison spreading through my veins, but I survived. My body, hardened by village life, fought the rage of the doomed. The wounds festered, then healed with scars, ugly, tightening the skin, so that my leg did not straighten. After three months, I was discharged from the ward.
I was no longer needed. The experiment was over, the data was in. Now I was just an invalid, a useless mouth. They threw me back into the general barracks. I walked on the crutches that Maria gave me. She didn’t need them yet. She didn’t get up. Every step was torture. But the air, the air outside, though saturated with the soot of the crematorium, seemed sweet after the smell of rotting meat in the hospital.
The meeting with Anya was terrible. When I entered the barracks, I didn’t recognize her. On the bunks sat a skeleton, covered in yellow parchment skin. Her eyes were sunken so deep that they seemed like black holes. She saw me, and these holes filled with tears. We couldn’t hug tightly. We were both too fragile, too sick. I sat down next to her, stretching out my mangled leg, and we just sat, our shoulders pressed together.
She stroked my crutches as if they were living beings. “Did they cut you?” she asked quietly. “Yes, did it hurt?” Now no more.” We didn’t talk about the details. Words weren’t necessary. We both knew we were in hell and that in hell they don’t ask what temperature the frying pan is. Now my life in the camp had changed.
I couldn’t do hard labor. In Ravensprück, those who couldn’t work were subject to extermination. I was saved by Olga Petrovna, our music teacher. She was still alive, and she got a job in the kitchen, peeling vegetables. It was a lucrative job. She somehow miraculously came to an agreement with Blokova, giving her the gold crown that she had torn out of her mouth and hid. I don’t know how.
She arranged for me to be taken to the knitting shop. There I had to sit and knit socks for German soldiers. Sit. It was salvation. My leg wouldn’t have stood up to standing on an Opel or carrying stones. The knitting shop was a huge, stuffy room. Hundreds of women sat in rows, the clatter of knitting needles merged into a monotonous hum. The quota was enormous.
If you didn’t manage to knit a couple of socks during a shift, you were beaten. If you dropped a stitch, you were deprived of your ration. I knitted quickly. My hands remembered work. My grandmother taught me to knit as a child. I knitted socks for those who killed my father, who burned down my house.
I wove my curse into each stitch . Let these socks rub their feet until they bleed. Let them freeze to death in them in the snow near Stalingrad. The system of oppression in the camp was built to stop us feeling solidarity. Hunger turned people into beasts. I saw two women fight to the death over a piece of bread that had fallen in the mud.
I saw a daughter steal a ration from her dying mother. The Germans didn’t have to kill us with their own hands. They created the conditions in which we killed each other. But there were other moments. Moments, which didn’t let me completely believe that humanity was dead. One day, when I was hobbling to the toilet, I fell.
My crutch slipped on the wet floor. I fell right into the mud, hitting my operated leg painfully. I lay there and couldn’t get up. I had no strength. I just lay there and cried from helplessness. A woman came up to me. I didn’t know her. She was from the French barracks. She helped me up. She was as thin as me, but there was light in her eyes.
She thrust something small and hard into my hand. It was an onion. A whole, real onion. For the camp, it was a treasure equal to a diamond. She smiled at me, said: “Courage, Macherie!” and left. I ate this onion at night under the blanket, little pieces at a time, sharing with Anya and Olka.
This taste is sharp, bitter, the living taste of an onion. It reminded me that I was alive, that there is kindness that cannot be cut with a scalpel or burned in an oven. But the darkness was gathering. It was 1944. Rumors that the front was approaching, that the Red Army was advancing, were leaking into the camp. This gave us hope, but also fear.
The Germans were becoming nervous, cruel. They wanted to cover up the traces of their crimes. The gas chambers began working at full capacity. We saw new trains arriving, Jewish women, children. They weren’t even registered. They were led straight there, to the pipe. The smell of burning human flesh became a constant backdrop to our lives.
It soaked our clothes, our hair, our skin. We breathed in the ashes of our sisters. Anya grew weaker every day. A cough tore at her chest. She had tuberculosis. I knew it, although the doctors didn’t diagnose it. I saw blood on her handkerchief when she coughed. I gave her half of my soup, but that was it. little.
She was fading like a candle in the wind. I looked at her and felt a wild, impotent rage. I survived the surgeon’s knife. I endured torture, but I couldn’t save the person closest to me. One day there was a big selection. The word selection evoked paralyzing horror. A doctor walked along rows of naked women and pointed his finger left or right.
To the left was life for now, to the right was the gas chamber. They were choosing the weakest, the thinnest, the sickest. Anya and I stood next to each other. I leaned on a crutch, trying to straighten up, trying to look strong. Anya was unsteady. Her skin was transparent. Her ribs stuck out so terribly that it seemed they would break through the skin. Dr.
Gebhart walked along the line. He stopped in front of me. He recognized me, recognized his work. He grinned, looking at the scars on my leg, and nodded to the left: “Live.” Then he looked at Anya. He looked at me for a long time, appraisingly. My heart stopped. I squeezed Anya’s hand so hard that my nails dug into her palm.
“This,” he said lazily and pointed to the right. The world collapsed, the sounds disappeared. All that remained was this finger in a black glove, pointing to death. “No!” – I screamed. I forgot about fear, about the rules. I rushed towards him. I fell to my knees, clinging to his perfectly polished boots. No, please take me. She is healthy.
She can work. Take me instead of her. I’m a koleka, I’m useless. He looked down at me with disgust. He kicked me into the mud with his boot. “Take this trash away,” he told the guards. Greta, the same bully with the dog, ran up and hit me on the back with a baton. Once, twice. The pain blinded me. I saw through the fog how two soldiers grabbed Anya by the arms and dragged her into the group of the doomed.
She didn’t scream, she didn’t resist. She turned her head and looked at me. There was no fear in her gaze. There was farewell and love. She whispered with her lips: “Live, Katya!” And they took her away . I lay in the mud, beaten, broken and howling. I howled not like a human being, but like a wounded animal whose cub had been taken away.
Nobody lifted me up. People avoided me, afraid of attracting attention. I wanted to die. Why should I live if she is not there? Why do I need this disfigured leg if I couldn’t catch up with death and shield my sister? That night I thought for the first time about throwing myself onto the wire.
High voltage, one touch and it’s all over. No pain, no hunger, no memory. I crawled towards the wire. It was dark. Searchlights swept the perimeter. But one area was in the shade. I crawled, dragging my leg behind me. I have already seen these terrible insulators and heard the hum of the current. There were only a few meters left.
Katya, stop! The voice was sharp, a whisper. Someone’s hand grabbed my ankle. It was Olga Petrovna. She was watching me. Let me go, I hissed. Let me go, I don’t want to. Stupid. Olga hit me on the cheek. Selfish woman. Anya, what did you die for? So that you would give in now, so that you would give them the satisfaction of seeing another corpse on the wire.
She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me: “You have to live. You have to tell. If you die, who will remember Anya? Who will remember what she was like? You will turn to ashes, and she will disappear forever. You are her memory.” You are her grave. Carry it within you, live for two. I looked into Olga’s eyes, full of tears and rage, and I understood that she was right.
To die was easy, to live was the hardest punishment, but also the only duty. I crawled away from the wire. I returned to the barracks. I didn’t sleep that night. I lay there and repeated my sister’s name. Anna. Anna. Anna, I swore that I would survive. I will go through all the circles of hell, but I will come out of here, and I will make the world know what they did.
This was a turning point. Pity died in me, fear died in me. All that remained was a cold, steely determination. I became a stone. I was saving my strength. I ate everything I could find. I stole when I needed to. I became cruel to myself. and to others. I stopped being friends.
Friendship is weakness, it is the pain of loss. I only kept in touch with Maria and Olka , but even that felt more like a union of survivors than a warm affection. My leg healed completely, turning into an ugly stump. But I learned to walk without a crutch, limping badly. I learned to tolerate pain the way one tolerates bad weather. just not paying attention. Time passed.
The year 1945 arrived. Gulnady became louder and louder. The earth shook. The Germans ran around the camp like rats on a sinking ship. They started burning documents. They blew up crematoria, they tried to erase history, but they couldn’t burn our memory. We were rabbits, we were prisoners, we were living documents, and they knew it.
We knew that before retreating they would try to kill us all, especially us, the witnesses of their medical crimes. Death stood at the threshold, closer than ever, but now I looked into its eyes and did not look away. I waited. The hour of reckoning was approaching. It was the end of April 1945. The air of ravens trousers has changed.
If before it was saturated with the smell of burnt flesh and the sweetish stench of rotting wounds, now a new pungent smell was mixed with it. The smell of fear of our executioners. The smell came from the bustling movements of the bullies, from the nervous barking of the dogs, from the black ash that swirled over the camp like mourning snow.
They burned the archives. I stood by the barracks window, leaning on Maria’s shoulder, and watched the wind blow away the charred sheets of paper. There, in that fire, our names, our diagnoses, the protocols of those monstrous operations that turned me into a cola disappeared.
They thought that the fire would wipe everything out. They thought that if there was no paper, then there was no crime. Fools. They didn’t understand that the real archives are our bodies. My disfigured leg, the scars on my uterus, my scorched soul, these are documents that don’t burn. We were driven out to Apel Platz at dawn.
The sky was leaden grey, low and oppressive. Thousands of women, living skeletons in striped robes, were given one loaf of bread for three. It was an unprecedented generosity that made my heart ache. Because we knew that this bread was the price for the long road to death. The death march has begun. The gates opened and a grey river of human bodies flowed west.
We walked away from the front, which thundered in the east like an approaching thunderstorm. Every step was a small war. My right leg, deprived of some muscles and nerves after Dr. Gebhart’s experiments, didn’t just hurt, it burned like fire, as if a red-hot rod had been inserted inside it. I walked, dragging her along the gravel, leaving behind an invisible trail of pain.
Maria supported me from the left. Olga Petrovna, our music teacher, was walking on the right. We linked our hands, forming a single being. If one fell, the other two had to hold her up, because to fall meant to die. The SS men walked behind. Any slowdown, any step to the side, a shot.
The sound of the gunshot became the rhythm of our breathing. A dry, short click, after which someone’s body was left lying on the side of the road, turning into a pile of rubble. The road was endless. We passed through German villages. Neat little houses with tiled roofs, embroidered curtains on the windows, and well-kept front gardens.
It was a world that seemed like a hallucination. How can such comfort exist next to our hell? I saw the faces of the locals, women in aprons, old men with pipes. They looked out of the windows and stood at the gates. I looked for sympathy in their eyes , but I saw only fear and disgust.
One elderly German woman, seeing us, quickly closed the shutter, as if we were plague rats that could infect her clean house with our misfortune. I wanted to shout to her: “Look at us. Your husbands and sons did this.” But I didn’t have the strength to scream. I only had enough strength to move my leg. Once. Two three.
At night we slept in the forest, on the damp ground. It was cold. April nights in Germany chilled the bones. We lay down in a tight heap, like puppies, trying to warm each other with the heat of our exhausted bodies. I remember how on one of those nights Maria whispered to me: “Katya, if I don’t wake up, take my bread. It’s in my bosom.
” “Shut up,” I replied rudely. Rudeness was our defense. You’ll wake up, we’ll get there. We have to see them lose. But Maria was getting weaker. She had a fever. In the morning she couldn’t get up. Olga and I lifted her up, practically carrying her on our shoulders. We walked like this for 2 days.
I felt the life draining from her, her body growing heavier not from weight, but from lack of will. And when another shot rang out very close, Maria jerked and hung in my arms. It took me a while to realize the bullet was meant for her. The guard decided that she was slowing down the column. We couldn’t bury her.
We simply laid her under a tree, covering her face with dry leaves. I took her piece of bread. I ate it and cried. And salty tears fell on the stale crumb . It was a communion of death. I ate my friend’s life to get my hatred across. On the fifth day, or perhaps the sixth, time lost its meaning. What we expected and feared happened.
The noise from Canada became unbearable. The ground shook underfoot. The German convoy began to disintegrate. The guards tore off their shirts, threw their weapons into the ditches, and disappeared into the forest. They were transformed from rulers of the world into pitiful fugitives. We were left alone on the road in the middle of the field.
The silence that followed the roar of the engines was deafening. We stood there, afraid to believe it, and then tanks appeared. They came from the east, dirty, powerful, with red stars on their towers. Soviet tanks. I remember this moment in slow motion, like in a dream. The hatch opened. A tank driver, just a boy, climbed out from there.
The face is black from soot. The helmet phone was knocked to the side. He looked at us, at the crowd of ghostly women with shaved heads and crazy eyes. “Girls,” he shouted, his voice trembling. Our relatives. I did n’t feel joy. Joy is too light a feeling. I felt like a dam had collapsed inside me.
I fell to my knees right in the mud and howled. It was not a human cry. It was the howl of a wounded animal that had finally been released from the trap. Soldiers ran up to me . They smelled of shag, gasoline and sweat, familiar smells. They thrust canned goods, lumps of sugar, and bread into our hands. One soldier, an elderly man with a moustache, threw his greatcoat over my shoulders.
She was heavy, rough, but so warm. “That’s it, my daughter, that’s it,” he said, stroking my head like I was a little girl. The war is over, live. But liberation turned out to be not as dreamed. We, Soviet citizens, were separated from the French, Polish and others. SMERSH, the military counterintelligence agency, has taken over our activities.
Instead of a homeland’s embrace, we received a cold shower of suspicion. We were loaded into trucks and taken to a filtration camp. Again barbed wire, again barracks, again interrogations. I sat on a stool in front of an NKVD officer. He was young, with clean, manicured hands. He smoked a cigarette, blowing smoke into my face.
Surname? – he asked, without looking up from the papers. Volkova Ekaterina Andreevna. How did you get captured? Why didn’t you leave with the partisans? We were captured in the village in 1942. Why did she survive? He asked this question quietly, but it hit me harder than a whip. Thousands died in Ravensbrück, and you are alive.
She collaborated and sold her own products. I choked with resentment. I unbuttoned my old blouse and lifted my skirt, revealing my disfigured leg, covered in terrible, lumpy scars. “Here is my payment!” – I shouted in his face. “Look, this is the work of German surgeons. They cut me up like a frog. I survived in spite of them.
And you? How dare you?” The officer winced when he saw my injury. Disgust flashed in his eyes. “Get dressed!” – he said dryly. “We’ll check. If you’re clean, you’ll go home. If not, you’ll go cut down trees.” We were tested for 2 months, 2 months of humiliation. We, who had been through hell, had to prove that we were not traitors.
This broke many who survived the concentration camp. A feeling of uselessness, a feeling of guilt without guilt. We were called repatriates. But this word sounded like enemies. In August 1945 I was given a certificate. Allowed to return to place of residence. I was riding home in a freight car. The sound of the wheels reminded me of that first trip to Germany, but now the doors were open.
I saw my country. She was black. Burnt villages, blown up bridges, fields dug up by craters. My land was bleeding, just like me. I returned to my village near Smolensk. All that remains of our house is a chimney and a piece of wall. The garden was overgrown with weeds as tall as a man. I stood where my room used to be and felt nothing. Emptiness.
The parents died. Sasha, my fiancé, went missing in 1941. Anya, sozhena v pechena ravens bryuka. I was left alone. 23 years old, disabled, orphan. Life after death has begun. I moved to Smolensk. I was given a bed in a dorm and work in the library chose books because they are silent, they don’t ask questions.
I learned to hide my limp by putting cotton wool in my shoe. I learned to hide my past. In those years, being a former prisoner was a stigma. We were not accepted into institutes, we were not allowed to get good jobs. People whispered behind their backs. The Germans had it. Who knows what she was doing there. I heard these whispers in queues, on trams.
I swallowed them like bitter medicine. I remained silent. I didn’t tell anyone about Anya, about Olga, about Maria. I locked them in my heart, like in a crypt. But the most terrible consequence was not the lameness or social outcast. The most terrible thing was the silence in my womb. Two years after the war I met Pavel.
He was a good man, a front-line soldier who lost his arm at Königsberg. We came together like two pieces of a shipwreck. trying to build a fruit so as not to drown in loneliness. We got married and we really wanted children. Pavel dreamed of a son, but a year passed, then a second, then a third. The cradle remained empty. I went to the doctor.
The old woman gynecologist examined me and was silent for a long time , then took off her glasses and looked into my eyes with endless pity. “My dear,” she said quietly, “everything there is burned. Inflammation, adhesions, scars. There is no living space. You will never be able to give birth. Never.
I left the hospital in the autumn rain. I walked down the street and didn’t notice the puddles. At that moment, Dr. Gebhart killed me for the second time. There, in ’42, he took away my health. Now in ’48 he has taken my future away from me. He killed my unborn children. I came home and told Pavel: “Go away, I’m empty. I can’t give you a son.
Find another, healthy one.” Pavel came up to me, hugged me with his only arm and pressed me to himself. We stood there for a long time, silently and crying. He didn’t leave. We lived together for 30 years until his death. But I saw with what longing he looked at other people’s children playing in the yard.
And every such look was torture for me, more terrible than any camp selection. The years passed, the country was rebuilt, new houses were built, rockets were launched into space, life was getting better. But for me the war did not end on May 9th. It continued every night. As soon as I closed my eyes, I returned to barrack number 24.
I could smell bleach and rotting meat. I heard dogs barking and shouts of “Schnell!” I woke up in a cold sweat, shouting to my sisters: “Pavel woke me up, brought me a glass of water. Again?” – he asked. “Again,” I answered. My memory became my curse. I remembered everything: the color of the sky above the crematorium, the taste of the rutabaga soup, the feeling of the scalpel cutting through the skin.
Time does not heal, it just puts a bandage on the wound, but under the bandage the wound continues to bleed. I tried to find others. I wrote to the Red Cross and looked for Olga Petrovna. After 5 years the answer came. She died in 1946 from tuberculosis. She survived the camp, but the camp did not survive her. I remained the last witness, the keeper of the memory of those who were turned into smoke.
It’s a heavy burden. Sometimes I wanted to forget, to become like everyone else, to enjoy holidays, to sing songs, but I had no right. If I forget, who will remember Anya? Who remembers the girl who gave me the onion? Oblivion is betrayal. It is now 1987 . I am 71 years old. I am an old sick woman.
My leg hurts in bad weather and I want to climb the wall. My hands are shaking, but my voice is firm. A lot is changing in our country . People are starting to speak the truth, publicity. Now we can talk about what we have been silent about for 40 years. And I decided to speak. I look at the old tape recorder, at the spinning cassette.
I say this for you, those who will live in the 21st century. You probably think that this is just a scary fairy tale, that people cannot be so cruel, that doctors cannot be murderers, that the state cannot betray its citizens. They can, believe me, they can. Civilization is a thin film over chaos. Just scratch it a little and a beast comes out.
We saw this beast in the face. We fed him with our bodies. Don’t let him come back. I often think about the meaning of my survival. Why me? Why not Anya, who was kinder and purer than me? Why not Maria, who was smarter? I don’t know the answer. Maybe God, if he exists, left me alive precisely for this moment, so that I could sit in this kitchen and tell you about how human bone crunches under a German boot, so that I could tell you about the price of bread, about the price of human dignity.
My life was not happy in the usual sense. I did n’t babysit my grandchildren. I didn’t dance at children’s weddings. My life has been a long vigil at the eternal flame of memory. But I don’t regret it. I lived it honestly. I didn’t betray, I didn’t break. I retained the human within me, despite all attempts to turn me into a shyuk, into a thing.
This evening I will go to the cemetery to Pavel’s grave. There is a place for me too, but only my name will be written on the monument. Anya’s name is nowhere to be found except in my heart. Maria’s name is nowhere to be found. Their grave is the sky above Europe. Look at him. When you see clouds, think of us.
We are there. We have become the air you breathe. Take care of this air. Take care of each other. Don’t let hatred settle in your homes, because hatred always starts small, with an insult. with the division between us and them, and ends with ovens and ditches. I turn off the recording. My story is told.
I give it to you. Now it is your memory, your responsibility. My name is Ekaterina. I am number 74.892. I am human and I remember. Farewell. It is estimated that more than 20,000 Soviet women were imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp during World War II. This testimony is an act of resistance to oblivion.
Remembering is the only way to honor collective memory. If you watched to the end, please let us know in the comments what city or country you’re watching from, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next testimonies. This story is a work of fiction inspired by the real suffering of Soviet women during World War II.
