The memoir is a translation (translated from Polish by Jaroslaw Jozef Gajewski ) of one of the twenty memoirs titled “Ponad ludzką miarę. Wspomnienia operowanych w Ravensbrück“, third edition published by Ksiazka i Wiedza 1972.
I want to devote the memoir of Ravensbrück to one fragment of camp life – secret correspondence with families in Poland, which we managed to establish and continue successfully for over a year despite the strict camp regime. Our letter contact with families was limited by camp regulations, which allowed writing letters from the camp and receiving messages from loved ones once a month. An official letter of the size of a notebook page did not allow much space for correspondence. The first half of the page was wasted with an overprint containing an excerpt from the official regulations for exchanging letters. The sender’s address was also entered here. The rest of the sheet, divided by twenty lines, could be filled in with the text in German, “transparent and legible,” as the draft said. Beyond the stereotypical sentence – “Ich bin gesund und fühle mich wohl” – and the information that the last letter from the family was received, as well as questions about the health of loved ones; it was impossible to find something that would convey any specific news about us, and at the same time would not expose the letter to destruction by camp censorship. Therefore, the families did not have direct and reliable information about our life in the camp for a long time.
We were right to suppose that people knew about hunger in the concentration camps, diseases decimating people, and Germans treating prisoners inhumanly; this was the case in all camps. However, something happened to us that had not been imagined before: medical experiments on healthy women against their will. As a result, several victims died. Many were disabled. Regardless of the degree of damage to their health – the experiments left indelible marks on their psyche. We believed that the world must learn about such shameful deeds of German doctors. At the same time, we realized that it is necessary to provide complete and accurate information. We were aware of the real possibility of being killed to cover a crime. We could be living evidence in future, so it became even more important to pass on this news. We hoped that revealing the truth about these experiences to the world might lead to a decision on which the lives of all the victims of these experiments would one day hang.
We were very young, and we still had in our heads the various secret ways of communication used in scouting games. The official letter from the concentration camp was the only means the news could reach occupied Poland. At that time, we did not have contacts that would allow us to send letters by regular mail. So we have decided that we will provide information using invisible to the naked eye ink to write between the lines of an official letter.
Nina Iwanska came up with this idea. In the initial phase of writing secret letters, four people were initiated: Nina Iwanska, her sister Krystyna, Wanda Wojtasik (Półtawska) and me. All of our families lived in Lublin, which was helpful for further correspondence. We used our urine because we did not have any commonly used liquids such as invisible ink at our disposal. It turned out to be more practical than milk or onion, or lemon juice because it did not leave a trace on the paper. So the fundamental difficulty in informing the family of the second, invisible content of the first letter was happily overcome.
The ally turned out to be the favourite author of pre-war youth – Kornel Makuszynski. In the official text of the letter, addressed to my younger brother, I reminded him how much we liked Makuszynski’s books, especially (“Szatan z siodmej klasy”) “Devil from the seventh grade” and how it impressed us with the ingenuity of the hero of this book. The hero of this novel sends a letter with no meaning, in which the correct content is encoded. The first letters of each line of the letter read from top to bottom, giving the solution. The content of our German letter was so composed that the first letters of each line gave two words: “letter made of urine.” The content written between the lines was concise. “We have decided to write you the whole truth.” Then a few sentences followed that reported on medical experiments. Finally, we announced the subsequent letters and a piece of information about what words from the family’s letter would signify that our letter sent to them had been read.
This letter with the triple meaning was posted to my family in January 1943. The addressees read the hidden content of the letter despite unforeseen difficulties. Namely, the information “letter made of urine” was read without the last two letters because they were not placed in the same vertical as the previous ones. As a result, they soaked the letter several times, which allowed them to read; however, the content was destroyed irreversibly. Only with the following notes did our families use the correct method of retrieving the hidden writing by ironing the paper with a hot iron. Thus using the high temperature, the entire paper material turned slightly yellow, and on it, there were letters of secret correspondence, permanently recorded on it in a brown colour. The legibility of the letters was different, which can be seen in the copies that have survived to this day: some have so far been distinguished by clean, clear lines of letters, others are indecipherable.
The only place where we could write secret letters away from unwanted eyes and in relative peace was the attic in our barrack. The mere stay in the attic was also not allowed. Nevertheless, the hiding place in the attic was used by cigarette smokers for a long time. In the sleeping area of the barrack above the third floor of the beds, entrances to the attic were made in known places, tearing off a few boards in the ceiling.
After receiving a sign from the family that the first secret letter had been read, the dangerous game engulfed us completely.
We started working on the improvement and expansion of the correspondence.
First of all, we stopped writing between the lines. Instead, we used the inside of the official camp envelope. Then, we gained space because it was possible to increase the number of lines on the blank paper. Undoubtedly, it was also a safer system. Each envelope in the first period of correspondence was assigned a consecutive number so that families in Poland could more easily check whether they received all the letters we wrote. Finally, we have expanded the circle of people who participated directly in our activities. Based on the surviving letters, apart from the four mentioned earlier, another four were directly involved in writing the letters in invisible ink: Zofia Sokulska, Alicja Jurkowa, Bogumila Babinska and Wojciech Buraczynska (The first two from Lublin). Maybe there were other people, but I don’t remember them. In addition, there was a small group of women closest to us who knew about our secret correspondence and helped us in various ways, but they did not write the letters themselves: we thought that for the good and safety of all involved in the activity, it was better not to excessively increase the number of people aware of writing this type of letters. Sending letters with hidden content lasted a year and a half – until June 1944; all correspondence with the country was cut off due to shifting the eastern front to the area where our families lived.
After twenty years, it is difficult to reconstruct how many letters reached our families. But in the returning correspondence, we did not find a trace that any of the letters sent to Lublin would be lost.
I also know that all letters sent by Bogumila Babinska and Wojciech Buraczynska to Warsaw and near Warsaw reached their addressees.
Twenty-seven original letters have been kept in my family, including twenty-two written by me, four by the Iwnski sisters, and one by Wanda Wojtasik. In addition, the contents of several letters were stored in the form of copies made from the original files immediately after reading them. Thanks to this, it was possible to resolve many doubts when deciphering the content of the originals. However, there are some originals that today are impossible to read, and since there are no copies, they were either not read at all or in such scraps that it was not worth transcribing them.
The period in which we conducted secret correspondence was very favourable in some respects. First of all, we were seasoned prisoners, having many acquaintances among our fellows. Thanks to this, shortly after we started the correspondence, we were able to arrange the sending letters by regular mail through our colleagues working outside of the camp column in Hohenlychen. These were the so-called standard “smuggled” letters. We wrote secret letters in parallel for some time: on the envelopes censored by camp officials and on the letters or envelopes sent by regular mail smuggled by going outside labour columns then sent by regular mail, which reached our families in places still occupied by Germany. Then, at the end of 1943 and in 1944, we gave up writing on camp envelopes. Then, of course, in the available content of the “smuggled” letters, it was possible to smuggle much more information to the families than in the letters subject to camp censorship; and it was written entirely in Polish!
Another way of sending messages to occupied Poland was to contact the branch of Oflag IIA in Neusterlitz. There was a so-called ledekommando, the column of prisoners working outside of the camp, in which Wanda Wojtasik and I worked for a short time. One of the POW cadets – Eugeniusz Swiderski – systematically corresponded with Anila Chalubinska, a family friend, passing on various information about the camp and medical experiments conducted in Ravensbruck concentration camp. He gave us the most practical favour by sending the so-called camp report to my family – a comprehensive description of the Ravensbruck camp and what was happening there, prepared by scouts from the secret underground team “Mury” – hidden in the double bottom of a coffee can. The second factor favouring and improving our contact with families was the receipt of food parcels from our relatives.
Parcels came more often than letters, and in them, according to the agreed signs, we were provided with confirmation of the letters. For example, there were threads of a specific colour or the number of letters received written on the tin inside the package.
When we realized how the inspection of food parcels in the camp (the SS woman searched the box in the presence of a prisoner) was done, we managed to receive “secret messages” from families, usually hidden in a tube with toothpaste. Hence the letters often mention “paste.” Sometimes food items were wrapped in book pages. In this way, families smuggled Mickiewicz’s “Pan Tadeusz” and Zeromski’s “Echa lesne”.
The secret correspondence cited below is – with one exception – excerpts from my letters. It should be emphasized that we did not treat the correspondence as a personal one. Instead, we decided together on what facts to include in the messages. Also, when drafting the letters, two people usually took part. For example, in Lublin, this correspondence reached mainly the families of Wanda Wojtasik, Iwanski sisters and mine. In the early stages of the correspondence, when it was our priority to quickly send as much information as possible, each family received different parts of messages. So families retrieved and read the letters collectively. This is why there is not a bit of personal touch to them.
While reading excerpts from this correspondence today, we must remember that the authors were young girls. Their age and lack of perspective on immediate experiences influenced how the facts were written and interpreted. Reading some letters, one can have an impression of contrast between the tragic in their actual content and the optimistic annotations that most often concern the authors personally. In this way, we wanted to reward our parents for the harrowing experiences of reading the letters.
These bright accents, often greatly exaggerated, distorted the camp’s image, so they are rarely quoted. I also do not mention repetitive but irrelevant for the whole, sentences concerning, for example, signs in letters and packages, etc. Finally, I did not correct any stylistic faults in the quoted letters.
The letters are arranged in chronological order. There are two reasons for this. First of all, although the letters are small scraps of the whole camp life, including the life of the group of the women on whom German doctors performed medical experiments, thus arranged neatly, they give some idea about the changes taking place in the camp. Secondly, I treated these letters as the actual content of these memoirs, not as illustrations, hence the chronological order that seemed most appropriate.
The first secret letters were devoted to medical experiments. Most letters’ content represents a list of women, victims of these experiments. The letters with the list were sent in several copies: first in the camp secret letters and later in the regular letters smuggled by prisoners working outside the concentration camp. The lists of victims, made in the spring of 1943, do not include all names, nor do they provide precise information on the number of experiments performed on individual persons. The letters also have mistakes in the victims’ names and numbers of the camp victims of medical experiments. For example, at the time of writing, some lists contained alive victims who were later executed by the SS.
In the lists of victims, there were mistakes in the names and prisoner numbers and the dates of individual medical experiments. These inaccuracies can be explained by considering the conditions in which the letters were created. For example, there were some mistakes when making excerpts from letters that were difficult to read. However, it is impossible to rectify them today due to the illegibility of the originals.
Here is one in a series of such letters, unfortunately with gaps that cannot be filled. First, we put crosses next to the names of women who died during medical experiments. Apart from the names of three victims of experiments carried out in August 1943, the last ones (Helena Piasecka, Stefania Sieklucka, Joanna Szydlowska) do not include the names of fifteen victims of medical experiments carried out in different periods. They are Wanda Kulczyk, Apolonia Rakowska, Maria Nowakowska, Maria Pajaczkowska, Weronika Szukszul, Genowefa Kluczek, Jadwiga Luszcz, Irena Krawczyk, Stanislawa Jablonska, Maria Kaplon, Barbara Pietrzyk, Izabela Rek, Irena Backiel, Maria Cabaj, Anna Sienkiewicz. Some of these names are mentioned in the regular lists smuggled out of the camp.