The Letter of February 15, 1944
On February 3, 1944, international transport of 945 old, sick and unfit for work prisoners left for Lublin; it included 110 Polish women (we could not write down a few names), one from the Lublin transport and eight from the Warsaw transport. Several Russian prisoners of war were enlisted, including two crippled. The camp authorities did not include Jews, children, and the mentally ill. Two Poles from the group of internees in Yugoslavia, who had been brought to the camp two weeks ago, were added to them – one is asthmatic, the other is healthy. Many of the deported prisoners were healthy – they were more than 65 years old. Many tuberculosis cases were curable.
Luckily, a small group of Polish women managed to get out of the list.
In factories outside the camp where prisoners work, the doctor announced earlier that whoever was sick or could not work could return to Ravensbrück and be treated. As a result, many female prisoners who did not want to work for the German war industry ended up on this list after returning to the camp.
Women, a German prisoner, told the camp commander that her six sons had gone to war to serve in the German army, and now he was sending her to the gas chamber. The commentator said that the deported prisoners would only be exchanged for healthy people; furthermore, the deported prisoners may write to families that there would be more transport like that in the future, and the mentally ill would go separately.
The prisoners travelled in freight wagons for thirty people in each wagon; they received food for three days, two buckets of coffee and two bales of straw. Some of the sickest remained in the camp. The seriously ill prisoners were carried on a stretcher to the railway station. Many of the deported prisoners fainted – we know of forty such cases. Rozalia Kirylo, camp number 7702, asks us to notify her family about the departure – the address for correspondence is Karolina Dudzinska, Warszawa 6, Terespol on the Bug River. Rozalia was seriously ill but curable (too many red blood cells.) Large transports of prisoners are coming to the camp.
Three thousand French women political prisoners, Yugoslavs, Dutch Jews with children, etc., arrived here; From France, all prisons were evacuated to our camp.
The Letter of February 22, 1944
For some time now, parcels from the Red Cross from Geneva have been coming to Polish women – so far, they are getting those prisoners whose names are given by friends from the Oflag. If it were possible to pass on our names – women subjected to medical experiments, it would help us – it is not about food but its moral significance. These parcels are carefully registered, and if they were sent to all of us, it would have made an impression on the camp authorities that out there, apart from the camp, there was a list with the names of Polish women who were experimentally operated on by German doctors; this could affect our fate because we still think that the camp authorities would like to remove the traces of criminal medical experiments by killing us. Suppose it cannot be dealt with otherwise than through the Oflag. In that case, Dziuba proposes to ask Jozef Mazurkiewicz and Czesław Stefanski, who would help – as well as Nius (Eugeniusz Swiderski from the Neusterlitz Oflag hides under the name of Nius, who was in constant contact with my family – a comment by Krystyna Czyz in her memoir ), he has our list. We have no contact with him for the time being. Please inform him that as long as Marta is on the team, we cannot contact them – let them wait; besides, maybe they will write to us officially (you can give my, Duski or Dziuba’s address) to keep in touch. Oflag correspondence is in addition to our limited monthly mail.
If the packages project is feasible, write “girls’ wishes can be fulfilled” or vice versa if none of this is possible. Last week, a transport of 350 Russian women (from Riga) arrived, they were five days, and it turned out that they were by mistake, because they were supposed to work in German factories. So yesterday evening, they were dressed head-on, packed, a multitude of overseers treated them horribly, then they were taken away from the camp. Among them were children from thirteen years old, pregnant women and older women. They stood in the frost during roll-call in socks and summer dresses, all heads shaved.
Prisoners of Block 15 were divided into four Polish blocks, and the victims of medical experiments (except for two that were in other blocks) were transferred to block 32. To us victims of experimental surgeries, the camp authorities joined the other Poles, French, Dutch, Norwegian, and German women in Postsperre and Packetsperre. There are 189 women prisoners on each side of the bloc. Write the address with a blue crayon. Write the package number on something in the package, because sometimes they take away the boxes. For several days, an order has been issued stating that children from ten years of age are to stand for working roll calls as “verfugbare,” i.e. they are to be taken to work.