Gross-Rosen to Mauthausen to Bergen-Belsen to Departure (February to Summer 1945)

Gross-Rosen to Mauthausen to Bergen-Belsen to Departure (February to Summer 1945) - Chapter 5

The rail evacuation from Gross-Rosen and the arrival at Mauthausen (February 1945)

Her departure from Gross-Rosen came at the end of the largest military collapse of the war in the east. The Soviet Vistula-Oder offensive began on 12 January 1945 and carried the Red Army across Poland and into Silesia within weeks. By early February it held bridgeheads over the Oder, and Breslau, where she had worked at Hundsfeld, was being turned into a fortress city. The encirclement closed in mid-February, and the siege lasted until 6 May. At the Yalta Conference (4 to 11 February) the Allied leaders were already discussing the postwar order, and the Dresden bombing (13 to 15 February) fell in the same week as the liberation of Gross-Rosen. The SS emptied the camp complex as the front arrived, and the first rail transports from the main camp left on 8 and 9 February. Gross-Rosen had begun as a granite-quarry subcamp of Sachsenhausen in 1940, became independent in 1941, and by 1944 ran about a hundred subcamps across Silesia and Sudetenland. In the final year it became one of the largest holding systems for Jewish prisoners moved up from Auschwitz.

Evacuation by rail in February was not a mercy compared with marching. The Reichsbahn assigned open coal and freight wagons, and the journeys from Silesia to Austria could take four to seven days without food, water or shelter. February temperatures regularly fell well below freezing. Survivors of these Gross-Rosen transports describe arriving with many dead in the wagons. At Mauthausen, prisoners and SS alike remembered the arrival of the “Gross-Rosen transports” as a distinct and especially bad episode. The 2,249 Jews you carried forward from Gross-Rosen to Mauthausen, mostly from the Riese complex (the underground construction project in the Owl Mountains), were a small part of a flow that also included Auschwitz evacuees, prisoners from the Reich’s eastern camps, and the transfers from Mauthausen’s own network of subcamps. Mrs. Ilkow’s group was among the minority of women. Mauthausen was a men’s camp with a small women’s section, and the arrival of thousands of Jewish women from the east was an improvisation for the camp administration.

By February 1945 Mauthausen was close to its peak population. The Mauthausen-Gusen complex held roughly 70,000 to 85,000 prisoners that winter, and about half of the 190,000 people deported to the complex over its history died. The camp sat on a granite hill above the Danube near Linz, and its SS commandant, Franz Ziereis, had run it since 1939. The climate in early February 1945 was already one of reprisal and panic. On the night of 2 February, about 500 Soviet officers in the punishment block (Block 20) broke out, and the “Mühlviertel hare hunt” that followed was a manhunt joined by SS, Volkssturm and local civilians, in which almost all the escapees were killed. The camp’s gas chamber, which her narrative says she learned of only after the war, remained in operation until the last days of April, and it was used more intensively in 1945 on the sick and exhausted who could not be absorbed into the overcrowded barracks.

Several details in her Mauthausen testimony match what is documented about processing there. The striped garments she calls pajamas fit the practice of issuing whatever prisoner clothing was available, including improvised issue of striped pajama-like sets in this period. The dirt floor she describes is consistent with the improvised housing Mauthausen used for new arrivals. The camp erected a tent camp (Zeltlager) in the winter of 1944 to 1945 and used various quarantine and transit barracks to absorb mass arrivals. Her account does not say which of these she was held in, and her words alone cannot settle it. Much more important historically is the naked medical inspection she describes before doctors. Admission examinations at Mauthausen were also a screening mechanism. Prisoners with scabies, lice-related skin disease, open sores or obvious weakness could be removed from the arriving mass and sent to the infirmary (Revier), where many were killed by injection or in the gas chamber. Her remark that she and her sister always passed because they had no skin ailments, which she attributes to a farm diet, is a significant testimony about what the screening looked for.

The Czech-speaking doctors who told her not to be ashamed are one of the most historically specific features of this phase. Mauthausen’s inmate administration was dominated by political prisoners, and the Czech prisoners, many arrested after 1939 and after the Heydrich reprisals of 1942, formed a substantial and organized group. They staffed parts of the prisoner infirmary and held positions in the camp’s internal administration alongside the Spanish Republicans, who had been deported from France in 1940 and became a decisive force in the camp’s clerical offices. These prisoner-functionaries could sometimes steer individuals past dangerous selections, and they often tried to give comfort to new arrivals who, like Mrs. Ilkow, had been taught Czech in a Czechoslovak school. Her recollection of the kindness is consistent with the political prisoners’ solidarity networks. Her mother’s modesty, which the narrative treats in the Auschwitz context, finds a counterpart here in a moment when professional prisoners recognized the shame of forced nakedness.

The sirens and the planes she describes belong to the Allied air campaign against Austria. From February onward the US Fifteenth Air Force, flying from bases in Italy, struck Linz, Steyr, Vienna and other targets in waves, often in daylight formations of several hundred bombers. Linz, the Nibelungen industrial complex, the Hermann Göring Works and the rail yards were heavy targets. Mauthausen sits only a few kilometers from this industrial zone, and prisoners elsewhere in the complex remember the alarms and the formations overhead. Her image of the bombers rising in the sky “like birds” is the testimony of someone seeing, for the first time, the scale of Allied air power.

The second transport and the stalled train (about March to April 1945)

Her stay at Mauthausen lasted about two weeks, and then she was moved. The exact transport cannot be determined from her words, but the pattern is well documented. In the last months of the war the SS shuttled prisoners between overcrowded camps as fronts moved, and Bergen-Belsen was designated as a reception point for women from the evacuated eastern camps. This is why you see Hundsfeld women going directly to Bergen-Belsen while others, like Charlotte Rudner, followed a route resembling hers. The figure of about 3,500 Jews from the Gross-Rosen system reaching Bergen-Belsen reflects the same process. Her description of a “nice train” and of Hungarian girls assuming they were being sent home belongs to a real feature of these transfers. Prisoners were occasionally put in ordinary or mixed rolling stock rather than cattle wagons, and rumors about repatriation or exchange circulated widely, partly because the SS itself spread talk of exchange schemes and partly because the prisoners could not believe the system would not release them in the end.

The state of the German rail network explains why a journey from Austria to northern Germany could take ten days or more. The Allied transportation campaign, including the large raids of 22 and 23 February 1945 (Operation Clarion) against rail targets across Germany, together with relentless fighter-bomber attacks on locomotives and rolling stock, left the network fragmented. Transports of prisoners were shunted onto sidings for days, rerouted around destroyed junctions, and sometimes abandoned. Survivors of evacuation trains from Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald and elsewhere in April 1945 describe the same pattern, and several of those trains were bombed or strafed with heavy loss of life. Her account of mixed carriages, with non-Jewish political prisoners at the end of the train, matches the practice of assembling convoys from whatever prisoner groups were available. The anger of those prisoners, who beat the Jewish women after their own wagons were hit, is a recorded feature of the final weeks: the fear, hunger and death around them broke down solidarity even among victims. Her interpretation of why her wagon was spared, and their cry about God’s favor, belongs to survivors’ own moral reckoning with such coincidences.

The ten days in the fields without rations reflect a breakdown the SS guards shared. Guards, too, were cut off from supply, and the Reich’s food distribution system was failing. German farms stored potatoes over winter in earthen clamps, and the ground could stay hard through the nights of March, so the frozen potatoes the women dug out with spoons have a plausible origin in these field stores. The searching of farm garbage reflects what many evacuation-train survivors describe: stalled convoys became foraging parties under guard.

Bergen-Belsen (March or April 1945)

The camp she walked into had a complicated history that shaped what she found. It began in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp, and tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners died there in 1941 and 1942. In 1943 part of it became an “Aufenthaltslager,” a residence camp for Jews held for possible exchange against Germans interned abroad, and a small number of exchange transports did leave. On 1 December 1944 it became a concentration camp under Josef Kramer. Kramer is directly connected to her earlier story. He was commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 until November 1944, the period of the Hungarian deportations, so the man in charge at Birkenau when she arrived was the man in charge at Bergen-Belsen when she reached it. Several of the staff convicted at the British trial at Lüneburg later in 1945 also had Auschwitz backgrounds, including the Oberaufseherin Elisabeth Volkenrath, the guard Irma Grese, and the physician Fritz Klein, who had worked selections on the Birkenau ramp.

From January 1945 transports from the evacuated camps poured in, and the population rose from around 15,000 to about 60,000 by mid-April in a camp built for a fraction of that number. Food collapsed, water supply failed in the final weeks, and typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery spread through the crowded barracks. Roughly 35,000 prisoners died between January and the liberation, and about 14,000 more died in the weeks afterward. Anne and Margot Frank died there in February or March. Her description of being unable to enter by the door and climbing in through a window fits survivor accounts of barracks packed beyond capacity. Her description of the latrine fouled so badly that people lived and slept in it reflects the sanitation collapse that British medical officers later documented. The mounds of corpses she compares to a house are confirmed by film and photographs taken by British army cameramen.

The prisoner hierarchy she describes also fits. Belsen’s women’s sections were run through prisoner-functionaries, many drawn from the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück populations, and meeting an acquaintance from home who was a Blockälteste matches the networks formed by Hungarian and Czechoslovak Jewish women. The rutabaga (Steckrübe) soup she remembers eating there, and her mother’s old prediction about it, correspond to the main daily food: a thin soup of turnips or swedes and a small bread ration that shrank toward nothing as April went on. Weed-pulling and field work are less well documented for the last weeks, but work details of various kinds continued at Belsen into the spring.

Her note that the SS guards who watched them spoke Hungarian is historically intriguing. Besides the SS, the camp had Wehrmacht and Hungarian army detachments among its guard force in April, and former Austrian guards from evacuated camps were scattered around the eastern and southern evacuation routes. The truce she does not mention, agreed on 12 April, left the camp’s administration and guard in place under an arrangement that kept Wehrmacht and Hungarian units on duty while Kramer remained in command, because the British feared the spread of typhus. This is why some guards were present when the British arrived.

Her story of trucks that were to take women to be thrown into the sea belongs to a wider atmosphere of the last weeks. Himmler’s orders in this period allowed local commanders to kill or evacuate prisoners, and transports were being assembled from Belsen in early April, with three trains carrying thousands of prisoners leaving between 6 and 10 April. One was liberated by US troops at Farsleben on 13 April and another by the Red Army at Tröbitz on 23 April. The sea, moreover, was a real fate for other prisoners. Neuengamme prisoners were shipped to Lübeck Bay in late April, and on 3 May 1945 the RAF bombed the ships Cap Arcona, Thielbek and Athen, killing thousands. A story told in Belsen about being driven to the sea belongs to a world where such rumors had a basis in the evacuation of the camps on the North Sea coast. The German remark about the devil not wanting them was a common way of rendering a breakdown of an SS plan, and it fits a camp where transport and fuel had run out.

Her statement that the bread was poisoned appears in several Belsen survivors’ accounts. It has no documentary confirmation, but it reflects the final-week conditions when food was scarce and survivors were hunted by hunger and dread. What medical records do confirm is that food itself became a mortal danger after liberation. Starved prisoners who ate army rations such as corned beef and biscuits often died of refeeding complications, and the British medical officers later learned to use diluted mixtures and, for the weakest, intravenous feeding.

Liberation by the British (15 April 1945)

The British Second Army had advanced across northern Germany in April. A truce was negotiated at the camp’s perimeter, with Wehrmacht and British officers agreeing to declare the area a neutral zone because of the typhus. The 11th Armoured Division, with the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery, entered on 15 April, a Sunday. Kramer was arrested that afternoon. The first British officers on the scene, including medical officers of the 11th Armoured Division, recorded seeing thousands of unburied corpses and tens of thousands of living prisoners in a state they struggled to describe. Within days, Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the deputy director of medical services of VIII Corps, took charge of the relief effort, and Lieutenant-Colonel Mervin Gonin of the 11th Light Field Ambulance left a famous account of the first days. Rabbi Leslie Hardman, a British army chaplain, arrived within days. The British army film unit recorded the scenes, and Richard Dimbleby’s BBC radio report, broadcast on 19 April, brought the camp’s reality to British listeners.

Her account of the British soldiers in the camp storehouses matches events on the day, since prisoners with enough strength stormed the food stores, and some ate until they were sick or died. Her sauerkraut, found on a floor, is a plausible item among the stores of the camp and the neighboring Wehrmacht Panzer training school at Hohne, whose barracks held ample supplies. The spraying for lice she remembers describes the first stage of the British response, the dusting of prisoners with DDT powder, still a new wartime delousing agent. The SS guards were made to bury the dead under British supervision, and bulldozers filled the mass graves in the following days.

Her sister’s discovery in the pile of the dead has parallels. In the days before and after liberation, the dead were gathered in heaps near the huts because no one had the strength to bury them, and British medical officers did occasionally find living prisoners among the dead. Her sister’s illness was typhus, as she later says in her testimony, and it was the central epidemic of Belsen. Typhus is carried by body lice, has an incubation of about two weeks, and spread because of the unwashed crowds and filthy clothes she describes.

The movement she describes after the bath, to a camp where German soldiers had been housed, is the Hohne barracks complex. The British set up the so-called “human laundry” there to strip, wash and dust survivors, and then turned the Hohne barracks into the hospital area, moving thousands of the sick over the following weeks. Belsen itself was too contaminated to remain. On 21 May the last huts were burned with flamethrowers, and the site was cleared. The Hohne area later became the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, which lasted until 1950. The Red Cross clothing she remembers fits the distribution of civilian clothing and Red Cross supplies that began in the weeks after liberation, followed by UNRRA staff and student volunteer medical workers who arrived in May.

Leaving Bergen-Belsen (summer 1945)

Her departure belongs to the Swedish relief effort. Sweden, through the Swedish Red Cross and its vice-president Count Folke Bernadotte, had already rescued thousands of Scandinavian and other women from Ravensbrück in the “white buses” operation in March and April 1945. In the summer the Swedish government agreed to take thousands of liberated survivors from Germany, mostly women, with medical priority, on the order of ten thousand. The French doctor she mentions fits the multinational medical staff working among the survivors. The provision that a patient could be accompanied by relatives explains why her group presented companions as kin, a practice many survivors used for friends. Her sister’s illness made her eligible, and the weeks of quarantine she describes on arrival were routine for these transports.

Her decision not to go home also reflects a change in the map. The Subcarpathian region from which she came, annexed by Hungary in 1939 and then occupied, had been claimed by the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia ceded it by treaty in June 1945. Her village, Novoselytsia, became part of Soviet Ukraine, and the Jewish community was gone. Many survivors from this region faced a return to a country that no longer existed, which is why her comment, “good thing I didn’t go home,” carries historical weight.