ravensbruck 5

The prisoners filed into the bunker. Dorothea Binz waited for the paperwork and watched the guards, the dogs panting at their side, pulling the unconscious women through the snow. The prisoner will be dead before Appel in the morning. The Blockovas under her command have already started to slash their whips across the legs and dole out some precautionary beatings with metal truncheons to the prisoners before flinging them into the stone cells. All are damp and lack light, but in some the window is blocked off and there was stifling darkness. As the numbers in the camp have multiplied, a cell with five, six, seven, eight bodies fighting each other for food became more common. Prisoners left for days with nothing but cold air to eat.  

But some of the more valuable inmates, Countesses, for example, with powerful Reich connections, were also kept away from others in the camp, in the luxury of single cells, almost like guess rooms with blankets and more than one serving of bread and watery cabbage soup and the prison guards to wait upon them and able to sun themselves outside when the better weather begun.   

Binz made it known, other than a rudimentary slap or punch, no one was to harm Bertha, she likes to beat prisoners herself, keep her hand in, and bring them down a peg or two, especially the ringleaders.

Her blonde bobbed hair caught the light of the snow as she rushed outside to gossip with the other guards and make a fuss of the dogs, rubbing between their ears. Slapping and ruffling the fur under their chests. She had a dog of her own in the kennels that she likes to pet and feed titbits. She’d worked as a child on a farm and knows the worth of animals, as do most of the local guards. She’d worked in Ravensbruck since leaving school early and knows what rules to bend and moved through the rank-and-file to her present position by being firm.

She had a certain knack for keeping order and on her first day at work had beaten an old crone that kept coughing and spluttering during the count to death. Only later did she find the inmate had been a year older than her.  The uniform with its eagle on the sleeve and cap appealed to her as did tripling her wages and specially built model accommodation. Binz pinched herself that she was a natural blonde; the other guards, counterfeit, bottle-blondes with mousy hair crouched together at the door, out of the cold.

One of the many perks of their job was access to hairdressers, with all the latest styles, manned by inmates through the wall from where they shaved new arrivals to prevent lice and promote moral hygiene. Other girls from Fustenberg and the surrounding districts were envious of her good fortune and access to making a good match with SS men who haunted the local bar. Many like her, joined up, having little or no education was no drawback and even a childhood bout of TB, a major drawback to any employer, worked in her favour in fostering a fraternal environment. Binz was treated locally in a sanatorium by the prestigious German Red Cross facility, but it is now an onsite facility for the SS elite and uses the women from Ravensbruck as guinea pigs to conduct experiments on sulphonamides, sepsis and gas gangrene.

On her day off, Binz borrowed two good horses and a carriage, to arrive in grandeur at the house of a local farm, where she’d worked briefly in the kitchen as a maid. The former giant of a mistress met her at the front door, her coiffed hair added a few inches to her waif-like frame, but she was barely up to Binz’s shoulder.

 ‘You look well, Dorothea,’ she had said.

Binz held her hand over her mouth, as any proper young women should, when stifling laughter at how small the farm was.

‘Yes Emma,’ said Binz, modestly, ‘I’m one of the lucky ones’.  

‘I’ll be mother,’ said her former mistress.

She had brought out the best bone china and served her almond cake—her own special recipe—in  in the front room with a piano she’d been scared to touch, where Binz, her face flushed, had been reprimanded for knocking over a picture frame while dusting and smashing the glass.

She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette and glanced over at the piano where the black-and-white photograph of a young couple still stood. He wore a uniform and her dark curls were as bright as their smiles.