A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (18 page)

Maybe the Kapo and the SS men got their trains muddled up.

Maybe you and the others weren’t on your way to Sweden.

Maybe there was never any intention of rescuing you at all.

Be that as it may, there is certainly no intention of rescuing you when you leave Ravensbrück a second time.

“Instead of Sweden, we were sent to Wöbbelin,” continues the letter you fear might bore the woman who is to be my mother.

I like your concise, low-key style. You really are doing your best not to bore your reader.

The story of Wöbbelin can hardly bore anyone.

The rail route from Ravensbrück to Wöbbelin runs due west, first through an area of lakes with long stretches of deciduous woodland and narrow forest roads, then through increasingly open agricultural countryside with small villages and towns along the roads, which are still narrow but now lined with poplars. When traveling by car, however, one can go west from Ravensbrück only by first going north for about ten kilometers and then taking the exit for Wesenberg and Mirow, and it’s not a straight route, particularly if you want to avoid the Berlin-to-Hamburg superhighway, which I do. Between Ravensbrück and Wöbbelin there are plenty of minor roads to go astray on, roads where in moments of inattention one runs the risk of being caught on camera.

It’s actually the road to Ludwigslust I’m taking, since Wöbbelin is too small to appear on my map. Wöbbelin is five kilometers north of Ludwigslust, so if I find the one, I ought to find the other. Ludwigslust has been called a gem of a town, as its name perhaps hints. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Mecklenburgian Grand Duke Christian Ludwig had a palace built here to satisfy his lust for hunting. Around the same time, he had a church built at an appropriate distance from the palace, perhaps to set limits to his lusts.

Ludwigslust is indeed a gem. Both the palace and the church are still standing, and the area between them has long been an
open common, lined with old linden trees and well-preserved half-timbered houses. The only thing disturbing the idyll, on closer inspection, are the two hundred flat gravestones in four straight rows, fifty stones per row, lying along the walkway between the linden trees, two rows on each side. Half the stones are engraved with a cross and half with a Star of David. That’s all. No names, no dates, no explanation. The stones are pale gray granite, and for particular reasons especially thick (eight centimeters) and extremely heavy (fifty-five kilos), and sunk deep into the ground, and provided with a graffiti-proof glaze. In short, they would be awkward to remove, and difficult to vandalize. For a gem of a town to have its most central place covered by gravestones is, after all, rather unexpected—and not entirely uncontroversial, either.

Especially not as the graves were dug once upon a time by the residents of the town themselves, at the command of American troops.

The forced digging takes place on May 7, 1945. While the world is celebrating the German surrender, two hundred dead bodies from Wöbbelin are lying in rows between the palace and the church. They are all wrapped in commandeered white cloth, carried to the freshly dug graves by Germans ordered to do so, and laid out on simple field stretchers, their tormented, emaciated faces left clearly visible. Every grave is marked by a white wooden cross. A voice-over on the documentary film of the mass burial announces that fifty-one of the two hundred graves are marked with a white Star of David, but none of these stars is seen in the film. What we do see are the residents of Ludwigslust, eyes lowered and heads bare, filing past the shrouded bodies. The townspeople are all well nourished and well dressed, in many cases even dressed in their best, and do not seem to have grasped
yet what is happening. Some women dressed in black are seen hesitantly placing flowers on some of the bodies, as if not quite knowing whether this is the appropriate thing to do, or as if at the last moment they are recoiling from the exposed faces. In his burial address, the American military chaplain, Major George B. Woods, hammers home their guilt and shame: “Within four miles of your comfortable homes 4,000 men were forced to live like animals, deprived even of the food you would give to your dogs.… Though you claim no knowledge of these acts you are still individually and collectively responsible for these atrocities.”

The contrast between death in Wöbbelin and life in Ludwigslust is grotesque and provocative, and the impulse to hold the well-nourished and well-dressed to account is hard to suppress. Revenge hangs in the air. Anger seeks an outlet. The decision to turn the prettiest place in Ludwigslust into a cemetery and memorial site answers a demand. The well-nourished and well-dressed are to be taught a lesson they’ll never forget. Never again shall they be able to stroll under the linden trees in the parkland between the palace and the church without being reminded of the atrocities in Wöbbelin.

That’s the idea, but it doesn’t turn out that way. Less than a year later, just as in Uchtspringe, the American troops are replaced by Soviet troops, and within a year or two the white wooden crosses and Stars of David are gone, and soon the blatant lie (we knew nothing and could do nothing) settles like thick grass over the memory, and had it been up to the good citizens of Ludwigslust in the German Democratic Republic, set free from history, the grass on the graves would have been left to grow higher and higher.

When the lawn between the palace and the church is nevertheless dug up again, it’s because people with good reason to remember the atrocities in Wöbbelin are suddenly able to return. A good ten years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Leonard Linton, a former corporal in the 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army, returns, and in November 2000 he launches a scheme to have the graves restored. Half the work is to be paid for from public funds and half by private donations, and what might still be lacking he’ll pay from his own pocket. Linton quickly gains a hearing from the local politicians of another era, and on April 22, 2001, the new, heavyweight, graffiti-resistant granite stones are laid out between the palace and the church, at exactly the same spot where once the wooden crosses and Stars of David stood. The day before, hundreds of neo-Nazis had marched through the streets of Ludwigslust and, stopping just a few steps away from the still unmarked grave lots, demanded honor and rehabilitation for the SS (and by extension for the perpetrators of Wöbbelin). The need for heavy granite and graffiti-proof glaze is thus dramatically illustrated.

On May 2, 2001, the fifty-sixth anniversary of the liberation of Wöbbelin, the graves in Ludwigslust are rededicated in the presence of, among others, some ten of the Jewish men from the
Łódź ghetto who were dispatched from Auschwitz in September and October 1944 to the Büssing factories in Braunschweig and in April 1945 were loaded aboard a train in Ravensbrück that was said to be taking them to Sweden but took them instead to a place called Wöbbelin. They’re all visibly moved by the commotion and, it seems, still somewhat surprised. Fifty-six years is a long time, and they may be wondering why nobody’s been in touch before, and I sense that they feel like pinching themselves now and then as they walk past the newly laid gravestones between the palace and the church in Ludwigslust and it gradually sinks in that the well-nourished and well-dressed have once again, this time of their own volition and apparently for posterity, allowed the memory of the atrocities in Wöbbelin to be etched into the prettiest part of their town, so none of them will henceforth be able to stroll with their children or grandchildren under the linden trees beyond the palace lake without running the risk of being questioned about the graves.

Unless it’s winter, of course, and a layer of newly fallen snow covers everything, and they’ll have to know exactly where to brush the snow off a bit so that the question about the graves can be asked.

In the long run, who wants to remember Wöbbelin?

At the Hotel Mecklenburger Hof, in the bar decorated with hunting paraphernalia, I get into a conversation with a man and a woman of about forty who have fallen in love, and have obtained separate divorces, and are having a drink to celebrate their good fortune. He’s an engineer from the West and she a nurse from the East, and they’ve just moved here, so it doesn’t seem the right time to bring up the graves in the park.

When I leave Ludwigslust the next morning, it has stopped snowing. You won’t need a map for Wöbbelin, the woman at the
reception desk assures me. Just continue a few kilometers along the road from the hotel. You can’t miss it.

Wöbbelin isn’t on the American troops’ map either. They don’t know of any place with such a name, still less that it’s a concentration camp, when they enter Ludwigslust on May 2, 1945. Only after they spot three naked, emaciated men in a broken shop window, trying to swap their striped prison clothes for something better, is the existence of Wöbbelin revealed. The camp has been abandoned by the SS during the night, and some of the inmates have managed to “go shopping” in Ludwigslust, and around noon, troops from the US 82nd Airborne Division move out to the north, following directions.

“One could smell Wobelein [sic] Concentration Camp before seeing it. And seeing it was more than a human being could stand,” writes the American commander, General James M. Gavin, in his memoirs.

Aussenlager
Wöbbelin in the Neuengamme archipelago is one of the last concentration camps to be set up in Nazi Germany. It’s in existence for ten weeks, from February 12 to May 2, 1945. Its main and before long sole function is to kill off its inmates. In Wöbbelin there are neither armament industries crying out for slave workers, nor a system for exploiting them otherwise, nor a system for keeping them alive, nor a system for putting them to death. Wöbbelin is hell, organized as the absence of every human necessity. Within the newly unfurled barbed wire and the hastily erected watchtowers, a few unfinished brick barracks stand in the late winter chill; the roofs leak, the windows
have no glass, the doorways no doors, and the floors no floorboards; the prisoners sleep on the ground, with nothing to lie on or to cover them, many of them wearing only their prison clothes, stiff with dirt. There’s scarcely any water (one polluted pump for the whole camp), scarcely any food (initially a kilo of bread and half a liter of “soup” to be shared among ten prisoners with no plates or cutlery, afterward less and less, and toward the end nothing). An overflowing latrine pit soon forces everyone to relieve themselves anywhere but there, and the total lack of washing facilities soon leads to deadly epidemics.

In the course of ten weeks, at an accelerating rate, more than a thousand of the five thousand prisoners in Wöbbelin die. At the beginning of April, some forty are dying every day, but by the end of the month, when you arrive, between eighty and a hundred. A few more unliberated days and the camp would have fulfilled its mission. Until the middle of April, the corpses are dumped into newly dug mass graves in the sandy heathland beyond the forest, a few kilometers from the camp and not far from the railroad track that links Wöbbelin to the rest of the disintegrating camp archipelago. It happens that living bodies are thrown into the mass graves as well. In the piles of dead bodies, one or two are still breathing.