Being a prostitute has never been easy, much less in the Berlin of 1939. Not only because of the bad life it entails, but because of the cold, which penetrates the bones of anyone who spends more than five minutes on the street, and because convulsive political turmoil. Therefore, when some officers offered many of them a salary, they accepted. The conditions were not clear to them, but they were clear about the promise of a better life. Although promises are not always kept and can be poisoned, to the point of becoming a death sentence. That was what a ticket to Ravensbrück meant. But they did not know that until they arrived at the concentration camp, when the meaning of this concept was not even known. The historian Fermina Cañaveras (Torrenueva, 1977) has spent four years researching and interviewing some of the few living testimonies who went through that hell and who, despite the pain, wanted to speak to honor their companions and so that nothing of what happened there It happened to be forgotten. The result is The Women's Barracks, a title that refers to the warehouses converted into brothels within the camps.
“At first, they recruited prostitutes but then the confinement was extended to the rest of the women. You got off the car, they tattooed you with a license plate, because from that moment on your name disappeared, and they shaved your head. But there were a few who kept their hair and deloused them. It was not a good sign. To them, they added another mark, that of a black triangle, the lowest link. They did it to lesbians, to asocial ones, and to those they planned to turn into prostitutes. The latter, beyond everything mentioned above, had the word Feld-Hure written on their chests, or in other words, country whore. Then, they made them undergo a quarantine and, days later, what they called the initiation test. After passing the required gynecological test to make sure they were healthy, they were dressed in very thin cotton nightgowns and members of the SS and high officials forced them to perform fellatio and anything else that came to mind at that moment. If you refused, they would shoot you. If you did it and they didn't like it, you were also dead,” says Cañaveras.
The alternative was not better. “If they accepted you, they took you to the women's barracks and, then, what awaited you was an average of between seventeen and twenty rapes a day. If one day the number dropped due to lack of officers, they were also in charge of transporting bodies of women who had just been gassed to take them to the ovens.”
With this statistic and without using any protection, pregnancies began to arrive and, with them, almost always, death. Both the inmate and the baby. “They changed their huts and moved them to another one they called the rabbit hut. There they were subjected to all kinds of pseudoscientific aberrations. They injected them with chimpanzee semen and the bacteria that causes syphilis, inserted mice into their vaginas or opened them with scalpels. There were few children who were allowed to be born. But they would not live much longer, because they also experimented with newborns.” Many times, another nurse prisoner was asked to help the doctor perform this perversion on her companions, which was also a method of torture, since there was a lot of sisterhood among inmates. But disobeying orders also meant death.
The teenage girls chosen as prostitutes lived in an adjacent barrack, the Uckermak. “They used them to reeducate Aryan homosexuals.” All of them had ten minutes to clean themselves before the rapes took place. “Some of them have not forgotten the smell of roses from that soap. A perfume that still repulses them today.
Cañaveras admits that the writing process was not easy for him. “They had told me such terrible experiences that I ended up internalizing.” He owes his investigation to one of them, the Spanish Isadora Ramírez García, with whom he could not speak, since she died years before the beginning of the investigation. “She survived, but it was difficult to find out about her because, like many of them, she left with false documentation. She was very young when the Civil War broke out and she had no political convictions, but her family was Republican, so they had to go into exile. Her brother was missing and she had a dream of finding him and finally reuniting the whole family. This is actually a love story.”
She joined the Resistance, always hoping to find her brother along the way, but ended up detained, deported to Ravensbrück and assigned to the country brothel. “I was missing some details and that's why I fictionalized the story instead of writing an essay, although everything I narrate and a large part of the characters I mention really existed. A book that is made of scraps of many women who have been forgotten for too long but whose stories can never again be silenced.”
