If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm

track of time, but she still peered through the holes into the neighbouring cells to see if anyone was there. One of the cells looked quite comfortable compared with hers; it had a bed with a blanket and a stool, but it was still empty. A little time later – she didn’t know how long – Hanna heard someone talking in the cell and recognised the voice. It was Olga Benario.
    As both Leocadia and Olga had feared in the last days of August, Olga’s Mexican visa had got stuck in the post – in fact it hadn’t got past New York. On 1 September German forces marched into Poland and war broke out, removing any chance of Olga leaving Germany. On 8 September the Gestapo took her back to Ravensbrück.
    Considered less of a threat now (for reasons not explained), the conditions of her confinement were not as strict as before; she had regular food and was able to receive mail, which included an envelope from the Mexican consulate in Hamburg, sending on a copy of the visa, which they had by now received. As Olga well knew, however, it was too late – and in any case copies were not good enough.
    Writing under new and stricter wartime censorship rules, Olga wrote to Leocadia and Ligia on 13 September:
My dears!
I am back in Ravensbrück camp. Received entry permit to Mexico from the Mexican consulate, Hamburg, but am afraid that I won’t be able to make use of it. However, I know that you will continue to do everything possible for me. Pass the enclosed letter on to Carlos and please write more details about Anita .
Lots of love, kiss my little child for me .
Yours Olga .
    As soon as she could Hanna made herself known to Olga by whispering through one of the tiny holes she had made in the wall. Olga was amazed to find her friend next door, saying she’d heard about the arrest of the Tolstoy reading group when she first came back to the camp.
    Hanna said she was being starved, so Olga offered to share her food, and they managed to enlarge the hole in the wall so that Olga could give Hanna bread – just as Hanna had got food to Olga when she was being starved a few months earlier. ‘You need some warm food, but how can we do it?’ wondered Olga. ‘The best thing would be if you bring your mouth up to the hole and I will feed you. In the morning I’ll give you the bread, right after Zimmer has brought the coffee.’
    Olga then told Hanna she had news for her, but they had to talk quickly before ‘ die Alte ’ came back. The news was that war had broken out. Sitting in her solitary cell, Hanna had no idea, so Olga passed on all she’d learned in Berlin. Soon everyone in the cell block knew, because Zimmer was ‘celebrating and boasting to the prisoners about the “glorious” news of Nazi conquests which are happening every day in the war’.

Chapter 3
    Blockovas
    D oris Maase saw a great deal from her window in the Revier . She watched women guards and SS men enter the staff canteen opposite at lunchtime and then saw them go out ‘as courting couples’ in the evening. In early September 1939, soon after war began, Doris looked out and saw a prisoner run at the electric fence. She was trying to kill herself, but was stopped by a young blonde guard who dragged her to the Strafblock , beating her as she went. Doris learned that the guard’s name was Dorothea Binz: ‘ I saw Binz take the skeletal woman away and beat her with a cane on her naked thighs. Such cruelty in one so young and pretty made a lasting impression on me.’
    Binz’s appetite for cruelty soon made an impression on everyone in the camp. And yet, until she got the job here, she had been little noticed. The daughter of a forester, Dorothea Binz was one of several local girls who started work over the summer. These recruits were different to the women who arrived with the prisoners five months earlier from Lichtenburg. They had no experience of any other penal institution, and many were so young that they had no meaningful experience of life before Nazi