BIOGRAPHY: Joanna K.

In 1940 Joanna K. made friends with Stefania G. and Janina K. in one of Warsaw’s clandestine high schools. The girls were keen to get high-school qualifications (“Abitur”), even though Polish children were prohibited from entering the “Gymnasium”. The three girls soon joined an illegal scouts troop.

In August 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising they were arrested as members of the resistance movement and taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

As the war progressed, the growing demand for manpower resources also led to the deployment of greater numbers of concentration camp inmates in armaments production. Slave labour was also recruited from Ravensbrück concentration camp. When two representatives of the “Reichswerke Hermann Göring” and an SS officer visited the camp to choose prisoners fit for work, the women were made to attend roll-call completely naked. Joanna and her two friends were transfered to Salzgitter-Bad on 13 September 1944, along with 300 other women, seemingly the first to be settled in the satellite camp located south of the town. They were billeted in four wooden barracks, each consisting of eight rooms with 16 beds apiece, a washroom and a room set aside for the senior barrack or room inmate. This group of prisoners was made up of women from Poland, France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Russia.

Many of the undernourished and exhausted women never survived the winter. The striped camp clothing, the wooden clogs and the paper wrapped around their feet offered no protection against the bitter cold. “In particular, the delicate-limbed Greek women who were unaccustomed to this climate froze to death. At every roll-call you could see the Greek contingent literally melting away”, Joanna K. recalls.

The prisoners in the “AG für Bergbau- und Hüttenbedarf” metallurgical plant worked in grenade production. Joanna K. operated the lathe. The women had to perform this labour non-stop eight hours a day without a break. After their arduous factory workshift they were then made to perform tidying and cleaning duties for hours on end.

The “evacuation” started in the night of 7-8 April. Together with prisoners from Drütte concentration camp, the women were loaded onto rail freight wagons. The next day, while standing in the railway station in Celle, the prisoner transport was caught in a bombardment by three US air squadrons. Large numbers of prisoners were killed inside the sealed wagons. In the general panic many tried to flee but were later herded together again or simply shot on the run by the SS and civilian inhabitants of Celle. Once recaptured by the SS, the remaining prisoners were marched away towards Bergen-Belsen. “Each gunshot sparked in me an unbridled willpower and the strength to continue walking. I was 18 years old and I didn’t want to die. (...) After marching for two or three days we finally came in sight of the destination, a large camp surrounded by barbed wire and lots of guards. It was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. (...) I won’t even try to describe what it looked like. In comparison to Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Neuengamme were heaven. Only hell could look like this.”

As members of the Polish resistance movement, after the war Joanna K. and her two friends received a school education and military training in special camps in Oberlangen, Italy and England.

In May 1947 the three friends finally went back to Poland. With the help of the Red Cross, Joanna K. managed to locate her father, and together they returned to her mother in Poland. Joanna started studying medicine and qualified as a doctor. In the course of her professional career she specialized in the problems caused by concentration camp imprisonment, investigating its physical and psychological effects, and gave treatment to former concentration camp inmates. In 1990, for the first time since the war, Joanna K. returned to Salzgitter to take part in a memorial ceremony. The following year, she was accompanied by her two friends on a second