The Polish woman had returned to Ravensbrück, 70 years after she had last seen the place. This time, she was in a wheelchair, strolled around by an attentive volunteer who called her his “auntie” and wore a Polish flag scarf with her concentration camp number emblazoned on it. They would stop periodically to take selfies with some of the young people who had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
Stanislawa “Stasha” Sledziejowska-Osiczko was one of the lucky ones. She had made it home.
Stasha was a member of the Ravensbrück rabbits, 72 Polish Catholic female prisoners who were subjected to a series of inhumane medical experiments by Nazi doctors at World War II’s only all-female concentration camp. The group’s name came from their treatment as medical lab rabbits — and also, because the cruel experiments often left them with injuries and deformities that meant hopping was the only way they could get around.
Their story has never been widely told, but now, a new novel called “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly describes their incredible journey, which spanned from the concentration camp to the United States, where a well-known philanthropist and socialite named Caroline Ferriday would help them recover from their horrific injuries. Her circumstances could not have been more different from those of the Ravensbrück prisoners — and yet she became one of their biggest defenders during a time when the reality of concentration camps seemed very distant to most Americans.
“In the beginning, [SS commander] Heinrich Himmler used [Ravensbrück] as a show camp. There were flowers in the window boxes, birdcages and a beautiful road lined with trees. Himmler would show it to the international Red Cross to prove [he was] supposedly treating the prisoners well,” says Kelly of the camp 56 miles north of Berlin, which housed prostitutes, socialists, communists, political protesters, abortionists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others.
“In the middle of the war, they needed all hands on deck to work, so they weren’t executing as many people. Toward the end, when [Germany was] losing, they began using the gas chambers.” Some 120,000 prisoners passed through the camp over the course of the war; 50,000 died.
While “Lilac Girls” is a novel, Kelly used several real people as characters, including Caroline Ferriday and a German doctor named Herta Oberheuser, who performed many of the experiments. A dermatologist who was desperate to become a surgeon, Oberheuser seized the opportunity to work in the camp. (Later, she would be sentenced to 20 years during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. She only served five years; after she was released, she would go on to open a family medical clinic in Stocksee, Germany.)
Ravensbrück’s sulfonamide experiments, as they were known, were performed to test the efficacy of sulfa drugs. They studied nerve and tissue regeneration, including bone transplantation from one person to another. Otherwise healthy prisoners had parts of bone, muscle and tissue removed without anesthesia; healthy limbs were amputated.
While the research was ostensibly to study battle wounds, “That was [only] what the Nazis wanted people to believe,” says Kelly.
The experiments were actually precipitated by the death of one of Hitler’s close friends, high-ranking SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who died from injuries sustained during a car bombing in 1942. Heydrich was treated by Himmler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, who refused to use sulfa drugs when operating on him. When he died, Hitler blamed Gebhardt, insisting Heydrich was killed by gas gangrene.
Gebhardt devised the experiments with Himmler to prove to Hitler that the decision to avoid sulfa drugs was correct. Heydrich’s injuries were re-created in detail on the women, in order to research just what had gone wrong. The doctors would deliberately maximize the potential for infections by inserting glass shards and bacteria into open wounds before sewing them up.
At first, the experiments were conducted on male prisoners at Sachsenhausen, a camp in Oranienburg, Germany, but those were suspended because the prisoners complained too much and were becoming difficult to control.
So the physicians turned to women, thinking they would submit meekly.
“They would take groups of 10 women, keep them for a while and then use a different group,” says Kelly. “Some of them died during the experiments, and several were executed right after. Some hadn’t healed yet, and had to be carried to the shooting wall.”
In researching details for “Lilac Girls,” Kelly spoke to several Ravensbrück survivors, who told her a heartbreaking detail: When the women were about to be executed, they would do each other’s hair.
“They would pinch their cheeks for color, do their hair, do the best they could to make themselves beautiful for that last walk,” Kelly says.
“And they talked about whether they would be brave enough to shout ‘Long Live Poland,’ because the Nazis hated that. There was a sedative drink [guards] would give them, and some women refused to take it.”
During the last months of the war, the Nazis determined to execute all remaining rabbits, as they were living proof of the atrocities committed. But other Ravensbrück inmates intervened in a great show of solidarity.
The rabbits had been gathered in a room and rumors were circulating; everyone believed this would be the night of their execution.
That’s when a group of Russian prisoners shut down the electrical grid, plunging the camp into darkness and allowing the women to hide under bunkers and in attic spaces. They remained safe this way until March 1945, when they were rescued and brought to Sweden via the Red Cross (and, eventually, back to their native Poland).
When the women were about to be executed, they would do each other’s hair.
Ravensbrück was one of the last camps liberated, leaving the Nazis plenty of time to destroy documents. As a result, little is known about the camp. But by the time it closed down, the results of the countless rabbit experiments were slanted in Gebhardt’s favor.
The story of the rabbits went largely untold until 1958, when Ferriday, who lived in Connecticut and came from a wealthy NYC dry goods fortune, learned of it from a friend and convinced journalist Norman Cousins to write an article in the Saturday Review. Reader donations poured in, totaling $5,000 — a healthy amount at the time.
Ferriday, then 56, was determined: The women would come to America, and she would help them get treatment for their Ravensbrück injuries.
“Americans right after the war were really sick of [the] war,” Kelly says. “That’s what was amazing — that she was able to galvanize people.”
After months of negotiations with the Communist Polish government, 35 of the rabbits — nearly half of the group — came to the States for extensive treatment, both physical and mental.
The women went to different cities, depending on which hospitals were best suited to handle their specific injuries. Four of the former prisoners stayed at Ferriday’s house in Bethlehem, Connecticut, for Christmas in 1958.
When Kelly went to Ravensbrück in 2015 for the 70th anniversary of its liberation, she met Stasha, now one of five surviving rabbits, each of whom has a volunteer aide who takes care of them.
“When I asked her about coming to America and meeting Caroline, that was the one thing she has trouble talking about, because she wanted to stay [in America] and be an actress,” says Kelly.
“After everything that happened to her — the fact that Stasha had to come home from America, that was the sad thing!
“But there is such a wonderful peace to the rabbits I spoke to. They don’t hate anymore. They let everything go. [When talking about Ravensbrück], Stasha said, ‘I don’t hold a grudge at all. I forgive them completely.’ ”