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In May 1944, a prisoner named Eugenia Kocwa escaped from a Forestry Kommando which was under the command of a 19 year old SS female guard who the Polish prisoners called Shenja. Her real name was Eugenie. A good natured girl whose home was in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, on the banks of the River Danube. The work crew was composed mostly of Polish prisoners and was headed by a Polish woman named Myszka Liberakowa. The crew normally worked hard felling trees and stacking wood, but they were allowed frequent breaks, and they went about their business without any harassment or fear of punishment.
They were instructed in their work by a kindly forester, a civilian named Kretschmar. He would mark the trees which had to be cut and, knowing about the meagre food rations in Ravensbrück, he would tell the women the best places to steal potatoes. After awhile he would burn the branches and the women baked potatoes on the burning fire.
Shenja and her guard dog liked to take naps in a little hut the prisoners had built out of pine branches to house the axes and saws used for tree cutting. She did so on Liberakowa's promise not to let anybody run away. It was because of Shenja's easy-going, trusting nature that Eugenia Kocwa was able to escape from the work crew.
In spite of a widespread manhunt, she was never found. She had planned her escape meticulously for about a year and postponed it several times until circumstances were just right. The hardest parts were putting together a respectable-looking civilian outfit and obtaining German money, but these were accomplished through the Camp barter system.
Kocwa was well educated, spoke perfect German and had the sense not to tell anybody else of her plans.
After leaving her work crew, she put on the civilian clothes that she had hidden in the woods, walked right through the centre of Furstenberg, and continued walking toward Berlin. She walked all night, and twenty-four hours later was in Birkenwerder, on the outskirts of Berlin. Once in Berlin, she went to the brother of a fellow inmate, who helped her. Five months later, she was home in Cracow.
Back at Ravensbrück, there were serious repercussions for the whole work crew. Ramdohr, the local Gestapo chief, interrogated everybody involved, but learned nothing. The entire work crew were sent to the punishment block where they were segregated from the rest of the camp by a barbed wire fence. There they were given the worst outdoor jobs, including cleaning out the toilet pits, with no time off and no postal privileges.
The crew leader, Liberakowa, and the guard Shenja, were sent to the Bunker and kept there for months until the camp was evacuated in April 1945.
The Bunker, which was located just inside the camp walls, contained 78 primitively furnished cells, 39 in each of two stories. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement. The cells were tiny, generally unheated and the prisoners were kept in almost total darkness.
Shenja had been sent to the Bunker on a previous occasion for smuggling letters for Polish prisoners to their relatives. After the escape, this Forestry Kommando ceased to exist.
While in the bunker Shenja got facial erysipelas, an illness which results in a red, infected swollen face. The symptoms include shaking, fever and vomiting. She was sent from Ravensbrück to the hospital in Schwerin for treatment.
In her book - Under Two Dictators, Margarete Buber-Neumann relates how five weeks after Ravensbruck was liberated she came across Shenja hiding in a ditch, still in her SS uniform. Shenja recognised Buber-Neumann as a former member of her Forestry Kommando. Afraid to go back to her home in Ulm, where she would be arrested as a former concentration camp guard, she started to weep.
Sitting next to her at the edge of the forest, Buber-Neumann gave her the addresses of former prisoners and advised her to write to them as soon as the mail started to work again. She also gave her her own address in Thierstein.
She advised her to get different clothes or risk being beaten up or killed. Shenja hadn't thought of that, her conscience was clear, she hadn't hurt anybody.
It's not known what happened to her after she left Buber-Neumann.
References:
Ucieczka Z Ravensbrück by Eugenia Kocwa, published by Union Verlag, 1973.
Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp, 1939-1945 by Jack G. Morrison, Markus Wiener Publishers, 31 May 2000.
Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler by Margarete Buber-Neumann, published by Collins, London 1989.
