As the crow flies, Mauthausen is some 700 km from Ravensbrück, but by train traveling through a bombed Germany and Austria, the journey was nearer 1,000 km and took three or four days, since the train stopped frequently.
Sabine described her journey to Mauthausen in a variety of reports and excerpts for the Red Cross and to author Dunya Breuer:
“The following morning, we were marched to the train station and pushed into cattle and coal wagons, around seventy women per wagon. The only way was to stand up or lie across each other, legs pulled up as much as possible, causing terrible cramps and stiffness. The Aufseherin, the woman in charge, and the guard sat by a small oil lamp and demanded a space around them, as they were worried they might catch our lice and nits, thus making the place even more cramped. A small metal bucket was provided by way of a toilet. It frequently had to be emptied through a small gap in the doors by some unfortunate sitting near there.
“On departure we were given one large piece of bread and a surrogate sausage, but since we did not know how long our journey would be, it was difficult to decide how much to eat and how much to save and for how long. Of course, if you saved it, the chance of it being stolen while you were asleep was great.
“The wagons were not only filthy with coal dust, but also freezing cold. Despite traveling in a southerly direction, the weather did not get any warmer. Occasionally the train stopped, and we were allowed to get off to relieve ourselves underneath the train.
“In our wagon, there was a woman who had gone mad and who constantly tried to run away. After having caught and beaten her several times, the guards tied her by her wrists to the open sliding doors, her feet barely touching the ground. It was very distressing seeing her hanging there like Jesus on the Cross.
“We managed to remove a plank from the side of our wagon so that we could see the passing landscape. We traveled through Berlin, which in March 1945 looked very sinister, like a ghost town with blackened, bombed buildings covered in dirty snow. The few people we saw did not look in much better condition than we were ourselves. It was an eerie sight.
“After four days, we finally arrived in the middle of the night at a small, quiet station, exhausted and starving. The dead were removed, and those women too weak to stand were taken to the back of the train and shot. I remember the shots.
“In moonlight and through heavy snow, we were forced to start our march in groups of five, carrying whatever possessions we had. A lorry drove behind us, picking up the bodies of those who succumbed on the way. We walked through several villages and hamlets, but nothing moved anywhere. I looked up at the bedroom windows and, seeing no one, I wondered if people were too scared to look, or were they too used to seeing these pitiful processions and slept through them?
“One of my worst memories is that of a Roma or Jewish woman carrying one child and holding the hand of another, who walked a few rows ahead of me. She was exhausted and kept falling down. The SS guards threatened and beat her, and the others around her tried to help her up, until the guards got fed up and dragged her to the end of the line and shot her. The other women took her hysterical children with them.
“We were all so afraid to fall down and not be able to get up again. We knew what would happen.”
Terror and an iron willpower to survive kept these women going. I have often wondered how some managed to survive these horrors, while others gave up or went mad.
Perhaps it was by thinking only of the next step, the next hour or day, and perhaps complete detachment, and with calm fatalism accepting the awful reality of what was going on around them. Thinking or feeling made you weak.
Sabine said later, “After the war, I buried these memories, but later they came back. It seems only then you begin to realize all the things that happened to you.”