While the wounded were lying in the corridors, waiting for treatment, a few of the male prisoners approached them and handed out food that they themselves had received in parcels from home.
One male prisoner who approached Sabine was Franz Josef Gebele. He was in the hospital himself while recovering from a bullet wound as well as being an orderly there. He offered to help her in any way he could. He seems to have instantly taken a great liking to Sabine, and she, finding someone who for the first time in years was kind and wanted to help her and look after her and, more to the point, was able to do so, gratefully received his attentions and food offerings. She probably felt she could accept his help because, although he was a hated German, he himself was also a prisoner and in the camp against his will. Sabine was still in a state of shock from the bombing, the ensuing panic and her injuries.
Gebele told her that he came from München (Munich) and had already been a prisoner for eleven years, and in that time he had gained the trust of the guards. Mauthausen was only opened in 1938, so where he was imprisoned before, I have not been able to find out. Perhaps Dachau, as that was a criminal jail before the war. In documents he is variously described as Franz Gebele or Franz Joseph (or Josef) or even Johann Joseph, which makes it difficult to trace him. I was however, able to establish the reason he was there, but Sabine at this time of course did not know. He was a Berufsverbrecher, a career criminal. He wore a green triangle, indicating he was a thief.
After Sabine had been treated for her wounds and left the hospital to return to her own barrack, Gebele smuggled letters to her via the Russian stretcher-bearers (also prisoners themselves) and she, in return, smuggled letters back to him on paper he supplied.
I found a bundle of seventeen of his letters, some typed, but most handwritten in the last few weeks of the war. In a note with them, she had written, “These letters are written by Franz Josef Gebele, a German prisoner of war who had already been imprisoned for eleven years and who fell in love with me and saved my life.”
Sabine’s letters are lost, but Gebele’s letters offer a fascinating glimpse of life in a concentration camp in the last few weeks of the war as well as being a strange kind of love letters. After eleven years living in the most dire circumstances, he was a desperate and damaged man.
It took me some time and effort to find someone who could translate these letters for me since they are written in the old-fashioned Sütterlin script no longer used, and while the handwriting itself is beautiful, it is very difficult to read.
Initially, on reading the letters, I felt a great dislike for Gebele, and the fear my mother must have felt was tangible. With every letter, he fell more and more obsessively in love with her, and yet at the same time, there was always a slight threat, meant as a joke, but in the context of the camp surroundings, nevertheless a threat, in most of his letters.
But the more I read them, the more I felt pity and gratefulness for him. He did save her life, after all, by preventing her being sent to the gas chamber, which, after having broken her ankle and being unable to work, was a real possibility. He provided her with food, medication, and clothes, and protected her from the advances (or worse) of the guards and other prisoners.
The war was nearing its end, and the tension in the camp was very high. Discipline slackened, and more and more fights broke out between the prisoners, all desperate to survive, being so close to liberation. After years of extreme hardship and dehumanization, many had turned into savage animals.
Although Gebele constantly assured Sabine of his love, his letters are written formally, even after Sabine suggested right in the beginning that they should abandon the formal Sie and use the more personal du instead.
His first letter to her is undated, but was written shortly after the bombardment and after she had left the Revier.
Sehr Geehrtes Fräulein Zuur,
On the basis of our conversation earlier today I permit myself the freedom to importune you with a few lines and should not wish to miss the opportunity to ask you, honored lady, for the address of your dear mother for a purpose which I imagine you will clearly recall (from our conversation).
Please let me have the full address including that of her emergency accommodation, and I promise that you need have no concern whatsoever about what I shall arrange for your benefit. In addition I wanted to ask you most earnestly for your date and place of birth as well as your profession, I should be grateful if you please would not attempt to draw me on the purpose behind the request for the moment, but perhaps to return to it later when you are restored to freedom. I must be open and honest and admit that a sincere interest in your person has strongly attracted me to you after my being permitted to get to know you a little personally. Please do not interpret my forwardness in writing to you as effrontery and I particularly do not wish to exploit your status as a detainee or turn your head in any way. I believe I recall having told you who and what I am. If you will, grant me assent to permit me to be allowed to express myself in greater detail and greater depth, but, above all, you must first become well once more and to that end I would like to ask you from the bottom of my heart to grant me permission to contribute to your recuperation insofar as it is within my limited powers and given my insignificance in the camp. To that end I should put myself entirely at your disposal and ask accordingly that you should make full use of me. I ask you once more that you please excuse this letter and, if I may be so bold, ask [you] to treat it with discretion. In the meantime it is a matter of some urgency that I should like to speak with you in private and in person.
With heartfelt greetings and best wishes for a swift recovery,
Yours Franz Josef Gebele
P.S. Please respond to my correspondence and above all to my offer of help without false modesty and as directly as you are able to. Deliver to me or via your female doctor whenever my daily visit to you proves impossible. Please feel free to share with me whatever weighs heavily on your heart: I think that at the age of thirty-nine one can assess facts and form judgments particularly well, so please have confidence in me just as I have in you. Tell me everything and you will find me a good advisor and for the time being a friend. What happens to us in the future, fate and the future will determine. For now I wait in expectation of a timely answer from you, both willingly and in the hope of hearing from you.
Was this a guardian angel sent to save her? Sabine was very ill, starved, exhausted and wounded in the bombardment. To attract the interest of someone in a position to offer help and protection was a miracle, even if he was German. Perhaps she persuaded herself that, since he was also a prisoner, he couldn’t be all bad. Besides, she was also desperate to let her mother know that she was still alive. Being a Nacht und Nebel prisoner, she had not been able to receive or send any messages home.
When Gebele wrote his first letter, Sabine had been approximately two to three weeks in Mauthausen. Not long after she was wounded in Amstetten, at the end of March, the British and American armies crossed the Rhine, and there were no further strategic obstacles in their march towards Berlin. The Allied armies moved with great speed: sometimes the front line in Europe moved several kilometers in one day. The Canadian army started its liberation of the still occupied parts of Holland.
On March 13, 1945, Queen Wilhelmina returned, for the first time since 1940, to Holland for a period of ten days. On May 2, she would leave London and return to Holland for good, accompanied by her adjudants, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Peter Tazelaar.
But in Mauthausen, the war continued for the time being.