Gebele was working overtime and often wrote to Sabine in the middle of the night.
On this Wednesday, April 4, he wrote at 2 a.m. and told her he had only just returned from work. It is not clear where he was living, but it is likely that he slept where he worked.
He had received a “sweet” letter from Sabine, for which he thanked her, although he was surprised by the content. She had told him that the rumor going around was that prisoners would be freed very shortly. Gebele confirmed that there was a possibility, or rather, there had been a discussion about an exchange of prisoners of certain nationalities, the Dutch, Danish and Norwegians. This would not happen immediately because the Red Cross in Geneva and the Swiss government were still in negotiations (with Himmler), and there was still uncertainty over the outcome. Gebele announced he was involved in this process and was working on a document relating to it. Or so he said.
“I am happy that you will all be free soon.” According to Gebele, the lists with names of the possible male and female evacuees from these countries had been compiled that very day, and included “a certain little Sabine Zuur.”
Gebele, elated that he could make sure Sabine would be on this list, was prepared to work all night. The camp authorities were very keen to make this plan work, thinking the Allies would see them in a better light if they agreed to these exchanges. They thought the same goodwill would be returned if they built a “neues Revier” (a new hospital), showing off their good care of the prisoners. According to Gebele, “They are scared witless of the consequences for them personally. They are simply trying to rescue their reputations, these criminals.” Gebele wrote what was for him a rather bald statement about his superiors.
Meanwhile, Sabine had written to him to say how sorry she was that they would be separated so shortly after they had gotten to know each other and that she feared he would soon forget her. But Gebele assured her, “I know that your departure will hit me hard and that, perhaps at the key moment I may behave in a somewhat unmanly fashion from a mixture of joy and tearful pain...only the future and fate will reveal to us what is to become of me and then I shall be pleased to resume our correspondence and indeed come to visit you, but only if you feel for me more than friendship.”
He continued for many pages declaring his love like a teenager, until he came to his senses and announced he must stop thinking about her departure or “otherwise I will still be here tomorrow night.”
However, he still reminisced also about the day of his arrest, August 20, 1936: “I know that I am forty years old and ‘unfortunately’ German. My degree qualification and doctorate were revoked by the People’s Court of Justice on August 20th 1936 on the basis of my conviction. I cannot and will not return to life in this unjustly based German social structure from which I have been ejected merely because I sought to bring to safety human beings who had been persecuted and robbed and plundered down to the last penny of their savings, just for the benefit of the masses. At the high point of my life I was forced to sacrifice my future to the ignominy of a regime and their crimes, in order to finally end up loveless and dishonored in a concentration camp, branded a criminal.”
Where in the outside world would he find a woman who would understand what he had suffered, “but you, Sabine, you understand what it is to drain the poisoned chalice.” Like him, she had endured terrible hardship and had been a witness to mass annihilation. He longed for a woman who had shared his hardships, who was not frightened by the horror stories of the hell he had lived in. Their shared experiences would form an eternal bond.
Yes, I love you with the last drop of my blood and I beg you to tell me one thing, in case we may not meet again. If you really understand how I feel, will you please give me your hand in marriage?
He confessed that if he had not had his daughter, he would probably have ended his life years ago. Now that the war was nearing its end, there was another challenge waiting for him: life in freedom. Even so, he had already made plans.
He would move to Valencia and start a business, something to do with cars or planes, a typewriter shop or something where he could use his professional qualification as an engineer. He had even already written to certain persons abroad, although he was aware that, after this disastrous war, the Germans would be vilified everywhere in the world. But he would manage. The thought of freedom encouraged him to think about a new life away from Germany, with a soul mate, to start a new business, to build a house and have children.
Unfortunately I was not able to come and see you yesterday evening, as the gate was locked until the Hauptsturmführer appeared. I had such a good supper prepared for you, but had to retreat without reaching you. Your washing is being completed today, Thursday, and will be ironed tomorrow. I have an appointment with Dr. Steijns today and he sends greetings to you via my adjudant.
Meanwhile it is 4 a.m. and I can no longer function properly. Tiredness and pain summon me to stop. What is on my tongue I can no longer say.
If the issue of your release suddenly becomes imminent, please send Nadja to call me immediately and if we don’t see each other again, meine liebe Sonnenschein, please always remember, there is someone who loves you from the bottom of his heart, you little Seelchen, and will remain loyal to you, waiting, free from all sadness, for a single word. A man to whose life you gave meaning.
From this long letter, it is clear that Gebele was nearly succumbing to stress. He was hardly able to put his words together coherently. The situation in the camp was becoming more chaotic by the day, despite the end of the war inexorably nearing. The transports taking their victims to the gas chambers increased, and the desperation of the regime to hide their barbaric deeds intensified. People, administration, everything was being destroyed as quickly as possible.
Reading Gebele’s letters, I begin to feel more and more suffocated. Sabine must have felt that ten times over. She couldn’t reject him because she needed his help and protection, and above all, she depended on him to put her name on the evacuation list.
With Gebele’s increasing insistence for an answer to his big question (would she marry him), Sabine’s anxiety must also have intensified. She could not rebuff him too much as she needed him to survive. Apart from that, with any luck, he might have placed her at the top of his evacuation list.
In March 1945, Count Folke Bernadotte, on behalf of the Red Cross, started negotiations with the Nazis from neutral Sweden, regarding the liberation and evacuation of concentration camp prisoners. Bernadotte was a member of the Swedish royal family and possessed an enormous and influential network. His opposite partner was Heinrich Himmler, who, unlike Hitler himself, still saw possibilities to save the German Reich. For Himmler, freeing prisoners was not a humanitarian question, but rather an effort to save what was left of his country, not to mention his own skin.
His problem was that in order to agree to evacuations, he had to allow the Red Cross entry to the camps, without them somehow discovering what barbarities had been committed there. The negotiations dragged on and on, but Bernadotte did not give up. He had already succeeded in freeing Norwegian and Danish prisoners at an earlier stage, while the Red Cross had sat on its hands and had done nothing to free prisoners.
Talks between Bernadotte and Himmler took place, among others, in Hohenlychen, just 10 km from Ravensbrück. But even when evacuations had been agreed to, it was difficult to put them into practice. To drive convoys of seriously ill, wounded and traumatized people through a Europe ravaged by war and still fighting was a nearly impossible feat.
Nevertheless, between March 16 and May 1, 1945, Bernadotte managed to save 15,000 people. On April 2, a convoy of white buses departed for the German/Austrian border to collect prisoners from Dachau and Mauthausen. From the Danish border, this was a journey of more than 1,000 km. In Mauthausen, they collected sixteen Nacht und Nebel women, all Scandinavian. Sabine was not among them. Did Gebele try to get her on this convoy, or could he not bear to part with her?
Sabine must have felt destroyed. I found a short letter that Gebele sent her the same day:
Meine liebling, you go on to say that you are not concerned by the thought of a possible evacuation. I am afraid such an attitude ought to make me really angry with you. Are you aware what effect statements like that have on me? I hardly imagine you can, otherwise you would not write such things to me. I can only hope you don’t seriously mean it.
But for Sabine, it made no difference whether the whole camp was liberated by the Allies or whether the Red Cross took only a group of people. As long as she could leave.
Gebele had of course realized that if his Sonnenschein left Mauthausen, he would be left on his own. For him life only had meaning if “his” Sabine was there too.