Karolina Lanckorońska

Karla, as she was called, spent her childhood and study period in Vienna and Rome. She studied history of art. In the now independent Poland, she settled in Lviv, where she got a job at the local university. There, she became the first woman in the country to receive her habilitation in art history. When the war broke out she joined the resistance movement. She became a lieutenant in the Home Army. She also worked for the Polish Red Cross organizing food for prisoners and prisoners of war.

In the middle of 1942 she was arrested, and after a long investigation was sent to the Ravensbruck camp on January 9, 1943. Until then, she did not know exactly what a concentration camp was. The Polish women confined to the camp quickly familiarized Lanckorońska, who for the Germans functioned as number 16076, with camp life. In the block, she was given the position of stubmaid (supervisor of one of the rooms in the camp block). She was able to move more freely around the camp, which she used to gather information.

She quickly learned about the executions carried out on political prisoners, as well as, among other things, the fact that babies born in the camp were thrown into the central heating furnace. She also learned about the fate of female prisoners on whom were carried out medical experiments. These women were called “rabbits” and were operated on by Dr. K. Gebhardt. During the operations, bones were broken and transplanted, and bone material was taken. The purpose of the experiments was to compare bone healing. Lanckorońska recalls the meeting with the “rabbits” as follows:

There was a young person waiting for me (…) and she said in a whisper “Miss, come with me into the room to the left, there are rabbits, the ones recently operated on. You should see them, you may come out alive and you have a lot of friends abroad. They will believe you“. We entered a small room, where five young girls were lying. Closest to the door was lying a young girl, maybe twenty years old, blonde. The guide asked them to uncover their legs. I noticed, apart from the bandage, two or three old scars from previous operations, each 20 cm long, above or below the knee (…) the guide managed to tell me that the rabbits were now being looked after, that there was a difference from the first operations. At that time they were lying completely abandoned, saving each other, no one had access to them, they didn’t even have water.

As late as 1943, Karolina Lanckorońska managed to send an encrypted report from the camp to the commander of the Home Army, General Tadeusz Komorowski, in which she reported on the crimes committed in the camp.

In addition, Lanckorońska gave lectures on art history to female prisoners and took care of her fellow inmates. She was a housekeeper in the block for French and Jewish women, and later in the block for N-N (Nacht und Nubel)-Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, French and “rabbit” women. Lanckorońska used her function to obtain additional food and medical care. The women on whom medical experiments were carried out were kept hidden in various blocks, among other things, by giving them numbers of dead female prisoners, so that the Germans could not identify them.

As Karolina Lanckorońska recalled, on February 4, 1945, there was a sort of mutiny by female prisoners when they learned that the camp authorities planned to execute all the “rabbits.” When the Germans surrounded the blocks where the women were located after the medical experiments, the female prisoners turned off the electricity in the camp and hid the wanted women under cover of darkness.

Karolina Lanckorońska was released from the camp on April 5, 1945 after the intervention of International Red Cross President Carl J. Burckhardt. At the end of the same month, most of the women locked up in the camp left in a so-called death march. On 30th of April 1945, the camp was liberated by the Red Army.