This testimony was written by Ekaterina Volkova between 1985 and 1987, two years before her death. For 40 years she remained silent about her experiences in the Ravensbrück camp. These are her words.
My name is Ekaterina Volkova. Everyone called me Katya. I am 71 years old. And for most of my life I pretended that the years between 1942 and 1945 never existed. I erased those years from my memory, like erasing a burnt photograph. But such memories cannot be erased. They remain there, buried inside, waiting, bleeding inside, even when you smile on the outside. Now, knowing that I have little time left, I must tell what happened in the cellar of Ravensbrück.
Not for me, but for those who didn’t survive to tell the story. For those whose names were erased from the records, whose bodies were burned without ceremony, whose voices were silenced forever. This is my story, and this is their story too.
It was August 1942. I was 26 years old and a nurse in the Red Army. Our medical detachment was captured near Smolensk after 7 days of continuous fighting. I saw fellow soldiers shot by the roadside simply because they dared to wear a military uniform. The Germans considered this unnatural for women. The punishment was immediate. A shot to the back of the head, no questions asked, no trial.
I survived that initial inspection because the officer noticed the Red Cross symbol on my torn uniform. He spared me. I still don’t know why. Sometimes I wished he hadn’t. We were transported in freight cars for 11 days without enough water, without a place to lie down, breathing the smell of urine and the despair of dozens of other women, crammed together like animals.
Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian women. All were captured for minor crimes: hiding food, listening to illegal radio, helping the wounded on the wrong side of the war. When we arrived at Ravensbrück, I still believed that my medical training could save me, that perhaps the Germans needed qualified nurses, that my knowledge would be valuable. How naive I was.
In the early morning of August 12, 1942, two SS guards dragged me from my wooden bunk in Block 10. They said nothing; they didn’t need to. Their silence was more terrifying than any threat. They dragged me through damp corridors to the concrete stairs leading to the basement of the camp hospital. A basement that wasn’t on the official Red Cross maps.
A place that technically shouldn’t exist. The corridor was about 50 meters long. Low ceiling, rusty iron beams, water constantly dripping. There were nine heavy metal doors, irregularly spaced. Everything painted gray, everything with small barred windows. The first four doors were open. I could see skeletal women lying on iron bunks, staring into nothingness.
Living bodies, but with already dead eyes. But it was the last door at the end of the corridor that terrified me, although I didn’t understand exactly why. It was locked, reinforced, and marked with a number drawn in white chalk, which someone tried to erase several times, but it always reappeared. 47. Room 47.
The guard unlocked the door with two different keys. The metal creaked, and then a smell wafted out. A nauseating mixture of cheap disinfectant, old blood, excrement, and some chemical that burned my nostrils and made my eyes water instantly. I was a nurse. I knew the smell of hospitals, of death operating rooms, but this was different. It was the smell of hell.
Room 47 was about 25 square meters, lit by bare, constantly flickering light bulbs. The concrete walls were stained with dark brown patterns that I immediately recognized. Blood that no one had bothered to clean. In the center of the room was a metal operating table, but it wasn’t the kind I knew from Soviet hospitals.
It had thick leather straps on the sides, stained from repeated use. And underneath it was a trench cut into the floor to drain liquids, like the ones I had seen in slaughterhouses before the war. Surgical instruments were scattered against the wall without any organization. Saws of different sizes, rusty pliers, unsterilized scalpels, bottles of strangely colored liquids, handwritten labels in German that I could barely read in the dim light. The doctor waited.
He didn’t introduce himself, didn’t offer an explanation, just lit a cigarette and made a casual gesture toward the table, as if I were just another lab animal arriving for processing. At that moment, I realized I wasn’t there to be healed. I was there to be cut up, studied, used, thrown away. I tried to speak, but my voice came out weak and trembling.
I asked in Russian: “What are you going to do to me?”
The doctor chuckled briefly. A dry, humorless sound. He said something in German to his assistants, which made them laugh too. Then I was roughly shoved toward the table, and it was there, at that moment, that Katya, who I was, died. They threw me onto the cold metal, tied my wrists and ankles with leather straps, tied so tightly that they cut off my circulation.
My hands went completely numb. I screamed, not yet from physical pain, but from the visceral horror of being completely helpless in the hands of people who clearly didn’t see me as a human being. Just laboratory material destined for disposal. What the doctor did next was methodical and documented. He took his notebook, flipped through the pages full of tables and numbers, found a blank page, and wrote at the top:
“Subject 47a, origin: Soviet, estimated age: 25-30. Procedure: Experimental Bone Graft Number 12.”
He then ordered his assistants to turn me face down on the table. While I sobbed and pleaded in Russian, mixed with the broken German I had learned in the camp, they cut my clothes with surgical scissors until I was completely naked.
The doctor examined my legs with gloves, feeling the muscles and bones like a butcher assessing cuts of meat, and finally selected my right leg, marking with a pen the exact area of the tibia where he would make an experimental cut. There was no anesthesia, or rather, there was a minimal attempt.
A cloth soaked in ether was pressed briefly against my face, just enough to stun me, but not enough to render me completely unconscious. The doctor wanted to observe my pain reactions during the procedure as part of data collection. When the scalpel cut the skin and penetrated the flesh, I felt an explosion of pain so intense that my vision blurred at the edges.
I was sure I was going to faint, but they kept me awake by throwing ice water in my face and slapping me when my eyes started to roll back. The doctor worked slowly and deliberately, cutting layers of muscle, separating the tissue with instruments that pulled and tore, exposing the bone, which he then partially sawed away.
He removed the fragments, which he placed in carefully labeled glass jars, while I screamed until my voice completely disappeared, replaced by guttural moans that no longer sounded human. When they finally finished and threw me back into the basement cell, I could no longer feel my right leg below the knee, only a throbbing, deep pain that waved in sync with my racing heart.
The wound was closed with crude stitches, without regard for proper surgical technique or infection prevention. It was simply stitched roughly, as if they were sewing leather. I bled through the dirty bandages, staining the rotten straw of the mattress, and spent the entire night trembling violently not only from the cold, but from the physiological and psychological shock of the methodical mutilation.
In the next cell, separated only by a thin concrete wall, I could hear another woman crying softly in Polish. And I realized with horror that I was not alone in this nightmare, that there were dozens of other women going through exactly the same methodical torture. The woman in the next cell was called Wanda Poltawska.
She was 20 years old. She was a medical student in Lublin before the war. Wanda had been there for three months and had already undergone six different procedures in Room 47, each more brutal than the last. Her legs were a deformed mass of scars, infections, and poorly healed bones. She limped grotesquely, dragging her left leg, which had been cut so many times that it barely responded to nerve commands.
Through the thin wall, Wanda began to speak to me that first night, using basic German, of which we both knew just enough for rudimentary communication. She explained that there were approximately 74 Polish women in Ravensbrück who were being used for medical experiments. All young and relatively healthy when they arrived. Everything now permanently scarred by the atrocities committed in the hospital’s basement.
German doctors were testing treatments for wounds deliberately infected with virulent bacteria, experimenting with bone and nerve grafting techniques, and studying how long limbs could survive without adequate blood circulation before complete necrosis. They used us, Slavic prisoners, because Nazi ideology classified us as subhuman. Invaluable lives, whose sacrifice would have contributed to the progress of German medicine and the salvation of wounded Aryan soldiers on the Eastern Front.
I listened to all of this in a growing silence of horror, realizing that my injury was not random or isolated, but part of an organized and officially sanctioned system. A system that turned women into lab animals with the same bureaucratic coldness with which it administered food rations or cleaned toilets.
In the following days, while the wound on my leg progressively became infected, producing yellowish pus and emitting a putrid odor, I met other prisoners. There was Maria Kuśmierczuk, a twenty-three-year-old law student from Warsaw. Both of her legs had been repeatedly cut for gas gangrene tests. She couldn’t walk without support. She had a chronic fever that never completely went away.
There was Edwiga Dzida, a twenty-eight-year-old history teacher. Doctors implanted fragments of glass and splinters of wood contaminated with staphylococcus and streptococcus bacteria in her legs to simulate battle wounds. They watched methodically as the infections spread and consumed healthy tissue. Barbara Petrzyk was the youngest of them all.
She was only 16 years old. She was caught handing out resistance leaflets at school. She underwent five experimental surgeries that left her legs so deformed she could no longer bend her knees properly. She was condemned to walk like a broken robot for the rest of her shortened life. And there was Zofia Monczka, a mother of three young children whom she would never see again.
Her body was used for radiation sterilization tests. Controlled doses were applied directly to her ovaries while doctors timed and recorded how long it would take to completely destroy her reproductive capacity. Each woman had a similar story. Capture for trivial reasons. The brutal transport to Ravensbrück, the gradual transformation from political prisoner to disposable medical guinea pig.
We formed a silent community of shared suffering, whispering encouragement to each other through the walls in the dark, sharing the tiny crumbs of bread we received as rations, cleaning each other up when we lost control of our bodily functions due to infection or high fever. Wanda, despite her deformed legs, became the unofficial leader of our group.
She used her strong personality and unwavering religious faith to encourage the hopes of others. She recited Polish poems from memory, organized collective prayers in whispers, reminding us that we were still people with names and stories and a dignity that no German could completely steal. But there were limits to what even the most resilient willpower could endure.
I was taken back to room 47 five times in two months. Each procedure attacked a different part of my body with methodical and scientific brutality. The second time, they cut muscles from my left thigh to test muscle grafting techniques, removing tissue that would never grow back, leaving a deep hole in my leg that made me limp grotesquely.
The third time, they injected tetanus bacteria directly into the open wounds on my shoulder, clinically observing as painful muscle spasms ravaged my body, recording my temperature, heart rate, and the time until the spasms began, as if I were an inert chemistry experiment.
For the fourth time, they tested the limits of blood loss, making controlled incisions and letting me bleed out while measuring my blood pressure at regular intervals, repeatedly bringing me to the brink of death from hypovolemic shock, only to resuscitate me at the last moment with minimal blood transfusions of unknown origin.
On the fifth occasion, when I was brought in nearly unconscious due to a high fever caused by a systemic infection, the doctor decided I was no longer useful for experiments. He ordered his assistants to dispose of me properly. This meant transferring me to another wing of the basement, where dying prisoners were left to die without care, piled up in unventilated cells where the stench of decomposing bodies was so intense that even the guards avoided entering.
I was supposed to die in that slow death chamber along with six other women in various states of decomposition while still alive, but something extraordinary happened. Wanda, dragging her mutilated legs, convinced a Polish guard working in the camp to bring her antibiotics stolen from the upstairs infirmary.
They were low-quality medications in inadequate doses, just expired sulfa drugs and diluted penicillin, which the guard had managed to hide in her clothes for weeks. With trembling hands and risking immediate execution if discovered, she administered the antibiotics, cleaned my infected wounds with boiled water she stole from the kitchen, and spent three nights applying cold compresses to bring down my fever, which had reached 40.5°C (105°F).
Miraculously, I survived. My temperature gradually dropped. The infections had receded just enough to halt the progress of fatal septicemia. Within two weeks I was able to sit up again, although my legs were now a mosaic of grotesque scars, poorly healed bones protruding at abnormal angles, and atrophied muscles that responded poorly to nerve signals.
I will never again walk normally, never again run, never again dance, as I did in my youth at village festivals near Moscow, when there was still a world where young women could be happy and carefree, but I was alive. And in this subterranean hell of Ravensbrück, the simple continuation of biological existence was a form of resistance to a system that wanted to reduce us to disposable material.
Weeks turned into months. A group of mutilated women in a basement developed survival and solidarity routines that defied the systematic dehumanization imposed by the Nazis. Wanda taught me Polish, and I, in turn, taught them Russian. We created a hybrid language that only we understood and used to share the stories of our lives before the war, keeping alive the memories of humanity and individuality.
Maria, despite her gangrenous legs, sang Polish folk songs in a low voice on cold nights. Her hoarse, yet melodic voice echoed through the concrete corridors like a ghost of beauty amidst absolute cruelty. Edwige, who was a teacher, recited passages from classical literature, from Pushkin to Mickiewicz, transforming that filthy basement into an improvised classroom where minds hungry for meaning found spiritual nourishment even as bodies languished from exhaustion.
But Room 47 continued operating, processing new victims at a steady pace. Newly arrived Soviet prisoners were regularly selected and assessed according to criteria we never fully deciphered. Perhaps it was age, perhaps physical condition, perhaps just a medical whim. Some lasted only one or two operations before succumbing to infection or shock.
Their bodies were silently removed at night and cremated without official record. Others survived months of methodical torture, becoming pale and ghostly. In April 1943, when the Wehrmacht began to suffer significant defeats on the Eastern Front, the experiments in the basement of Ravensbrück were brutally intensified.
New doctors arrived from other fields, bringing even more radical and brutal experimental protocols, and began testing the limits of human tolerance to extreme temperatures, submerging prisoners in tanks of freezing water until they lost consciousness, timing how long it took for hypothermia to cause irreversible brain death, testing the effects of total water deprivation by keeping women without any liquid for days on end while methodically documenting the fatal dehydration process, from the first hallucinations to the final renal collapse, testing the effectiveness of various poisons, introducing controlled doses of arsenic, cyanide and other toxic substances to determine the precise lethal limits.
And always, always documenting everything in meticulous notebooks with tables, graphs, and photographs. It was during this period of intensification that an event occurred that would forever mark the survivors as the lowest point in this abyss of suffering.
In June 1943, the doctors decided to conduct a collective experiment of extreme sensory deprivation, locking 18 prisoners, including Wanda and me, in Room 47 at once, without light, water, food, or sanitary facilities, completely isolated from the outside world for 120 hours straight.
The stated goal was to study the psychological effects of absolute isolation in groups. To observe how the social structure would collapse under extreme pressure, and whether cannibalistic behaviors or violence would emerge when basic resources were completely removed. The first 24 hours were marked by increasing discomfort, but still manageable.
We tried to organize ourselves, ration the little energy we had, stay awake and mentally alert through whispered conversations and collective prayers. But when thirst really began to bite, when saliva completely dried up and tongues swelled in our mouths, when hunger turned into brutal abdominal cramps, and when total darkness began to cause visual and auditory hallucinations, the cohesion of our group began to dangerously crack.
Some women panicked, screaming and banging against the walls until their bloodied hands were bruised. Others became catatonic, sitting in corners and rocking rhythmically, murmuring nonsensical words. One tried to drink her own urine, but vomited immediately. The liquid was too concentrated and toxic to be processed by an empty stomach.
When they finally opened the door after five whole days, they found four women dead from dehydration and exhaustion, three completely insane and never to regain their sanity, and the rest, including Wanda and me, so deeply traumatized that we would spend the rest of our lives haunted by nightmares of that absolute darkness and the sound of women slowly dying just inches away, unable to do anything to help them.
The chief physician made detailed notes, photographed the bodies, and classified the experiment as partially successful in his report. The war was finally turning against Nazi Germany. In the final months of 1944, with the Red Army advancing inexorably from the east and the Allies pressing from the west, Ravensbrück descended into a state of bureaucratic panic.
Orders came from Berlin to destroy evidence of atrocities, burn incriminating documents, and eliminate witnesses who could testify about war crimes. Many of the mutilated women in the basement were summarily executed by lethal injections of phenol directly into the heart. Their bodies were cremated in ovens that operated 24 hours a day, producing a thick, black smoke that covered the camp like a shroud.
But some of us, including myself, Wanda, and Edwige, were temporarily forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation. Left locked in our cells while the guards fled and documents burned in huge makeshift bonfires in the main courtyard. When Soviet soldiers finally liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945, they found an apocalyptic scene.
Piled-up bodies, skeletal survivors wandering like zombies, and the heavy silence of a place where humanity had been systematically destroyed. I weighed 38 kg, half my original weight. My legs were permanently deformed, making me look decades older than my actual 29 years. I couldn’t speak for three days after my liberation, only crying silently while Soviet military nurses fed me small spoonfuls of porridge and treated my chronic infections with the best antibiotics available.
It would take years of physical recovery and decades of psychological processing before I could finally testify about what I had experienced. In 1947, I went to Nuremberg as a witness at the Doctors’ Tribunal, limping to the witness stand with my mutilated legs exposed so that the judges and the public could physically see the consequences of the Nazi experiments.
My voice trembled, but it didn’t waver as I described each procedure, each mutilation, each moment of agony, coldly documented in scientific notebooks presented as material evidence of crimes against humanity. Wanda also survived and testified. She became a psychiatrist in postwar Poland and dedicated her professional life to treating survivors of extreme trauma, transforming her own suffering into a source of therapeutic empathy that would help thousands of other victims process experiences that words could barely describe.
The stories of these women, and of dozens of others who did not survive to tell theirs, have become fundamental evidence for understanding not only the specific brutality of the Nazi regime, but the broader human capacity for systematic dehumanization, when ideologies classify certain groups as less than human.
When science operates without ethics, when absolute power removes all moral restraints, Room 47 is like a pair of trousers. It was just one of hundreds of similar places scattered across occupied Europe. Each processing human lives through the meat grinder of bureaucratic cruelty. Each leaving scars that will last for generations.
I am dying now in 1977, at the age of 71, in a modest apartment in Moscow. My mutilated legs still ache on cold, damp days. Constant physical reminders that survival doesn’t mean escaping unscathed, that witnessing atrocities leaves invisible traces deeper than the visible ones. The question that hangs over these stories is never truly how this could have happened, because human history is full of similar examples of organized cruelty and systematic dehumanization.
The real question, which continues to echo in the decades to come and which each generation must answer anew, is: “How do we prevent this from happening again?” The psychological and social mechanisms that made Ravensbrück possible continue to operate: blind obedience to authority, categorization of human groups as inferior, separation between science and ethics, gradual normalization of cruelty.
All of this continues to operate in modern forms, less obviously monstrous, but potentially just as dangerous. The women of Room 47 die not only when their hearts stop beating, but also when their stories are forgotten, when their scars are reduced to abstract statistics, when the specific and individual horror of each mutilation is dissolved into generalizations of war crimes that sound horrific, but remain emotionally distant.
We die again every time someone denies or minimizes the Holocaust. Every time modern authoritarian regimes repeat similar patterns of dehumanization against vulnerable minorities, every time science operates without rigorous ethical oversight. But we also continue to live in every person who hears our stories and consciously chooses to resist indifference.
To defend universal human dignity, we insist that science must always serve humanity instead of exploiting it. We continue to live in a collective memory that transforms individual trauma into a generational lesson, specific pain into transmitted wisdom, and we continue to live with the simple yet profound question to which each of us has responded through our survival and witness:
“Faced with systems that deny our humanity, can we maintain our capacity to see humanity in others?”
Even when we are treated as disposable objects, the scars on my legs never completely disappeared, but became maps of lived territory, physical evidence that resistance does not require dramatic heroism.
Sometimes, it’s simply about continuing to breathe when every cell in your body wants to give up. It’s about holding another prisoner’s hand in the dark and whispering, “Tomorrow can be different,” even when all the evidence suggests otherwise. It’s about refusing to allow those who have mutilated us to also mutilate our capacity to love, to hope, to insist that the world can and must be better than this.
This is my final plea to those who hear these words. Do not let our stories die. Do not let oblivion become a second death for those who suffered. Remember us. Remember room 47. Remember that humanity is fragile and must be protected every day, with every choice, with every action. My name is Ekaterina Volkova. This is my testimony.
This is our history, don’t forget it.
