On January 23, 1943, at 4:00 a.m., when the darkness over Ravensbrück was so thick that it seemed as if the very air had frozen with cold, Roxana Volkova stood in line for roll call. Her feet, shod in rags, no longer felt the ice beneath them. She heard blood dripping from her neighbor’s broken nose, but she didn’t turn around.
On this day, unlike others, the SS-doctor with gold glasses, whom everyone simply called doctor, walked past the first three rows without raising his head, and stopped right in front of her. He looked at her hands, roughened and with black fingers from frostbite, and wrote something down in his notebook. Then he nodded to Konrshe.
Roxanne didn’t know what it meant, but when her number came over the loudspeaker along with twelve others, she felt something inside her break. They were taken not to the factory, as usual, but to a red brick building at the end of the camp, where the windows were boarded up and the door could only be opened from the inside.
There, behind that door, began what historians would later call survival experiments. But what Roxana felt at that moment was simply the end. Roxana was born in a village near Smolensk, where winter lasts 7 months, and people have become accustomed to the cold as they become accustomed to breathing. She was the daughter of a mathematics teacher and a collective farm worker who sang in the church choir.
When the Germans broke into their home in June 1941, their father was shot in front of the entire family for hiding partisans. The mother died of hunger in besieged Leningrad, where they were trying to get to on foot. Roxana was captured not as a soldier, but as a suspicious element. She was detained at a checkpoint because they found a note in Russian in her bag that she had not had time to eat.
She was first sent to a displaced persons camp in Poland, then to Ravensbrück, the largest women’s concentration camp in the Third Reich. There, among 50,000 women from 20 countries, Russians made up less than a percent, but they became the object of special attention from doctors at the Institute of Racial Hygiene.
The premise was simple and cruel. If Russians survive their Siberian cold, it means their bodies contain secrets that can be extracted for the German army fighting on the Eastern Front. But the secret turned out not to be in survival, but in how long a person can exist on the border between life and death before ceasing to be human.
During the first week, Roxana was simply observed. Every morning at 6:00 a.m. she was woken up and taken to a white room, where two nurses in white coats measured her body temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and recorded everything in thick journals. They didn’t talk to her, didn’t answer her question, and didn’t even look her in the eye.
She thought it was some kind of medical commission. Maybe she will be sent to work in a hospital. But in the second week something else started. She was taken to the basement, where there were 10 bathtubs filled with ice water.
“Enter,” said the doctor.
Roxana entered. The water was so cold that the air was knocked out of my chest. She stood there for exactly 3 minutes, then 5, then 10. The doctor walked around, looked into the bathtub, felt her skin, looked at the stopwatch. When her body stopped shaking and began to slowly shut down, they pulled her out, wrapped her up, and measured her again. They measured everything: how fast the heart beats, how slowly, how long consciousness is maintained.
In the third week, another element was added. After the bath, she was led into a room where there was a stove, red-hot.
“Take off your clothes,” they ordered.
She stood in front of an open fire, and they again measured how quickly her skin sweated, how long the temperature lasted, how long it took for the body to warm up. Then back into the ice, then back into the fire. The cycle repeated four times a day. Roxana no longer understood where the cold ended and the heat began. Her skin became covered in strange spots, sometimes crimson, sometimes purple. Her hair began to fall out in clumps, her nails darkened and crumbled. But the worst thing was not in her body, but in her head.
She began to forget names. First the names of her neighbors in the barracks, then her mother’s name, then her own. The doctor noticed this and smiled. He wrote something in a notebook.
“Memory deteriorates with temperature fluctuations above a 60° difference. It is useful for studying amnesia in soldiers in the east.”
Among the twelve Russian women selected along with Roxana was Anna, a nurse from Kyiv, who had worked before the war in the maternity hospital. She was older than the others, she was 38, and she knew what she was doing. When they were led into the ice baths for the first time, she whispered to Roxanne:
“Breathe slowly, don’t move. Pretend you’re already dead.”
It was the first piece of advice that helped. Anna became the secret doctor of their small group. She knew how to signal when their blood pressure was dropping, how to pretend to faint so that they would be left alone for at least an hour. She told them about her son, whom she had managed to send to Siberia to relatives before the Germans took Kyiv.
“He will live,” she said. “Because I will survive here. Every day I live through is another day when he grows up.”
Then there was Lyudmila, a girl from Belarus, who was only 19. She was an artist; before the war, she drew posters for the collective farm. In the camp, she began drawing on scraps of burlap that she found in the dump. She drew what she saw: doctors with their notebooks, baths of ice, women standing by the stoves. She hid the drawings in the lining of her slave.
“Someday,” she said, “Someone will find them and understand.”
There was also Natalia, a former physical education teacher, whose body was so resilient that doctors chose her for special tests. They made her run across the icy yard in just a shirt until she fell. Then they lifted her up again and made her run. She ran because she knew:
“If you stop, you will be killed.”
She ran, thinking about her village, about the fields, about how she ran to school in the mornings. Her body remembered the movement. Even when her mind already wanted to die, and there was Elena, the youngest, 17 years old, from Pskov. She said nothing, barely ate, sat in the corner and stared into space. But one night, when Roxana was shaking with a fever after another cycle, Elena crawled up to her and put her palm on her forehead. The palm was cold as ice, but it was the first human gesture in forever. Then she whispered:
“My grandmother said that Russians don’t die, they just fall asleep for the winter.”
What was done to Roxana and her comrades was not just the cruelty of individual psychopaths. It was part of a program the Nazis called Operation Eastern Front. In Berlin, at the Institute for Racial Hygiene, Dr. Sigmund Raschki wrote reports on how inferior races could withstand the cold that was killing German soldiers. His research was personally funded by Himmler, who believed that if the secret of Russian survival could be discovered, a super-soldier could be created, capable of fighting in any conditions. Hundreds of similar experiments were conducted in camps across occupied Europe. The Wauswitzers studied the effects of phosgene on Poles. In Daha, they tested malaria on Italians. In Ravensbrück, Russian women became models for studying extreme temperatures.
Every morning, the doctor collected data, which was sent via an encrypted line to Berlin. There, it was analyzed, graphs were plotted, and conclusions were drawn. The conclusions were simple. The Russian body can withstand 40% more than the German one. But this did not mean that the Russians were stronger. It meant that they could be tortured longer. This information was used not only for training soldiers, but also to develop new torture methods. The KGB later found archives after the war that described exactly how to freeze people to death so they wouldn’t die too quickly. These methods were used in captivity, during interrogations, in camps.
Roxana and her comrades weren’t just victims, they were prototypes. Their suffering became instructions. The first turning point came at the end of February. The doctor announced that the experiment was changing. Now they wouldn’t just endure cold and heat, but learn to do it. Each woman had to learn to control her breathing so that her heart beat slower. This wasn’t just a test, it was training. They wanted Russian women to teach German soldiers how to survive. Anna, the nurse, immediately realized they wanted us to become their instructors, and then kill us so we wouldn’t tell the truth. She proposed a plan: pretend to learn, but in reality learn more slowly, pretend we weren’t getting it, waste time. But the doctor was smarter. He began to threaten:
“If we don’t learn in a week, your children, whom you talk about at night, will get the same.”
The second turn happened in March. One night, after a particularly harsh cycle, Elena, a seventeen-year-old girl from Pskov, did not wake up. She simply did not open her eyes. The doctor came, looked at her, and diagnosed organic amnesia with a fatal outcome. He was pleased. It was the first confirmed case of death from temperature shock. He ordered that the body not be removed, but left in the refrigeration chamber for an autopsy. Roxana saw how her hair was covered with frost.
The third turn happened in April. Lyudmila, an artist, was caught with drawings. The doctor personally came to their barracks, tore apart her uniform, found sackcloth with images. He was not angry, he smiled.
“Okay,” he said, “Now you will draw what I say.”
He made her draw women in bathtubs, but not the way it really was. He made her draw them happy, smiling, as if they were participating in a wellness treatment. Lyudmila refused. He took her hand and placed it on the stove.
“Draw or your fingers will burn,” he said.
She drew. The fourth turn was the most terrifying. In May, the doctor announced that the experiment was entering its final phase. They selected three women: Roxana, Anna, and Natalia, for a field test. They were taken outside the camp into the forest, where an abandoned hunting lodge stood. There, they were stripped naked and left overnight in the snow, while the doctors themselves watched through night vision goggles. This was not an experiment, it was a game. They wanted to see who could last the longest.
Anna fell first, Natalia second. Roxana was left alone, kneeling in the snow, staring into the darkness somewhere beyond the trees, seeing the lights of their cigarettes. Roxana stopped thinking about home, she stopped thinking about the war. She thought only about her next breath. Every breath was a victory, every exhalation a defeat. She learned to count her heartbeat, to slow it with her will. She learned to ignore the cold, to shut off her consciousness, but it didn’t make her stronger. It made her empty.
She looked at Anna, who told a story about her son every night, and understood that Anna no longer remembered his face. She looked at Lyudmila, who was drawing, and saw that her hand was shaking not from the cold, but because she no longer remembered how to hold a pencil. She looked at Natalya, who was running, and knew that Natalya was running not from them, but from herself, from the memories slowly dying in her head. Roxana herself stopped crying. The tears froze on her cheeks, and it hurt. She stopped speaking, the words lost their meaning. She ceased to be Roxana. She became specimen 47B.
That was the name the doctor gave her in his journal. Specimen 47B. High resilience, 73% identity loss. She read this one day when the doctor left the journal open. She wasn’t offended. She just thought 73%, so there was still 27% left. And in that 27%, she kept the image of her mother, the smell of bread in their oven, the sound of snow underfoot. The day they killed her father, she kept it like a fire that can’t be fanned, but which also can’t be extinguished. Every time the doctor said:
“Get up!”
She got up, because getting up was another way of saying:
“I’m still here, I still remember.”
The final experiment was scheduled for June 23, the summer solstice. The doctor gathered all 12 Russian women in a white room where they had once only taken pulses.
“Today,” he said, “we will test the limit.”
He explained that they would alternate between an ice bath and a red-hot stove every 15 minutes without a break until someone died. It wasn’t scientific. According to protocol, it was a public performance. He brought with him three young SS officers who were supposed to observe how science worked.
The first cycle went as usual, the second too. On the third cycle, Natalia fell and didn’t get up. Her body was dragged aside, but she was still breathing. On the fourth cycle, Anna started coughing up blood. She looked at Roxana and said with her eyes:
“Don’t give up.”
On the fifth cycle, Lyudmila, who was forced to stand and watch, screamed. She screamed in Russian:
“Enough!”
The doctor nodded, and the escort hit her in the stomach with the butt of her rifle. She fell silent. On the sixth cycle, Roxana felt her body giving out. She saw the doctor looking at his watch, the officers exchanging impressions, one of them laughing. She realized that this was the last cycle. She stood on the edge of the bathtub, looked into the black water, then raised her head and looked straight into the camera the doctor had set up for filming. She said in Russian, slowly and clearly:
“I will not die today. I’ll die when I want to.”
Then she fell into the water, but she didn’t fight. She just lay on the bottom, looking up, seeing the rays of light dancing above her. She counted 1 2t. The doctor started to get nervous. He shouted:
“Get her out.”
But no one moved. She counted 202122. She saw her mother standing on the riverbank, her father waving at her. She counted 4344. And then they pulled her out. She wasn’t breathing. The doctor leaned over her, put his ear to her chest. And suddenly she opened her eyes and said:
“78 – that’s my record.”
She won. But the victory was as empty as her eyes. After this day, the experiments stopped. Not out of pity, simply because Rashke received all the information he needed. He wrote in his final report:
“Russian women demonstrate exceptional resistance to temperature shock, but at the same time, they lose their human qualities. It is recommended that they be used as instructors for training elite troops, but not allowed to socialize.”
Roxana and the remaining survivors were transferred to an ordinary barracks. They were no longer models, they became just workers, but they could no longer work. Roxana couldn’t hold a spoon. Anna couldn’t remember how to tie knots. Natalia didn’t run anymore. They just sat, stared at one point and waited. They were not expecting liberation. They waited until they finally ceased to exist.
When the Russians arrived in January of 1945, they found this barracks last. The door was locked from the inside. When they broke it open, they saw 12 women sitting in a row, dressed in rags, staring into space. They were alive. But when the soldiers spoke to them in Russian, none of them responded. They forgot the language, they forgot the names, they forgot themselves.
Roxana was sent to a hospital in Moscow. For a long time, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. Her body was alive, but her eyes were dead. She did not respond to sound, light, or pain. She just lay there and stared at the ceiling. Then, after 3 months, she suddenly spoke: the first word was cold. Second – mom. Third:
“Sorry.”
She lived another 40 years, but every winter she asked that the room temperature not be higher than 15 degrees. Because the warmth reminded me of the stove, and the stove reminded me of what came after. She never talked about the camp. She simply said:
“There I learned to breathe and forgot why.”
In the KGB archives, declassified in the nineties, a report by Rashka was found. It contained the names of twelve Russian women whom he used in his experiments. Next to each name there was a note: used, disposed of. lost. Roxana Volkova was listed as specimen fortyB, but at the bottom, in someone else’s handwriting, was added:
“Survived. Found in hospital number three Gdina Moscow. Condition: amnesia, personality degradation. Recommendation: avoid contact with the outside world.”
She died in 1985 in her apartment in the Moscow region. On her desk there was a piece of paper on which she had written one phrase:
“I remember that I forgot, but I don’t remember what exactly.”
She was buried under the name Roxana Volkova, but the date of birth she chose herself was engraved on the monument. July 12, 1921, the day she was born for the second time. The day she realized that survival is not a victory, it is just a duty. the duty to remember, the duty to tell, the duty to not let them win, because they didn’t just want to kill, they wanted to erase. But memory is not the body. It cannot be frozen, it cannot be burned. She lives in everyone who hears this story and does not look away. The question is not how much you can endure. The question is how much can you remember. And the answer is always the same: enough. y
