February 12, 1943, Western Russia, Smolensk region. Heavy snow fell on the ruins of the former Illiberal Factory, which had been converted into Camp 23 (long-term base). But there was no sign of medical care, only the cold, acrid smell of disinfectant, mixed with the smell of dried blood and the muffled sound of orders in German.
Between these gray stone walls, Soviet women were stripped of their names, their clothes, and every trace of humanity, and it always began the same way. “Austen Unthinkninen, undress and get on your knees.” The sentence echoed through the narrow corridors, spoken with clinical coldness, without anger, without hatred, simply an order, carried out like a protocol.
For a long time, no one dared to speak about what happened next. Officially, this place didn’t exist. The Wehrmacht files contained no mention of Hospital Camp 23. There were no records of how many women came and went. There were no photographs, no official witnesses, but there were memories.
And these memories haunted the few survivors until the end of their lives. This is the story they wanted to erase from history. The story of women whose bodies became testing grounds, whose screams were lost in the noise of war, whose names sank into the silence of time.
But some stories are immortal, and this is one of them. The winter of 1943 was particularly harsh in western Russia. The German occupation had already lasted a year and a half, and the territory controlled by the Wehrmacht had transformed into a network of camps, fortresses, and makeshift military installations. Among them, discreetly located 40 km south of Smolensk, was an old textile factory.
The building was ideal for the Germans’ plans. Secluded, surrounded by forests, and with thick walls that muffled all sound. The factory operated until 1941, but with the German invasion, the workers fled or were shot. The machinery was dismantled, the windows boarded up, and the main workshop converted into something entirely different.
In February 1943, the infirmary at Camp 23 was fully operational, but the term “infirmary” was merely a euphemism. What happened there had nothing to do with medicine. It involved experiments and torture disguised as scientific research. And the victims were Soviet women. They were brought there from other camps—Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen—and even from prisons in the occupied territories.
Among them were Red Army nurses captured on the battlefield, partisans imprisoned in the forests, teachers accused of anti-German activities, and simple peasant women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They all arrived with the same hope: not to be sent to forced labor, but that they still had a chance of survival.
But as they stepped through the doors of the medical post in Camp 23, that hope vanished. In the midst of this inferno stood a man in a white coat. Dr. Ernst Völker, an SS officer who had graduated from the University of Berlin in 1936. In pre-war photographs, he appeared to be an ordinary man. Of average height, blond hair, round glasses – nothing about him hinted at the monster within.
But within these stone walls, Völker transformed into something inhuman. He didn’t scream, showed no emotion, worked with absolute method, as if the women before him were not living beings, but mere objects of study. Völker kept meticulous records of everything. Every injection, every reaction, every cry was recorded with scientific precision in his notebooks.
He described the experiments as if he were writing a scientific paper, using a cold, unemotional language that made the horror all the more unbearable. In one of his notes, discovered decades later, he wrote: “Subject 47, female, approximately 28 years old. Injection of solution A into the right thigh. Time: 2:37 p.m. Reaction observed after 4 minutes: convulsions, vomiting, screams. Loss of consciousness at 2:52 p.m. Death recorded at 3:01 p.m. Tissue samples taken for analysis.”
Case 47. Not even her name was recorded. She was just a number in Völker’s notebook, but she did have a name. Her name was Anna Petrovna Sokolova. She was 26 years old. She was a teacher in the village of Pod Vyazma. She left behind an eight-year-old son who would never see her again.
Beside Völker stood another man: Klaus Rittner, an SS officer with impeccable bearing and cold blue eyes. If Völker was the scientist of this hell, then Rittner was its administrator. Rittner was responsible for documentation. He registered every woman who arrived at the camp, assigned her a number, and noted her approximate age and physical condition.
He organized the trial plan, ordered medical supplies, and coordinated the transport of bodies. He handled everything with flawless efficiency. For Rittner, the medical station at Camp 23 was simply another administrative task. He performed his duties with the same meticulousness with which other officers organized food deliveries or tank repairs.
His files, discovered after the war, contained clear tables, columns with names (often replaced by numbers), and dates of arrival and death. Everything was organized, everything documented. A death bureaucracy, executed with German precision. One of the survivors, Maria Ivanovna Lebedeva, recalled Rittner during her trial in 1975.
“He never raised his voice. He was polite, almost friendly, when he spoke to us. But his eyes—his eyes were empty. He looked at us as if we were pieces of furniture, not people, just things that needed to be cataloged.” There was another person in this story. A woman who saw everything but was powerless to change it. Greta Hofmann, a German nurse who was assigned to the medical supply depot Camp 23 in March 1943.
Greta didn’t want to be there. She was only 23 years old. She had just finished her medical training in Hamburg when she was ordered to Russia. She was told she would be helping wounded soldiers. No one told her the truth. When Greta arrived and saw what was really going on in the camp, she was shocked. She tried to fight back. She told Völker that it was wrong, that this wasn’t medicine.
He looked at her with cold contempt and replied, “Mrs. Hofmann, you are here to follow orders, not to ask questions. Should you fail to fulfill your duties, I will find you a place in another camp as a prisoner.” Greta understood. She was a prisoner. If she refused, she would be exterminated. And so she stayed. But she did something dangerous.
She began keeping a secret diary. Every night, in her small room by candlelight, Greta wrote down what she saw. She noted the women’s names if she recognized them. She described the experiments. She documented the deaths. She did this knowing that she would be shot if she were caught. Her diary, discovered in 1978 in a sealed box in the cellar of her Munich home, became one of the most important pieces of evidence about the events in the medical unit of Camp 23.
In one of her entries dated April 15, 1943, she wrote: “Today they brought in a new group of women, 23 people. Among them was a girl who could not have been older than eighteen. She had light braids wrapped around her head. She was crying and calling for her mother. Dr. Völker chose her first. I can’t bear this anymore. I can’t anymore. But if I don’t continue, who will be a witness? Who will tell the world what has happened here?”
Greta knew that most of the women who passed through her hands would not survive, but she also knew that she had to remember their names, that she had to write down their stories, because if she didn’t, they would disappear forever, as if they had never existed.
The women were held captive in damp stone cells in the basement of an old factory. There were no windows, no daylight. Only a dim lamp glimmered from the ceiling as military trucks drove overhead. The cold was so unbearable that some women woke with chapped lips and shivered all night.
There were no mattresses, only old straw and torn blankets that smelled of mold and urine. The routine was always the same. At six o’clock in the morning, the soldiers banged their rifle butts against the iron cell doors. “Out, get up!” The women were led by harsh voices through icy corridors into a large hall that had once served as a warehouse for the factory’s fabrics.
There, in the harsh glare of makeshift operating room lamps, Dr. Völker conducted his experiments. Three assistants stood beside him: conscripted German nurses who obeyed orders without raising their eyes. And in the corner of the room, always with his hands clasped behind his back, SS officer Klaus Rittner silently observed the proceedings.
He never spoke, he only wrote. And that was far more frightening. “Austien Unthinknen, undress and kneel.” The order was repeated by the soldiers in broken Russian, but understandable enough. Some women surrendered immediately, already resigned. Others hesitated, looked around, searching for a chance to witness a miracle.
But there was nothing there, only cold, silence, and the indifferent gaze of Dr. Völker. Völker didn’t shout, didn’t threaten, he simply waited. And when they were all naked and helpless on their knees, he began his work, injecting them with unknown substances. The women received injections of solutions whose composition they didn’t know.
Völker observed the reactions: vomiting, convulsions, loss of consciousness. He recorded everything in his notebooks: the onset of the reaction, the intensity of the symptoms, the time of death, if it occurred. Everything was documented with scientific precision. Cold resistance tests.
Women were submerged naked, with leather straps cutting into their wrists and ankles, in pools of ice-cold water between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius. Völker timed them until they lost consciousness. Every five minutes, he checked their body temperature rectally. The touch was brutal and aggressive, adding further humiliation to the physical torture.
Some women lasted 15 minutes, others half an hour. None survived longer than an hour. When they were taken out, their skin was bluish, their lips violet, their eyes glassy. Some never regained consciousness. They were taken back to their cells, where they died alone in the cold at night. Völker not only observed, he also tested heating methods.
Some women, after being submerged to the point of drowning, were pressed against the naked bodies of German soldiers to test whether body heat could revive them. Others were immersed in hot baths, resulting in heat shock and often cardiac arrest. Völker documented everything.
According to his records, the most effective method was gradual warming with electric blankets. But this discovery cost dozens of lives. Women died of hypothermia, of cardiac arrest from shock—all to write in a black notebook. Another experiment involved deliberate infections. Völker injected live bacteria—tetanus, gangrene, and sepsis pathogens—into small cuts on the prisoners’ legs or arms.
He observed the course of the infection without treating it. He noted how quickly the fever rose, the color of the skin around the wound, and the onset of delirium. Some died after three days, others after a week. He compared the results and created charts. And when one of the animals died, he simply noted: “Guinea pig number 12 died next.”
He also conducted tests with experimental antiseptics, applying them to open wounds without anesthesia. The women screamed and writhed against the straps that bound them to the metal tables. Völker measured the intensity of the pain by observing muscle contractions, pupil dilation, and heart rate. For him, pain was not suffering.
These were physiological data that needed to be recorded and analyzed. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect was the constant presence of SS officer Klaus Rittner. He never touched anyone. He never gave direct orders. He merely observed and took notes. He carried a small black leather notebook and wrote with a fountain pen, always standing, always silent, and always with the same cold gaze, as if he were observing a routine surgical procedure and not an atrocity.
Rittner embodied something even more insidious than Völker himself. Völker was a scientist, albeit a perverse one. Rittner was a bureaucrat. He didn’t get his hands dirty, yet his presence confirmed everything. He was an official witness, the guardian of administrative legitimacy. And it was precisely this bureaucratization of horror that made all of this possible.
Without Rittner, Völker would have been just a mad doctor. With Rittner, he was an authorized investigator. And it was precisely this permission, this systematic approval, that made the Nazi machine more dangerous than mere individual violence. The German nurses who worked under Völker’s command reacted in different ways. Some refused to look the prisoners in the eye.
Others developed a mechanical rigidity, following orders with robotic precision, as if emotional detachment were the only way to survive the situation. Greta Hoffmann kept a secret diary. She wrote: “I no longer know who I am. I have become a different person. Someone who holds a woman’s hands while a doctor cuts off her fingers. Someone who no longer cries. Someone I no longer recognize in the mirror.”
Greta was only 23 years old when she was assigned to the medical unit at Camp 23. Before the war, she had dreamed of becoming a pediatric nurse and working in a Hamburg hospital to help children recover. But the war had other plans.
And now she spent her days assisting with torture. In her diary, she describes how she tried to mentally detach herself. She recited poems by Goethe. She remembered songs from her childhood. She imagined herself somewhere else. But this only partially succeeded, because her hands were still there, holding the instruments. Her eyes still saw, and her presence, even passive, made her an accomplice.
The victims tried to protect themselves in every way imaginable. Some developed small inner rituals, counting to thousands, saying prayers, remembering the faces of children they might never see again. Others simply fainted and fell into a state of emotional detachment that was almost equivalent to death. But the body does not forget.
Even when the mind tries to escape, the body registers every pain, every humiliation, every injury. And it never disappears. In July, a prisoner, a young woman of about 25, identified only as number 19, managed to scratch a message into the wall of her cell with a rusty nail. The message read: “My name is Elizaveta Sokolova. I have existed.”
When the ruins were explored in 1977, the message was still there, covered in moss, but legible. It was photographed, cataloged, and now hangs in a Moscow museum in a permanent exhibition on war crimes. Elizaveta was a teacher in a small village near Smolensk. She was arrested for refusing to hand over the Jewish family she was hiding in her cellar. She was 26 years old.
She loved Pushkin’s poetry and played the violin. After the war, she wanted to travel through Europe. That never happened. Three days after carving her name into her cell, she died there. But that name remained, and today it is all that is left of her. Despite everything, some survived not because they were saved, but because their bodies were, for some reason, more resilient than others.
When the medical post in Camp 23 was evacuated in April 1944, 17 women were still living there. They were transferred to other camps, where they were lost in the chaos of the war’s end. Some were liberated by the Allies in 1945, but died soon after, broken both physically and mentally. A few managed to return home. But they never spoke about what they had experienced.
At least not publicly, because who would have believed them? Post-war Soviet society didn’t want to hear about these atrocities. People wanted to recover, forget, and look to the future. And the women who had survived these camps carried a shame they didn’t deserve. A shame imposed on them by a world that didn’t want to know the truth. Under Stalin, survivors of German captivity were often considered traitors.
They were interrogated by the NKVD and accused of collaborating with the enemy. Many lost their jobs, were deported to the Gulag, or lived under constant surveillance. Then they fell silent. They repressed their memories. They tried to return to a normal life, but some wounds never heal. Never. And the question no one dared to ask: How many other places like this were there? How many other women vanished without a trace? The answer is chilling.
When the Allies liberated the occupied territories between 1944 and 1945, thousands of Nazi documents were seized, cataloged, and archived. But not all survived. Many files were deliberately destroyed by the Germans themselves before their retreat. Others simply disappeared in the chaos of the postwar period.
Some were deliberately kept hidden because they contained truths that no one—neither the Allies nor the Soviet authorities, not even the Germans themselves—wanted to bring to light. Ernst Völker’s notebooks were among these lost documents. Officially, they had never existed. But in 1977, nine years after the discovery of the sealed cellar on the grounds of the former factory, an antique dealer in Munich offered a collection of historical documents from the Second World War for sale.
Among them were three black, handwritten notebooks in German containing detailed records of medical experiments conducted between 1943 and 1944. The buyer was the Soviet historian Nikolai Morozov, a war crimes expert based in Moscow. As he began to read, he realized he was holding something explosive.
The notebooks contained meticulous records, data, code names, descriptions of procedures and results. Völker noted everything with a clinical detachment that made reading them all the more disturbing. “Subject f. Female, estimated age 28. Experiment. Immersion in water at the temperature of Chvordi Gyüyse. Duration 22 minutes. Result: Unconsciousness after 18 minutes. Last body temperature 30 degrees. Subject died during the night.” Page after page, the same entries were repeated. The numbers, the dates of death, as if they were statistics from agricultural research and not records of torture. Morozov spent weeks locked in his office, reading each page over and over again.
He compared the dates with other historical documents. He looked for inconsistencies, but everything seemed authentic. The handwriting was consistent, the medical terminology correct, the anatomical details precise. And most disturbing of all was the tone. Völker didn’t write like a criminal trying to conceal his deeds.
He wrote like a researcher documenting a scientific experiment. There was no trace of guilt, no embellishment, no attempt at moral justification, only facts, observations, and conclusions. But the most shocking thing was not the experiments themselves, but the matter-of-fact way in which they were described.
Völker showed no remorse whatsoever. He offered no euphemisms. He simply reported, like a scientist observing a chemical reaction. And in doing so, something horrific came to light. For him, these women were not real human beings. They were biological material. And this dehumanization stemmed not from hatred or sadism, but from a cold, rational, almost bureaucratic logic.
It was the banality of evil, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt would describe it years later in her analysis of Nazi crimes. Morozov knew he had to verify the authenticity of the notebooks before publishing them. He consulted graphologists who confirmed that the inscription did indeed date from the 1940s.
He consulted experts, Wehrmacht historians who recognized the codes and terminology used. He sent paper samples to a laboratory in Switzerland, which confirmed that the paper and ink matched those used in Germany during the war. Everything pointed to one thing: the notebooks were genuine. Morozov became obsessed with them.
He spent years comparing information with other documents to confirm its authenticity and came across clues. Reports from German military personnel mentioned an experimental medical unit in western Russia, without providing details. Statements from former soldiers confirmed the existence of interrogation centers where civilian prisoners were held.
The human remains found in 1978 matched the descriptions in the notebooks. Everything seemed to fit together, yet something was missing. There weren’t enough living witnesses. He searched Soviet archives. He contacted several associations of former party members. He placed advertisements in regional newspapers. But for years he received no response. Many of the women who had survived the camp had died within a few decades.
Others had emigrated, changed their names, and severed all ties to the past. And those who were still alive often preferred to remain silent, for speaking meant reliving the past, and that was too painful. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Morozov placed an advertisement in Russian newspapers, asking anyone who had been imprisoned in German camps in western Russia between 1943 and 1944 to contact him.
He hadn’t expected much, but then he received three letters. Three women, now elderly, wrote that they had once been together—something no one believed. Morozov sought them out, and their testimonies confirmed everything. The first was Sofia Lebedeva, 78 years old and a resident of Moscow. She had been arrested in 1943 at the age of 21 for allegedly aiding partisans.
She was taken to an old factory and held there for eight months. When Morozov showed her the pages from the notebooks, she began to tremble. “I remember that order,” she said, pointing to the note. “Austinhinkin, undress and kneel. I heard that every single day.” She spoke of tanks of ice water, injections, and women who were taken away and never returned.
And then she said something that deeply moved Morozov. “The worst thing wasn’t the pain. The worst thing was knowing that no one cared about us, that we didn’t exist for the world, that we meant nothing.” Sofia described how the women supported each other in their cells, how they whispered together in the dark and shared the meager rations of moldy bread they received once a day.
How could she hold one of their hands as they led her away, knowing she might not return? These small gestures of solidarity were all that remained of their shared humanity, destined to rob them of it. She also remembered the sounds: the clatter of boots in the corridors, the creaking of metal doors, the commands in German, the ensuing silence, and sometimes, very rarely, a shout that suddenly stopped, followed by silence again.
This silence was worse than any scream, for it meant that someone had given up the fight, surrendered, or, worse still, died. Sofia remembered one night when a woman in the next cell began to sing. She sang a lullaby in a soft, trembling voice. There were no words, only a melody, gentle and sad.
One by one, other women joined her. Each in her cell sang the same melody. For a few minutes, the corridors were filled not with screams, but with song—a fragile yet determined act of resistance. The next morning, the woman who had started singing was taken away. She never returned, but the music remained. In memory of the survivors.
Sofia told Morozov, “I can still remember the melody. Sometimes I sing it when I’m alone, and every time I cry.” The second witness was 75-year-old Margarita Belogo, who lived in a nursing home in St. Petersburg. She was very frail but still conscious. She described Völker as a man who never shouted. He was quiet. Always quiet.
“And it was worse than any scream,” she said. She remembered a German nurse weeping silently while holding a tray of surgical instruments. “I think she was just as much a victim as we were,” Margarita said. “Only her captivity was invisible.” Margarita also recounted a detail that shook Morozov to his core. She remembered a young woman, perhaps 18 years old, who had been brought to the camp in March 1944.
She was about five months pregnant. Völker was fascinated by her. He wanted to observe how the cold affected the fetus. He subjected her to repeated hypothermia experiments. The young woman begged, wept, and screamed that she would carry the child to term and then do everything he asked of her, but that he must stay with the child.
Völker didn’t reply. He simply made cool, methodical notes in his notebook, as if recording weather data. Two weeks later, she miscarried. The fetus was removed and preserved in a formaldehyde jar, and the young woman died three days later from a hemorrhage. Margarita remembered her face, but not her name.
No one knew her name. She was just a number in Völker’s notebook. Subject 34: Margarita also remembered how the German nurse, the same one who had wept silently, had tried to help after the abortion. She brought rags to stop the bleeding. She held the young woman’s hand, but Völker ordered her to stop. “Don’t interfere,” he said.
“Let the process run its course. I need clean data.” The nurse stepped back. She had to obey, but Margarita saw her face, saw the pain in her eyes, saw something break inside her at that moment. The third to speak was Elena Grishina, 69, who had emigrated to Israel after the war. She had never spoken about her experiences, not even with her family.
“I tried to forget it,” she told Morozov, “but you don’t forget things like that. They just stay buried, and if someone touches them, they resurface as if it were yesterday.” Elena confirmed the cellar’s existence. We knew there were bodies down there. We could smell them, but we never talked about it because talking about it would mean admitting we’d be next. Elena was a literature teacher before the war. She was arrested for refusing to remove banned books from her school library.
She remembered how, during the experiments, she would recite Tyutchev’s poems in her head. It was her way of escaping, of remaining human, of remembering that there was something beyond the pain. She told Morozov that even now, almost 50 years later, she couldn’t read Tyutchev without trembling. “The words that once saved me now cause me pain,” she whispered.
“Every verse reminds me of that place, the cold, the pain, the women who died beside me.” Elena also spoke about the survivors’ guilt. “Why me? Why did I survive and they didn’t? What made me special? Nothing. It was simply luck. A cruel, random luck. And I carry that guilt with me every day. Every day I see their faces, hear their voices, and ask myself: Do I deserve to live when they died?”
Based on their testimonies, Morozov was able to compile a comprehensive report. He continued his research for another ten years, interviewing former German soldiers and combing through military archives. Finally, in 2001, he published the book “The Silent Women of Smolensk.” The book caused a great stir both in Russia and abroad.
For the first time, the story of Camp 23 was told publicly, and the reaction was shocking. Not because the Nazi atrocities were unknown—that was already common knowledge—but because this history had been completely erased. These women died nameless, unregistered, without any memory.
And if it hadn’t been for these notebooks, discovered by chance, they would never have existed. The book was translated into several languages, discussed at universities, documentaries were made, and exhibitions were organized. And suddenly, these forgotten women began to rediscover their names. Families sought out Morozov and reported that their grandmother, their aunt, their mother had disappeared during the war and never returned.
Some finally managed to give the number a name. Some were finally able to mourn someone they had lost without ever having known how. But one question remained unanswered: What happened to Völker? He disappeared after the camp was evacuated in 1944. There were no records of his arrest, trial, or death.
Some suspected he had fled to South America like other Nazi war criminals. Others believed he had assumed a new identity and lived peacefully in West Germany until his death at an advanced age. But the truth is: no one knows, and this impunity is perhaps just as horrific as the crimes themselves. Morozov spent years searching for traces of peoples.
He consulted the lists from the Nuremberg trials. He searched the archives of Mossad, the agency that hunted Nazi fugitives. He contacted investigators in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. But he found nothing. Völker vanished as if he had never existed. And somewhere, perhaps, he lived in peace, without having to face up to his actions, without having to atone for them, without having to answer for them.
It was another wound that would never heal. But the story didn’t end there, because decades passed, and one of the survivors did something that changed everything. She decided to return. Spring 2005. Sofia Lebedeva was 83 years old. For 62 years she had tried to forget this place. But she couldn’t.
The images kept returning to her dreams. The voices echoed when she was alone. And the more time passed, the stronger her urge to return became. Not for revenge, not to encounter ghosts, but to close a cycle that had never truly ended. For years, she dismissed the thought. She told herself it was pointless, that it would change nothing, that the dead were dead, and that reawakening the past would only reopen old traumas.
But something inside her wouldn’t let her go. It was like an unpaid debt, a broken promise. She had survived. So many others hadn’t. And she felt she owed them something. She had to bear witness. She had to return to the place where it had all happened and say, “I remember, you existed, you are not forgotten.”
She invited Morozov to accompany her. He agreed. And together, on a cold April morning, they drove to the Smolensk region, to the site of an old textile factory. The parking lot, built in the 1980s, was still there. Cracked asphalt, a few empty spaces. No plaque, no memorial, no indication that something terrible had happened there.
Sofia stood motionless in the middle of the parking lot, looking around and trying to recognize something. “It was here, Ki,” she said. “I’m sure of it. There was a gate there, the entrance to the cellar. I remember every single stone.” The journey here had been difficult for her. On the train, she had remained silent, staring out the window with her arms tightly wrapped around her knees.
Morozov didn’t try to speak. He knew that some things couldn’t be put into words. When they arrived at the next station, she hesitated before getting off. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered, but got off anyway because she knew she had to. Morozov had photos of old things, maps, and documents with him.
He managed to locate the exact spot of the factory entrance. Sofia approached the place slowly, leaning on her cane. When she arrived, she sank to her knees and began to cry. It wasn’t a new pain. It was an old pain, suppressed over decades.
And now she could finally let them go. Her hands trembled, her body yielded under the weight of the memories. She touched the asphalt as if she could smell the scent of the earth, in which so many women lay buried, through the layers of concrete and time. She closed her eyes and saw them: Elizabeth, Margaret, Anna, Clara, Isabella, Jeanne.
Blurred faces, muffled voices, ghosts that had never left her. “They didn’t deserve this,” she sobbed. “None of us deserved this, but they deserved it even less, because I survived. They didn’t.” For almost an hour she stood there silently, just breathing, as if saying goodbye. And then she did something unexpected.
She pulled a small list of names from her bag. Names she had memorized over the years. Women she had known, women she had met in this place. Women who never returned. And she began to read the names aloud, one after the other: Elizaveta Sokolova, Margarita Ivanova, Anna Petrovna, Klara Smirnova, Izabella Kuznetsova, Zhanna Volkova.
They were names without surnames, sometimes without dates, without faces. Yet she remembered them, and now at last they were spoken aloud, right where they had been crushed. Morozov wrote everything down. He filmed it with the small camera he had brought with him. He knew that this moment was historic not only for Sofia, but for all the women whose names were being read aloud.
It was an act of resurrection, an act of resistance against oblivion, and he knew he had to preserve it. After Sofia had read all the names, she took a small envelope from her bag. Inside was a lock of hair. Her own lock of hair, which she had cut off upon her arrival at the camp in 1943. She had kept it for 62 years. She didn’t know why.
Perhaps as proof. Perhaps as a connection to the young woman she had once been. Perhaps simply because she couldn’t let it go. But now she knew what to do. She buried the lock of hair in a small crack in the asphalt. “You’re finally free,” she whispered. “So am I.” Morozov used this material to pressure the Russian authorities to erect a memorial.
It took time: bureaucracy, discussions, budget issues, resistance from those who didn’t want to dredge up the past. But Morozov didn’t give up. He wrote articles, gave lectures, convinced politicians, and mobilized survivors’ associations. And finally, in 2010, a small bronze plaque was placed at the site of the disaster.
The inscription read: “Here, between 1943 and 1944, dozens of Soviet women were tortured and murdered on the orders of the Nazi occupation forces. May their names, even if forgotten, never be erased.” The unveiling of the memorial was a very moving moment. Dozens of people were present: relatives of the victims, historians, students, journalists, and Sofia.
She sat in the front row, very upright despite her age, her gaze fixed on the memorial plaque. When the mayor removed her veil, she closed her eyes and murmured something unintelligible. But Morozov, who sat beside her, saw her lips. She said, “Thank you.”
After the ceremony, several people approached Sofia. Some were descendants of victims who had disappeared during the war. Others were simply people moved by her story. A young woman, perhaps in her twenties, shook her hand and said, “My grandmother disappeared in 1943. Her name was Klara Dubova. I don’t know if she was here, but thank you for remembering her.”
“Kla? Yes, I knew Klara. She sang, even in the dark.” The young woman began to cry, and Sofia took her in her arms. Sofia died in 2013 at the age of 91. But before her death, she gave one last interview. She said: “I don’t want people to pity me. I want them to understand what happened, because it didn’t just affect us. It was about what happens when humanity is trampled underfoot, when ordinary people follow orders without question, when silence becomes complicity. And I want you to know: This can happen anytime, anywhere, if we aren’t careful.”
This interview was broadcast on Russian television. It touched millions of people. Schools invited historians to speak about the history of Camp 23 Medical Point, and textbooks were updated to include this story. And slowly, very slowly, these forgotten women found their way back into the collective memory.
But the story doesn’t end with Sofia. In 2017, another survivor came forward. Her name was Louise Petrova. She was 93 years old and lived in a small village in Siberia. She had read Morozov’s book and seen an interview with Sofia. She then decided to tell her own story. She contacted Morozov and told him about it. She had been imprisoned for six months in 1944 in Hospital Camp No. 23.
She survived, but never spoke. “Never, not even to my husband, who died 20 years ago, not to my children, not even to myself.” Louise buried her memories so deeply that she almost forgot them. Almost. But they kept returning—in nightmares, in moments of silence, in smells that reminded her of disinfectant, in sounds that made her think of boots in the hallway.
And now, at 93, she knew she didn’t have much time left. If she didn’t speak now, she would never speak, and these women’s stories would be forgotten. She told Morozov details he had never heard before. She remembered the German nurse who secretly pressed a piece of bread into her hand late at night.
She remembered the woman who had sung a lullaby before she died. She remembered Völker’s face, always calm, always impassive, as if he were examining insects under a microscope. And she remembered the sentence, that sentence: “Austin undhinkniin, undress and kneel.” She could still hear it, even years later.
“It is an echo that never fades,” she said. “It lives within me and will only die with my death.” Morozov recorded Louise’s statement and included it in the second edition of his book, published in 2018. This edition also included letters from the victims’ families, rediscovered photographs, and newly found documents.
The book became even more comprehensive, even more compelling, and continued to move people worldwide. Today, the story of Camp 23 Medical Point is included in the war crimes curriculum of some Russian schools, but it remains relatively unknown. Many victims remain unidentified. Historians are working on projects to identify more women by comparing missing persons lists with recovered documents.
But it’s a lengthy process, because back then these women weren’t counted, and it’s easy to erase someone from history. Rediscovering them is almost impossible. History students at Moscow State University have launched the digital project “Forgotten Voices of Smolensk.” It collects evidence, digitizes documents, and creates online archives.
They contacted families throughout Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. They found letters the women had written shortly before their arrest: photos, marriage certificates, birth certificates. Small fragments of a life before the horror. One of the students, Alexei Kuznetsov, dedicated his doctoral thesis to the medical ward in Camp 23.
For five years he researched in military archives in Germany, France, and Poland. He interviewed descendants of German soldiers. He searched for traces of other peoples. He found none. But he did find evidence that Hospital Camp 23 was not an isolated case, that there were other similar places, other hidden laboratories, and other missing women.
And the scale of these crimes was far more serious than we had imagined. In his dissertation, Kuznetsov writes: “What happened in Sanatorium 23 was not an isolated incident. It was a system. A system that degraded people into guinea pigs. A system that functioned with bureaucratic efficiency. And the most horrifying thing about it is that it was not the work of monsters. It was the work of perfectly ordinary people who accepted the abnormal as the norm.”
Kuznetsov also made a surprising discovery. In 2019, while working in a German archive in Berlin, he found the personal documents of Greta Hoffmann, the German nurse who had kept a secret diary. After the war, she had returned to Hamburg.
She never married. She had no children. Until her retirement in 1978, she worked as a nurse in a children’s hospital. In 1985, she committed suicide. She left a suicide note: “I can no longer bear this burden. I saw what no one should have seen. I did what no one should have done. I thought time would heal the wounds, but some wounds are too deep. Forgive me.”
Greta’s diary was found after her death by her niece, who handed it over to an archive in Munich in 1982. There it remained unnoticed until Kuznetsov discovered it in 2019. The diary contained a detailed description of the events in the infirmary of Camp 23: women’s names, dates, experiments, and, most importantly, her inner struggle.
In one of her last entries, dated May 1944, shortly before the camp’s evacuation, she wrote: “I no longer know who I am. I have become complicit in this horror. I told myself I had no choice. But that is a lie. I did have a choice. I could have refused, I could have died, but I chose to live. And that decision cost me my soul.”
Greta’s diary was published in 2020 under the title “Witness in White: The Diary of a German Nurse in Smolensk.” The book sparked a major debate in Germany about responsibility, complicity, and moral boundaries in extreme situations. However, Morozov’s book continues to be read. Greta Hoffmann’s diary has also been published. Völker’s notebooks are kept in a Moscow museum and can be viewed there.
These are testimonies, memorials, open wounds that cannot be ignored. In 2021, a special ceremony took place at the memorial. Candles were lit, names were read aloud, and a new plaque was unveiled bearing the names of the 37 women identified through the work of historians. 37 names among dozens. But this was only the beginning.
It was a victory over oblivion. And the phrase that repeated itself on the walls, in the newspapers, and in memories: “Austiininukhinin, undress and kneel.” This is no longer just a command; it is a silent scream. A scream that spanned a decade, buried, forgotten, but which still resonates today because these women existed, loved, dreamed, and resisted.
And their story is not just a story of the past. It is a warning for the future. A warning of what happens when humanity is forgotten, when orders are obeyed unconditionally, when silence becomes complicity. Visiting the site of the old textile factory today, one sees a small bronze plaque, names and dates, but one also senses something else.
You will feel the presence of those who have vanished. You will hear the echo of their voices. And perhaps, if you pause for a moment, if you close your eyes, you will hear a soft song, a lullaby, a song of resistance, a song of remembrance, for remembrance is the only weapon against forgetting, and as long as we remember, they live on.
Names we know today thanks to the work of historians: Elisabeth Sokolova, teacher, 26 years old, died in July 1943. Anna Petrovna, Red Army nurse, 28 years old, died in February 1943. Klara Smirnova, partisan, 25 years old, died in March 1944. Isabella Kuznetsova, peasant, 32 years old. She died in December 1943.
Zhanna Volkova, a 45-year-old teacher, died in August 1943. Maria Petrova, an 18-year-old pregnant woman, died in March 1944, along with 31 other people, and dozens more whose names we will never know. Yet they existed, they mattered, and their story will not be forgotten. This is not just a war story, but a story about what happens when humanity is forgotten, when victims become mere numbers, when silence becomes the norm.
And this is the story of why we must remember, why we must raise our voices, why we must never allow this to happen again. Because history repeats itself again and again, in different ways, in different places, but always with the same pattern: dehumanization, indifference, silence. And the only way to put an end to it is to remember, to bear witness, to raise our voices.
These women can no longer speak, but we can. We owe it to them, to ourselves, and to the future. Don’t forget. Never forget. M.
