“Take everything off, it’s just an examination” – what they did to the young captives was more terrible than pain
These testimonies were recorded in Kyiv in 2012. Zinaida Boyko was 88 years old at the time of recording. For 70 years, she avoided publicly speaking about the horrors she experienced in a German medical facility in 1942, sharing her memories only with those closest to her. These are her words.
My name is Zinaida Boyka. Today, outside my window, it’s 2012, and my native Kyiv is bathed in sunlight. The city is noisy, laughing, preparing for the holidays, and young people stroll along the chestnut alleys, who cannot even imagine that the ground beneath their feet was once soaked in blood and silent despair. I am 88 years old now.
I feel my strength fading, my breathing becoming heavy, like an old clock that will soon stop. For 70 years I kept this story deep inside me. Of course, my children and grandchildren knew that I was captured, that I survived the war, but I never told them the whole truth. I was afraid that these words would defile their pure lives, that the shadow of that past would fall on their future.
But now, as I stand on the threshold of eternity, I understand that I cannot take this with me. If I remain silent, then those girls who remained there in the cold tiled halls will disappear forever. I’m turning on this old cassette recorder so you can hear my voice while it’s still playing. This is not just a story, this is a confession.
I often close my eyes and see myself at eighteen. In 1942 I was completely different. I had long braids and hands that smelled of wildflowers and fresh milk. We lived in a small village near Kiev, and then I moved to the city itself, dreaming of becoming a teacher. I wanted to read poetry to children and teach them kindness.
My youth was filled with hope, despite the fact that my childhood was harsh. I remember the famine of 1933, when we ate grass and swan cakes. But even then there was some unbreakable strength in us. By the age of 18, I believed that the worst was already behind me. When the war began in 1941, the skies over Kyiv became black with airplanes.
I remember the whistling sound that made my ears pop and the scent of Harry that lingered in my hair for years. The occupation came suddenly, like a cold fog. The city became alien. Everywhere there were these grey uniforms, barking dogs and orders written in an incomprehensible language. We tried to survive, hid food, helped our own as best we could.
I worked in a small pharmacy, trying to discreetly pass bandages and medicines to those who went into the woods. My world collapsed one warm September day in 1942. It happened because of betrayal. I still don’t know who exactly pointed the finger at me, but I remember the face of that policeman, our neighbor, who looked away when I was pushed out of the house.
The German officer looked at me as if I were not a person, but a thoroughbred horse at a fair. He wrote something down in his notebook and nodded. Me and a dozen other girls from our area were driven to the station. We thought that we were being taken to work in Germany, to the fields or factories. We cried and said goodbye to our native walls, but deep down we hoped that if we worked hard, we would one day return home.
If I had known then what kind of work awaited us, I would have preferred to throw myself under the wheels of that very train. The carriage was packed to capacity. 40 people in a cramped, smelly space. We drove for several days, losing track of time. There was almost no water, my lips were cracked and bleeding, and there was only one thought in my head: where were they taking us.
Finally the train stopped, but it was not a farm or a factory. We were taken out onto an empty platform surrounded by barbed wire. There was a forest all around, and only a gray concrete building rose above the trees. It looked strange, too clean, too quiet. It was a special medical unit, hidden from prying eyes.
We were not taken to the barracks with the other prisoners. We, young, healthy, with clear eyes, were separated from everyone else. I remember the chills that ran down my spine when I saw people in white coats standing next to the SS men. They had the same cold, dead looks as the soldiers. We were taken inside the building.
A sharp, nauseating smell of bleach, ether, and something else that I couldn’t make out at the time hit my nose. The smell of burnt meat and old fear. Inside, everything was dazzling white. The tiles on the floor were so shiny that it hurt the eyes. We were lined up in a long corridor.
The silence was so thick that I could hear my friend Katya’s heart pounding as she stood next to me. We shivered, clinging to each other, trying to find at least a drop of warmth in this sterile hell. And then the heavy door at the end of the corridor opened. A man came out, tall, fit, in an impeccably clean white coat over his uniform. It was Dr. Richter.
He didn’t shout or push us. He walked along the line, looking closely at each face, sometimes touching our chins with his icy fingers. “Welcome,” he said through the translator, and his voice was soft as silk, but from that silk there emanated a grave-like chill. He told us that we were chosen for an important purpose, that we would serve great science.
We didn’t understand anything, what kind of science it was, what kind of helpers we were. And then came this order that I will hear in my nightmares until my last breath. He said it casually, as if asking for a glass of water. Take off your clothes, it’s just an examination. We froze.
In our culture, in our families, nudity was something deeply personal, shameful in front of strangers. We were country girls, brought up in strictness. For us, undressing in front of these men was worse than being lashed. We stood motionless, hoping it was a mistake, that we had heard wrong, but the soldiers standing by the walls clicked their machine guns back.
Richter smiled again and repeated, “Take everything off. We need to make sure you’re healthy. This is a simple formality.” Slowly, burning with shame and horror, we began to take off our clothes. My fingers wouldn’t obey. The buttons on the sweater felt as heavy as stones. I saw Katya crying silently, her shoulders shaking.
When the last of my clothes fell onto the cold tiles, I felt completely defenseless. We stood naked in this brightly lit corridor under the gaze of dozens of men. They didn’t look at us with lust, that would have been even more understandable. They looked at us as pieces of meat, as material. They measured our proportions, examined our skin, teeth, and wrote something down in their folders.
At that moment I realized that we are no longer human here. They took away our names, they took away our modesty, our soul. We became numbers in their reports. I was brought into the office first. There was a high metal bed, and next to it were strange devices that I had never seen before.
Richter came up to me and put on rubber gloves. That sound of rubber stretching still haunts me. He said: “Don’t be afraid, Zinaida, you are a very valuable specimen. Your indicators are ideal.” He began the examination. It wasn’t like the way doctors treat. His movements were mechanical, indifferent. He pressed on my stomach, inserted some instruments, which made everything inside me clench with pain.
But the pain wasn’t the worst thing. The most terrible thing was the feeling of desecration that permeated every cell of my body. I looked at the ceiling at the bright lamp and tried to imagine that I was now far, far away in my garden, where the apple trees were blooming.
I tried to escape from my own body, which no longer belonged to me. When the examination was over, I was not allowed to get dressed. We were driven further into other rooms, where the real tests began. There I met Vera and Tamara. Vera was older than us. She was already married, and there was such deep sadness in her eyes that it was painful to look at her.
Tamara was just a child. She was barely 16, although the Germans were told she was 18. She kept calling for her mother until her mouth was shut with a rude shout. They put us in wards, but they were cages. There were bars on the windows, and the doors were locked with heavy bolts.
We were given thin striped shirts that provided almost no warmth. The very first night I heard screams. They came from the basement, seeping through the walls and ventilation. These were not just cries of pain. These were the cries of people who were confronted with something that was beyond human comprehension.
I huddled in the corner of my bed, covering my ears with my hands, but the sound penetrated straight into my brain. It was then that I realized that the examination was only the beginning, that those words of Dr. Richter about science concealed within them the abyss into which we were destined to fall. I looked at my hands, at my young legs and thought: “How much longer can I remain myself?” They came for us again in the morning.
Richter stood in the doorway, holding a stack of medical records. He looked rested and even contented. “Today we will begin the first series of procedures,” he announced. His gaze settled on me. There was no hatred in that gaze, and that was the most terrifying thing. For him, I was just an interesting case, a biological process that needed to be studied.
We were taken to a block, which they called room number 10. There was a huge machine there, from which a strange hum emanated. We were forced to lie under it for long hours. An invisible heat emanated from this machine, which penetrated deep inside, to the very bottom of the abdomen. We did not know the word radiation then.
We did not understand that this machine was killing in us the very possibility of ever becoming mothers. We just felt a strange nausea and burning. Richter stood behind the glass and wrote down. He watched how our faces changed, how strange spots appeared on our skin. One day I dared to ask a nurse named Greta what they were doing to us.
Greta was a German woman with an icy face. She never smiled and treated us like inanimate objects. She looked at me, and something akin to pity flashed in her eyes, but it immediately disappeared under the mask of discipline. “We are making you pure,” she replied. Only years later did I understand the meaning of those words. They wanted to sterilize us, women they considered inferior, so that our blood would never flow in future generations.
They wanted to wipe our people off the face of the earth, starting from our wombs. And they did it methodically, with German precision, using the most advanced technology of the time. Every day brought new torment. We were forced to drink bitter concoctions that darkened our vision and caused terrible convulsions. After these medications, many of the girls couldn’t get out of bed for several days.
Their bodies swelled, their skin became transparent like parchment, but Richter didn’t stop. If a specimen died, they would carry us away in the night, and the next morning a new girl would appear in the line, as scared and young as I was on my first day. We lived in constant anticipation of death, but death did not come quickly. It played with us.
It looked into our eyes through the lenses of Dr. Richter’s microscopes. I remember one time Tamara was taken away for a special procedure. She was gone for 3 days. When they brought her back on a gurney, she did not recognize us. Her eyes were wide open, but there was no spark of life in them.
She whispered something about white worms and cold needles. A week later, she died in my arms. Her body was covered with small scars, the origin of which I could not explain. That night I did not cry for the first time. My tears dried up, turning into a cold stone inside my chest. I realized that if I wanted to survive, I had to become as cold as this tile, as this metal.
I had to remember everything: every name, every face, every word of this monster in a white coat. This became my only goal: to survive. To one day tell, so that the world would know, what kind of examinations were performed here, in the silence of the Ukrainian forests, on the daughters of my people. Life inside this concrete box turned into an endless gray cycle, where time was not measured in hours.
It was measured by the steps of boots along the corridor and the clang of iron bolts. In this second part of my story, I want to open those doors that I was afraid to look into for 70 years. As I sit here in Kyiv in 2012, it seems to me that I can still feel that icy draft that walked through halls number 10 and number 11.
There were about a hundred of us girls in our wing. All young, all from different corners of Ukraine and Russia. But now we had neither a homeland nor names. The system was simple and merciless. Every morning began at 5:30. We were awakened by a sharp whistle and the shouts of the guards. If you hesitated even for one minute, you would be lashed with a leather whip or deprived of your daily ration of gruel, which already consisted of rotten rutabaga and 200 grams of bread mixed with sawdust.
But hunger was not our main problem. We quickly learned that in this place, being full was a bad sign. Those chosen for the most difficult examinations were fed a little better, so that their bodies would not give in a little longer. Doctor Richter created a world here where everything was subordinated to his perverted order.
He called it biological discipline. Each of us had our own number. Mine was 34. It was tattooed not on my arm, but on a small metal tag that we had to hold in our teeth during certain procedures, so as not to bite my tongue from the pain. I remember Vera. Vera was my only support. She was 24 years old.
She was older than us and knew a little more about life. One night, when the room was completely dark, she whispered to me: “Zina, they’re not just studying us, they want us to be the last of our kind.” I didn’t quite understand her words then, but Vera saw what we didn’t. She noticed that after visiting the ray room, the girls stopped menstruating and their skin acquired a strange waxy tint.
Greta, the head nurse, was Richter’s shadow. If the doctor was the mind of this hell, then Greta was its hands. She was a woman of about 40, with perfectly styled blond hair and hands that always smelled of strong disinfectant. I never saw her blink when someone screamed under her with a needle.
For her, we weren’t even animals, but some kind of annoying obstacles on the way to her flawless reports. One day, she saw me sharing a piece of my bread with little Tamara, who was really unwell. Greta came up to me without saying a word and hit me in the face with a metal instrument tray. My lip burst, blood splattered on her white coat.
She simply took out a handkerchief, wiped the stain and said: “There is no room for pity in this block, only for data.” The main injuries began when Richter began the injection cycle. It was November 1942. A group of 10 people, including me, Vera and Tamara, were led into a room with high windows painted over with gray paint.
We were forced to lie down on tables that were so cold that our skin instantly stuck to the metal. Richter walked between the tables with a large syringe. He injected a bright yellow liquid into our veins. “This is for your own good,” he said in his broken language. But two minutes after the injection, a fire started in my body.
It felt like molten lead was being pumped through my veins instead of blood. My heart was beating so hard it felt like it would break my ribs. 34, 35, 36 beats per minute. And then the rhythm would break into a mad dash. My eyes went blurry, and I could hear Tamara on the next table start to convulse.
Her body arched, and foam started coming out of her mouth. Richter just stood next to her with a stopwatch and recorded the time the convulsions began. This nightmare repeated itself three times a week. After each such experiment, we would return to our cells, dragging our feet. We were nauseous. Our hair was falling out in clumps, and our teeth were starting to loosen.
But the most terrible thing was the psychological oppression. Richter loved to hold conversations. He would call us one by one into his office, offer us to sit down and ask about our dreams, about our parents. He did it so casually that for a moment you could forget where you were. And then he would suddenly change his tone and begin to describe exactly how our body would decompose under the influence of his drugs.
It was torture by hope and despair. One day in December 1942, an incident occurred that I will never forget. A new group of women was brought to our unit. Among them was a very young, almost girl named Maria. She had an amazing voice. She quietly sang Ukrainian lullabies at night.
Richter became interested in her. He decided to test how stress and certain chemicals affect the vocal cords. He made her sing while injecting drugs that caused swelling of the larynx. We heard her voice, at first clear and ringing, and then it became quieter and quieter, turning into a hoarseness, and then into an animal groan.
After two weeks, Maria fell silent forever. She didn’t die? No, she simply lost the ability to make sounds. Richter was disappointed. He said that the material turned out to be of poor quality and she was taken away to an unknown location. Vera and I made a pact. We swore that if one of us survived, she would tell everything.
Vera said: “Zina, you’re young. You must remember every little detail. Remember his fingers. Remember the smell of this bleach. You are our witness.” I looked at my hands, which had become like the feet of a bird. Skin to the bone, covered with bruises from endless blood draws, and I did not believe that I had a future.
The most difficult moment of that period was the experiment with X-ray rays. We were taken into a room with massive lead doors. There was a huge black machine that buzzed like an angry swarm of bees. We were forced to stand in front of the screen for 15-20 minutes, while Richter and his assistants were behind a thick protective wall.
We felt only a slight tingling and the smell of ozone. We did not know that this machine was burning out our female essence, that it was turning our ovaries into dead tissue. We were just glad that at least in this room they did not beat us or prick us with needles. We were so naive in our desire to survive. One day, when I was being led out of the X-ray room, I saw my face in the reflection of the glass cabinet.
I didn’t recognize myself. A creature with sunken eyes, gray skin, and the wispy remains of her hair was looking back at me. I was 18 years old, but I looked 60. At that moment, I felt something inside me finally break. It wasn’t physical pain, it was the realization that they had already killed me, although my heart was still beating.
They had taken my beauty, my youth, and my potential to give life to another person. The control over us was total. Even in the toilet, Greta was watching us. We had no right to personal space, to our own thoughts. We were forced to learn German marches and sing them when Richter entered the room. It was the highest degree of humiliation.
Glorifying those who slowly killed you. Those who refused to sing were sent to the cold punishment cell, a windowless concrete pit where there was always ice water on the floor. Vera spent three days there. When they took her out, she couldn’t speak. Her teeth were constantly chattering, and her feet were black from frostbite.
I remember how Stepan, one of the few male prisoners who worked in the hostel block and sometimes threw us an extra potato over the fence, whispered to me once: “Hold on, daughter. Ours is already close.” I heard the guns thundering in the east. These words became oxygen for us. We began to listen to the silence.
And indeed, sometimes, when the wind blew from the front lines, a dull, barely audible hum reached us. It was hope, but it was dangerous. Richter heard this hum too, and it made him even more cruel. He was in a hurry. He wanted to finish his research before the war came to the doorstep of his laboratory.
At the end of December 1942, the regime became even harsher. They began to subject us to procedures twice a day. My body was so exhausted that I often lost consciousness right in the corridor. At such moments, Greta simply doused me with cold water and forced me to walk further. “Movement is life, 34,” she grinned.
But I knew that for them, our movement is simply a way to test how resilient human flesh is in the face of ultimate destruction. I remember Tamara in her last days. She lay on the neighboring bunk, delirious. She saw her mother, she saw our village, she saw apples ripening in the orchard. She stretched out her matchstick-thin hands to the invisible fruit and smiled.
That smile on her emaciated face was the most terrible sight in my life. That night, she fell silent. When Greta came to check on her in the morning, she simply pushed Tamara’s body off the bunk onto the floor and ordered Stepan and me to carry her out. We carried her small, weightless body across the courtyard to a ditch dug behind the building.
Snow fell on her open eyes, and I swore I would never forget that look. In this second part of my testimony, I have described only the tip of the iceberg of pain in which we lived. Richter’s aim was to turn us into obedient zombies, into organic material. But they miscalculated one thing: that even in the most inhumane conditions, the heart is capable of remembering.
My heart beat slowly, it sank from fear and hunger, but it continued to count every day of our shame. I write this now, in 2012, and my hands tremble not from old age, but because I can once again smell the yellow liquid they poured into our veins. We were young, we were 18 years old, and the world around us should have been blooming, but instead we rotted in the sterile halls of German science.
Ahead lay 1943, the year of the most terrible choice and the deepest despair. In the next part, I will tell you about how I was forced to become an assistant in Richter’s operating room. And about the moment when I realized that death – it’s sometimes the most merciful gift. I’m sitting here in my chair and I can hear the hum of machines outside the window in 2012.
This sound is so peaceful, so ordinary. But in my head, another hum still sounds. The hum of the lamps in Dr. Richter’s operating room. Now I must tell about the most terrible thing, about the time when the pain in my muscles gave way to emptiness in my soul. By January 1943, I was no longer the same girl from near Kyiv.
I was a shadow. My hair had almost all fallen out, my skin was stretched over my bones like gray parchment, and my eyes—when I saw myself in the reflection of the medical cabinets, I was afraid of my own eyes. They were dead. In the middle of the winter of 1943, Dr. Richter decided that I was too capable to just lie on the bed and wait for the next injection.
He found out that I knew a little about Latin and pharmacy, and then he did something more cruel than any injection. He forced me to work for him. He ordered me to be an assistant in his laboratory and operating room. “Zinaida, you have steady hands,” he said to me one day, pulling on his white gloves.
“You will help me prepare the material.” It was my personal hell. I had to wash the floors after the procedures, sterilize the instruments used to torture my friends, and hold their hands when they screamed. It was the kind of cruelty that went beyond physical pain. Richter didn’t just want to destroy our bodies, he wanted to turn us into accomplices.
He wanted me to look into the eyes of Vera or Katya when he injected them with his poisons, and for them to see me as a traitor. I remember February 1943. It was so cold outside that the walls of our concrete box were covered with frost from the inside. But the operating room was always hot from the powerful lamps.
That day Richter evoked faith—my dear Vera, who was like a sister to me. She was already very weak after the X-rays. Her belly was covered in dark spots and her breathing was wheezing. Richter wanted to make a final inspection. This is what he called his surgical experiments in organ removal.
“Hold her by the shoulders, 34,” he ordered me. I stood at the head of the table, my hands shaking so much I almost dropped the tray. Vera looked at me. There was no hatred in her gaze. There was only an endless farewell in it. She whispered: “Zina, don’t look, close your eyes.” But I couldn’t close my eyes.
Greta stood next to me and made sure I followed every order. That hour lasted forever. I saw the scalpel gleam in Richter’s hands. He worked without anesthesia, using only local cooling, which was of little help. He wanted to see the reaction of the nervous system at every stage. Vera screamed loudly at first, with a choking sound, and then her voice broke into a wheeze.
I felt her nails digging into my forearms, her life literally leaking through my fingers, and I had to give him the clamps. I was handing over the tools that killed the man who had protected me from day one. At that moment my heart turned into a piece of ice. I realized that this is their main goal—to burn out everything human in us, so that we hate ourselves.
After that day, Vera did not return to the ward. Richter said her body provided valuable data for histology. I spent the whole night cleaning the operating room. I scrubbed the tiles until my nails bled, trying to wash away the blood of Vera. But I knew that this blood was now forever on my conscience.
I have been living with this feeling for 70 years. For 70 years I have seen Vera’s face in the dark before going to bed. The experiments became more and more sophisticated. Richter began working with infections. He injected us with pathogens under our skin that we had previously thought had disappeared.
He watched as ulcers developed and living flesh rotted. He called it a study of the resistance of the Eastern races. One day he selected five girls and forced them to drink water laced with chemicals that caused immediate kidney damage. I had to record how many times per hour they asked for water and how many times they lost consciousness.
One of them was very young, she was barely 17 years old. She called for her mother in Ukrainian so quietly and plaintively that even the guards’ eyelids sometimes twitched. But not with Richter. To him, these were just numbers: five people, 10 mg of the substance, 3 hours before death. The most terrible peak came in March 1943.
The front began to move, and the Germans became nervous. Richter received orders to shut down the investigation as soon as possible and destroy non-core assets. We understood what this meant. This meant that we would all soon be gone. That day, Richter decided to conduct his great experiment.
He wanted to test the theory of completely sterilizing an entire settlement through injections into the water supply. But first he needed to test the dosage on us. He gathered all the remaining girls in the main hall. There were 22 of us. We stood naked, huddled together, exhausted, sick, barely able to stand on our feet.
Richter entered the hall accompanied by a group of officers from Berlin. He looked triumphant. “Today you will become part of history,” he announced. He chose me to help him introduce this new lineup. I stood in front of a bowl of this liquid. It was clear as water, but it smelled of death. He pointed to Katya, my last remaining friend.
“Start, 34,” he said and handed me the syringe. I looked at Katya. Her eyes were full of horror. I looked at Richter. He smiled his subtle, scientific smile. The whole hall froze. Even Greta held her breath. It was the moment of my final destruction or my final rebellion. I understood that if I did this, I would survive today, but I would die inside forever.
If I don’t do it, they’ll kill me on the spot. My fingers squeezed the cold glass of the syringe. I saw the officers take out their notebooks. And then something happened that no one expected. Katya suddenly straightened up. Despite her thinness, at that moment she looked majestic. She spat in Richter’s face, simply and quietly.
There was dead silence. I saw a drop of saliva running down his clean-shaven cheek. Richter’s smile slowly faded. His face became a mask of rage, which he had hidden for so long behind his politeness. “Kill her,” he muttered through his teeth. One of the soldiers hit Katya on the head with the butt of a rifle.
She fell to her knees, but did not make a sound. Richter snatched the syringe from me and thrust it into her neck himself, injecting the entire dose at once. Katya began to convulse terribly right at my feet. Her body arched so hard that her bones began to crack. It was agony which cannot be described in words. It was pure, concentrated evil, committed in full view of everyone.
We stood and watched as the last of our group’s spirit died. At that moment I realized that the examination was over. There was only darkness beyond. Richter turned to us. His robe was stained with Katya’s blood. “We’ll finish with the rest tomorrow,” he said and left the room. They drove us back to the wards, but we were no longer the same.
After Katya’s death, something changed in us. We were no longer afraid of injections or x-rays. We waited for death as liberation. Nobody slept that night. We sat on the floor, huddled close to each other, and listened to the wind outside the walls. I looked at my hands and hated them because they were still warm. I remember Vera telling me that I had to remember everything.
And I remembered. I repeated the names to myself: Vera, Katya, Tamara, Maria, Olga. I counted them like rosary beads. 22 girls, 52 days in this block. 1943. These numbers are imprinted in my memory forever. I understood that the climax of our suffering had been reached. Things couldn’t get any worse, because they couldn’t get any worse.
We have reached the bottom of human cruelty. That last night in Richter’s laboratory, I felt my soul separate from my body. I saw myself from the outside: a small, withered old woman in the body of an eighteen-year-old girl, sitting on a dirty mattress. I knew that they would come for us tomorrow morning.
I knew that Richter would leave no witnesses, but deep down I felt some strange, bitter freedom. They could take away my health, my ability to have children, my youth, but they could not make me forget who I am. In the morning at about 4:00 we heard strange sounds. It wasn’t screams from the basement, it was the sounds of explosions, but they were very close.
The ground shook and plaster fell from the ceiling. We heard panic in the corridors. The Germans were running, screaming, burning papers. The smell of burning became unbearable. Richter no longer came to us with a smile. We saw through the crack in the door how he and Greta hastily loaded boxes into the cars.
It was the end of our imprisonment, but we did not yet know whether it would be the beginning of our freedom or our mass grave. The last morning in that concrete hell arrived not with sunlight, but with a silence that was more terrible than any explosion. In March 1943, when the ground in the forests near Kiev was still covered in ice, we woke up and didn’t hear the usual barking of shepherds.
The heavy footsteps of the guards, which usually drummed on the corridor floor, were not heard either. We lay on our hard bunks, afraid to move, thinking that this was some new, even more sophisticated trap from Dr. Richter. The smell of smoke was so thick that it seemed like the air itself had turned to grey, sticky ash.
The Germans left during the night in a hurry, trying to cover up the traces of what they called science. They set fire to the archives and part of the basements where our medical records were kept—our medical histories, which were in fact the histories of our destruction. I remember how we and a few surviving shadows decided to go out into the corridor.
The doors of our cells were thrown open for the first time in many months. We walked along the blindingly white tiles, which were now strewn with scraps of burnt paper and empty ampoules. My legs were bare, the skin on my soles had long since become rough from the cold, and touching the floor seemed to me at that moment the most wonderful feeling in the world. It was the cold of freedom, not the icy steel of the operating table.
We were making our way through the fog of burning papers, and I could see black flakes flying in the air. It was our names that burned, our torments, turning into nothing. I went out into the yard. Air. I can never forget the taste of that spring air. It smelled of March snow, rotten pine needles, and hope.
I stood on the porch, shielding my eyes with my hand from the unusually bright light. I was only 18 years old, but at that moment I felt like an ancient, withered old woman who had seen the creation of the world and its end. We looked like people from the other world, with grey, sunken faces, empty eye sockets and arms as thin as twigs.
Our striped shirts hung on us like skeletons. We didn’t know which way to go. Where is north and where is south? We just stood and looked at the forest that tightly surrounded this damned laboratory. And then they appeared from behind the trees, breaking the bushes: people in grey quilted jackets, with machine guns on their chests, with red stars on their earflaps. Our soldiers.
I remember the young lieutenant who was the first to jump over the low fence and approach us. He looked no more than 22 years old, almost my age. But when he saw us, his face, already roughened by endless battles and deaths, suddenly twitched. He stopped dead in his tracks, took off his hat and simply fell silent.
He looked at our shaved heads, at our scars, at what the enlightened doctors of the Reich had turned us into. There was no pity in his gaze. There was a horror of what one person could do to another. He silently took a piece of stale bread from his bag and handed it to me. His fingers, stained with gunpowder smoke, trembled.
I took this bread, pressed it to my chest like the most precious treasure, but I couldn’t bite off a single piece. A spasm gripped my throat. I just stood there and cried. For the first time in all those months that I spent in block number 10. These were tears of relief, but they also contained all the bitterness for those who did not come out into this sun: Vera, Katya, Tamara.
They remained there, in nameless pits behind a concrete fence. Richter took their lives, and he took away our right to a normal life. We were loaded into trucks and taken to a field hospital. It was there, after a month of examinations, when doctors were trying to bring our exhausted bodies back to life, that I heard my final verdict.
A young Soviet doctor, whose face was grey from sleepless nights, leafed through my tests for a long time. He sighed, shuffled papers and could not bring himself to raise his eyes. Finally he said, stammering softly, “Zinaida, what they did to you—those rays, those compounds in the syringes—they burned everything out of you. They destroyed your chance of ever becoming a mother. You will never have children.”
At that moment, the sky above my head, which I had just begun to consider peaceful, finally collapsed. At 18, I learned that my lineage would end with me, that life could no longer begin within me, that I was scorched earth on which nothing could grow. This was Dr. Richter’s last, most vile victory. He didn’t kill me with a bullet, but he killed my future, depriving me of what makes a woman a woman.
After the front moved west, I returned to my Kyiv. The city lay in ruins. It was wounded just like me. I saw how people cleared the rubble on Khreshchatyk, how they sang songs, despite hunger and losses. And I couldn’t sing. I walked along broken streets and saw women with strollers, and every child’s laugh pierced my heart like a sharp Richter needle.
For 70 years I have carried this infertility within me as the heaviest invisible burden. In 1947, when life slowly began to return to a peaceful course, I met Stepan. He, too, was wounded by the war and went through captivity. He had terrible scars on his back and deep sadness in his eyes. We got married.
We lived in a small room in a communal apartment and never spoke out loud about what was there. Stepan knew my secret. He knew that I would not be able to give him a son or a daughter. He simply squeezed my hand tightly when I woke up in the middle of the night from my own scream, and whispered: “The main thing is that we are together, Zinochka, the main thing is that we are breathing.”
Together we built this Kyiv that I see today from my window in 2012. I worked on construction sites, carried heavy bricks on par with men, worked in a pharmacy, trying to treat people with the simplest means. I tried to be useful, tried to forget myself in endless work, so as not to think that my house would never be filled with children’s laughter.
But the smell of disinfectants in hospitals always made me turn pale and faint. I’ve avoided doctors all my life. I was deathly afraid of any medical examination. I have lived my entire long life in the shadow of that single year. I told Stepan everything, and he was the only person who knew the truth.
But even to him I didn’t fully admit how exactly I helped Richter in the operating room when he was tormenting Vera. I was afraid that Stepan would no longer be able to touch my hands if he found out that these hands had been used to hand over the murderer’s tools. It was my secret cross, which I bore alone for decades.
Now, when it’s 2012, I look at the young people walking along the Dnieper embankment. The city is preparing for the football championship. There are flags, music, and laughter everywhere. I look at them and see in them the life that they tried to take away from us. Stepan has been gone from me for 10 years, and I am left alone in this empty apartment.
Sometimes I feel like I’m still sitting on that dirty mattress in Block 10, and that my entire subsequent life is just a long, detailed dream I had before I died. 70 years of silence. I kept it because I wanted to protect my loved ones from the evil I saw with my own eyes. But now, as I feel the cold creeping into my heart, I realize that silence is also poison.
If we don’t tell this story, if we let these stories disappear with us, then the Richter doctors may return. Evil loves the silence of its revelation. I often think about that man in the white coat. I don’t know what happened to him after the war. Perhaps he escaped overseas and lived to a ripe old age in prosperity and honor.
But I know one thing: his science has failed. He wanted to prove our insignificance, he wanted to turn us into biological waste. But I stand here, I’m 88 years old, and I remember every name. His name has been erased from the world’s memory. His manuscripts burned in March 1943. And my memory is alive.
My memory is the highest justice. My ability to cry for Katya and Vera after 70 years is something he never had and could never have. He had only cold calculation and steel, but we had a soul that he was never able to dissect with his scalpel. I feel the candle of my life begin to flicker. This old tape recorder is recording my last breaths.
I want to address those who will listen to this in my native Kyiv or in any other corner of the Earth. Take care of the human within you. This is the hardest and the most important thing. Never let anyone convince you that one life is more valuable than another because of the color of their skin or the shape of their skull.
Don’t let fear make you an instrument of someone else’s evil will. Remember that behind every dry figure in history books there is a living, pulsating heart, which knew how to love, hope and forgive. When I am gone, I want these records to remain as a testimony. Let them be a reminder that even in the darkest place, in the deepest hell, one can and should keep the light within oneself.
I close my eyes and finally see them all. They are standing on a huge green meadow, sun-drenched, where there are no tiles, no sharp needles, and no cold, studying gaze from Dr. Richter. Katya laughs happily, Vera straightens her braid, and little Tamara eats a juicy ripe apple. They wave to me, call me to them, and I go to them with a clear conscience.
I didn’t remain silent, I told everything. My voice gets quieter and soon the tape will stop. For 70 years I have been waiting for this moment, the moment when I can finally breathe out this story and leave it to you. Life is the greatest miracle, even if it has gone through fire and ashes. Remember about this. Remember us.
We were young, we were 18 years old, and we really just wanted to live.
Historians estimate that thousands of Soviet and Ukrainian women were subjected to forced sterilization in SS medical facilities during World War II. In the Ravensbrück camp alone, hundreds of young girls were mutilated in chemical and radiological experiments under the pretext of racial hygiene, permanently depriving them of the right to motherhood.
