Edgewater woman, 97, recalls torture, abuse in Nazi concentration camps

Through a small square in the side of a boxcar cramped with human cargo, 22-year-old Elsie Ragusin watched the cities of Central Europe pass in and out of view.

The smell of human waste hung heavy in the thick heat. Hunger blurred her vision.

For five days in August 1944, the train traveled from northern Italy to Vienna, east to Budapest and up across Czechoslovakia and into Poland — no food, no water and no reprieve for its passengers.

Ragusin dared not budge from her place beside the sole source of fresh air and sunlight.

“If you moved, you’re afraid to be trampled,” Ragusin said. “I couldn’t squat down or anything.”

Ragusin was in shock.

What’s going on? Why am I being held?

“It was horrible. I couldn’t understand what was happening,” said Ragusin, now 97 and living in Edgewater. “I was stunned most of the time.”

Earlier that spring, German troops occupied Lussino, twin Italian isles off the Croatian coast where Ragusin was visiting her grandparents.

Nazi soldiers entered their home and demanded Ragusin and her father accompany them for questioning on suspicions of spying for the Allies.

She languished in jail cells for weeks, and then was put on a train bound, she thought, for factory work in Germany. That still seemed a possibility five days later when she stepped off the train in front of a hall with huge doors.

But several hours later when she entered a brick barracks lined with overcrowded bunks, she finally realized.

This was no factory.

Ragusin had arrived at Auschwitz, a sprawling death camp complex in Poland to which the Nazis deported more than 1.3 million people during Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Prisoners were shipped to Auschwitz from all over Europe. Most were Jews. Some were political dissidents. Others belonged to ethnic or social groups Hitler sought to eradicate.

But as far as Ragusin knew, she was the only American.

A sudden shift

From the deck of an Italian steamship, Ragusin (pronounced Ra-gu-ZEEN) gazed with eager eyes on majestic Mediterranean palaces and centuries-old monuments she’d only imagined in her native New York.

It was her third transatlantic voyage, but the first she was old enough to appreciate.

Soon after she was born on Nov. 4, 1921, her parents, Giovanni and Domenica Ragusin, took Elsie and her three older brothers to Lussino, their ancestral homeland, to meet the rest of the family.

But on this 1939 trip, 17 years old and fresh out of high school, Ragusin was mesmerized by every port they passed. Lisbon, Barcelona, Genoa, Corfu, Venice — each city enchanted her further.

Her fantasy continued when she arrived with her mother and father at her family’s seaside villa on Lussinpiccolo, the smaller of the Lussino islands. Their stay extended several years to care for her aging grandparents.

Ragusin explored castles, joined a theater group, assisted university students with English language compositions and fell for a striking 22-year-old navy captain named Toni Rocchi.

Neighbors called her the “most beautiful girl on the island” and numerous men sought her hand in marriage. But she had eyes only for Toni.

They danced on the moonlit shore, reveled at romantic military balls and took walks along the waterfront under their families’ watchful eyes.

“I had the love of my life in Europe,” Ragusin said. “He was a beautiful, kind man.”

He didn’t officially propose — the looming war cast a long shadow of uncertainty — but he asked her to wait for him. It was all the assurance she needed. “I knew I was his, you know, and that was it,” she said.

Toni was called to active duty on a warship in 1941, and the idyllic future she foresaw was snatched away.

Unjust imprisonment

At first, it seemed like a simple misunderstanding.

Soon after German forces occupied Lussino in spring 1944, two Nazi soldiers entered her grandparents’ home and accused Ragusin and her father of signaling Allied aircraft with cigarettes. Her mother and extended family were not implicated.

“I never smoked in my life,” Ragusin said. “(They said) we were spies, and that never happened. And then they were saying, too, that we were Jews, and that didn’t work out because we were Roman Catholic.”

Perhaps someone pointed the Nazis toward her and her father to spare their own life or curry favor with the occupying army. She still doesn’t know.

The soldiers ordered them to pack suitcases — they would be detained for a night or two until they could be interrogated.

But days stretched into weeks. They were shifted to other cities, other prisons. Ragusin’s father explained to authorities that it was all a big mistake. Instead of being freed, they were fingerprinted and separated.

Ragusin was moved to Trieste, in a northeastern nook of mainland Italy, and jailed with female political prisoners in a filthy, rat-infested cell. There, the seriousness of her situation set in.

Prisoners were selected for execution at random. Ragusin heard the screams of those who were tortured. The survivors returned with harrowing accounts of barbaric brutality.

She found hope in rumors that they might be sent by train to Germany. After so long in a prison cell, even the thought of forced labor seemed an escape.

At the station, she saw a familiar face among men being herded from one train to another.

“I saw my father and oh — that beautiful face,” Ragusin said. “I ran to him and he spotted me and ran to me and we embraced.”

A German soldier tore them apart, spat insults and shoved them into separate lines.

“He was put on one train, which went somewhere, I didn’t know where, and I was put in another,” she said. “And that was the last time I saw my father.”

‘Nothing but bones’

Five numbers tattooed on Ragusin’s forearm have faded with time, but her memory of the moment they were inked remains fresh.

Ragusin already was within the walls of Auschwitz when the train came to a stop at the end of her transcontinental trek from Trieste.

She hadn’t eaten, drunk, slept or sat down for five days.

The boxcar door slid open, and the bodies of those who perished on the journey tumbled out. The survivors waited on a platform for hours to enter a large hall that led into what she discovered later was a gas chamber.

Their suitcases were taken first, next their garments and then their dignity.

“I never took my clothes off in front of (anyone) — never,” Ragusin said. “And here I was naked in front of all these people. I think I died several times. I was so humiliated.”

She begged to keep her gold necklace with its cross pendant, her gold watch and a ring, a graduation gift from her parents. “You don’t need them here,” she recalled a guard’s cold reply.

They shaved her body and cropped her long, brown hair. She was sprayed with water — first scalding, then freezing — and doused with insecticide. The women lined up again, still naked, for officers to assess.

Women huddled together for warmth and were beaten for it. One fell to the floor in front of Ragusin, bleeding from a gash on her head.

“But you can’t pick them up,” she said. “You can’t do anything, you just have to stay there and look.”

A high-ranking Nazi officer she later learned was Adolf Eichmann, whom Hitler tasked with coordinating the Jews’ extermination, decided their fate with a flick of his finger.

“He'd mark you: Go this way or that way,” Ragusin said. “It meant those (sent to one side) are to go to work, and those (pointed to the other) will be killed.”

Those selected for labor had a number tattooed atop their left forearms. Ragusin no longer had a name. She was 82384.

She received one damp, smelly blue-and-gray dress, but no undergarments or shoes.

Prisoners slept in muddy barracks lined with rows of bunk beds. Seven to 10 people squeezed on their sides into each bunk with one blanket between them.

“When you open a can of sardines, they’re this way and that way — that’s how it was with people,” Ragusin said. “How could you ever sleep?”

She covered her face with her hands at night to protect it from being kicked.

They were roused daily at 2 or 3 a.m. for roll call. Many collapsed and died, too weak to stand at attention for hours in the rain or snow until the count was correct. The rest went to work.

A sign on the camp gate in German stated “Arbeit macht frei” — work sets you free — but Ragusin couldn’t read it.

She mixed cement, chopped wood and laid bricks to build more barracks. Her arms bled from carrying rocks and pushing heavy carts laden with sand and boulders. She sometimes worked all day and night with no rest.

“It was so atrocious, so hard to believe the things that were happening,” Ragusin said. “You never could imagine all the beatings and everything else.”

Guards struck her more than once as punishment for not working fast enough. One whipped her so hard across her left ear that she lost hearing.

She refused to show weakness.

“I was afraid that if they see that I’m hurting, they might shoot me,” she said, so she tucked her bloody face into her shoulder and kept going. “I never heard (out of that ear) again.”

Food was scant, and sanitation was nonexistent.

The latrine — if there was time to use it — was a row of holes in the ground, out in the open. Breakfast was a mug of ground beans.

“And then later, coming home (after work) for supper, we had a piece of black bread — very hard, which I broke my tooth on — a piece of margarine, a piece of some kind of bologna. But that was it,” Ragusin said.

Disease was rampant. Body lice spread typhus fever. Dysentery was common, and feces-contaminated drinking water induced typhoid.

“We were starving and thirsty because you knew if you drink the water, you’re gone,” Ragusin said.

She went barefoot for weeks until she bartered some bread for mismatched, holey shoes from a prisoner who worked unloading luggage from incoming transports. She stuffed scraps of paper and trash into the slits to keep the mud out.

Days and dates were meaningless. Her 23rd birthday passed, but she had no notion of it. Her withering body was the only means of measurement.

“I was a skeleton,” Ragusin said. “My face was sunk and my legs, my arms — just bones. Nothing but bones.”

She felt utterly alone. “I had no friends because you can’t trust anybody,” she said. “Who put you there? You don’t know. You can’t believe anybody.”

During the several months Ragusin estimates she spent at Auschwitz, she watched desperate prisoners grab the camp’s electric fence to kill themselves. Others tried to escape and were hanged. But she still held on to hope.

‘A lot to live for’

She’d always been strong-willed.

At age 2 or 3, Ragusin wandered away from her family’s Lussino home. Her panicked mother searched among the nearby shops until she found some men singing and drinking wine. One had Ragusin on his knee, singing along.

To forestall any further adventures, her mother took her sandals away, sure that Ragusin wouldn’t walk barefoot down the rocky path leading toward town. Her mother was wrong.

“Sure enough, I went there again without shoes,” Ragusin said. “I was a little rebel.”

Her innate perseverance kept her alive, but the waning days of the war tested her resilience more than ever.

As Allied forces approached Auschwitz in January 1945, she was shipped west by train to Ravensbrück, an all-female camp in northeast Germany.

It was as if the whole horrible nightmare was rewound and played again: a 400-mile journey in an overburdened boxcar during the heart of winter, the same humiliating intake process and selection. Only Ravensbrück was even worse than Auschwitz.

A colored cloth triangle on each woman’s uniform depicted why she was imprisoned. Jews wore a yellow triangle. Ragusin’s was red — designating her a political prisoner.

“I was so angry,” she said, still incensed at the injustice of it all. “I did nothing wrong.”

She traded a day’s supper for a needle and thread and sewed “USA” onto her red patch in defiance. Guards never confronted her about it.

She was quarantined for almost a month with hardly any food and infected sores spread over her body.

Once she was released into the general population, she worked in factories making parts for bombs, sawed down trees and dug holes in the forest. The prisoners on duty when the holes were deep enough were shot and shoved in.

People around her constantly died or disappeared, hauled away in trucks and never seen again.

A tooth once caused her such pain that she couldn’t work. Guards pulled it with pliers and no anesthesia. “I thought my whole insides were being taken out,” she said.

Even that was better than being taken to the medical ward, where “unthinkable” things happened.

Josef Mengele, a German physician who became known as the “angel of death,” subjected some prisoners to grotesque and inhumane procedures.

Ragusin underwent frequent “examinations,” she said. Women would be made to stand naked in front of large windows to be X-rayed and injected with unknown substances.

“You see the doctors standing there watching,” she said. “You have to parade in front of them. If you could, you could have just stabbed and killed them. Many times that’s how I felt. But you had to keep your sanity and keep on going, just be strong.”

Some experiments — cruel attempts at sterilization — were too graphic to describe in detail.

She remembers six doctors in white uniforms holding down her head, arms and feet, and then excruciating pain.

Her mind flashed to her fiance, Toni, and she mourned her lost innocence. She thought of her mother and father, her brothers back in New York and her Catholic faith.

“When they let me out that time, I said, ‘God, I want you to make a hole and put me right down there,’” Ragusin said. “I wanted him to bury me. I was so embarrassed, so ashamed. I didn’t want to live anymore for what they did.”

But she longed to see her family and Toni again. And so, as she had done so many days before, she summoned the courage to carry on.

“I kept on fighting all the time. Because I did want to live. I didn’t want to die then,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have a lot to live for.’”

The Swedish Red Cross arrived at Ravensbrück on April 24, 1945. And not a moment too soon. The Nazis had begun locking prisoners in and setting their barracks on fire. Ragusin heard hers was next.

She was taken to Sweden and later Denmark to recover and returned to the U.S. in late December 1945.

Her mother hid out in Italy until the war ended and came home to New York in 1947. Her father perished in Buchenwald concentration camp. Toni was killed in battle, and her youthful dreams died with him.

But 10 years later, she had a son. His father looked just like Toni.

‘God always saved me’

Ragusin has lived 1,170 months. She spent just 10 of them in Nazi jails and camps.

She has three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She wrote a book. She loved and lost other men.

But she never recovered what those 10 months took from her.

She wasn’t a soldier, but she did go to war. She has no pension to show for it.

Ragusin resides alone in a retirement community, struggling to survive on her Social Security stipend. She relies on the Council on Aging of Volusia County to supply her with meals several times a week.

The same questions she grappled with at 22 have haunted her for 70 years.

“God always saved me in the camp,” Ragusin said. But why? Why was she there? Why is she here now?

She settles on two reasons. The first is her son, who lives with his wife a few doors down.

The other is her testimony.

Two years ago, a married couple asked Ragusin to meet their teenage daughter, who had fallen in with Nazi extremists and begun preaching their ideology in internet videos: The Holocaust was a hoax. Those sent to camps had plenty of food and spent their time relaxing in swimming pools.

Ragusin met with the girl and shared all she’d endured.

“Later, she called (me) and she said, ‘You saved my life,’” Ragusin said. “I think that’s why maybe I’m here.”

'Never forget'

The Holocaust survivors’ rallying cry has long been “never forget.”

As the youngest survivors age into their 70s, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., makes a special effort to preserve firsthand accounts in order to educate people about what happened during the Holocaust to Jews and non-Jews alike.

To honor this week's Days of Remembrance, established by Congress as the nation’s annual Holocaust commemoration, The News-Journal is sharing the individual accounts of four local Holocaust survivors.

Aimee Rubensteen, the museum's acquisitions coordinator, travels South Florida “rescuing the evidence of the Holocaust by speaking to firsthand witnesses,” she said, and collecting their World War II-era photos, letters, newspaper clippings, clothing and other artifacts of historical value — including the red triangle patch on which Elsie Ragusin sewed "USA" during her time in a German concentration camp.

“These original artifacts will be the things that teach the Holocaust to future generations,” Rubensteen said.

The museum’s mission is to educate people about what happened during the Holocaust to Jews and non-Jews alike and to encourage critical thinking about how and why those atrocities occurred.

Firsthand stories make those larger themes more personal.

“A lot of people don’t know about these specific, individual stories. The more we spread the word and expand the conversation, the better it is for everyone,” Rubensteen said.

Individuals or families who are interested in sharing their Holocaust artifacts or family keepsakes with the museum may contact Rubensteen at 786-496-2788 or arubensteen@ushmm.org to schedule an appointment.