Within it paraded peacocks ("stolzierten") and on a climbing tree dangled monkeys and a parrot which always screamed the same word, "Mama". I wondered, "this is a concentration camp"? Buber-Nuemann wrote how her first meal in Ravensbrück exceeded her expectations, when she was served sweet porridge with dried fruit ("backobst"), plus a generous portion of bread, margarine, and sausage. Conditions quickly deteriorated. Elsie Maréchal, a young Belgian who worked with the Comet Line, was a prisoner at Ravensbrück from 1943 to 1945. She described the conditions:  They didn’t shoot the women. We were to die of misery, hunger and exhaustion...when we arrived at Ravensbrück, it was the worst. The first thing I saw was a cart with all the dead piled on it. Their arms and legs hanging out, and mouths and eyes wide open. They reduced us to nothing. We didn’t even feel like we had the value of cattle. You worked and you died. Starting in the summer of 1942, medical experiments were conducted without consent on 86 women; 74 of them were Polish inmates. Two types of experiments were conducted on the Polish political prisoners. The first type tested the efficacy of sulfonamide drugs. These experiments involved deliberate cutting into and infecting of leg bones and muscles with virulent bacteria, cutting nerves, introducing substances like pieces of wood or glass into tissues, and fracturing bones. The second set of experiments studied bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and the possibility of transplanting bones from one person to another. Out of the 74 Polish victims, called "Kaninchen", "Króliki", "Lapins", or "Rabbits" by the experimenters, five died as a result of the experiments, six with unhealed wounds were executed, and (with assistance from other inmates) the rest survived with permanent physical damage. Four such survivors—Jadwiga Dzido, Maria Broel-Plater, Władysława Karolewska, and Maria Kuśmierczuk—testified against Nazi doctors at the Doctors' Trial in 1946. Between 120 and 140 Romani women were sterilised in the camp in January 1945. All had been deceived into signing the consent form, having been told by the camp overseers that the German authorities would release them if they complied. All inmates were required to do heavy labor ranging from strenuous outdoor jobs to building the V-2 rocket parts for Siemens.