Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Paperback – March 22, 2016

Ravensbrűck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah HelmFirst published in 2014 in the UK where the title was If This is a WomanFirst of all the UK title comes from Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man (often titled Survival In Auschwitz in the US:Consider if this is a womanWithout hair and without nameWith no more strength to rememberHer eyes empty and he womb coldLike a frog in winter.Meditate that this came about:I commend these words to you.This is a remarkable book and not only because the author tells a part of the German concentration camp story that’s not generally know. I’ve read a lot about WWII (not at all an expert mind you) and before reading this book knew only the name of the camp and that it was for women.What’s most remarkable about this book is the characters that she manages to bring to life, the women who lived this nightmare primarily but also the women who were their guards and doctors, the SS men who ran Ravensbrűck and its satellite camps, and the various people and organizations who form part of its story: Himmler who planned and managed all the camps, and the Swede, Bernadotte, the only one who actually mobilized to save any of the millions in the camps. (The military, American, British and Soviet armies overran camps on their way to Berlin and certainly offered freedom and succor to the inhabitants, but there was no other effort to save those in the camps, even toward the end of the war when Hitler’s orders were to kill all the inhabitants of the camps, burn them down and plow them under before they could be captured by the enemy. Eisenhower said he could help those prisoners best by military defeat of Germany. His attitude was that of all the Allies.)Many people don’t realize that prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps had a “different status” from those in POW camps where generally men were not made slave laborers or starved or denied communication with the outside world (their relatives were notified they were POWs and they had a right to receive aid packages, etc.). There were no rules governing concentration camps…none except Hitler’s rules.Ravensbrűck was unique among Hitler’s camps in that it was experimental, a camp for women, built in 1939 in Mecklenburg near the town of Furstenberg. If you have Google Earth search for "Ravensbrűck Memoria"l and you’ll see the remains of the camp with even some of the barracks still standing. Near of beautiful lake—it was a vacation spot—east of Hamburg in what became East Germany. It was intended as something of a “model camp”.The new camp had buildings like other camps: an Appellplatz (square where prisoners assembled for roll calls) a revier, or infirmary, and an Effectskammer or prisoner’s clothes store. (The latter held the belongings of those who died or were killed and was the only source of clothes for the living.) The camp had electrified fences (with enough power to kill a person trying to scale them) but no watchtowers or gun emplacements like the men’s camps. Flowers, red salvias, were planted alongside the first row of barracks. Some ex-prisoners were to hate the sight of red salvias in their afterlives….The first 867 prisoners entered Ravensbrűck in May of 1939 (there would be several hundred thousand at the end of the war, many not even processed, as prisoners were moved hastily from places further east, many ill and starving or worn out from forced marches). They were divided into groups: asocials (prostitutes, beggers, lesbians, petty criminals, gypsies, mentally ill or retarded people, etc), political prisoners who were mostly Communists at first, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jews were divided into political and non-political. Political Jews were usually those arrested for Rassenschande (polluting the race by having relations with non-Jews).There were many Germans in the prison who were not Jews, a fact which is sometimes ignored, but all the categories Hitler wanted out of Germany were there as well in later years as women who critized Hitler or the regime. Among the foreigners, the different groups tended to stay together. Among the most close-knit were the Russians, many of whom were actually in the Red Army as nurses, doctors, even foot soldiers. The closeness of the Russian group and the wisdom of their leader gained them some points in negotiating with their captors. The Poles were the next largest group, but there were also many Austrians, Czechs and others. When the American army was poised to take Paris, the Gestapo transported all its prisoners east, the women to Ravensbrűck. Most had been arrested for working with the Resistance, but there were some SOE women from the UK and at least one American who had helped get stranded pilots out of Framce.The book opens with Johanna Langefeld inspecting the site. Langefeld is the first of many women Helm brings to life. An experienced prison guard, she was to be the Oberaufseherin (head female guard).We see her as excited about an experimental project at first. Then we see her later through the prisoner’s eyes, not exactly a nourishing type of person but generally decent. Later we see her when she’s transferred to Auschwitz and is unable to tolerate the degree of cruelty. Then we see her back at Ravensbrűck only to find much of what she hated at Auschwitz. Finally we see her on trial and in 1957 we see her knocking on the door or an ex-prisoner trying to explain herself.I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 were characterized in some detail and followed through their lives, including before and after the camp. Though there was not an "after" for many. 50 or 60 other woman are also presented so that we not only associate them with the part they played in the story of Ravensbrűck but as people, with pasts and in some cases futures, with likes and dislikes and problems, illnesses, talents and peculiarities. And friendships—there were a lot of friendships especially among women who were long-term prisoners, evidently considerably more than in men’s camps.One case would be that of 15-year old Krysia Czyz . She was one of about 75 “rabbits” (kännchen is the German word; we’d call them guinea pigs), young and fit girls from Lublin in Poland who were singled out for possible medical experimentation by Dr. Karl Gebhardt. Of those actually experimented on, some died of the operations performed on them, other died later and still others, including Kysia, lived through many transports (when a prisoner was selected for transport it usually meant to be killed. At first they were sent away to mental hospitals elsewhere in Germany—where Hitler had arranged to experiment with gassing as a way of killing large numbers of people—but later they were sent to the “Youth Camp” adjoining Ravensbrűck where they might be starved to death, left to die because they were already ill, or shot. Eventually Ravensbrűck got its own gas chamber.)The Polish prisoners were allowed to correspond with family, though the letters were severely censored. Krysia came up with a plan to write in urine between the lines of her letters home, telling her family what had been done to her and others and asking them to contact anyone they can in London (remember there was an interim Polish government in exile at the time). Krysia’s daughter was eventually able to give the author a copy of one of those letters.I recommend this book highly. It is not a depressing read. Any book where bad things happen is much less likely to be “depressing” if you understand something of the individuals involved. That is this author’s genius, to dig in, which was not easy nearly 70 years after the end of the war, and give faces and characters to the people involved.

It has been several days since I finished this book and I am still absorbing it. I have read a lot on Ravensbruck, even to the point of researching in libraries and online. I had wished for a well-researched book that would detail all the points I was missing because I wanted to truly understand more.And Ms Helm's book is the book I have been waiting for, a triumph of meticulous research, of painstaking fact-checking in at least 5 countries that I can recall, including her most extraordinary race to interview the last remaining witnesses and victims to the atrocities of this camp. How did she do it? How did she get them to talk, when they had been silent for so long? I don’t know, but her book is written with such compassion and conviction, that I assume that the survivors understood her as she understood them. She wanted to chronicle the truth before time ran out. To tell us all and help us understand. Her timeline is difficult and yet she is able to keep track of all the events, blending and building on events and people, and making this many-layered book into an almost seamless chronology.In the wider story of the Holocaust, Ravensbruck is not a camp that targeted the Jewish people, but rather demonstrated the Nazis to be equal-opportunity torturers with little differentiation between Poles, Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Germans, or the French, because their goal was singular: they wished to destroy women. Destroy their spirits, bodies, and minds, their ability to bear children or trust other human beings; to make them into unwilling slave labor to the Nazi cause. They were used to the limits of their endurance and then destroyed when they no longer had a purpose: gassed, their bodies turned to dust. And the final plan was to kill all the women if the war turned against the Nazis.Ravensbruck first began as a prison for political prisoners as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma women, Communists. Dare to speak against any aspect of Nazi Germany, and chances are you would wind up in Ravensbruck.Unfortunately for these prisoners, Ravensbruck quickly segued into the only women's prison camp, a place to train women guards to become torturers for the other camps, as well as an experimental station for doctors to practice their art of using humans as “rabbits” (almost entirely Polish women), moving back and forth between Auschwitz, Mauthause, Belsen... The prisoners became slave labor, marched to work at Siemens , forced to build their own gassing chamber, own crematoriium; they shovelled sand until their hands were shredded, hauled coal, rocks, and made roads pulling giant cement rollers by hand.Ms Helm chronicles the world these women existed in with a voice that begs us all to listen. Her interviews with the survivors, some of them the Polish “rabbits”, others Russian communists who suffered even more at the hands of their own compatriots under Stalin post-war, among others, & the surviving SOE agents, was incredible reading. I can never feel what they felt, but Ms Helm tells us to try, and to never forget.One of the things that Ravensbruck excelled in (if I may be permitted to use that word) was psychological torture. Women were given hope only to have it snatched away, time and time again, in the ultimate cat-and-mouse game until even the most optimistic of women would lose all hope. Surviving in unimaginable filth with no chance to bathe or change their clothes, lying in excrement or having it drip from upper bunks, they began to feel like animals although they tried as hard as possible to not give in. One of the things that made me cry was after their liberation, they were told by kindly Swedish doctors to remove their clothes to be fumigated, and they began to scream in abject terror. Readers will understand that they had been so mentally tortured, given hope so many times by smiling men in white coats, that they thought it one last trick by the Nazis, and a final hope of freedom lost as they were headed for the gas chambers.Then there was the horrible efficiency of Commandant Fritz Suhren who, long after Auschwitz had stopped gassing prisoners, continued to do so at Ravensbruck within several days of its liberation by the Russians, and when he needed to rapidly cover up truths, took political prisoners who knew too much and threw them, fighting, screaming, and kicking live into the crematoriums. Ms Helm’s extraordinarily meticulous research on this — what can you call the worst of humans? — is difficult reading. He was STILL manipulating the lives of the women with the Russians one day away, and Count Bernadotte at the door with his red cross trucks, still playing God. He was not human, he was the worst of non-humans.This is not an easy book to read, but it is so worthwhile. It makes us, the readers, rejoice in the prisoners’ heroism to overcome terrible odds, the most appalling of tortures, and conditions and adversity that would have broken most men. They were largely ignored after their liberation (and sadly, a great amount were raped by their Russian liberators) and some had the ignominy of seeing men strutting about with medals on their chests who had never done a thing to earn them. But then Ms Helm reminds us in so many words that still these women survived.And they lived to tell their tale.

This is the best book I have ever read in my entire life and I’m almost half century old. I cried through the entire book. The author takes you on a journey you could never really be ready for and brings you close to many victims and survivors of this horrific hell. When I finished it I felt like I had actually witnessed it, the level of detail really puts you there watching it unfold. The author deserves an award for this book. Read at your own risk. This story will stay with you indefinitely. It took me 8 months to read due to needing many breaks just because the truth is so heart wrenching and horrifying and at times I couldn’t even sleep. It is sickening to think this could happen again, and I believe everyone needs to read this book to understand that we have to keep this from happening again because the world is moving at a rapid pace toward repeating history.

Very readable. Many books on the horrors of concentration camps are dry recitals of fact or testimony. This successfully weaves the two together. There could have been more careful editing. Typhus is transmitted by lice, but typhoid comes from contaminated water. The book assigns typhus to both sources. It's not correct that a 10-year old will go off to Vienna, protest WWI soldiers and get a PhD.There is a little too uncritical acceptance of the stories of Soviet soldiers that seem scripted from Cold War Moscow.Overall, an important book that needs to be read by a wide audience.

Relato claro, a autora concentra na respectivas personalidades e históricos das pessoas centraisoaos fatos que ocorreram no campo. Uma parte da biografia de Olga Benário é revelada.

Very detailed and full of shock segments. Beware this book is the same book as the one titled " If this is a woman" . I bought both books and they are exactly the same so just get on or the other.

every thing went to plan

Un libro de lo más interesante. Un libro que merece la pena leer. Emocionante y estremecedor. A book we must read.

Great source of information..