- 336 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
About this book
Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. Located about fifty miles north of Berlin, the camp was the site of murder by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, "medical" experimentation, and gassing.
While this camp was designed to hold 5,000 women, the actual figure was six times this number. Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women from twenty-three countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, including political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials" (including Gypsies, prostitutes, and lesbians), criminals, and Jewish women (who made up about 20 percent of the population). Only 15,000 survived.
Drawing upon more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbrück's Jewish women prisoners. She worked for over twenty years to track down these women whose poignant testimonies deserve to be shared with a wider audience and future generations. Their memoirs provide new perspectives and information about satellite camps (there were about 70 slave labor sub-camps). Here is the story of real daily camp life with the women's thoughts about food, friendships, fear of rape and sexual abuse, hygiene issues, punishment, work, and resistance. Saidel includes accounts of the women's treatment, their daily struggles to survive, their hopes and fears, their friendships, their survival strategies, and the aftermath.
On April 30, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Ravensbrück. They found only 3,000 extremely ill women in the camp, because the Nazis had sent other remaining women on a death march. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp reclaims the lost voices of the victims and restores the personal accounts of the survivors.
While this camp was designed to hold 5,000 women, the actual figure was six times this number. Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women from twenty-three countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, including political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials" (including Gypsies, prostitutes, and lesbians), criminals, and Jewish women (who made up about 20 percent of the population). Only 15,000 survived.
Drawing upon more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbrück's Jewish women prisoners. She worked for over twenty years to track down these women whose poignant testimonies deserve to be shared with a wider audience and future generations. Their memoirs provide new perspectives and information about satellite camps (there were about 70 slave labor sub-camps). Here is the story of real daily camp life with the women's thoughts about food, friendships, fear of rape and sexual abuse, hygiene issues, punishment, work, and resistance. Saidel includes accounts of the women's treatment, their daily struggles to survive, their hopes and fears, their friendships, their survival strategies, and the aftermath.
On April 30, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Ravensbrück. They found only 3,000 extremely ill women in the camp, because the Nazis had sent other remaining women on a death march. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp reclaims the lost voices of the victims and restores the personal accounts of the survivors.
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Yes, you can access The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by Rochelle G. Saidel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Holocaust History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Wisconsin PressYear
2015Print ISBN
9780299198640, 9780299198602eBook ISBN
9780299198633Table of contents
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface to the 2006 Edition
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ravensbruck on My Mind
- 1. A Special Hell for Women
- 2. Triangles of Many Colors
- 3. Olga Benario Prestes and Kathe Pick Leichter
- 4. Resistance that Lifted the Spirit
- 5. Joyless Childhoods
- 6. A Year of Comings and Goings, 1944
- 7. Women at Work
- 8. Gemma LaGuardia Gluck: A Jewish American
- 9. Jewish Evacuees Arrive from Auschwitz
- 10. Late Arrivals from Other Camps
- 11. The Satellite Work Camps
- 12. Malchow and the Death Marches
- 13. Rescue to Sweden
- 14. Reconstructing Lives in the Aftermath
- 15. Gender and Women’s Bodies
- Epilogue: Ravensbruck Still on My Mind
- Appendix: The Jewish Ravensbruck Survivors
- Notes
- Selected Reference List
- Index