First published in 2014 in the UK where the title
was If This is a Woman
First 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 woman
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember
Her eyes empty and he womb cold
Like 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 Memorial
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, 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 citizen
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 were
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 were 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.