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Full Chapter The Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbruck Who Were They Modern Jewish History 1St Edition Agassi Judith Buber PDF
Full Chapter The Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbruck Who Were They Modern Jewish History 1St Edition Agassi Judith Buber PDF
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prelims.080 11/12/2006 4:10 PM Page i
A Oneworld Book
ISBN-13: 978–1–85168–470–0
ISBN-10: 1–85168–470–0
Oneworld Publications
185 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7AR
England
www.oneworld-publications.com
NL08
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Illustrations xv
Appel! (Edith Kiss) xvii
La Nuit (Edith Kiss) xviii
viii Contents
Contents ix
x Contents
Contents xi
Maps
Nazi Camps 309
Ravensbrück 310
Photo of Ravensbrück 311
Indices
Archives and Documents 313
Concentration Camps 315
Names other than Victims and Survivors 318
Victims and Survivors 321
Places 326
Subjects 330
CD-ROM with a list of names of all known
Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück back cover
prelims.080 11/12/2006 4:10 PM Page xii
prelims.080 11/12/2006 4:10 PM Page xiii
ACKNOWLED GEMENTS
xiv Acknowledgements
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xvi Illustrations
Note: The three color paintings by Edith Kiss are reprinted with the permission of
Dr. Helmuth Bauer and of the Metropol Verlag, Berlin. They are part of the Album
Deportation, a cycle of 30 Gouaches depicting the deportation of Jewish Hungarian
women in 1944 to the Concentration Camp Ravensbrück and to forced labor in the
external camp Daimler-Benz Genshagen. Edith Kiss painted them immediately after
her return, in July and August 1945, and exhibited them in the same year in
September in Budapest. They are published for the first time in book form in
Dr. Helmuth Bauer, Das Album Deportation von Edith Kiss und die Frauen im KZ-
Aussenlager Daimler-Benz-Genshagen, Metropol Verlag, Berlin, Winter 2006/07. The
color plate sections in this book were made possible by sponsorship from the
Remember the Women Institute, New York, USA.
Appel! (Edith Kiss)
La Nuit (Edith Kiss)
ch1.080 09/12/2006 12:52 PM Page 1
1
THE ORIGIN OF THE PROJECT: MY PERSONAL
INTEREST IN RAVENSBRÜCK
Union where, in 1937, he was arrested and secretly executed; she was
arrested and sent to Siberia in 1938. Later, in 1940, she was forcibly
handed over – together with about one thousand other German and
Austrian refugees, mainly Communists and many of them Jews – to the
Nazi authorities at the border that then separated Nazi and Soviet
occupied Poland.2 Thus my mother,after learning firsthand the realities
of the Soviet Communist regime and its prisons and concentration
camps, was incarcerated for five more years in the Nazi “Hell for
women”, Ravensbrück, this time as a suspected Soviet agent.
Ostracized by the leadership of the German Communist
Ravensbrück prisoners, she survived due to the support and friend-
ship of many fellow prisoners, a few Communists who did not accept
the dictate of their own leaders, and others, mainly Czech, French,
and Norwegian non-Communist prisoners. Those who survived
remained her friends for life.
During these five years, she had learnt about many events in the
camp and about the behavior of many of the SS guards, supervisors,
and commanders. She knew hundreds of fellow prisoners from dif-
ferent national groups, categories, and workplaces. Through her
Czech close friend Milena Jesenska,3 she knew about the horrors of
the camp Revier (hospital). She knew about the deportation of nearly
all the Jewish women there to Bernburg in 1942, and to Auschwitz
until October 1944; but even she had no firsthand contact with Jewish
prisoners, since all contact between non-Jewish and Jewish prisoners
was strictly forbidden. Jews and non-Jews worked most of the time in
different work details and work sites. Therefore, her account can serve
only partially as evidence for the construction of the present histor-
ical account of the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück. It supplies much
background material for this study.
When I visited the campsite at the end of 1994 to take part in the
preparations for the commemoration of 50 years since the liberation
of the camp, considerable efforts had already been made by the gov-
ernments of the Land Brandenburg and the Federal Republic of
Germany to reform the memorial site and to open it to visitors and
researchers from all over the world. Yet, when I learned that the gov-
ernments of the Land Brandenburg and the Federal Government of
Germany had decided to share the cost of travel and accommodation
for all the survivors of Ravensbrück so that they could attend the com-
memoration, and asked the members of the inviting committee how
many survivors they were inviting from Israel, I was astonished to
ch1.080 09/12/2006 12:52 PM Page 4
learn that there was only one. It turned out that only the name of this
one woman, who had been the editor of the Mapai (Social Democrat)
daily newspaper Davar, had been registered on the list of the
International Ravensbrück Committee as an Israeli survivor. The
Committee also did not possess any separate list of Jewish
Ravensbrück survivors living in any country whatsoever.4
On returning to Israel, I went to the archive of Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes Remembrance
Authority) and asked for a list of Ravensbrück survivors. Yad Vashem
had then no separate list of Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück. A cur-
sory search produced a short list of women who had mentioned the
name of this camp in their testimonies or in interviews about their
Holocaust experiences. Many of the addresses and phone numbers of
the women on that list were no longer valid. (Later on, Yad Vashem
was very helpful to our research teams. Many more names of
Ravensbrück survivors were located in its archives. Previously unex-
amined microfilms of arrival lists of prisoners to Ravensbrück soon
proved most significant for the beginning of my study. Much later we
found many more Ravensbrück documents in its archives.)
As I had taken upon myself the task of organizing the travel of Israeli
Ravensbrück survivors to the commemoration event, I approached a
young woman journalist writing for the daily Yediot with a request to
interview me about this issue. I offered my phone number to all who
were interested. As a result, the phone did not stop ringing for the next
two weeks. More than 200 women declared themselves willing to travel
to Ravensbrück, and about a hundred additional ones also told about
their being Ravensbrück survivors, but were unable to travel – usually
because of their own ill health or that of a family member. The upshot
was that the German government had to rent a special plane from
EL-AL so the survivors could reach Berlin in time.
In Germany, the arriving survivors were received well and a group
of young students who had all previously visited Israel were very help-
ful guides. Yet, in Ravensbrück itself, it took a special effort to enable
them to appear as Israelis and for a representative to deliver their spe-
cial message to the thousands of other survivors arriving from all over
the world. Many of the Israeli survivors had not spoken before about
their Holocaust experiences, even to their own children, and many
had set out to visit Germany with great trepidation. Surprisingly, all
experienced the visit to the place of their immense suffering as posi-
tive, and the opening of the floodgates of their memories as liberating.
ch1.080 09/12/2006 12:52 PM Page 5
NOTES
2
IS TRUE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION
POSSIBLE?
HETEROGENEITY
standing in lines twice a day for hours in all weather for endless roll-
calls, with prisoners collapsing and dying during the roll-calls.
At Ravensbrück, new female SS guards were trained for duty in all
camps with women prisoners. They were trained in treating the pris-
oners to a constant barrage of foul language and threats, to blows to
face, head, and body by using fists or truncheons, to kicking them with
their booted feet, or to setting their dogs at the prisoners to bite their
legs. Ravensbrück also had from the very start a formal system of pun-
ishment. Its prison included a punishment block and rows of cells
where prisoners were incarcerated in solitary confinement, total
darkness, and near-starvation. Already by the beginning of 1940,
Himmler had introduced for female camp prisoners punishment by
flogging (25 lashes, once, twice, or three times), causing extreme suf-
fering and many deaths.
Yet there also existed extreme heterogeneity in the experiences, con-
ditions, and fate of different groups of prisoners among the more than
110,000 women, girls, and children whose arrival was registered.1
There was a separate, much smaller men’s camp in the middle of
Ravensbrück, but completely isolated from it, which for most of its
existence contained concentration-camp prisoners brought there to
perform construction work. Through it passed 20,000 men and boys,
2000 of them Jews, some of them boys over 13, some of them trans-
ferred there at the age of 13 from the women’s camp. Though the two
camps were adjacent, severe penalties were imposed for any attempt at
contact.2
Any effort to get as near to the truth as possible when engaging in his-
torical reconstruction (of Ravensbrück or of anything else) must run
into serious obstacles of different kinds.
As in all Nazi concentration camps, the Ravensbrück camp
authorities – both SS and Gestapo – systematically tried to limit the
number of survivors by causing, or not preventing, the deaths of as
many prisoners as possible, especially during the last half-year.
Prisoners were subjected to selection for the gas chamber and other
forms of organized killing, chronic near-starvation, frostbite due to
lack of clothing, shoes, blankets, shelter, and heating, extreme over-
crowding, filth, and vermin (conditions that caused the spread of
ch2.080 09/12/2006 12:54 PM Page 10
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