Experience and Expression by
Despite the fact that Holocaust studies is now a mature field, the topic of women and the Holocaust remains unexplored. Women's voices have given rise to many powerful accounts of the Holocaust, and yet few researchers have analysed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular. In Experience and Expression, the authors take on this challenge, addressing the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish women.
Women of Theresienstadt by
This is the first book in English on the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in former Czechoslovakia and the only one of its kind which focuses on the women who were forced to live in it. Interwoven with the description of everyday life in the camp are memoirs and poems selected from the work of over twenty women. Carefully translated into English, these testimonies form an extraordinary and moving collection.
Women in the Holocaust by
As Jews throughout Europe faced Nazi persecution, Jewish women - wives, daughters, mothers - encountered special problems and had particular vulnerabilities. By examining women's unique responses, their resourcefulness, their courage and their suffering, the book should enhance our understanding of the experiences of all Jews during the Nazi era.
The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by
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Drawing upon more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbrück’s Jewish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.
Ravensbrück by
A masterly and moving account of the most horrific hidden atrocity of World War II: Ravensbr#65533;ck, the only Nazi concentration camp built for women On a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women--housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes--was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards. Their destination was Ravensbr#65533;ck, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust. By the end of the war 130,000 women from more than twenty different European countries had been imprisoned there; among the prominent names were Genevi#65533;ve de Gaulle, General de Gaulle's niece, and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of the wartime mayor of New York. Only a small number of these women were Jewish; Ravensbr#65533;ck was largely a place for the Nazis to eliminate other inferior beings--social outcasts, Gypsies, political enemies, foreign resisters, the sick, the disabled, and the "mad." Over six years the prisoners endured beatings, torture, slave labor, starvation, and random execution. In the final months of the war, Ravensbr#65533;ck became an extermination camp. Estimates of the final death toll by April 1945 have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. For decades the story of Ravensbr#65533;ck was hidden behind the Iron Curtain, and today it is still little known. Using testimony unearthed since the end of the Cold War and interviews with survivors who have never talked before, Sarah Helm has ventured into the heart of the camp, demonstrating for the reader in riveting detail how easily and quickly the unthinkable horror evolved. Far more than a catalog of atrocities, however, Ravensbr#65533;ck is also a compelling account of what one survivor called "the heroism, superhuman tenacity, and exceptional willpower to survive." For every prisoner whose strength failed, another found the will to resist through acts of self-sacrifice and friendship, as well as sabotage, protest, and escape. While the core of this book is told from inside the camp, the story also sheds new light on the evolution of the wider genocide, the impotence of the world to respond, and Himmler's final attempt to seek a separate peace with the Allies using the women of Ravensbr#65533;ck as a bargaining chip. Chilling, inspiring, and deeply unsettling, Ravensbr#65533;ck is a groundbreaking work of historical investigation. With rare clarity, it reminds us of the capacity of humankind both for bestial cruelty and for courage against all odds.