The Jewish women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

Description:

"Ravensbruck 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." "Although 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 Ravensbruck, 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"Drawing on more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbruck's Jewish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."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Ravensbrück (Concentration camp),  Jewish women in the Holocaust,  Prisoners and prisons, German,  Women concentration camp inmates,  German Prisoners and prisons,  Conscript labor,  World War, 1939-1945,  Concentration camps,  Women, germany,  World war, 1939-1945, prisoners and prisons, german,  World war, 1939-1945, germany,  Jewish women,  Holocaust, jewish (1939-1945),  Women internment camp inmates,  Women Nazi concentration camp inmates,  Juives pendant l'Holocauste,  Détenues de camp de concentration,  Guerre mondiale, 1939-1945,  Prisonniers et prisons des Allemands,  Travail obligatoire,  Weibliche Überlebende,  Jüdin,  Vrouwen,  Joden,  Concentratiekampen,  Ravensbrück (Allemagne : Camp de concentration),  Ravensbrück / Konzentrationslager

Places: Germany (East)