Research Catalog

Title

The Jewish women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp / Rochelle G. Saidel.

Author

Saidel, Rochelle G.

Publication

Madison, Wisc. : University of Wisconsin Press, ©2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvii, 279 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

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 Drawing on more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbruck's Jewish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

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books

Subject

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

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-268) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: Ravensbrück on my mind -- A special hell for women -- Triangles of many colors -- Olga Benário Prestes and Käthe Pick Leichter -- Resistance that lifted the spirit -- Joyless childhoods -- A year of comings and goings, 1944 -- Women at work -- Gemma LaGuardia Gluck : a Jewish American -- Jewish evacuees arrive from Auschwitz -- Late arrivals from other camps -- The satellite work camps -- Malchow and the death marches -- Rescue to Sweden -- Reconstructing lives in the aftermath -- Gender and women's bodies -- Epilogue: Ravensbrück still on my mind.

ISBN

• 029919860X
• 9780299198602

LCCN

2003020576

OCLC

• 53076015
• SCSB-11472405

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library