Acquire Ravensbrück: Life And Death In Hitlers Concentration Camp For Women Assembled By Sarah Helm Contained In Version

has taken a fortnight to read this bookor, rather, to LIVE this book, It is haunting, horrifying and a major work, How Sarah Helm endured writing it is almost beyond belief, "Write it quickly," she was advised but here it is overpages of exhaustive research and interviews, of digging out obscure records and lively interviews.
ed in advancedreading copy under the title "Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women", by Sarah Helm.


Sarah Helm has done an enormous feat of research and investigation: the story of Ravensbruck, the one camp in the Nazi system specifically for women victims, could well have been

obscured or lost.
The Nazis, as she shows, tried to eliminate documentation and witnesses the site was behind the Iron Curtain for decades and mostly leveled for a Soviet army base even after the Soviet period, she tells us, the locals wanted to replace the site with a supermarket.
The site has a memorial now, but Ms, Helm went to extraordinary lengths to find and interview the survivors, as well as go through archives, surviving documents and trial records.
Many of the survivors had been kept in silence till now the Soviet, East German and British governments had varying reasons to keep the story quiet.
Now, in horrifying detail, here it is,

The author did well to find the aging survivors and piece their stories together, some of it in more detail than the warcrimes testimonies, some of it new.
Some is fragmentary: she relates an account of a children's party at Christmas, as appalling as it sounds, but is unable to confirm a story of a bombing of that barracks that night.
We're left to wonder if it was nightmare or some terrible crime she obviously went to great effort to get at any detail, in this story as in all the rest.


The author shows us every facet of this camp, from its opening in Maytill its fall in April.
It would be a major camp, with thousands of prisoners and thousands of deaths, and every evil of the Holocaust would visit: slave labor for German war industry, hideous medical experiments involving gangrene, forced sterilization, starvation, and mass murders by shooting, mistreatment and a gas chamber.
We learn that the prisoners included large numbers of children, and babies born in the camp almost none of the latterwould survive.
We learn of the SS custodial and medical staff, and of camp society: its informers, collaborators, resisters, prisoners consigned to the "slum" section of camp.
From an original body of German women prisoners the camp would take in every nationality and group set out for maltreatment, notably French women, Jews, Soviet women prisonersofwar, Gypsies.
We learn that the story doesn't end well: Swedish bus evacuations inarranged by Count Bernadotte but often strafed by Allied aircraft the camp itself overrun by Soviet forces and the surviving inmates raped.
It's all set out in readable if horrific detail this may very well be the definitive story of this place.


Indispensable as a memorial of this part of the Holocaust an important and careful work of scholarship a detailed indictment of just how villainous human government can be.
This needed telling.
Wow! What a chunkster of a book basicallybooks in one! Too big a burden to carry most places, and you almost need a bipod to set the thing on while you read it.
A thick, thick book and I was riveted to every page! Any other book this dense has caused my attention to lapse at least a little, but this one caught my interest early and kept it right through to the Acknowledgements.


Ravensbruck was an anomaly as far as death/concentration camps were concerned, Officially I suppose it's a concentration camp, since the Jewish council of Germany decided it couldn't be called a death camp because only Jewish camps were allowed that dubious distinction.
Never mind that an unknown number of women were murdered here, estimated between,and,but who really knows, doesn't matter, can't be a death camp.
They were starved, hanged, shot and gassed, possibly cremated alive, but no death camp designation for this place, Ravensbruck was unique in that it was a women's camp, it was on German soil, and also in that Jewish women were in the minority.
Clustered within the walls you would find gypsies, British SOE agents, French resistance operatives, German "asocial types" which would include anything from murderesses and prostitutes to homeless women who had lost their husbands and sons to the Reich.
Eventually, captured Soviet servicewomen, taken as POWs, would also suffer here,

Sarah Helm has travelled extensively to interview the survivors of this camp, and tells as complete a story as is possible under the circumstances.
Most documentation pertaining to the camp was destroyed, and much of the bit that survived was smuggled out by inmates.
She tries to tell as fair a story as possible where a German was kind, which was not unusual, it is noted.
I felt particularly sorry for Johanna Langefeld, first chief woman guard of the camp, who was eventually fired for excessive kindness.
As a result of the evenhanded reporting, a lot of the inmates do not come out with particularly glowing report cards.
There were whiners, informants, bullies, thieves, and sadists in the ranks, Helm has no reluctance in reporting this, Sometimes the inmates who volunteered to assist the guards were more brutal than the guards were,

Ravensbruck was definitely a hard luck camp that besmirched everyone involved with it, whether they wore field grey or prison stripes.
Sometimes the tormentors were outside the wire, as in the case of Cicely Lefort, an Englishwoman who joined SOE at the urging of her French husband.
After her capture and internment, she gets a letter from him requesting a divorce! Talk about kicking them while they're down! And Frau Thuringer, who lost three sons to the war was imprisoned by the very country they had fought for.
She was murdered in a hallway,

In fact, the whole world seemed ready to crap on these women, with the exception of Sweden, The Allies would not negotiate their release with Himmler, American troops halted at the Elbe in order to let Russian troops take Berlin, . . meanwhile, these women are being killed in their hundreds daily, When Count Bernadotte of Sweden, on his own initiative, arranged limited release of inmates, the Americans refused them safe passage and at least one convoy was strafed by the British.
The Russians finally liberated the camp, . . and then raped and raped and raped, They raped sick women on their cots, . . they raped women with babies, they even raped their own female POWs their comrades in arms! They raped everything with a pulse and opposable digits, seemingly with very little opposition from authority.
Does the Russian Army have no Military Police What the hell is with these guys As one woman is quoted on page:

"The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us.
We were disgusted that they behaved like this, Stalin had said that no soldier should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt, "

I have the greatest respect for the Russian women soldiers who worked as a team and put up a brave front in captivity, but it's pretty hard not to feel contempt for the common soldiery.


I'm not going to go on and tell you about the shitty treatment many of the survivors received after liberation.
You'll have to read that for yourself, This is an important book, and you owe it to these women to read it, Ten, if I could, How do you write apage book on one of the most secret concentration camps during WWII By talking to as many survivors as you can.
Sarah Helm undertook this Herculean task, which mere mortals would shrink from, I don't know how she listened to their testimonies, day after day, then sat down to sort it all out and write the most comprehensive history of a camp we will ever have.
This is a hard, difficult, painful read, But it is owed to every woman to survived and died in that camp to know their story, know their name, and know that they were people.
We need to know about the women guards, many of them who started out as teenagers and became inhuman brutes with no grasp of the value of a human life.
And how these prisoners suffered, struggled and tried to survive, Frankly, I think this should be standard reading for all high school students, Every single one. You will not be able to keep track of names, there are far too many as the story stretches out in years and waves.
But read their names, know they were once alive, and that this happened to them, This kind of book is so incredibly valuable, It came out in paperback this week, It ispages. Read them all. In If This is a Woman, Sarah Helm has written utterly phenomenal study, She tells of the atrocities of Ravensbruck, a German concentration camp during the Second World War, and the only one of its kind exclusively for women prisoners.
It is the first book to write extensively about Ravensbruck, one of the final camps to be liberated by the Russians.


Only ten percent of Ravensbruck's prisoners were Jewish, contrary to a lot of other camps the rest were arrested due to opposition to the Nazi Party, and were drawn from such groups as communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and members of the Resistance in various European countries.
There were also others deemed 'asocials', who ranged from lesbians to Gypsies, Among the prisoners were 'the cream of Europe's women', including various countesses, a former British golfing champion, and the niece of General de Gaulle.


Helm draws upon the published testimonies of Ravensbruck's prisoners, as well as seeking out those who survived the brutal conditions, and studying records of the court case which followed, aiming as it did to punish those who were in charge.
Her research has been carried out impeccably, particularly considering that the majority of the papers relating to prisoners and conditions were burnt before liberation.
Helm has aimed to create 'a biography of Ravensbruck beginning at the beginning and ending at the end, piecing the broken story back together again as best I could'.
The death toll from the camp is unknown, but is estimated to be somewhere between,and,,

Helm's writing style is immensely readable, and her research meticulous, If This is a Woman is such a well paced account, and the author never shies away from demonstrating how harrowing the conditions were, and how horrific the injuries and deaths which many within Ravensbruck faced.
In trying to tell the individual stories of as many women as she possibly could, both prisoners and those who guarded them, she has added an invaluable biography to the field of Holocaust and Second World War studies.


If This is a Woman won the LongmanHistory Today Prize, which was incredibly well deserved, One can only hope that further accolades follow, If This is a Woman is, without a doubt, one of my favourite historical studies in terms of its farreaching material and the sensitivity which has been continually demonstrated, as well as one of my books of the year.
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