The Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück

Who Were They?

Judith Buber Agassi

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780896728738
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. Between 1939 and 1945, it was the site of murder by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, medical experimentation, and gassing. In its six-year history, 132, 000 women from twenty-seven countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück. Only about 15, 000 in all survived. Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück reclaims the lost identities of these victims. Together with a team of researchers, Judith Buber Agassi interviewed 138 survivors of Ravensbrück on four continents. Using the survivor testimonies to corroborate her research from major archives in Germany, Israel, and the United States, as well as from transport and death registration lists and from records that were smuggled out of the camp before liberation, Buber Agassi constructs an image of the women of Ravensbrück: their countries of origin, age distribution, professional roles prior to the war, religious backgrounds, and the types of social interactions and emotional support that existed among and between the various groups of women. To date, Buber Agassi has recovered the identity of over 16, 000 Ravensbrück prisoners. Now in paperback, this study of Ravenbrück, largely overlooked in favor of more notorious killing campus, continues the female approach to understanding the Holocaust.

1

THE ORIGIN OF THE PROJECT: MY PERSONAL INTEREST IN RAVENSBRÜCK

This book is the result of my part in the group effort of a team of women sociologists and historians that I initiated, to rescue from oblivion the memory of thousands of Jewish women, girls, and children imprisoned in the only Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women.

The group effort resulted in a book with contributions by most of the members of the initial two teams, the Israeli and the German.¹

The present book is the record of my own effort – my answer to the question: The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they?

Let me report how I, a sociologist of gender and of work, got involved in this project that, although pertaining to women and thus to gender, lies on the borderline between history and sociology. I had not previously worked in the field of Holocaust or anti-Semitism studies, and I was not engaged with their specific gender aspects, nor with the problems issuing from the combination of the evidence of the memoirs of individual survivors, published and unpublished, with that of documentary evidence, nor with the problems involved with the combination of the information contained in open-ended interviews, specific testimonies, and questionnaires, with police documents, documents of the Ravensbrück camp administration and that of other concentration camps and their outlying labor camps, their work details (AKDOs), the SS correspondence, and documents concerning the names of victims and perpetrators recorded after the War.

It was a personal connection that in the first place brought me to Ravensbrück, and to the realization that its Jewish prisoners, the dead and the surviving, and the story of their fate, had not yet been recorded systematically, and that were in danger of being irretrievably forgotten. The irony is that I was brought to this study of the Holocaust through my German, non-Jewish mother, who had been for nearly five years a Ravensbrück prisoner.

My mother was Margarete Buber-Neumann. Her daughters, my sister and I, had known nothing about her whereabouts and fate from 1938 until the end of the War. By then, she had survived two years in Soviet prisons and concentration camps and another five years in a Nazi concentration camp. Although I had known these facts since 1945, the name of the Nazi camp registered in my memory for the first time two years later, when she related to me her memories of Ravensbrück when we first met in Sweden in the spring of 1947 after all those years. At this time, she was busy writing the second half of her book Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler, which was soon translated into 12 languages (published in English as Under Two Dictators) and brought her international fame.

Much later, five years after her death, due to that book of hers I was invited to take part in the preparation of the planned commemoration reunion on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of Ravensbrück, its “liberation”. This is how I came to see, towards the end of 1994, for the first time, the site of this camp, which is situated north of Berlin in an idyllic countryside of lakes and forests. The fact that, due to the Cold War, my mother had never returned to the site of Ravensbrück before her death in November 1989 is symptomatic of the political situation in Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall: it was inaccessible to her – as an anti-Communist, she was naturally persona non grata in the German Democratic Republic.

She left Germany in 1932 as a Communist. I am one of her two daughters from her first marriage, raised as Jews. We immigrated to Palestine with our paternal grandparents. Her second husband was Heinz Neumann – also a Jew – who had been a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, and a member of the German Reichstag. He formed a left-wing faction whose slogan was “Hit the Fascists wherever you meet them” and opposed Stalin’s directives to declare not the Nazis, but the Social Democrats, the main enemy of the German Communists. In 1931 he was removed by the Comintern from his post and thus from all German politics. In 1932, the Comintern sent him and my mother to Spain and one year later abandoned them in Switzerland. In 1935, the Nazis demanded his extradition on a trumped-up charge. They had no choice but to go to the Soviet 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 friendship 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 different 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 historical 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 governments 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 governments 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 commemoration, and asked the members of the inviting committee how many survivors they were inviting from Israel, I was astonished to 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 cursory 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 unexamined 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 helpful guides. Yet, in Ravensbrück itself, it took a special effort to enable them to appear as Israelis and for a representative to deliver their special 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 positive, and the opening of the floodgates of their memories as liberating.

On returning to Israel, I realized that by this informal process, a considerable amount of evidence through oral history had come my way. Colleagues persuaded me then to use this unique opportunity for systematic research and to apply for funding to the GIF (German Israel Foundation for Research and Development). I approached with this suggestion a sociologist, Professor Hanna Herzog, and historians Professor Dina Porat and Dr. Irith Dublon-Knebel, all of Tel Aviv University, and they accepted the idea and agreed to cooperate. The regulations of the GIF demand the cooperation of teams of Israeli and German researchers. Eventually, a group of women sociologists and historians of Tel Aviv University and of Free University Berlin, also including Professor Dr. Sigrid Jacobeit, then the director of the Ravensbrück Memorial (Mahn und Gedenkstätte), started out on a three-year research project, which was later extended. We first sent out a questionnaire to survivors living in Israel that hundreds answered. For many more who had lived in Israel but had died, relatives filled in the data to the best of their knowledge. We also used the data eventually found in 200 Yad Vashem survivor testimonies. All this resulted in a database for over 700 survivors of Ravensbrück who had ever reached Israel. Using the data first gained in 1995, we organized a moving meeting of Israeli Ravensbrück survivors at Tel Aviv University.

Though both teams participated in this initial effort, soon our ways parted as each showed interest in different aspects of the story. It became increasingly clear to me that in addition to my contribution to the collective volume of both teams: Schnittpunkt des Holocaust: Jüdische Frauen und Kinder im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück, that Dr. Irith Dublon-Knebel has edited, which appeared in German in 2009 and in English in 2010, my task was to concentrate on a thorough study both historical and sociological, in an attempt to answer as best I can the question, The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they? I wanted to illustrate my view that social studies do not preclude the individual human aspect of the story.

Meanwhile, three welcome publications appeared on the same topic but from different viewpoints. One is by a member of our German team, Dr. Linde Apel, Jüdische Frauen im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück 1939-1945, Berlin: Metropol, 2003; the other is by Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Wisconsin University Press, Madison WI, 2004 (this book appeared in the meantime also in Hebrew). Rochelle Saidel has pursued this same topic independently as the terms of our contract with GIF regrettably prevented including her in our team.

The third is by a second member of our German team, Dr. Sabine Kittel, “Places for the Displaced” – Biographische Bewältigungsmuster von weiblichen jüdischen Konzentrationslager-Überlebenden in den USA (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2006).

Let me add a brief paragraph on these three books. Neither book aims at as complete an answer as possible to the question of my choice, The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they? And neither book pays as much attention to the differences in the Jewish prisoner populations and their different situations in different periods — as this study does.

Apel made a valiant effort to be objective. She describes and analyzes the specific conditions of work, life and death of the Jewish women prisoners on the basis of a wealth of documents, records and testimonies of Jewish as well as of non-Jewish survivors. Her effort at objectivity towards the Jewish prisoners may be the reason for her not having touched upon moral issues, attitudes and sentiments.

By contrast, Saidel is very sensitive to the attitudes and sentiments of the interviewed survivors, including also the problems that the survivors experienced after the war. She includes in her book many pages of interview texts. Her book is indeed the fruit of a labor of love.

The declared purpose of Kittel’s study was – in 25 extensive interviews – to concentrate on the important problem of the psychological and social adjustment of Jewish women concentration-camp survivors, who had been imprisoned at Ravensbrück, and who had imigrated to the USA and eventually settled there.

To return to the question of my choice, The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they? In the following ten chapters I present the fruits of my efforts to answer this question. I also enclose on a CDROM a list of well over sixteen thousand names of Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück with much detailed information about them.

In addition, I have also attempted to include in this volume an analysis of the social relations of the Jewish women prisoners and of the specific social ties among them. What I did not do is study the problems related to the physical and psychological damage to survivors of the Holocaust and the degree of success of efforts to overcome them and integrate in the societies whose majority were spared this horrendous experience. I also did not deal with the difficult question, whether it was advisable or inadvisable for survivors to share their horrid experiences with their closest relatives. How heavy was the post-Holocaust traumatic burden and was its transmission to the next generation inevitable? On these questions there is a wealth of literature that I was not sufficiently qualified to examine on the basis of the data available to me. As a sociologist I always found very relevant the difference of conditions between the USA, Israel, and other countries. I also found relevant the degree of education and the social status of the survivors, as well as their ability to integrate in their societies of settlement. I did not have sufficient data to examine these. I used the expression of Halina Nelkin as a motto for this study: “Once again,” she says, “we are being turned into...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• 1. The origin of the project: my personal interest in Ravensbrück
• 2. Is true historical reconstruction possible?
• 3. The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they?
• 4. The first period
• 5. The second period – from Bernburg to Auschwitz
• 6. The third period – the special groups
• 7. The fourth period – August 1944 to end of 1944: the floodgates open
• 8. The fifth period – the last stage
• 9. Summing-up: the place of Ravensbrück in the Holocaust of Jewish women
• 10. Social ties and moral survival
• 11. Diagrams
• 12. Literature concerning the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück
• 13. Lists of interviews
• 14. Appendix
• Maps
• Indices
• CD-ROM with a list of names of all known Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück