The Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück: Who Were They?

Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück

Copyright © 2014 by Judith Buber Agassi

First English edition published by Oneworld Publications, copyright © 2007 by Judith Buber Agassi

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997). ∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014933156

ISBN (paper): 978-0-89672-872-1

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-89672-873-8

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Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037 | Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042 | ttup@ttu.edu | www.ttupress.org

The cover painting by Edith Kiss is reprinted with the permission of Dr. Helmuth Bauer and of the Metropol Verlag, Berlin. It is part of the Album Deportation, a cycle of 30 Gouaches depicting the deportation of Jewish Hungarian women in 1944 to the Concentration Camp Ravensbrück and to forced labor in the external camp Daimler-Benz Genshagen. Edith Kiss painted this and several others immediately after her return, in July and August 1945, and exhibited these paintings in the same year in September in Budapest. They were published for the first time in book form in Dr. Helmuth Bauer, Das Album Deportation von Edith Kiss und die Frauen im KZAussenlager Daimler-Benz-Genshagen, Metropol Verlag, Berlin, Winter 2006/07.

Once again, we are being turned into nameless, faceless, dehumanized theories and statistics. I wish I could protect the memory of us all, young and old: not one of us thought of ourselves as hero or victim – and yet we were both.

Halina Nelken, And Yet I Am Here!, p. 135

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Foreword

1.The origin of the project: my personal interest in Ravensbrück

Notes

2.Is true historical reconstruction possible?

Heterogeneity

Obstacles to historical reconstruction

Special obstacles to Jewish commemoration

Memoirs and historical research

Notes

3.The Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they?

Six years of Ravensbrück

Who was a Ravensbrück prisoner?

Who should be considered Jewish?

Gender questions

The percentage of Jewish prisoners

The sources

Periodization

Notes

4.The first period

No Jewish Alte Ravensbrückerinnen

Official reasons for arrest: police documents and the reality

The documentary basis for statistical estimates: filling the gaps

Nationality, age groups, marital status, and occupations of the first-period prisoners

Notes

5.The second period – from Bernburg to Auschwitz

Countries of origin

Official reasons for arrest

Age groups

Marital status

Conditions of life

The big deportation to Auschwitz

Notes

6.The third period – the special groups

Prisoners with hidden Jewish identities

The French transports

The special categories

Statistical summing-up of the third period

Notes

7.The fourth period – August 1944 to end of 1944: the floodgates open

August 1944: the arrival of Hungarian and Polish Jewish women and girls from Auschwitz

Three ghetto transports

A huge transport from Auschwitz

Direct deportations from Budapest: November 1944

The direct transports from Slovakia

The Frankfurt/Walldorf transport

The arrivals of December 1944

Summing-up the fourth period: national groups, age groups, and fates

Notes

8.The fifth period – the last stage

Who was in Ravensbrück at the beginning of 1945?

Major changes in 1945

The documentary evidence concerning new arrivals in 1945

Direct transports from Slovakia, France, and Italy

The arrivals from the Auschwitz Todesmarsch and their fates

Neustadt-Glewe

Krupp-Neukölln: an exceptional labor camp

The transport to Burgau: a death train of the last period

The role of the Bernadotte-Aktion in the rescue of Jewish Ravensbrück prisoners

Evacuation marches from Ravensbrück and its external camps

Evacuation marches from, or abandonment in, external camps

Liberation policies

Statistical summing-up of all fifth-period arrivals

A late large transport of Jewish men to the women’s camp

Notes

9.Summing-up: the place of Ravensbrück in the Holocaust of Jewish women

Statistical summing-up of all five periods

Ravensbrück and Auschwitz

Women and girls of part-Jewish descent (Mischlinge) in Ravensbrück

Non-Jewish prisoners married to Jews

Righteous of the Nations in Ravensbrück

Notes

10.Social ties and moral survival

Why was there so little group-wide social organization among the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück?

The crucial role of small-group or camp-family ties

Individual and group contacts between Jewish and other prisoners

Remembering the jailers

What is heroism – everyday moral behavior

Gender-specific issues

Conclusions

Notes

11.Diagrams

Diagram 1 The First Period – Countries of Origin

Diagram 2 The First Period – Age Groups

Diagram 3 The Second Period – Countries of Origin

Diagram 4 The Second Period – Age groups

Diagram 5 The Third Period – Age Groups

Diagram 6 The Third Period – Formal Citizenship

Diagram 7 The Third Period – Fate

Diagram 8 The Fourth Period – Countries of Origin

Diagram 9 Fourth Period – Age Groups

Diagram 10 The Fourth Period – Fate

Diagram 11 The Fifth Period – Countries of Origin

Diagram 12 The Fifth Period – Age Groups

Diagram 13 The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Countries of Origin

Diagram 14 The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück – The Five Periods, Countries of Origin

Diagram 15 The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück – Age

Diagram 16 The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück – The Five Periods, Age

Diagram 17 The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück – The Five Periods, Fate

12.Literature concerning the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück

Full-length published autobiographical memoirs

Short memoirs, edited by others

Autobiographical and biographical documents

Unpublished memoirs

Books on Ravensbrück by non-Jewish prisoners who describe the situation of Jewish prisoners

Research concerning the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück

13.Lists of interviews

14.Appendix

List of major camps and ghettos from which Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück came

List of major camps to which Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück were sent

Maps

Where they came from

Where they were sent

Ravensbrück

Photo of Ravensbrück

Indices

Archives and Documents

Concentration Camps

Names other than Victims and Survivors

Victims and Survivors

Places

Subjects

CD-ROM with a list of names of all known Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück

Acknowledgments to the first English language edition

I thank the German Israeli foundation for research and development (GIF) for their financial support for over six years of part of the cost of this research. I also thank Mr. William L. Frost, the Lucius N. Littaues Foundation, and Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, the Remember the Women Institute, for their help in the last stage of the preparation of the text.

I thank my assistants: Adi Schilling, for her enthusiastic assistance and support in the early stages of this research; Tamara Kalechmann-Khatav and Nili Alon, who loyally assisted me during the middle years; Sefi Rom, Tomer Rajwan, and Dr. Chen Yehezkely, who ren-dered technical service in the final stages; and particularly Dr. Nurit Shmilovitz-Vardi, for her years of dedicated, expert contribution up to the final stages, including her construction of the databank, diagrams, and statistical tables.

I thank the directors and staff members of three major archives who were of particular help. Special thanks go to Monika Herzog, Cordula Hoffmann, Britta Pawelke, and Sabine Röver of the library, archive, and Fotothek of the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, as well as to Judith Klaimann of the archive of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to Megan Lewis of the US Holocaust Survivors Registry in Washington, DC. I also thank the staff of the Italian archive Centro di doocumentazione ebraica contemporarea in Milan, Cornelia Rühlig of the archive of the Museum der Stadt Mörfelden-Walldorf, and the staff of the Buchenwald and Dachau archives.

I thank my colleagues Dr. Irith Dublon-Knebel and Dr. Adriana Kemp in Israel, Dr. Sabine Kittel and Dr. Linde Apel, and Professor Dr. Sigrid Jacobeit and Ms. Petra Fank, the then head and secretary, respectively, of the Ravensbrück Mahn- und Gedenkstätte in Germany, for generously sharing with me much valuable interview and documentary material they had collected. I also thank Frau Johanna Kootz of the Institut für Frauenforschung, Freie Universität Berlin, for her constant help and support.

I thank especially other Ravensbrück researchers, who were more than generous in this respect, for sharing with me their then unpub-lished material. They are Mme. Anise Postel-Vinay, the Ravensbrück survivor and historian, for her identification of Jewish names on the reconstituted French transport lists; Dr. Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow, the author of the Ravensbrück Gedenkbuch, who shared with me over the years the knowledge she had gained about the fate of hundreds of Jewish victims, as well as the documentary material that she had dis-covered and that proved useful to me, particularly the databank con-cerning the deceased Jewish prisoners; Monika Schnell, the scientific assistant of Dr. Schindler-Saefkow; Dr. Irmgard Seidel, researcher and past head of the Buchenwald archive, who shared with me valuable information on the fate of Jewish Ravensbrück prisoners sent to the external labor camps of Buchenwald; Ravensbrück researcher Dr. Simone Erpel, who gave me the texts of interviews with Jewish Ravensbrück prisoners made soon after the war by the Polish Institute of Sources in Lund; Ms. Wanda Wassermann, who volunteered to translate these interviews from the original Polish; and Herr Karl Heinz Schütt, who shared with me the results of his dedicated research into the history of the prisoners of the Ravensbrück external camp Neustadt-Glewe. Thanks also to Dr. Brigitte Halbmayr and to Dr. Helga Amesberger for sharing with me the results of their ongoing research concerning Ravensbrück prisoners originating from Austria.

Special thanks to the many survivors of Ravensbrück and to their families, who shared with me their valuable written memoirs, pub-lished or unpublished, who gave hours of their time for interviews, recorded on tape or on paper, who answered questionnaires, who ver-ified names and dates in correspondence and in telephone interviews, and who generously sent precious photos and memorabilia.

Without all this generous help, this work could not have been done.

My special thanks to Joseph Agassi for his extensive help and for his compiling the indices, and to my family and many friends, old and young, for their unflagging interest, encouragement, and technical assistance.

My sincere apologies to the victims, survivors, and their relatives, for any factual errors and omissions that occur in this work, all efforts notwithstanding.

May their heroism be remembered with their suffering.

Acknowledgments To The Second English Language Edition

I am deeply indebted to Dr. Robert Mandel, Director of the Texas Tech University Press, for his initiative in the publication of this US edition. This edition differs only slightly from the first one, and I am grateful to the readers who called me and helped me to correct and add a few details, as described in the following note to the Hebrew edition.

Note on the Hebrew Edition

Since I sent the first English language edition to the press in 2006, I received additional information from other researchers and from some survivors of the Holocaust, as well as from relatives of victims and of survivors. This information includes new names, dates of arrival to Ravensbrück, dates of birth, place of origin, fate, and countries of settlement of survivors. The information includes 35 additional names. The new information entails slight changes in the tables, especially those of the fourth period—from the beginning of August 1944 to the end of that year. Wherever the change was significant the tables were corrected and, of course, I added the new names and the additional information to the list of names.

In the light of the new information arrivals to Ravensbrück were as follows:

In the first period 713 prisoners arrived (2 more than previously recorded).

In the second period 539 prisoners arrived (4 less than previously recorded).

In the third period 670 prisoners arrived (15 more than previously recorded).

In the fourth period 10,626 prisoners arrived (41 more than previously recorded).

In the fifth period 3,759 prisoners arrived (no change).

The number of prisoners whose date of arrival is unknown was reduced to 60 (9 less than previously known).

The total number of Jewish prisoners (including children) who arrived in Ravensbrück is 16,367, 35 more than were known to me when the first English edition appeared.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Olga Benario–Prestes

Marianne-Katharina (Käthe) Leichter b. Pick

Rosa (Reise Hienda) Menzer

Emma Murr b. Engel Irma Eckler

Rosette Susanna (Rosa) Manus

Jewgenia Lasarewna Klemm

Sylvia Grohs-Martin

Menachem Kallus

Stella Nikiforova b. Kugelmann

Sara (Seren) Tuvel Bernstein

Edith Kiss b. Rott, plus her relief, Deportation

Kato Gyulai

Halina Birenbaum b. Hala Grinstein-Balin

Bat-Sheva Dagan b. Isabella Rubinstein

Halina Nelken

Esther Kemeny

Eva Danos Langley

Gloria Hollander Lyon b. Hajnal Hollender

Dr. Gertrud Luckner

Professor Dr. Hildegard Schaeder

Marie Pleißner

Erna Lugebiel b. Voley

Corrie ten Boom

Jelisaweta Kusmina-Karawajewa Mat Maria

Erika Myriam Kounio Amariglio

Lidia Rosenfeld-Vago

Judith H. Sherman b. Stern

Niza Ganor b. Anna Fränkel

Map of camps from which they came

Map of camps to which they were sent

Map of Ravensbrück

Photograph of Ravensbrück

FOREWORD

I met Judith Buber Agassi first in 1995. I then served as director of the Memorial of the Women’s Concentration Camp Ravensbrück—where between 1939 and 1945 about 130,000 women and children from all over Europe were imprisoned, as well as about 20,000 men. A bond of research developed between us since her mother, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was from 1940 to 1945 a Ravensbrück prisoner and in 2001—on the occasion of her 100th birthday—the Ravensbrück Memorial (Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrück) prepared an exhibition in her honor. Between December 1992 and May 2005 I served as director of the Ravensbrück Memorial.

Judith Buber Agassi was then researching and analyzing with passion and scientific precision the names of former camp prisoners, discovering new names and interviewing many survivors. For these research-activities, she frequently made use of the Archive of the Ravensbrück Memorial and of its professional contacts. An especially close and fruitful cooperation developed between her and the research project of the Ravensbrück Memorial led by Dr. Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow that focused on the victims killed in this concentration camp. This project resulted in the publication in 2005 of the Gedenkbuch für die Opfer des Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück 1939-1945.

I especially welcomed this research project concerning the Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück and supported it as much as possible. I read the manuscript with great interest. It is the first thorough analysis of all those Jewish women, girls, and children who were deported to Ravensbrück, about whom any evidence was found. Judith Buber Agassi analyzed and presented the written and oral sources, using sociological methods. Thus for the first time the fate of Jewish prisoners originating from many countries becomes known to a large extent. This work sets standards for the research of other camps and its method and analysis should serve as an example. It thus not only closes a gap in the research concerning Concentration Camp Ravensbrück; it also constitutes an important contribution to concentration camps research in general. Thus far this book has appeared in English, German, and Hebrew.

I am using Judith Buber Agassi’s The Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück: Who Were They? for my teaching at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Luxemburg.

I welcome this new, more accessible, and more affordable American edition of this book.

Professor Dr. Sigrid Jacobeit, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie and the University of Luxemburg

September, 2013

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 nameless, faceless, dehumanized theories and statistics. I wish I could protect the memory of us all, young and old: not one of us thought of ourselves as hero or victim – and yet we were both. I sincerely hope that this study, dealing with theories and statistics as it does, nevertheless does justice to the memory of the victims: I honor as many names as I could find, describing them and their diverse personalities and fates, and above all their having been both victims and heroines.

HerzliyaJ. B. A.

January 2006

NOTES

1.Irith Dublon-Knebel (ed.), A Holocaust Crossroads: Jewish Women and Children in Ravensbrück, London; Vallentine Mitchell, 2009.

2.Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under two Dictators, New York, 1950, pp. 162–166 (first published in German as Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler, Munich, 1949); Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo: Die Auslieferung deutscher und österreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion nach Nazideutschland 1937–1941, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, pp. 110f.

3.Margarete Buber-Neumann, Milena, London, 1989 (first published in German in 1963).

4.Later we found that lists of Ravensbrück survivors existed in several countries; although the overwhelming majority of these women had been arrested and deported to Ravensbrück either directly or via Auschwitz as Jews, they usually were listed as anti-fascists, without mention of their being Jewish. In the US about 1200 Jewish women (and some men) who had registered with the Washington Holocaust Registry had mentioned Ravensbrück as one of their camps.

NB. Dates of documents are recorded here as in the originals: day, month, year.

2

IS TRUE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION POSSIBLE?

HETEROGENEITY

Before dealing with the problem of the reconstruction of the memory of the Jewish prisoners, let me discuss the problem of the reconstruction of historical memory in general – written or oral. Any memory of what happened to a large number of human beings in any location or institution that existed over several years of necessity must be heterogeneous, multifaceted, and contain even conflicting items of information – even in cases where there had been no organized efforts to suppress or falsify this memory, or reluctance to treat it with respect and consider it significant to a collective or a national memory.

In the case of Ravensbrück, there had