Ravensbruock: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp, 1939-1945 - Softcover

Attempting to reconstruct the workings of everyday life in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, the only camp in the Nazi system designed for women, Morrison examines the prisoners’ social relationships with each other and their overlords; prisoner activities, from bartering to storytelling, from political maneuvering to coping with body lice, and, of course, the kinds of forced labor performed (Ravensbrück was a labor camp, not an extermination camp); and the occurrences of sickness, death, and killing at the camp. The volume is illustrated with drawings by inmates, and photos by the SS. This book is designed to make it possible for today’s generation of students and general readers to imagine what daily life in a concentration camp may have been like.

Ravensbruck was a labour camp within German borders, not far from Berlin. In the beginning it was, by camp standards, a ""better"" camp, designed for indoctrination and industrial production, but by the end of the war it was just another overcrowded locus of horror complete with gas chamber. The result is a fascinating case study of how women of different nationalities and social backgrounds coped for years with lack of food and basic sanitation, illnesses, prejudices and death by carving out their own cultural life. Morrison's reconstruction of the dynamics of camp life presents a vivid picture for today's readers, highlighting the experiences of many individuals, such as the story of one of Ravensbruck's first inmates, an upper-class woman who arrived in her own car and soon found herself standing completely naked in a group of women for seven hours to undergo a humiliating medical examination in front of laughing SS officers. But the women developed all kinds of survival skills, many of which stand as a monument to the human spirit. Bonds of friendship and the creation of ""camp families"" helped alleviate the miseries of camp routine, as did a highly sophisticated educational system developed by Polish inmates. Women artists from several countries provided a further cultural dimension from crafts to poetry, theatre, music and drawings. As the war progressed, camp life deteriorated. More and more victims were concentrated in Ravensbruck, and the Nazis installed a gas chamber. About 140,000 Ravensbruck inmates did not survive the war. In 1945 life in Ravensbruck came to an abrupt end with a dramatic and macabre death march, in which many inmates perished and Nazis, clad as inmates, tried to escape the Russian troops.