“Les Françaises à Ravensbrück” – French Women in Ravensbrück – testimonies, published by Denoël Gonthier by the Amicale de Ravensbrück (Association of Ravensbrück Survivors) and the Association of Deportees and Detainees of the French Resistance. An important publication containing dozens of detailed testimonies on the atrocities of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. One of the most important and harrowing accounts written about the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp by the inmates themselves. Paris, 1965 – First edition. French.
“French women in Ravensbrück / Those who wrote this book wished to bear collective witness to a collective struggle. Because they committed themselves to resistance against Nazism, they found themselves in the deportation camps and continued the struggle there together. To continue the struggle when cut off from the world, dying of hunger, infested with lice and stricken by epidemics, tortured with cruelty and threatened with death at every moment, is to preserve oneself in a state in which one can one day bear witness: simply to survive; to help others survive. And that is what they did” (back cover).
A collection of testimonies compiled into a substantial volume in which dozens of women who themselves survived the camp recount their stories twenty years after the camp’s liberation. This was a special initiative in memory of their friends who perished: “We wrote this book as a monument erected in memory of our comrades, who are undoubtedly victims, but, as some may have forgotten, first and foremost fighters. Whether they enlisted of their own will, were captured in another’s place, or, without enlisting, were swept into the great struggle of a people against Nazism, liberation was paid for with their lives.” The book documents in detail what took place in the camp from its establishment until its dismantling at the end of the war. From the construction of the camp by force by 500 prisoners brought from Sachsenhausen at the end of 1938, the turning point in 1941 when it became a “labor camp, ” the executions in the camp that began in the spring of that year, and the use of prisoners as human subjects for horrifying experiments conducted on their bodies. Among other things, described here in detail is the “vivisection” experiment carried out in the camp, in which 75 women and young girls were forced to undergo horrific “treatments” on their legs by Prof. Gebhardt of the University of Berlin. Those who survived this dreadful experiment were called “Kaninchen” – little rabbits, and they remained limping along the camp paths, walking with crutches. The youngest among them was 14 years old. Testimonies appear regarding the transport trains that arrived at the camp at the beginning of 1943. The completion of the construction of the gas chambers in the camp in December 1944, and the process of mass extermination following “selection.” Throughout the book, the horrors endured by the French women are described in detail – those sent there because of their underground activity, as well as Jewish women deported to the camp from various places – many passages are difficult to read, in which the women themselves describe the atrocities they experienced. The testimonies recount daily life in the camp, forced labor, coping with hunger, the typhus epidemic that raged in the camp, the operational mechanism of the camp, and the harsh punishments. As well as the prisoners’ struggle to raise their children under impossible living conditions, through remarkable cooperation among the women themselves, and their daily struggle to survive the inferno and preserve their humanity (one of the women describes: “The struggle that demanded the greatest effort was the struggle to remain human. The destructive actions of the concentration camp regime were directed not only at our physical existence, but also at our moral being…”).
In the book there are, among other things, nominal lists of dozens of women who perished in Ravensbrück, with regard to each of whom their surviving comrades describe their biographies, the manner in which they were murdered, and the reason for their murder. For example: “We must not forget Vera Obolensky, known as Vicky. A Russian woman who was raised in France from the age of 7. Her head was severed in August 1944… Marie-Louise Cloarec, born in Carhaix (Finistère), decided, since there were no sons in her family, to join the Resistance and serve France. She traveled to England, underwent training at a parachute school, and was subsequently sent to France in the Compiègne region. Finally, she was assigned to a mission in Paris. After being arrested and deported to Ravensbrück, she was executed by a firing squad at the age of twenty-six.” And so regarding dozens of women.
Many women took part in the project of collecting testimonies for the book, among them Anne-Marie Bauer, Marinette Dambuyant, Paulette Don Zimmet, Simone Gorny, Rose Gorin, and many others.
The photograph on the cover, depicting a mother and her son in a state of extreme starvation, is one of the images most identified with the suffering of the camps. The sentence appearing at the bottom of the cover, “Nous avons appris à ne pas nous soumettre” (“We learned not to submit”), alludes to the spirit of the book – a testimony not only to suffering, but also to female solidarity and the steadfastness of the prisoners in the face of the Nazi attempt to break their human spirit.
387 [6] pages. Light stains on the cover. Good condition.
