Two bowls of soup from the Ravensbrick Women's Camp. [early 1940s]. The bowls were collected in the camp, and preserved after the war by two surviving camp prisoners, in a home in Jerusalem for over 60 years.
As known, in Ravensbrück each each prisoner was given only one dinnerware, which he had to hold at all times. A prisoner who lost one of their eating utensils simply did not receive a meal. Sometimes the camp administration even prohibited them from washing their eating utensils, forcing the prisoners to repeatedly use the same utensil without washing it.
Ravensbrück camp (some 100 km north of Berlin) was considered the largest women's concentration camp (later also became an extermination camp) in Germany. At its peak, together with its subcamps, the camp held about 46,100 female prisoners. The Jewish female prisoners in the camp were forced to wear a yellow badge. As part of the general trend of exploiting camp inmates for the war economy and weapons industry in particular, the Siemens company established production facilities in the camp starting in June 1942, where camp inmates were forced to work. Conditions in the camp were insufferably harsh. Thousands of prisoners were shot to death, choked, gassed, buried alive or worked to death. Ravensbrück became known as one of the camps where German doctors conducted cruel experiments on human beings starting in August 1942. The camp claimed the lives of about 40,000 victims.
Diameter 13-15 cm approximately. Slight break in the rim of one of the bowls. Good condition.
