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Michelangelo in Ravensbruck: One Woman's War Against the Nazis
In 1939, Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, professor and wealthy landowner, joined the Polish underground, was arrested, sentenced to death, and was held in Ravensbruck concentration camp. There she taught art history to other women who, like her, might be dead in a few days. This inspiring and beautifully written memoir records a neglected side of World War II: the mass murder of Poles, the serial horrors inflicted by both Russians and Nazis, and the immense courage of those who resisted.
372 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 2007
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321 people want to read
About the author
Karolina Lanckoronska
4 books4 followersHistorian and art historian, daughter of Count Karol Lanckoronski. She studied at University of Vienna. After 1918 she went to Univeristy of Lwów to teach. During World War II she was working for Polish underground. She stayed some time in prison in Stanisławów and later sent to notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. After release in 1945 she wrote memoirs. Since end of the war she lived in Fribourg, Switzerland and later in Rome until her death at age of 104.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 13, 2020
I was going through my favorites shelves and came across this book and recalled exactly why it is on that shelf. Karolina was a Polish Countess and academic who worked for the resistance which is why she ended up in Ravensbruck. My favorite part of her long story is the fact that she was given special status because she was a Countess. She was given her own quarters, of a sort, better and more food and less work. But Karolina could not tolerate the isolation nor being treated better than her comrades. She wanted to be with her compatriots and other women with whom she felt some solidarity and, being the type of person she was, she found ways to survive under far worse conditions and found ways to help others survive as well. A very strong and strong-minded woman whom I admired very much.
June 16, 2008
Very inspiring tale of a countess turned professor turned underground turned concentration camp prisoner during WWII. It's a very interesting, intelligent detail of the "inside" of everything during the war. She tells of the Soviet occupation of Poland, then the Nazi occupation of Poland and then how it felt not to know what was happening to her homeland while she was in prison.
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March 31, 2011This was a difficult book to read, not so much for its content as because of the author’s formal and somewhat distant accounting of herself, surely a result of her lifelong devotion to academia. I think that what I love most about Countess Lanckorońska’s war narrative is how she continually and unselfconsciously refers to any humanitarian effort on her part as “my work.” Here she is writing about a time she spent in near-solitary confinement in the prisoner section of the concentration camp at Ravensbrück:
My work was going very well, not only as far as food distribution was concerned, but also the business of gathering and reporting information.
The communication and food distribution is achieved through guards and cleaners (often prisoners themselves) supplemented by a certain amount of acrobatics:
The most exacting task was how to get food into the ‘dungeons’ after raising the iron shutters. If the shutters jammed, the prisoner inside could not reach high enough to help, with nothing to climb on and no bunk… The thing to do was to attach a stone to the string from the parcel and aiming at the slit in the partially open upper window, throw it. Then the prisoner above would lower the string, to which the small parcel could be attached.
(Being a rather special prisoner herself, Lanckorońska was allowed unlimited food parcels from outside the camp, and took advantage of this, distributing almost all of it with abandon.)
However, only the last fifth or so of Lanckorońska’s narrative takes place in Ravensbrück, despite the title—the bulk of the book is devoted to activities and events beginning with the German invasion of Poland. And, indeed, the Russian invasion of Poland. My Polish history is scanty, and this was a real eye-opener. Lanckorońska’s home city of Lwów was occupied by the Soviet Russian Army on 22 Sept. 1939, leading to, among other things:
* Lanckorońska being forced to share her apartment with a Russian officer who insisted on washing his beard in the toilet.
* The entire winter’s coal supply from her block being “nationalised” by the Soviet government -- i.e. requisitioned and removed without recompense to the tenants who had originally purchased it.
* The Polish currency being abolished four days before Christmas, paralysing “all commercial and investment enterprises” -- so when you went into a shop and tried buy a newspaper or board a tram, you were asked for Russian roubles, then “shown to the door” when you failed to produce them. Suddenly nobody had any cash. Curiously, Polish currency was still valid on “the German side.”
Lanckorońska is a humanitarian and an extremely learned historian, but her well-earned prejudices are hidden only just beneath the surface. It’s hard to tell whether she despises the Russians or Germans more, though she makes a valiant effort to try to analyze what’s going on with scholarly indifference. If there’s any cultural group that comes off as barbaric in this narrative, it’s the “Asian” Russians -- barbaric in the sense that they are uneducated and uncivilized, as well as brutal. When Lanckorońska eventually leaves Lwów for Kraków, she is at first hugely relieved to be under German rule. “Whatever else, this is Europe.”
Again, I’m not really doing justice to the narrative. It’s meaty and there’s a lot of information here, including extensive biographical notes for about 85 individuals. Although presented as an autobiography, this book is also a very personal, subjective, and crystallized look at Poland during World War II. Not easy, but well worth the effort for the curious and ambitious reader.
My work was going very well, not only as far as food distribution was concerned, but also the business of gathering and reporting information.
The communication and food distribution is achieved through guards and cleaners (often prisoners themselves) supplemented by a certain amount of acrobatics:
The most exacting task was how to get food into the ‘dungeons’ after raising the iron shutters. If the shutters jammed, the prisoner inside could not reach high enough to help, with nothing to climb on and no bunk… The thing to do was to attach a stone to the string from the parcel and aiming at the slit in the partially open upper window, throw it. Then the prisoner above would lower the string, to which the small parcel could be attached.
(Being a rather special prisoner herself, Lanckorońska was allowed unlimited food parcels from outside the camp, and took advantage of this, distributing almost all of it with abandon.)
However, only the last fifth or so of Lanckorońska’s narrative takes place in Ravensbrück, despite the title—the bulk of the book is devoted to activities and events beginning with the German invasion of Poland. And, indeed, the Russian invasion of Poland. My Polish history is scanty, and this was a real eye-opener. Lanckorońska’s home city of Lwów was occupied by the Soviet Russian Army on 22 Sept. 1939, leading to, among other things:
* Lanckorońska being forced to share her apartment with a Russian officer who insisted on washing his beard in the toilet.
* The entire winter’s coal supply from her block being “nationalised” by the Soviet government -- i.e. requisitioned and removed without recompense to the tenants who had originally purchased it.
* The Polish currency being abolished four days before Christmas, paralysing “all commercial and investment enterprises” -- so when you went into a shop and tried buy a newspaper or board a tram, you were asked for Russian roubles, then “shown to the door” when you failed to produce them. Suddenly nobody had any cash. Curiously, Polish currency was still valid on “the German side.”
Lanckorońska is a humanitarian and an extremely learned historian, but her well-earned prejudices are hidden only just beneath the surface. It’s hard to tell whether she despises the Russians or Germans more, though she makes a valiant effort to try to analyze what’s going on with scholarly indifference. If there’s any cultural group that comes off as barbaric in this narrative, it’s the “Asian” Russians -- barbaric in the sense that they are uneducated and uncivilized, as well as brutal. When Lanckorońska eventually leaves Lwów for Kraków, she is at first hugely relieved to be under German rule. “Whatever else, this is Europe.”
Again, I’m not really doing justice to the narrative. It’s meaty and there’s a lot of information here, including extensive biographical notes for about 85 individuals. Although presented as an autobiography, this book is also a very personal, subjective, and crystallized look at Poland during World War II. Not easy, but well worth the effort for the curious and ambitious reader.
September 21, 2022
Through her family connections with highly-placed individuals in the Italian government and nobility; the use of her wits and intelligence to say the right words at the right times; her ability to maneuver and manipulate the Nazi civil and military bureaucracy in the General Government; and her resolute faith in God and belief in the eventual emergence of a free Poland, Karolina Lanckoronska kept herself alive during perhaps the darkest period in the history of her long-suffering country, when enemies from east and west seemed intent on erasing Poland as country, culture and people.
Although she was not able to escape imprisonment and interrogation on many occasions, finally ending up in the notorious Ravensbruck womens’ concentration camp from January 1943 to April 1945 when she was taken out of the camp to Switzerland as part of a Red Cross rescue convoy, her goal and focus throughout was to try to help both her country and all the unfortunates she encountered. As a member of government-approved relief organizations, and even as a prisoner, she was able to smuggle food to many who were starving or persuade officials to allow food shipments openly. She did this by recognizing that many of the Germans in the prison system hated each other more than they hated the Poles, and in addition were extremely corrupt and avaricious and thus vulnerable to being played off one against another. At the same time in the midst of this work Lanckoronska was able to gather valuable intelligence which she passed on through the use of various codes to the Polish Home Army.
She was a distinguished, highly educated academic whose specialty was Renaissance art history. Perhaps the most amazing and uplifting part of her incredible story is the way she undertook to impart some of her vast knowledge, from memory, to other unfortunates (even those in Ravensbruck—hence the book’s title-- even many who were awaiting execution) desiring to hold on to a shred of their humanity. She saw their hunger for something that would enable them to look beyond their dire circumstances to a world where there was still goodness, light, creativity, and love, all the things that define humanity at its best, and, especially meaningful to those who were, like her, of the Catholic faith, a God who made all those things possible. The brutality, degradation and savagery of the Bolsheviks and Nazis, the darkness and death of the torture chambers of Ravensbruck, were as nothing compared to the glories of the Sistine Chapel; if not to be experienced in this life, then, by faith, in the next.
Countess Lanckoronska was blessed with an extremely long life (1898-2002), and spent the rest of her life after 1947 in Rome where she continued to teach and lecture. It was long enough to see some of the war criminals against whom she had struggled so courageously finally brought to justice; and long enough, perhaps most satisfying for her,
to see Poland emerge from the shadows of its existence as a Stalinist puppet state, and member of the Warsaw pact, to become a truly free country at last. Her autobiography is a much-needed reminder, especially today when (to paraphrase Churchill) the storm seems to be gathering once again, of the resilience and determination of the human spirit to hang on to the good even in times of extreme adversity.
***** review by Chuck Graham *****
Although she was not able to escape imprisonment and interrogation on many occasions, finally ending up in the notorious Ravensbruck womens’ concentration camp from January 1943 to April 1945 when she was taken out of the camp to Switzerland as part of a Red Cross rescue convoy, her goal and focus throughout was to try to help both her country and all the unfortunates she encountered. As a member of government-approved relief organizations, and even as a prisoner, she was able to smuggle food to many who were starving or persuade officials to allow food shipments openly. She did this by recognizing that many of the Germans in the prison system hated each other more than they hated the Poles, and in addition were extremely corrupt and avaricious and thus vulnerable to being played off one against another. At the same time in the midst of this work Lanckoronska was able to gather valuable intelligence which she passed on through the use of various codes to the Polish Home Army.
She was a distinguished, highly educated academic whose specialty was Renaissance art history. Perhaps the most amazing and uplifting part of her incredible story is the way she undertook to impart some of her vast knowledge, from memory, to other unfortunates (even those in Ravensbruck—hence the book’s title-- even many who were awaiting execution) desiring to hold on to a shred of their humanity. She saw their hunger for something that would enable them to look beyond their dire circumstances to a world where there was still goodness, light, creativity, and love, all the things that define humanity at its best, and, especially meaningful to those who were, like her, of the Catholic faith, a God who made all those things possible. The brutality, degradation and savagery of the Bolsheviks and Nazis, the darkness and death of the torture chambers of Ravensbruck, were as nothing compared to the glories of the Sistine Chapel; if not to be experienced in this life, then, by faith, in the next.
Countess Lanckoronska was blessed with an extremely long life (1898-2002), and spent the rest of her life after 1947 in Rome where she continued to teach and lecture. It was long enough to see some of the war criminals against whom she had struggled so courageously finally brought to justice; and long enough, perhaps most satisfying for her,
to see Poland emerge from the shadows of its existence as a Stalinist puppet state, and member of the Warsaw pact, to become a truly free country at last. Her autobiography is a much-needed reminder, especially today when (to paraphrase Churchill) the storm seems to be gathering once again, of the resilience and determination of the human spirit to hang on to the good even in times of extreme adversity.
***** review by Chuck Graham *****
April 24, 2018
3.5
Did book is very well written and highly detailed, that being said you never really get the feeling of getting to know or fall into place with the author. There is a lot about her pre camp work, though little of her life, she stays aloof and this feeling is furthered when she comments on the physical appearance of people (sometimes whole groups) mostly as ugly. There were also too many German sentences thrown in to the general narrative; that while indexed at the back (or on an dreaded a much easier deep system) I felt through you out of the story since they weren't repeated in English and weren't always what you may have thought. It may add to the authenticity of her memories, but was clunky in a book. Over all it could have been shorter I think and possibly more relatable. It was just very hard to connect to this book with so many details that I felt in the end lined up to few stories I understood properly (for instance her resistance work).
I read about Miss Karolina in a fantastic 5 star book on Ravensbrück Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by [author:Sarah Helm|265909 who describes the lessons and such and the positivity it brought to camp. I highly recommend it.
Did book is very well written and highly detailed, that being said you never really get the feeling of getting to know or fall into place with the author. There is a lot about her pre camp work, though little of her life, she stays aloof and this feeling is furthered when she comments on the physical appearance of people (sometimes whole groups) mostly as ugly. There were also too many German sentences thrown in to the general narrative; that while indexed at the back (or on an dreaded a much easier deep system) I felt through you out of the story since they weren't repeated in English and weren't always what you may have thought. It may add to the authenticity of her memories, but was clunky in a book. Over all it could have been shorter I think and possibly more relatable. It was just very hard to connect to this book with so many details that I felt in the end lined up to few stories I understood properly (for instance her resistance work).
I read about Miss Karolina in a fantastic 5 star book on Ravensbrück Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by [author:Sarah Helm|265909 who describes the lessons and such and the positivity it brought to camp. I highly recommend it.
March 4, 2018
This was a really heavy book, so it took me a while to read. But it was also a very interesting account of one woman's experience resisting the Nazis and subsequent imprisonment. Countess Lanckoronska was a University professor in Poland who's social standing and education often gave her preferential treatment once she was imprisoned. One of her most vivid descriptions happens close to the end of WWII when the city around Ravensbruck was being bombed and yet the concentration camp saw balloons lighting the sky and later found out they served as guides so they wouldn't be touched by the bombing. So much history happened during the 94 years Countess Lanckoronska lived, but the defining era became WWII during which she was in her 40's, not young and not yet old.
August 25, 2022
Very interesting and informative as a first-hand account of Poland in WWII and of Ravensbruck. What I didn't like was having to constantly refer to the "Notes" section in the back of the book to get a translation or better understanding of what she was referring to. Some of it is okay, where it was lengthy, but it wasn't necessary for all of it, especially the translations. It just became annoying. Also, the book begins by the occupation of Poland by the Russians. I wish it had started a bit before then, leading up to it, so you could better understand why they were there and what was going on.
May 6, 2020
3.5 stars
September 2, 2019
Very stilted writing.. translation bad?
March 23, 2011
A level-headed aristocratic Polish university professor gets swept up in the resistance and prisoner welfare programs as the Soviets and Nazis divide up and invade Poland. She accounts for life under both Soviet Russian and Ukrainian communist occupation as well as Nazi occupation. She is eventually sent by the Nazis to Ravensbruck Concentration camp because a Gestapo leader slips up and boasts of murdering her university colleagues to her.
The details of her story and experiences are so interesting while I'm absorbing the history of the Nazis in William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"! I have never known anything about Poland other than it being the location of some of the most horrible Nazi extermination camps. I have gained a great respect for the brave and proud Poles and mourn how the Nazis and Communists systematically swooped in and exterminated entire cities' "intelligensia" - the very people who led or made the cities function. No wonder Poland and much of Eastern Europe had such a hard time recovering from WWII when most of their civic leaders, engineers, universities, teachers, clergy, and others disappeared under occupation or war!
Ms. Lanckoronska's account of the various prisons and Ravensbruck concentration camp give great detail to the struggle for life in the most squalid of conditions. My heart broke for her and her compatriots when they heard about the Yalta conference that gave Poland away. They had to re-evaluate their reason to live since they'd have no free homeland to return to. The politics of camp life were fascinating and I feel honored to pay homage at Ravensbruck next week to her and Corrie Ten Boom ("The Hiding Place") who survived Ravensbruck but lost people they loved and cared for.
The details of her story and experiences are so interesting while I'm absorbing the history of the Nazis in William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"! I have never known anything about Poland other than it being the location of some of the most horrible Nazi extermination camps. I have gained a great respect for the brave and proud Poles and mourn how the Nazis and Communists systematically swooped in and exterminated entire cities' "intelligensia" - the very people who led or made the cities function. No wonder Poland and much of Eastern Europe had such a hard time recovering from WWII when most of their civic leaders, engineers, universities, teachers, clergy, and others disappeared under occupation or war!
Ms. Lanckoronska's account of the various prisons and Ravensbruck concentration camp give great detail to the struggle for life in the most squalid of conditions. My heart broke for her and her compatriots when they heard about the Yalta conference that gave Poland away. They had to re-evaluate their reason to live since they'd have no free homeland to return to. The politics of camp life were fascinating and I feel honored to pay homage at Ravensbruck next week to her and Corrie Ten Boom ("The Hiding Place") who survived Ravensbruck but lost people they loved and cared for.
March 9, 2011
It is hard for me to put this book down. This memoir is about a brave wonderful woman who has 2 PhDs in Renaissance Art and how she deals with what is going on in Poland during WWII. She found out that women in her concentration camp who had one more hour to live before being executed, still wanted desperately to learn about art, art history. I like that her text is peppered with Latin phrases.
A favorite excerpt:
From p. 272, ..."..she [Marysia Kujawski]came straight to the point. 'You're making anti-Communist propaganda among the young people.' 'With all my strength' I replied. 'You simply must not do it! You see what's happened. For some time to come, we have got to co-exist with Communism, and the Soviets. It certainly won't be easy, bu we must find a modus vivendi, and it's therefore not permissible by any means to incite the young to hostility against Russia or its system.'
"I was well acquainted with Marysia and I knew her intentions were of the purest. I also knew, however, that honourable people who are unable to imagine Evil can be very dangerous. I therefore answered gently, but inflexibly. No use. Finally, when Marysia insisted ever more forcibly, I told her calmly that, as an academic teacher, I had special duties to the young, which I intend to fulfill-to the end. We parted without resolving our differences."
A favorite excerpt:
From p. 272, ..."..she [Marysia Kujawski]came straight to the point. 'You're making anti-Communist propaganda among the young people.' 'With all my strength' I replied. 'You simply must not do it! You see what's happened. For some time to come, we have got to co-exist with Communism, and the Soviets. It certainly won't be easy, bu we must find a modus vivendi, and it's therefore not permissible by any means to incite the young to hostility against Russia or its system.'
"I was well acquainted with Marysia and I knew her intentions were of the purest. I also knew, however, that honourable people who are unable to imagine Evil can be very dangerous. I therefore answered gently, but inflexibly. No use. Finally, when Marysia insisted ever more forcibly, I told her calmly that, as an academic teacher, I had special duties to the young, which I intend to fulfill-to the end. We parted without resolving our differences."
March 16, 2009
Great woman and art historian. In her war memoirs she decribed her life during World War II - stay in Lviv (work at Central Welfare Council), aressting by Gestapo and hearing by Hans Krüger, head of Gestapo in Stanisławów (he thought that countess will die soon and he told her that he played a great role in murdering Polish professors from Lviv at the begging of July 1941 and murdering Polish intelligence (people making their living from work mainly of their mind) in Stanisławów. From prison in Stanisławów she was moved do Lviv and than to concentration camp in Ravensbrück (camp no. 16076). In the camp medical experiments were conducted on Polish and other women. Many of them died in great pain and those who survived had health problems til the end of their lives. Countess survived, but most of the time spent in the camp she was sepearted from other prisoners. After the war she stayed in Italy.
February 25, 2013
Michelangelo in Ravensbruck is a true account of a polish countess of her life during the Holocaust. Karolina Lanckoronska was born into the aristocracy in poland and lived a very privileged life. She was educated in Rome and it was a classical education.In 1939 she was a professor at the university in Lwow Poland and had to flee to Krakow as the persecution of the intellectuals escalated. she worked for the Red Cross and the underground and eventually was arrested but because of her background and connections she escaped death and starvation.Her eventual incarceration in Ravensbruck the woman's concentration camp and her preferred treatment gave her the opportunity to write a diary of her experiences and later with memory to recount her holocaust experiences.I found this to be an interesting account.Karolina was a very strong woman and deeply catholic.I think the title of this book very much describes the author....elitist but with a depth of humanitarianism.
February 27, 2016
Pretty damn dry memoir of a Polish Countess' lack of adventures during and just after World War II. The Polish pronunciation guide at the front of the book is practically worthless. And did we REALLY need detailed biographies of every person in her life? At some points, the end notes refer you immediately to the biographies in the Appendix. So it can take you nearly an hour to get through four pages because of flipping around so much from the text, the end notes and the biographies.
Despite the title, there is hardly anything about Michelangelo OR Ravensbruck.
Despite the title, there is hardly anything about Michelangelo OR Ravensbruck.
August 22, 2009
Great as a historical memoir, but the title is deceiving. Very little of the book discusses art history, and she doesn't even reach Ravensbruck until 200 pages in (of a less than 300 page book). Before reading this, I was hoping to hear more about how art history can be an inspirational force. Her perspective was unique and certainly is an important aspect of understanding the Holocaust. Just not what I was hoping for.
December 4, 2008
This book is taken from the journals of a Polish noblewoman and university professor who participated in the Resistance during World War II. The book contains a mixture of factual information about what happened and her reflections on her experience. The book is easy to read but contains some quite profound insights.
January 3, 2011
Fascinating insight into this little known aspect of WW II's dreadful history. This book is slightly dated but in a way all the better for it as we are truly transported back to the values and mores felt by this extraordinary woman at this time. She was an amazing war hero and her story and her courage deserve to be better remembered.
July 27, 2012
This was a challenging read, but the author maintained an academic perspective on the horrible events happening around her, which helped some. I admired the way that the author managed to find beauty in darkness; for example, she focuses her narrative on the continued intellectual curiosity of her fellow inmates. I would highly recommend it for any lover of history.
Want to read
February 22, 2010Aristocrat with will & intelect in Nazi
October 31, 2011
This is a powerful account of survival and resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland, written by Countess Karolina Lanckorońska, an art historian (who died in 2002, aged 104).
February 18, 2013
I would give it a 3.5 star rating. I learned quite a bit from Karolina Lanckoronska, and am glad to have read the book.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews