Déportée en Ravensbruck: Prisonnière de Staline et de Hitler, T. 2

by Margarete Buber-Neumann

Née en 1901 à Postdam, Margarete Buber-Neumann rejoint le parti communiste allemand en 1926. Elle devient la compagne d'Heinz Neumann, un des leaders, député au Reichstag. Le couple fuit le nazisme, mais Heinz est arrêté en 1937 et disparaît. Plus tard, Margarete est condamnée et déportée en Sibérie. Livrée en 1940 à la Gestapo, elle est envoyée dans le camp de concentration de Ravensbrück. Libérée en 1945, Margarete Buber-Neumann vivra à Francfort où elle décèdera le 6 novembre 1989.

352 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Margarete Buber-Neumann (21 October 1901 – 6 November 1989), was a member of the Communist Party of Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. She survived imprisonment in concentration camps during World War II in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the war, she wrote a memoir of her time in both of these camps and served as a star witness during the so-called "trial of the century" in the Kravchenko Affair in France

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

Margarete Buber-Neumann was the partner of Heinz Neumann, a German Communist party leader during the 1930s; the pair of them moved to the Soviet Union where (kind of inevitably, sigh) Heinz was executed and Margarete sent off to a labor camp as part of Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’. During World War II she was hauled out of Siberia, taken to the border of Germany and handed over to the Gestapo, who threw her into Ravensbrück (which is of course how *I* happened to ‘meet’ her).

Déportée à Ravensbrück is the second book about her 7 year incarceration, the first being Déportée en Siberie. It is interesting to me, now that I’ve read several personal histories from Ravensbrück, how the lives of these imprisoned intellectuals intertwined; here is an emotional cameo as Germaine Tillion breaks down in hysterics when she discovers she has failed to save her mother from the gas chamber, denying the dry precision of Tillion’s own exhaustive catalogue of murders in Ravensbrück . Here, also, for the first time, I’ve finally discovered WHAT was manufactured in the Siemens factory on site at the camp, and also some interesting information about what it was like to work there.

Almost as harrowing and exhausting to read as her camp narrative is the story of Buber-Neumann’s trek back to the village of her childhood after liberation. Sustained chiefly by the magic of her camp liberation papers which entitle her to money, ration tickets, and double portions of food wherever they’re doling such things out, she makes her way by foot, horse-and-cart, boat and bicycle. Various hazards she encounters are the Red Army 14 hours behind her (if they catch her she’ll be sent back to Siberia), the fact that she’s German and the Red Cross won’t help her out, rivers that can’t be crossed because the bridges have been blown up, a randy American soldier who won’t back off on his sexual assault of her EVEN AS HE’S SHOWING HER A PICTURE OF HIS WIFE… all this in addition to fatigue and hunger and illness and all of Germany now being, well, frankly, a bombsite.

The hardship is always contrasted with the amazing fortitude, generosity and character of so many people Buber-Neumann encounters - including former concentration camp detainees and SS guards along with American soldiers, refugee children and farmer’s wives. And the ending, where she returns (after a 25 year absence) to her bombed childhood town to find her own house intact and her family alive and in good spirits - well, that was a surprise ending. And I needed it.

I kind of wish I’d read this book in English because I got tired at the end and found it hard going - and it wasn’t even French to begin with but translated from German! A mistake on my part when ordering it. But for all that, a fascinating book.