Ravensbrück Quotes

“I wish I could be built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn't bother me as much, but I just can't help it. It may sound paradoxical, but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people. - Doctor Doris Maza”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease. 
Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered. 
The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials. 
As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“Most are pious, but with a peculiar sort of piety. They seem to me to be hiding behind God in disgust at their own meanness.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims—already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead—did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it.

While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’

Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.

In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“Did nobody see where we were heading? Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy of the articles of Goebbels? I could see it even through the thick walls of the prison; yet more and more people outside were toeing the line.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“Listening to the voices of the Ravensbruck women I looked for clues about why this group survived. I could almost hear Maria Bielicka banging her fists on the table as she tried to explain why survival was in the blood of every Polish woman, 'passed on from mother to daughter. Jeannie Roussau… survived because she refused not to... she refused to make German arms... she refused to die on the freezing airfield and escaped back to the man camp, hiding in a typhus truck. When Bernadotte arrived, Jeannie was locked in the Strafblock but refused to be left behind, and persuaded the Blockova to let her out. 'You can refuse what is happening. Or go along with it. I was in the refusal camp,' she said. I asked her how she had the courage. 'I don't know. I was young. I thought if I do it, it will work. You simply cannot accept some things. Certain things.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“The entire time I was in the camp it was as if I had a double personality. My real self seemed to be observing what was happening to my physical self.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front had taken Prenzlau, fifty miles to the east. The German army now blew up fuel depots and military bases around Fürstenberg, ready for the final retreat.”
― Sarah Helm, If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“In broken English, Suhren told the American soldier: 'This is Frau Churchill. She is related to Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England.' Odette said she then stepped out of the car and added: 'And this is Fritz Suhren, commandant of Ravenbruck concentration camp. Please take him as your prisoner.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women