The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück  by Lynne Olsen is an extraordinary telling of a little-told Nazi horror story, barely hinted at by the subtitle, “How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp.”  This goes beyond any book you’ve read or movie you have seen. The S.S.-run Ravensbruck hard labor camp was designed for killing, first by disease, starvation and hard labor, but also by barbaric medical experimentation, lethal injection and ultimately by transport to gas chambers.  The targets were all women, initially Czechs, Poles and Russians, then French.  One hundred thirty thousand were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Forty thousand died there. We might never have known their stories but for the courage and determination of certain prisoners who, having miraculously survived, determined that their stories must not be ignored or covered up.

With scrupulous attention to detail, Olsen brings to the reader the events leading to the women’s imprisonment, the horrors to which the Nazis subjected them and -over many years -the apprehension, prosecution and punishment of the SS officers, guards and higher-ups who practiced the evils that history still struggles to put into words.

Leading up to the war, France was, as Olsen describes, a deeply conservative, patriarchal society. Yet many of the imprisoned women were audacious and fiercely patriotic enough to become resistance leaders during German occupation, carrying intelligence by bicycle to designated drop sites, hiding French spies and downed Allied airmen, collecting information on German troop movements, working on underground newspapers. These brave women were artists, historians, students, professors, photographers; they cut across class lines.

Eventually, thousands were captured and sent to the hellscape that was Ravensbruck. There, many found survival through community, caring for one another, sharing blankets or crumbs from their meager food allotments, tending to the wounds of others who had been beaten. Special attention was paid to the “lapins” or rabbits, members of the Polish resistance whose legs were sliced open and injected with tetanus and gangrene bacteria and shards of broken glass, leaving them to die from fever and infection or survive with permanent disability.

The prisoners would softly sing to one another at night, to calm their fears as they lay crammed together like spoons on 2-foot wide straw mattresses or on dirt floors of the barracks. Tens of thousands were used as slave labor to make German military uniforms, dig mass graves or build bunkers. Some were deployed to build weapons at a nearby Siemens factory.  Profiting from all the forced labor was Heinrich Himmler, mastermind of the German concentration camps, who was a shareholder in the company running the forced labor operation. Hundreds of German women were trained at Ravensbruck for concentration camp work, many of them unspeakably sadistic.

A leader of the French prisoners was an anthropologist named Germaine Tillion, who used her professional skills to document the savagery the Germans were visiting upon the Ravensbruck prisoners.  Another prisoner was Genevieve DeGaulle, 22-year-old niece of Charles DeGaulle, who worked with Tillion and others to secretly build the case against the war criminals, identified by names and ranks. After liberation in 1945, it was only due to the women’s years-long pressure on the Brits and Americans, whose attention had turned from the Nuremburg trials to waging the Cold War, that some of those who carried out the Ravensbruck barbarism were brought to trial.

The tight bonds among the Ravensbruck sisterhood were what mattered to their survival while in the camp, and their love and encouragement for one another aided their uneasy reintegration into “normal” life afterward. Olsen uses deep research and first-hand interviews and other (non-German) records to document the atrocities perpetrated by the captors, and to portray the determination of the prisoners hanging onto the slimmest hopes of survival. Could we who have grown up with the comforts of our country, however flawed it may be, have the physical and moral courage to prevail were we ever faced with the existential challenges confronting these women? Readers of this memorable book will not easily shake off the impact of the stories told.