Himmler liked his camps to be in areas of natural beauty, and preferably hidden from view. When daylight came they saw that the camp was built on the edge of a lake and surrounded by forest. Women arriving in the night sometimes thought they were near the coast because they tasted salt on the wind they also felt sand underfoot. The camp took its name from the small village that adjoins the town of Fürstenberg and lies about 50 miles due north of Berlin, off the road to Rostock on Germany’s Baltic coast. Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. On another occasion he said the killing wasn’t going fast enough. Once he ordered more root vegetables to be put in the prisoners’ soup. He rarely left without issuing new orders. The head of the SS had friends in the area and would drop in to inspect the camp as he passed by. Heinrich Himmler often drove out to Ravensbrück, even in atrocious weather like this. The first time I drove there, in February 2006, heavy snow was falling and a truck had jackknifed on the Berlin ring road, so it would take longer. Meditate that this came about: / I commend these words to you.”įrom Berlin’s Tegel airport it takes just over an hour to reach Ravensbrück. The book’s title comes from the Primo Levi poem “If This Is a Man,” in which he writes: “Consider if this is a woman, / Without hair and without name / With no more strength to remember, / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a frog in winter.
She unearths unknown stories of the heroism and endurance of some of the 130,000 women who passed through its gates. In her new book, If This Is a Woman, journalist and author Sarah Helm relates the six-year history of the Nazis’ all-female Ravensbrück concentration camp.
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