Although both men and women suffered unimaginable horrors in Nazi concentration camps, female Holocaust survivors often recount experiences that were specific to women.
From the loss of menstruation to forced abortions, a host of issues unique to women posed a special set of horrors for female victims.
Because Ravensbruck was the largest Nazi concentration the 50th anniversary of their liberation provided a rare opportunity to learn about both universal and uniquely female experiences.
The gathering included 200 women from Israel, as well as other Jewish women from such countries as the United States, Sweden, Germany, Hungary and Russia.
Now a national monument and memorial, Ravensbruck is located outside the village of Furstenberg. about 850 miles northeast of Berlin.
Originally planned as a work camp for political prisoners, the site opened when the first transport of 867 women arrived in May 1939.
These women were. for the most part, German anti-fascists, either Social Democrats or Communists. Some just happened to be Jewish.
At its inception, the camp was intended to provide harsh labor as “rehabilitation,” but after the war began, murder and torture were routine.
At least 132,000 women were incarcerated there, and only some 15,000 survived, according to camp statistics, which are incomplete and may be low.
Perhaps 20 percent of these women were Jewish, though this estimate may also be low.
As in other camps, the first terrifying indignities occurred upon arrival. The women had their hair cut off and gave up whatever they had brought with them. They were then forced to submit to humiliating “medical” examinations.
Their own clothes were replaced with ill-fitting striped uniforms, and their names with numbers.
Torture, beatings and murder by shooting, gassing and lethal injection were daily occurrences.
Many women also succumbed to illnesses such as typhoid, tuberculosis and starvation.
Many of the differences in the experiences of men and women at concentration camps were the result of biological differences.
The fact that adolescents and women in concentration camps stopped menstruating has been well-documented, and survivors confirmed this at the Ravensbruck ceremonies. But some of them also remembered that there was always a final menstrual period before the cycle ceased.
Women recalled feeling embarrassed and unkempt, with no way to obtain any sanitary supplies. Other women spoke about pregnancy, forced abortions, childbirth and sterilization.
An 87-year-old German Jewish survivor from Dresden, Joanna Krause, said that prior to her arrival at Ravensbruck, she had been arrested as a political prisoner and a Jew when she was seven months pregnant.
Placed in a Nazi prison, she was forced to have an abortion, then sterilized.
Ilana Lehner, an Israeli survivor who had been brought to Ravensbruck from Hungary, said her pregnant sister arrived at the camp with her, and the baby died soon after birth.
Other immates described how they sometimes helped pregnant women to abort fetuses secretly or mrder newborn children in order to keep the mother alive, because pregnancy could be punishable by death.
Brutal “medical” experiments at Ravensbruck included not only sterilization, but surgery that deformed the legs of female prisoners, who were called “rabbits” in camp parlance.
In addition to the suffering related to their reproductive systems, women were also generally responsible for any babies or small children who were too young to be useful as workers.
Although mothers at Auschwitz-Birkenau often were selected immediately for the gas chamber, mothers at Ravensbruck were, under certain circumstances, sometimes allowed to care for their children.
Nomi Friedmann and Chaya Dana, two sisters from Netanya, spoke of their arrival at the camp from Amsterdam at the ages of 16 months and 7 years, respectively.
They came to Ravensbruck after being interned in the Dutch camp at Westerbork, along with their mother and brother, age 11. Their father was sent to Buchenwald.
They said women prisoners took turns providing child care, with one mother watching all of the children while the other mothers worked.
Some children’s mothers died of disease or were murdered, and a rotating group of women took responsibility for the orphans’ care.
A Jewish woman living in St. Petersburg, Stella Kugelman Nikofarova, was a prisoner in Ravensbruck from the age of 4 to 6.
She said she arrived with her mother from Antwerp in 1943, but her mother died of disease within three months. After that, she said, she was always cared for by other women prisoners.
Some feminist writers and scholars make the case that solidarity among women was much stronger than among men in concentration camps.
Although the idea can neither be proved nor disproved, the collective child care provided by the women is an example of such solidarity.
Another example of solidarity at Ravensbruck was political resistance, which was highly organized in the camp, especially among the Communist prisoners.
To Jewish women who were gassed in the winter of 1942, Olga Benario Prestes, a German Communist, and Kathe Leichter, an Austrian Social Democrat, collaborated on a clandestine newspaper for the inmates.
However, some survivors remember instances when this sisterly support and solidarity was not displayed.
Several of the Jewish survivors remembered, for instance, that they were treated poorly by non-Jewish political prisoners, especially by some of the Ukrainians incarcerated there.
In the case of Stella Nikofarova, who should have been returned to Antwerp after the camp’s liberation, the selfish act of one of the female prisoners subjected her to many years of suffering after the war.
A Soviet prisoner-of-war from the camp kidnapped the 6-year-old Nikofarova, just as Soviet troops were arriving in the area.
Using the child to prove that she was not a traitor but a rescuer of the orphan, the woman then took her back to the Soviet Union, where she placed her in an isolated orphanage outside Moscow.
Not until Nikofarova was released at age 18 did she learn that her father, in fact, had survived incarceration in Buchenwald.
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