Ravensbruck, Sarah Helm
Ravensbruck, Sarah Helm
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Ravensbruck
Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

Author: Sarah Helm

Narrator: Christa Lewis

Unabridged: 32 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/09/2017


Synopsis

On a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women—housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes—was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards.

Their destination was Ravensbrück, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust. By the end of the war 130,000 women from more than twenty different European countries had been imprisoned there; among the prominent names were Geneviève de Gaulle, General de Gaulle’s niece, and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of the wartime mayor of New York.

Only a small number of these women were Jewish; Ravensbrück was largely a place for the Nazis to eliminate other inferior beings—social outcasts, Gypsies, political enemies, foreign resisters, the sick, the disabled, and the “mad.” Over six years the prisoners endured beatings, torture, slave labor, starvation, and random execution. In the final months of the war, Ravensbrück became an extermination camp. Estimates of the final death toll by April 1945 have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000.

About Sarah Helm

Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII and the play Loyalty, about the 2003 Iraq War. She was a staff journalist on the Sunday Times (London) and a foreign correspondent on the Independent, and now writes for several publications. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Maria on May 03, 2020

Ravensbruck — Um Testemunho da Força da Mulher Mas afinal ainda há mais? Já não foi tudo dito e redito?! Pois é...a arca dos HSGG* é como a cartola do mágico -- cada vez que se abre salta de lá um coelho! Este dá pelo nome de Ravensbruck e, como certamente se aperceberão, não pertence àqueles que celeb......more

Goodreads review by Tim on April 15, 2022

Sarah Helm's brilliant book about Vera Atkinson and her SOE activities involved researching the Ravensbruck concentration camp where some of Vera's agents were taken. No doubt this was the catalyst that inspired her to write this book about the camp itself. This is a remarkably researched and constr......more

Goodreads review by Moira on April 11, 2015

It has taken a fortnight to read this book…or, rather, to LIVE this book. It is haunting, horrifying and a major work. How Sarah Helm endured writing it is almost beyond belief. "Write it quickly," she was advised but here it is - over 600 pages of exhaustive research and interviews, of digging out......more

Goodreads review by Gemma on May 12, 2022

Definitely my most harrowing read for a long time. It's a brilliant achievement how vividly the author recreates the Nazi concentration camp for women and how many of the individuals, both prisoners and staff she brings back to life. You find yourself loathing the Nazis and anxious for the survival......more