Those of you who know me will know I am something of a history buff. Not 'big' history, particularly, more social history. I mean don't get me wrong, 1066 and all that is interesting, and I think it's important we continue to teach the next generation coming through about where we all came from and why the world looks the way it does (which from the current perspective is pretty much "fucked up"), but 'big history' tends to be full of Grand Old Men Doing Grand Old Things, or a scattergun approach to 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous circa 1126' or whatever. All of which is fine and interesting; it's just that, while I'm jolly glad old Will Shakespeare allegedly wrote some plays that one time, I'm much more interested in what life was like for the family down the road he bought his paper and quills from. I don't relate to Grand Old Men, I relate to people who are more, well, me. Proud as I am of my ancestors, for without them I should not be here, we weren't part of the Great and Good. We were farmers, wheelwrights, publicans, labourers; in some cases we were workhouse inmates and transported convicts and prostitutes. That's the kind of thing I like reading about: what life was like for the average Man-or-Woman-on-the-street.
Social history, then, is one of my great loves. You should see my book shelves: alongside the obligatory biographies of Henry VIII et al I have loads of books about the workhouse, maidservants, ordinary people surviving the Blitz. And while I would like to think the idea of 'women's history' will someday become obsolete, I sort of hope it never does. It was 'women's history' which introduced me to the daring exploits of the women of the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War; I'd never heard of the 'Attagirls' before and was so impressed that I promptly threw the book at my then-11 year old goddaughter and instructed "read that; you will Learn Something Important". (To Bethany's credit she did so, and was just as upset as I was on learning of the death last of year of one of the 'Attagirls', Lettice Curtis). It was 'women's history' which led me to a book about the courage and carnage inflicted on the Queen Alexandra nurses during that same conflict; again, I had no idea that these women had been torpedoed and bombed and, in the case of some of the girls shipped out to Hong Kong and Singapore, brutally raped and murdered or locked up in one of the Japanese POW camps. You've seen Tenko...) And 'women's history' is the reason I'm currently reading Sarah Helm's magnificent, pulls-no-punches, should-be-mandatory-reading-for-everyone book entitled 'If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women.'
Now I know about the concentration camps. Heck, I've even been to one, and while I wouldn't say it was a highlight of my trip to Munich in 2011 I remain forever glad I did go to Dachau. In fact we all know about the concentration camps, right? Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka...you might also be able to name Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald if you really thought about it, am I right? But Ravensbrück?
Well, sure, you might have heard of it. I had, in passing, although I couldn't actually tell you where. After all, Ravensbrück was not an extermination camp for Jews, and when we are taught the tragedy of the Holocaust it is the six million Jews whose story we are told. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't tell that particular history; far from it - what happened to the Jewish people in the concentration camps and the ghettos was an absolute abomination and we should never, ever forget that. All I'm saying is we should perhaps look at the bigger picture. Those camps evolved over time, and it wasn't just Jews who were rounded up and locked inside them, to live or to die as fate or the Third Reich decreed.
The history of Ravensbrück which Sarah Helm so vividly, painfully brings to life is a case in point. Usually I would be devouring a book like this at a rate of knots, pausing only to exclaim breathlessly about a particular passage or to make notes on something to follow up on afterwards, but with this book...I can't do that. It's so exquisitely written, so damning in its condemnation and so vividly, brutally alive with the detail of the history of the camp and those who lived and worked there that I can only read a chapter or two at a time before I have to put it down and go and do something else. I have alternately wept and raged while reading it and I'm not even halfway through; so powerful and evocative is the writing, so senseless and unthinkable the cruelty, that I just can't read it in one fell swoop. There are times when this book physically hurts me to carry on with, but now I've started I don't think I can, in all good conscience, turn aside and read something else. I can't. The story of Ravensbrück was hidden from the West for so long that now it's come to light there is a part of me which feels, odd as it may seem, that I owe it to the women who were held there to carry on with it. Their story, their suffering, was hidden for so long it seems cruel to merely put the book down and pretend I'd never read any of it.
Now I'm not trying to make some grandiose gesture here or start 'comparing my suffering reading it with the suffering of the women' blah blah blah - that is both absurd and inhuman. But when the Iron Curtain came down Ravensbrück was firmly on the Communist side of the divide and, as such, its stories were lost to those of us on the other side. And these stories need to be told.
Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp specifically built to house women, although of course many women lived and died in the other camps. But Ravensbrück was the only one in which only women were held, and as such it marks not just a testimony to the Nazi's cruelty but their specific cruelty towards women. Only a tiny percentage of the women who passed through Ravensbrück's gates were Jewish; the vast majority were either political prisoners, mainly Communists from Germany and then, as the war progressed, from the other countries the Nazis annexed and invaded; 'asocials' - prostitutes, lesbians, beggars, the 'work-shy' and the homeless; and habitual criminals. There were also a number of Jehovah's Witnesses who hadn't renounced their faith as decreed and were therefore lumped in with the rest; these good German housewives must have been completely appalled at being locked up with thieves, murderers and prostitutes, but they wouldn't swear the oath renouncing their belief Hitler was the Antichrist and so they had to go. Basically, anyone who may have been a 'threat' to Hitler's precious Fatherland and the racial purity of the people therein were rounded up and shipped off to the camps. Woe betide the women of Germany who didn't fit the 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche' model of Nazi femininity; they were likely to be arrested and sent off to Ravensbrück. As the war progressed, resistance fighters from France and elsewhere were also shipped off to the camp, including English Special Operations Executive personnel. Once there, it's a miracle any of them made it home.
Let's be completely clear about this: while the Nazis designated Ravensbrück as a 'slave labour camp', and while it was used to provide free labour for the likes of Siemens, many women died there. All of its Jewish women were eventually shipped off to Auschwitz; women were routinely taken out to nearby woods and shot there; others were transported to the early gas chambers at places like Dessau under the '14f13' programme once, after a public outcry, Hitler had to stop euthanising 'useless mouths' (the mentally and physically disabled) in the gas chambers built at their sanatoriums. Women died in the prison block or as a result of the beatings they endured; women died from the exhausting work they had to do or from injuries they sustained in doing so; women died at their own hand rather than endure the camp a moment longer. Most horrifyingly of all, perhaps, women died slow, prolonged deaths as a result of the barbaric 'medical experiments' Himmler allowed his favourite doctor, Karl Gebhardt, to carry out on the women at the camp. Most of the victims of these 'experiments' were Polish; they had gas gangrene and various other types of bacteria injected into their legs to see if the Nazis sulphonimide treatments could save soldiers lives at the front; they had bits of bone chiseled out of their legs - or the whole bone completely removed - in trials to see if more could be done to help wounded soldiers with broken bones; they had bits of muscle hacked off and grafted to other bits of bone...this was all done under anaesthetic but the anaesthetic didn't always work; sometimes they were awake. Afterwards they were left alone to suffer the agonies of infection and mutilated limbs. Many died. How any of them survived these 'experiments' is something of a miracle, but survive some did, and they were able to testify at the trials which sprang up in the wake of the war's end. Not for nothing did the women of Ravensbrück call it a death camp.
That wasn't the end of it, either. As 'revenge' on the Czech people for the murder of one of his favourites, Hitler ordered that no stone be unturned in an attempt to catch the killers. Entire villages were razed to the ground; men taken out and shot; children murdered in front of their mothers...and the women of one small village in particular, Lidice, were all rounded up and sent to Ravensbrück. One of these women was part of the next round of 'experiments', when doctors at the Ravensbrück 'hospital' (I use the term lightly) were using lethal injections to kill 'mad' patients and then use their arms, legs and, in at least one case, a collarbone to attempt transplants to wounded servicemen. She was designated as 'mad' on her arrival at the camp, although given the fact she'd just seen her entire village burnt down, her husband shot and her own house set on fire with all eight of her children inside screaming, I'm not actually surprised. I suppose we should at least be grateful they killed these women before they hacked off their limbs...Ravensbrück may not have been designated as an extermination camp, but it was nonetheless: a painful, prolonged extermination.
The thing which has struck me the most about reading this book, besides its unflinching detail and the fact I've cried more reading this than almost any other book I possess, is the fact I didn't know about it. I didn't know. I could probably tell you a bit about Auschwitz and the gas chambers there, the selection of which Jewish people to kill right away and which ones to work half to death first. I could tell you a bit about the Lodz ghetto and those like it, and how they were liquidated and their residents sent to their deaths. I might even be able to dredge up from the old memory banks something about the Gypsies who were murdered, or the men sent to Dachau for 're-education' who were then released once Hitler was sure they posed no threat to him. But could I have told you anything about Ravensbrück before I started this book? No I could not, although as I said I had heard the name in passing somewhere. But the story of Ravensbrück is not told in this country, and so I could have told you nothing.
I didn't know where it was.
I didn't know it was a women's camp.
I didn't know it was the women's camp.
I didn't know what they did there.
But the genie is out of the bottle now and my god, I am not going to let it get back in. Sarah Helm has done a magnificent job in rescuing these women from the obscurity of history and has shone a light full force on the barbarism inflicted on them. Between thirty and fifty thousand women were murdered at Ravensbrück - some were Jewish but most were social 'outcasts', political 'enemies', the 'useless mouths' of the sick, the mentally ill, the poor. They could have been anyone. They could have been me. I'm not Jewish but I could easily see myself in one of those categories which came under suspicion from Hitler's paranoia; I may have escaped Auschwitz but - in another time, another place - who's to say I would have escaped Ravensbrück?
And this, to me, is why 'women's history' is so important. I read about Sarah Helm's book one lunchtime on the website of the Independent. As a woman and a feminist - hell, as a person - it intrigued me and I ordered it. I'm so glad I did. History is written by the victors, they say, and in all cases these victors are Great Men. The voices of ordinary men are rarely heard, those of ordinary women even less so. The idea of 'women's history' may grate with some, and often does, but it is this specific type of history which rescues the role of women from the shadows and brings them to light. In the case of the Ravensbrück women in particular, hidden first by the Nazis and then by the Iron Curtain, this is especially important.
What happened in the Holocaust was intolerable.
We must remember, always, so it doesn't happen again.
Admittedly we seem to suck at this, but still...we do our best to ensure it will never happen again.
But we must make sure we tell the whole story.
**Sarah Helm's book "If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women" is out now. I strongly recommend it to everyone.**
