In 1939, the Nazis opened Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women. Sarah Helm (A Life in Secrets) offers a biography of the camp and its occupants in this extraordinary book. Helm begins with the moment the camp's chief woman guard, Johanna Langefeld, saw Ravensbrück for the first time to the camp's closure at the end of the war. Ravensbrück does not simply recount what happened. Helm tells the history of this part of the Holocaust with stories about those who were sent to Ravensbrück and those who ran the camp.
Johanna Langefeld seemed to be under the impression she would be "re-educating prostitutes," but by the time the camp opened, the women who arrived came from mixed backgrounds, from Germany and occupied countries, and some were Jewish. Most eventually died from starvation, disease and overwork; a smaller number died in the gas chambers. The inmates were political activists, opera singers, vagrants, a trapeze artist and women like Wanda Wojtasik, who became one of the medical "guinea pigs." The women guards came from varied circumstances.
Helm's phenomenal research material includes official documents, letters and diaries, interviews, blueprints and other primary sources. Using these narratives, she creates what reads as a firsthand account of significant events and changes in Germany that allowed such a place of horror to be built.
Helm manages to bring to light the unimaginable abuse and suffering, but in Ravensbrück she goes beyond the atrocities to chronicle the lives of the women, both the Nazi staff and the regime's victims. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company