“Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Story of Courage & Hope," at the Moline Public Library -- October 18.
Tuesday, October 18, 6 p.m.
Moline Public Library, 3210 41st Street, Moline IL
In a special Moline Public Library event held on October 19 in conjunction with the area-wide Holocaust-remembrance project “Out of Darkness” (OutOfDarknessQC.com), Judith Winnick will present an extraordinary lecture about the only all-women's concentration camp established by the Nazis during World War II, her lecture Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Story of Courage & Hope detailing imaginative acts of resistance, heroic bonds of friendship, and survival never assured.
Located in northern Germany, roughly 56 miles north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel), the camp's memorial estimates a figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war. That total includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries, including a number from the United Kingdom and United States. More than 20,000 of the total inmates were Jewish, with the others of other races and cultures. More than 80 percent of the women were political prisoners, many of whom were employed as slave labor by the German electrical engineering company of Siemens & Halske. In the spring of 1941, the Nazis also established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp's gas chambers in 1944. Of some 130,000 female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 perished, with some 2,200 killed in the gas chambers.
Among the survivors of Ravensbrück was author Corrie ten Boom, arrested with her family for harboring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She documented her ordeal alongside her sister Betsie ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place, which was eventually produced as a motion picture. Polish Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, an art historian and author of Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, was imprisoned there from 1943 until 1945. SOE agents who survived were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne, who was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping. Englishwoman Mary Lindell and American Virginia d'Albert-Lake, both leaders of escape and evasion lines in France, survived. Another SOE agent, Odette Sansom, also survived and is the subject of several biographies documenting her ordeals. Among the Communist survivors of the camp was French Resistance member Louise Magadur.
Ravensbrück survivors who wrote memoirs about their experiences include Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, as well as Germaine Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor from France who published her own eyewitness account of the camp in 1975. After liberation, Anna Garcin-Mayade, a French painter and member of the French Resistance, painted works illustrating prisoners and the terrible conditions of the camps; these were recreations of works she had created while in the camps. And In 2005, Ravensbrück survivor Judith Sherman published a book of prose and poetry titled Say the Name. Sherman writes of her childhood home in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and of several deportations, hiding in homes and in the forest, undergoing torture, and witnessing murder in Ravensbrück before her final liberation.
Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Story of Courage & Hope will be presented at 6 p.m. on October 18, participation is free, and more information is available by calling (309)524-2470 and visiting MolineLibrary.com.
