Ravensbrück

I was immediately captivated by the depth of material and engrossing writing style of this book. Despite being a serious and challenging topic, Helm drew me in from the first page and never let up.

I also learned quite a bit of new information about a topic I thought I knew quite a lot about already. 

Ravensbrück is a meticulous, gut-wrenching account of Hitler’s horrific women-only death and torture concentration camp, which fell into Soviet hands after the war and was largely erased from history.

This book is personal to me because my Austrian grandmother was imprisoned there for nearly five years because of her public defiance of Hitler. I knew she was only eighteen when she entered the camp and endured time as a sex slave in the camp brothel in an effort to survive.

I also knew that she had been stabbed with a bayonet and left for dead during the death march she… show more.

This is a meticulously supported history of the women who were imprisoned at the notorious camp 54 miles north of Berlin.

Ravensbrück is a detailed history of the lives of the women imprisoned at the only concentration camp for women. Because the camp was located in East Germany, most of the documents needed to write the history were unavailable to western writers until the cold war ended.

As soon the Berlin wall fell, author Sarah Helm leaped into action, combing through the documents that remained, and from those she found survivors, who told her their stories.

Ms. Helm tells a… show more.