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February 21, 2003
The Shoah's forgotten women
Different gender meant a different experience, according to N.Y.
scholar.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
To maintain her sanity and to keep a tenuous hold on reality during
her incarceration in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women,
Rebecca Buckman Teitelbaum stole tiny scraps of paper and scrawled
from memory 110 recipes of foods she prepared before the cloud of
Nazism rolled across Europe. Stealing even such unremarkable items
as paper could have resulted in her arbitrary murder by the camp
guards, but Teitelbaum's small act of defiance was just one of the
ways the women of Ravensbruck maintained their sense of humanity
and community.
Teitelbaum survived Ravensbruck, despite the fact that the women's
concentration camp had the highest death rate of all the concentration
camps on German soil and the most horrific medical experiments.
After Teitelbaum was liberated from Ravensbruck, on April 30, 1945,
she found her husband alive, but most of her family had perished.
Her daughter, Anny, whom she had placed in hiding as the reality
of the Final Solution became evident, survived, along with Teitelbaum's
brother's son, Alex. The children, aged six-and-a-half and seven
when they were reunited with Teitelbaum, had been cared for by a
Catholic orphanage. The family moved to Canada in 1951 and, last
Thursday night, to a rapt crowd in the Norman Rothstein Theatre,
Alex Buckman told the story of the aunt he came to call his mother.
Teitelbaum had made a promise to herself when she discovered that
Alex was one of her few remaining relations. She determined to raise
him as her own, despite the challenges faced by her as a survivor
rebuilding her life and the fact that, after the war, the family
barely had enough food to sustain it.
"No matter how little we have, we have enough for Alex too,"
Buckman recalled Teitelbaum declaring.
Teitelbaum died in 1998, but her memory was alive through Buckman's
words at the opening of a new exhibit on the women of Ravensbruck
at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. And the recipes Teitelbaum
so meticulously maintained during her incarceration are now on display,
providing a poignant, physical connection to the time.
At the exhibit's opening night event, Rita Akselrod baked two cakes
from the recipes Teitelbaum had written. The recipe collection is
one of only a couple of such artifacts known to have survived the
Holocaust, according to Dr. Rochelle Saidel, who delivered the keynote
lecture at the event opening. Saidel, a political scientist who
specializes in women's experiences in the Holocaust at the Remember
the Women Institute in New York City, described the recipes as a
monumental artifact that the Vancouver community is extremely lucky
to possess. It is also exemplary of the unique methods women used
to help them survive the universal horror of the concentration camp
experience.
Ravensbruck was anomalous not only because it was a camp specifically
for women. It also had a relatively small Jewish population. About
15 to 20 per cent of the victims of Ravensbruck are believed to
have been Jewish, the camp's original purpose having been to incarcerate
political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, resistance fighters, Allied
prisoners of war and "asocials," which probably included
lesbians and prostitutes as well as Roma (Gypsies).
About 90 kilometres from Berlin, Ravensbruck was originally opened
in 1939, with space for about 3,000 women. Within the next couple
of years, it would burgeon to 43,000. One of the methods of murdering
inmates, Saidel said, was forcing so many women into a small barrack
that inmates were forced to climb atop each other, until a large
proportion was dead. Those who survived were again forced into overcrowded
barracks, as many as 1,100 in buildings intended for 240.
Saidel discussed the impact of gender on Holocaust experience, stressing
that gender was neither a help nor a hindrance in the struggle to
survive, but that it was a different experience. On the one hand,
women, especially in that era, were the primary nurturers and homemakers
in society. So when they were incarcerated, they tended to form
supportive relationships and surrogate families to aid each other
in surviving. The exhibit includes a drawing of a woman picking
lice from another inmate; a depiction of a life-affirming act amid
the inhumanity of the camp.
Artifacts that survive that time show that inmates managed to give
gifts to one another, such as cards, drawings and handkerchiefs.
"It was a very important way of staying human," said Saidel.
On the other hand, the adaptation to camp culture was also more
difficult in some ways for women because they were taught to be
submissive. Surviving in the camps required a degree of self-preservation
and assertiveness.
"You have to overcome this if you were going to be able to
survive," said Saidel.
Rape was common in the camp and pregnancy added to one's vulnerability.
It is known that miscarriages and self-induced abortions were a
fact of life in Ravensbruck. It is also estimated that about 850
infants were born in the camp and very few survived. While conditions
were perhaps more deadly to infants than to adults, it is also known
that some of the infants were killed at birth, said Saidel.
Ravensbruck is one of the least-known of the Nazis' concentration
camps and Saidel, as well as members of the audience, posited why
this may be the case. Theories vary. Saidel maintains that some
blame must be put on patriarchal historians, who somehow overlooked
Ravensbruck. There is also the reality that there were very few
survivors to tell their stories. Reliable numbers about Ravensbruck's
population are not available, due to frequent mobility of inmates
between various camps. However, an agreed-upon statistic suggests
there may have been 132,000 women, at various times, incarcerated
in Ravensbruck, and that 117,000 did not survive. Also, most of
the women in Ravensbruck had spent prior time in other camps, so
their shorter, although usually more horrific, periods in Ravensbruck
may have not figured as highly in testimonies as their periods in
such familiar camps as Auschwitz. On top of this, the fact that
the women of Ravensbruck were among the most ethnically diverse
of any camp meant that those few survivors who may have written
memoirs did so in their native languages, somewhat under the radar
of much scholarly Holocaust literature. Nevertheless, the exhibit
on now at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre is a major step
toward ameliorating the invisibility of the experiences of the women
of Ravensbruck.
Ravensbruck: Forgotten Women of the Holocaust, runs until May 30
at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
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