Biographies - Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück

1

Erna Ludolph

Staying true to the faith
2

Eugenia Kocwa

Escape
3

Klawdia Jazenko

Leaflets
4

Nelly Mousset and Nadine Hwang

Relationships in the camp
5

Elfriede Mergenthaler

Smuggling
6

Elisabeth Krug

Resistance to SS orders
7

Majda Mačkovšek

Medical assistance
8

Ilse Hunger

Staying true to the faith
9

Yvonne Useldinger

Spreading news
10

Jožka Jabůrková

Founding of con spiratorial groups

11

Urszula Wińska

Salvaged documents
12

Lise London

Illegal handicrafts
13

Germaine Tillion

Refusal to work
14

Wanda Fischer

Contacts with the men’s camp
15

Elizaveta Skobcova

Religious life
16

Antonia Bruha

Children’s Christmas party
17

Lidia Beccaria

Secret lessons
18

Aat Breur

Cultural activities
19

Joanna Szydłowska

Documentation of the crimes
20

Nadjeshda Kalnitzkaja

Sabotage

ERNA LUDOLPH

Erna Ludolph, who worked as a housekeeper, shop assistant and kitchen help, was sent to Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel police prison for three months in 1936 for refusing to use the Nazi salute. In August 1937, she was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for distributing an open letter in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses informed the German people about their persecution. Sub sequently she was placed in “protective custody” in the concen tration camps of Moringen, Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück. In all these places she was urged to sign a declaration renouncing her faith, which would have led to her immediate release. However, she refused to do this, even though she was not yet officially a Jehovah’s Witness – in fact she was not baptised until May 1945.

In 1939 in Ravensbrück, Erna Ludolph and around 400 fellow members refused to make army sewing kits. Later she was forced to work in SS leaders’ gardens. In 1943, she was assigned to the household of physician Friedrich Holtz in Berlin. She managed to convince his wife and children to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses and lived with them in East Germany even after the religious community was banned there in 1950. In 1957 she moved to Frankfurt/Main with them.

Staying true to the faith

**Declaration on the faith of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Ravensbrück concentration camp, undated**
When Jehovah’s Witnesses signed this docu ment to renounce their religion, they were also express-ing their will to integrate into the German national community. If they refused to sign, this was con-sidered a confirmation that they chose to remain “fanatical Bible students”. In the case of men, adherence to their belief also meant refusal to serve in the military.
Jehovas Zeugen, Archiv Zentraleuropa

In all, 850 Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, their community having been banned since 1933. Many were persecuted because they had con-tinued to practise their beliefs or even tried to convert others. Some were imprisoned because they refused to work in the arma-ments industry or use the Nazi salute. They were distinguished by the SS as a distinct prisoner category and were obliged to wear a purple triangle on their uniform.

Due to their firm religious convictions, they formed a tightly-knit, united group. The SS tried to divert them from their faith in order to break their spirit. They were promised immediate release if they renounced their faith, but only a few accepted this offer.

In 1942, the SS acknowledged the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ resistance to working in war production plants. Instead, they were put to work in the households of SS staff, as they were considered to be reliable and clean and due to their religious beliefs there was no risk of them absconding.

Eugenia Kocwa

A correspondent and stenographer who had worked both in the Polish parliament and in a news agency, Eugenia Kocwa was arrested in Krakow in 1941 and deported to Ravensbrück due her involvement in the resistance movement. In the camp she secretly taught girls preparing for the camp school-leaving examination, which was illegal, held lectures and translated French and English literature.

She escaped during her lunch break on 25 May 1944 while working with the “forest detachment”. She had sewn herself some civilian clothes and clandestinely got hold of others from the clothing stores. She worked under a false name in Berlin, was arrested again and then managed to escape a second time. She hid in various places in Germany, including at the home of the sister from her fellow inmate Maria Grollmuss. She finally reached Krakow at the end of October 1944.

After the war, she worked as a journalist, author and translator. In 1949, Eugenia Kocwa wrote down her escape story and this was published 20 years later under the title “Escape from Ravensbrück”.

Escape

Not many prisoners managed to escape from the actual Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was strongly secured and guarded around the clock. It was more common for prisoners to escape from one of the satellite camps or while being transported from one location to another. There are reports that SS personnel assisted them occasionally. Nevertheless, any attempt to escape was dangerous. The prisoner then had to go into hiding somewhere in Germany or try to reach her home country without being detected on the way. Most escape attempts were individual actions and it was not until near the end of the war that small groups also managed to escape from death marches.

If a fugitive was caught, she faced severe punishment: beatings, detention in the “bunker” or imprisonment in the punishment block. The SS also imposed collective punishments, such as those in the case of Katharina Waitz, a Romani who escaped from Ravensbrück for the second time in 1941. While the search for her was underway, all the inmates were punished by being forced to stand for hours. Prisoners in the punishment block from which she had escaped were also deprived of food for three days. When she was caught by the SS two days later, even though she had already been severely abused by them, camp commandant Max Koegel handed her over to the other prisoners in the punishment block, and they beat her to death out of revenge.

Klawdia Jazenko

**Klara Šidlovskaja, probably 1960s** Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG; Photographer unknown

Klawdia Jazenko, a Jewish woman born in Kyiv, was deported from Krasnodar to Frankfurt/Main in December 1942. There she was forced to work at the precision mechanics company Fritz and Georg Merz. In January 1943, the Gestapo arrested her for spreading Communist propaganda in the barracks and in March she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she worked in the Navy satellite camp, an armaments factory in Fürstenberg. Here, she and some Soviet and Polish prisoners secretly wrote flyers for “International Workers Day” on 1 May 1943. Shortly before they were able to distribute these in the factory, someone informed on them and they were imprisoned in the “bunker” and beaten before being sent to the punishment block. In January 1945, Klawdia Jazenko was transferred to Universelle, a Dresden armaments company serving as a satellite camp of Flossenbürg concentration camp.

After the war, she settled in Lviv, Ukraine, where she married and worked as an accountant. In retrospect, Klara Šidlovskaja, as she was now named, said that in her opinion, there had not been much solidarity between the female Red Army soldiers and the forced labourers in the camp, as she once wrote to her former fellow inmate, Antonina Nikiforova.

Leaflets

**Communist slogan written on a slip of paper, 1 May 1941**
The incorrectly written message “Comrades do not despair – the sun rises in the East and no-one can change its course”, refers to socialism, which the authors believed would prevail over national socialism.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Leaflets are one of the most common forms of protest and inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp also made use of them. The main aim of the leaflets was to pass on information to fellow inmates and boost their morale. The leaflets produced for 1 May, for example, were a form of resistance to the Nazis appropriating the date – of strong symbolic significance to the international labour movement – and renaming it “National Labour Day”. It is not known if and how the leaflets were ever actually distributed. There are reports that five Russian girls created leaflets showing a red star to celebrate 1 May 1944. They were caught, however, imprisoned in the cell block, known as the “bunker”, and beaten, before being sent to the so-called punishment block.

In 1942, prisoners assigned to the workshop producing army sewing kits used leaflets in place of the paper on which the thread was normally wound. The leaflets urged the soldiers to refuse to fight against the Soviet Union. It was written by a Czech prisoner, Hilda Synková, and fellow prisoners copied it. Polish women deployed in the workshop used the sewing kit pouches to smuggle out news on the situation behind the front.

Nelly Mousset and Nadine Hwang

**Nadine Hwang (l.) and Nelly Mousset, undated** Auto Images/Rise And Shine Cinema; Photographer unknown

Nadine Hwang, a lawyer and pilot, held posts in the Chinese army and in politics in the 1920s. In 1933, she moved to Paris and became immersed in intellectual and artistic life there. She was arrested in 1944, presumably for helping people to escape, and was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There she worked on the Siemens production site.

On Christmas Eve 1944, she met the opera singer Nelly Mousset, who was singing Christmas carols for her fellow prisoners in a French block. The two fell in love. Nelly Mousset, mother of two daughters, had been arrested in 1943 for spying for the Belgian resistance. In her secret diary, she described the importance of her relationship with Nadine Hwang in the camp and how this had been essential for her survival. In March 1945, she was transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp where she was subsequently liberated. Nadine Hwang travelled to Malmö with the Swedish Red Cross. Thanks to her assistance, Rachel Krausz, a Dutch Jew, and her daughter Irene were also able to join this transport.

The couple were reunited in Brussels in 1946. Nelly Mousset got a divorce and moved with Nadine Hwang to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, in 1950. The Belgian state later honoured her as a war heroine.

Relationships in the camp

**Květa Hniličková “Our Island”, 1944/45**
Czech artist Hniličková drew this card for her German friend Ilse Hunger. She chose the subject – two laughing women on an island surrounded by sharks – to express how happy she was to have such a friendship despite the destructive forces reigning in the camp.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Despite the racist ideology of the National Socialists and the enforced inmate hierarchy, the imprisoned women formed friendships. They fell in love or formed small “families” comprising several women and children. Diary entries, drawings and numerous gifts that have been preserved show how important these deeper relationships were. Friends provided emotional support, offered protection and cared for each other when they fell ill. They shared food and clothing and helped each other with hard labour. The older women, called “camp mothers”, became carers for minors who had no relatives. They organised toys and gave the children tuition. In some cases, women adopted “their” child after the war had ended.

Lesbian relationships were strictly forbidden according to camp rules, so couples had to be particularly careful, especially as there was no form of privacy. They ran a high risk of denunciation by fellow prisoners because in those times female homosexuals were very much ostracised by society.

Camp relationships developed both across national borders as well as political, religious and social boundaries. Some of them lasted a lifetime.

Elfriede Mergenthaler

As a teenager, Elfriede Mergenthaler became an opponent of National Socialism thanks to the influence of her father and her uncle. She distributed socialist leaflets and in 1939, she refused to work in the armaments industry. Her father hid her in the uncle’s cellar, where she prepared illegal material for distribution. She was betrayed by a family member, however, and was arrested in 1941.

After terms in the Rudersberg labour education camp, Auschwitz and the Uckermark “Juvenile Protective Custody Camp”, Elfriede Mergenthaler was eventually sent to Ravensbrück in November 1942. At first she was put to hard labour and was then transferred to the prisoners’ kitchen. Here, she and her comrades stole potatoes and distributed these to Sinti and Roma children at night until a fellow prisoner denounced them. The SS punished her with 75 lashes and detention in the cell block and the punishment block. Towards the end of the war, she hid in the camp since she was ill.

She returned to Heilbronn in the summer of 1945, married and gave birth to a son. However, she constantly required medical treatment for conditions resulting from her imprisonment. Elfriede Mergenthaler, named Schneider after her marriage, spoke about her experiences under the Nazis for the first time in 1984.

Smuggling

**Felt slippers – a good place to hide illegal educational material, 1944**
In July 1944, the French prisoners Suzanne Cage and Georgette Cadras smuggled chapters of a French book on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into the camp – sewn into the soles of felt slippers.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

On arrival at the concentration camp, the women had to hand over all their personal belongings. Only a few managed to take things into the camp, defying the strict controls. As the prisoners were not allowed any possessions, they would steal anything they needed from their workplace – for example medicine or paper to pad out their thin clothing or for writing and drawing purposes. Secretly kept Bibles, religious artefacts and scripts were important for practising their faith, which was not allowed. Political manuscripts were passed from hand to hand for edu-cational purposes.

In order to survive or to help others, prisoners would steal food from kitchens and storage cellars. Women from agricultural and horticultural work detachments smuggled fruit and vegetables into the camp under their clothes. Charcoal to reheat the ovens in the barracks was clandestinely brought in by the forest workers’ detachment. Prisoners with the task of unloading materials from trucks and trains smuggled clothes, biscuits and soap into the camp. One external detachment with unauthorised connections to prisoners of war also smuggled books and even communion wafers into the Ravensbrück camp.

Elisabeth Krug

Little is known about Elisabeth Krug, better known as Else. She was born in Merzig in the Saarland as one of five children. She worked as a prostitute, first in Cologne and then, from 1927 on, in Düsseldorf. On 30 July 1938 she was arrested during a raid, was classified as “antisocial” and sent to Lichtenburg concentration camp. After this camp was dissolved in 1939, she was sent to Ravensbrück.

The SS put her in charge of a work brigade in the storage cellar. She stole food there for over a year and shared it with her work detachment. This gained her respect and prevented her from being denounced within her own ranks. However, following an intrigue by political prisoners, Else Krug was punished by detention in the cell block, followed by imprisonment in the punishment block. There, the camp commandant, Max Koegel, ordered her to beat a fellow female prisoner if she wanted an early release. She refused to follow this order. As a result, the SS sent her to the gas chamber in Bernburg in February 1942 as part of the “14 f 13” euthanasia programme.

In August 2025, a “stumbling block” to commemorate Else Krug will be placed in front of her last known place of residence in Saarbrücken.

Resistance to SS orders

The SS tried to involve prisoners in their crimes and thus sow distrust among the inmates, for example by appointing them as “prisoner functionaries” in the camp and in work detachments, by turning them into informants, or by getting them to assist in the selection and punishment processes. Some prisoners refused to comply with such demands, even if they risked punishment themselves as a result. In 1943, Polish women protested against medical experiments to which they were to be subjected, but only succeeded in postponing surgical operations. Others, like Else Krug, refused to punish fellow prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war and French inmates refused to sing German songs and sang songs in their own language instead. There are also stories of prisoners who physically resisted beating and harassment by the SS.

Some prisoners circumvented orders, such as Hanna Sturm from the construction brigade. She was ordered to board up the windows of the Jewish block in the summer of 1940. However, she used extra-short nails for this so that the women inside could secretly ventilate the room.

Majda Mačkovšek

The qualified surgeon was working at a hospital in her native town of Ljubljana when she was arrested on 14 October 1944 for having connections to the resistance movement. She was sent to Ravensbrück where, at the initiative of a fellow Yugoslav prisoner, she was assigned to the internal diseases block as a physician. Although this allowed her to help fellow prisoners, she also had to decide, on a day to day basis, whom to help with the limited resources at her disposal.

Early in 1945, she and Dr. Maria Grabska, a prisoner from Poland, removed the numbers that had been tattooed on the arms of Jewish communists Toni Lehr, Gerti Schindel and Edith Rosenblüth in Auschwitz, thus enabling all three to hide in the camp unrecognised.

After her liberation, Majda Mačkovšek returned to Ljubljana. She began working as a radiotherapist at the Oncological Institute in 1946 and married her colleague Ivan Peršič. She was appointed senior physician in 1963. In 2000, she was awarded the Medal of Honour of the Republic of Slovenia for her humanitarian efforts at the Ravensbrück concentration camp and for her scientific work in the field of oncology.

Medical assistance

**Infirmary barracks at Ravensbrück concentration camp, May 1945**
Many liberated prisoners worked as doctors or nurses, for instance Dutch artist Aat Breur (left) and Czech journalist Olga Vojáčková (right), assumedly shown in this photo.
It was taken shortly after the camp had been liberated and shows how over-crowded the infirmary was at the time.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG; Photographer unknown

Prisoners were also deployed as doctors and nurses in the infirmary. Some of them were able to protect fellow prisoners by secretly treating their wounds, performing life-saving surgery and administering stolen medicines. They made false diagnoses to give prisoners a break from hard labour. Manipulated medical records, forged sick notes and laboratory results helped to save inmates from deportation. Particularly during the chaotic months of spring 1945, the infirmary also served as a hiding place for fugitives. At the same time, it also became a more dangerous place, as so-called “selections” took place there regularly.

Thanks to a joint assistance effort, the Jewish communists Toni Lehr, Gerti Schindel and Edith Rosenblüth survived. They had been transferred from Auschwitz in January 1945. Fellow prisoners hid them, gave them dead inmates’ prisoner numbers and smuggled them onto Swedish Red Cross liberation transports in April. Prior to this, the numbers that had been tattooed on their arms in Auschwitz were removed by the doctors Maria Grabska, from Poland, and Majda Mačkovšek, from Yugoslavia, themselves both prisoners.

Ilse Hunger

The shorthand-typist from Leipzig and her husband were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in January 1942 for plotting high treason. Both had produced and distributed material for the KPD, although they were not party members. After they had served their sentence, the Gestapo transferred them to concentration camps in August 1942. Friends and family took care of their two-year old son.

Ilse Hunger was sent to Ravensbrück, where in 1943 she was given the task of assisting the SS camp administration in coordinating prisoners’ work assignments. Together with like-minded prisoners, she manipulated work assignment and transport lists, concealed punishment orders and assigned false prisoner numbers. In this way she organised the transfer of Rita Sprengel and Nadja Kalnitzkaja to other camps in 1944. The lives of the two women were in danger following sabotage activities at the Siemens factory near Ravensbrück.

At the end of April 1945, Ilse Hunger escaped from a death march and returned to Ravensbrück to nurse the sick. Back in Leipzig, she joined the Germany Communist Party (KPD) and, later on, the German Socialist Unity Party (SED), where she also worked for a while. She was also involved in the efforts to establish the Ravensbrück National Memorial Museum.

Staying true to the faith

**Knitting detachment – drawing by Jeanne Letourneau, prior to 1945**
The SS-owned company “Gesellschaft für Textil- und Lederverwertung mbH” (Texled) had been running production facilities for the Wehrmacht and the SS on the concentration camp grounds since 1941. Jeanne Letourneau recorded the cramped conditions in which knitters had to make stockings in barrack 27. She gave the notebook containing this drawing to her fellow prisoner Ludwika Broel-Plater on her name day, 25 August 1944.
Universitetsbiblioteket Lund/Polish Research Institute collection

Like many other sectors of the camp administration, the typist pool and work assignment department also deployed prisoners. Working in such key roles gave them the opportunity to forge documents and assist fellow prisoners. Manipulated transport lists, for instance, enabled women who were at risk of “selection” to be transferred to satellite camps, and as a result of such intervention, weaker prisoners were often given jobs with better working conditions, such as gardening, or in the knitting detachment of the textile workshops.

Prisoner functionaries also often destroyed punishment orders. With the help of prisoners working in the infirmary, they also managed to give endangered women the prisoner numbers and names of dead inmates or in some cases the identities of prisoners who had already been sent to other camps. This allowed women in Ravensbrück or its satellite camps to go into hiding. Thanks to forged transport lists, other prisoners managed to obtain a place on the Red Cross liberation transports in April 1945.

Yvonne Useldinger

Born in Luxembourg, Yvonne Useldinger joined the Communist Party at the age of 16. In 1942, she was arrested for resisting the German occupation. She gave birth to a daughter while imprisoned in Trier court prison and the child was then sent to live with its grandmother.

In June 1943, the Gestapo transferred Yvonne Useldinger to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she had an office job at the Siemens production site. She became involved in acts of sabotage, kept a secret diary and sketched everyday scenes and fellow prisoners. Together with four other women, she wrote the “Ten Commandments for Illegally Organised Prisoners”. The group passed on these rules about communal life and survival in a concentration camp to trustworthy inmates. In 1945, she sketched a map of the current front line and reproduced and distributed this in the camp.

Yvonne Useldinger was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945. Back in her home country, she again became actively involved in the party and co-founded the Union des Femmes Luxembourgeoises, whose aim it was to improve the social standing of women and fight for peace and social justice.

Spreading news

**Sketched map by Yvonne Useldinger showing the front line in the direction of Ravensbrück, 1945**
Based on information that her Czech fellow prisoner, Božena Rotterová, had gathered from a newspaper, Yvonne Useldinger, from Luxembourg, sketched a map of the advance of the Red Army, thus illustrating imminent liberation of the concentration camp. She reproduced the tiny map on a printing press of her work detachment at the Siemens production site in Ravensbrück.
Archives nationales de Luxembourg

Information on current political and military matters was vital for the prisoners since this helped them to gain a better picture of their own situation. In the final months of the war, any good news fuelled hopes of imminent liberation. In order to obtain current news, prisoners would smuggle newspapers into the camp from their external workplaces. They also analysed the officially authorised newspapers and even misprints being used as toilet paper in the camp. Women who worked in SS offices and private homes secretly listened to the radio, sometimes even to English-language radio stations. They also obtained information from new arrivals at the camp and from inmates who had contact with civilian employees at their workplaces. Rumours say that a home-made radio receiver also existed in the camp for a while in 1943.

News was spread during the hours-long roll calls and during walks along the camp roads. Prisoners who were allowed to move around the camp more freely, such as artisans, gardeners and camp couriers, also passed on news. There was also an exchange of information between the men’s and the women’s camp.

Jožka Jabůrková

This clerical worker from Czechoslovakia moved to Prague after the First World War, where she initially joined the social democratic and, later on, the communist movement. She supported workers’ sports and published articles on women’s emancipation. In 1931, she was elected to the Prague Assembly of Deputies, where she devoted herself increasingly to social policies.

In March 1939, Jožka Jabůrková was arrested as part of “Aktion Gitter” (putting people behind bars campaign), during the first major wave of arrests by German occupation forces in Czechoslovakia. At Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, she endeavoured to contact politically like-minded inmates, especially from Germany. She and other members of this circle are said to have set up an illegal organisation in 1940, in which women communists from various nations discussed conditions in the concentration camp and the political situation in general. Jožka Jabůrková also taught basic party politics to fellow prisoners.

She died on 31 July 1942 from injuries sustained from torture during an interrogation.

Founding of con spiratorial groups

**Embroidered patch with concentration camp motifs, undated**
Four of these emblems are known, so it can be assumed that this was a sign of togetherness of a specific group in the camp, probably Polish. The red triangle symbolises political prisoners. The prisoner number refers to Stanisława Schönemann-Łuniewska, who was probably housed in Block 13 and was the block elder and, for a while, head of the arts and crafts detachment.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Especially those prisoners who had been arrested for political activities felt that they were still part of the resistance after being imprisoned. For this reason, while they were in the concentration camp, they often did not talk about their previous underground activities. All the same, the prisoners were aware of the advantages of networks and groups, since besides allowing the important exchange of ideas, these also afforded personal protection. In November 1941, some Polish girl scouts set up the secret “Mury” (walls) group led by Józefa Kantor, an experienced girl scout. Over time, the group grew to over 100 members, who were mainly involved in organising food and providing medical care. They afforded mutual moral support and gave each other not only school lessons but also scout training.

Anna Truszkowska-Kuliniczowa reported on a group that was thinking about the “United Nations of Europe”: Here, two women at a time from each country were invited to discuss possible post-war concepts.

Urszula Wińska

This political prisoner, who had a PhD in polish studies, was arrested in 1941 for distributing underground publications. She had also taught in secret, since Poles had been excluded from higher education under the German occupation. She was deported to Ravensbrück, where she worked in various sectors, including the tailor shop. She also continued her teaching activities at the camp, as well as writing texts – including the “Ravensbrück Camp Prayer”. Thanks to her, many of the transport lists to Ravensbrück have been preserved.

After liberation, Urszula Wińska and her family lived in Zopot, where she worked as a teacher. During this time, she focussed on the didactics and methods of teaching the Polish language. In 1957 she was awarded the first chair of methodology and didactics of Polish literature and language in Poland. This was in Gdańsk, where she was also appointed associate professor in 1968.

After her retirement, she wrote about life in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her book “Zwyciężyły wartości” (The values won) presents a very diverse portrayal of her experiences in Ravensbrück from a Polish perspective.

Salvaged documents

**Transport list for the tailor shop, 13 September 1943** Instytut Pamięci Narodowej Warszawa

Prisoners made efforts to inform the world outside on what was going on in the camp. For example, some Polish women wrote reports on the medical experiments carried out on their legs and smuggled these, together with descriptions of their imprisonment conditions to Polish prisoners of war in Neubrandenburg. These, in turn, passed the reports on to the Polish exile government. Some of the originals of the reports had been buried in a jar which was not discovered until 1976.

In the tailor shop, prisoners had to make the textile rectangles which bore the prisoners’ numbers and were attached to their clothes. These were based on the transport lists of new arrivals. Urszula Wińska hid the lists and managed to get some of them copied. These were then hidden in some 70 parcels and given to prisoners who were able to leave the camp after liberation by the Swedish Red Cross at the end of April 1945.

The last camp secretary of the Ravensbrück men’s camp, Józef Kwietniewski, also tried to smuggle documents out of the camp when it was liberated. He managed to save the ledgers listing the prisoners’ numbers and thanks to these, the names of almost all the approximately 20,000 male prisoners are now known.

Lise London

As daughter of Spanish immigrants in France, the trained shorthand typist had been a communist ever since her youth. She had worked for the Comintern in Moscow and fought with the International Brigades in Spain alongside her second husband, Artur London. In 1938 she returned to France, had a child and joined the Resistance. She motivated women, in particular, to engage in resistance to the German occupation.

She was arrested in 1942, gave birth to her second child in prison and was sent to Ravensbrück in June 1944 as Élisabeth Delaune. When she fell ill, the block elder, Hilda Synková, and Zdenka Nedvědová, the inmates’ doctor and fellow prisoner, helped her to recover. She thanked them with two secretly-made dolls. At the end of July, she was transferred to the HASAG Leipzig satellite camp.

After the war, Élisabeth (Lise) London again became involved in women’s politics and the communist party. She lived with her family in Prague after 1949. When Artur London was convicted during the anti-Semitic communist show trial against Rudolf Slánský and members of the KSČ in 1952, she lost her job at the radio broadcasting company. In 1963, she returned to Paris, where she was later appointed Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Illegal handicrafts

**Doll in a traditional Spanish dress, summer 1944**
Lise London (under the name Élisabeth Delaune in the camp), who was French, made this doll from scraps of fabric, wire and human hair. It was a birthday present for Zdenka Nedvědová, a respected Czech doctor and fellow prisoner who helped many sick people in Ravensbrück.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Producing artistic works helped prisoners to counteract the monotony and inhumanity of the concentration camps with something of their own. At the same time, these activities helped to strengthen relationships among the prisoners. The women often stole material from their workplace and the articles were made secretly either during work hours or in the barracks after work.

Bags, cloth pouches, toys, jewellery, scarves, bookmarks, notebooks and greeting cards were produced in this way. Rings were made by punching buttons and dried berries were used as pendants. Miniature objects, carved from toothbrush handles, were used as lucky charms and souvenirs. Some objects, decorated with national or political symbols such as the French flag, the cross of Lorraine or the Soviet star also symbolised resistance to the Nazis.

The women produced items for their own use or to cheer up their fellow prisoners. The handicrafts were given as presents on special occasions and as a sign of friendship. They were also coveted trading items. In some cases prisoners even used them to bribe members of the SS.

Germaine Tillion

An ethnologist from France, she and her mother Émilie were active members of the Musée de l’Homme resistance group in Paris. They were arrested in 1942 and deported to Ravensbrück in 1943. Germaine Tillion was forced to do a variety of jobs, since she was “available”. However, she evaded this work as often as possible and went into hiding. Sometimes she feigned weakness or clumsiness in order to be thrown out of a detachment. She recorded her experiences in 1944/45 in the operetta “‘Available’ in the Underworld”, which she wrote while hiding in the looted goods barracks. To save her from impending selection, Margarete Buber-Neumann hid her under a duvet in the infirmary at the beginning of 1945. Tillion’s mother, however, was murdered in the Ravensbrück gas chamber.

To save her from impending selection, Margarete Buber-Neumann hid her under a duvet in the infirmary at the beginning of 1945. Tillion’s mother, however, was murdered in the Ravensbrück gas chamber.

When the Swedish Red Cross liberated her, Germaine Tillion smuggled a film containing secretly taken photos of the victims of medical experiments out of the camp. She returned to France, where she again worked as an ethnologist and became a human rights campaigner. In 1946 she published the first scientific book on Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp.

Refusal to work

**Drawing by France Audoul for the operetta “‘Available’ in the Underworld“, 1944**
For the operetta, which Germaine Tillion had written secretly in the camp, this French artist drew this picture of three prisoners considered to be “available”. They are being driven to work by a female SS guard. The inscription reads: Shorn, quite often mangy and with a troubled look… popularly known as “available”…
From: Germaine Tillion „Le Verfügbar aux Enfers“. Paris 2005, S. | p. 19, Éditions La Martinière / Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de Besançon

Despite the threat of punishment, some prisoners had the courage to refuse to work. Most Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, refused to perform any sort of military work on religious grounds. The story goes that on 19 December 1939, 400 women refused to make bags for army sewing kits. As a result, they were punished for weeks, during which time they were beaten, detained in cells, deprived of food and forced to stand outdoors for hours. Some of the female Red Army soldiers sometimes refused to produce armaments, too, since these would later be used to kill their families and destroy their country.

When the camp became overcrowded in 1944, a covert form of refusing work evolved: prisoners who were considered to be “available” – i.e. they did not belong to a fixed detachment and could be assigned any task, as required – went into hiding in the camp. In order to do this, they had to be prepared to get no regular meals, be persecuted by the SS or be betrayed by fellow prisoners. Others tried to escape work by pretending to be clumsy, deliberately injuring themselves or feigning illness.

Wanda Fischer

Born in Gandersheim, Sinteza Wanda Fischer and her family were arrested in Hanover in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. Her one-year-old son starved to death there. When she was sent to Ravensbrück in August 1944 with her relatives and her fiancé Anton Pranden, she passed his niece off as her daughter, thus ensuring the child’s survival.

Wanda Fischer opposed harassment by the SS in Auschwitz by making a wig using her hair which they had cut off, and it was only after repeated beatings that she eventually removed it. In Ravensbrück, she managed to make contact with her fiancé, who was in the men’s camp, through her work. They communicated in Romani, and although she was caught and punished, she tried over and over again.

In January 1945, she was forcibly sterilized. Two months later she was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp and then on to Bergen-Belsen, where she was eventually liberated. Her fiancé lived to see the end of the war in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. They returned to live in Hanover. Wanda Fischer’s applications for compensation were successful. Since 2012, the 13 members of the Fischer family are commemorated by “stumbling blocks” in Hanover. Only five of them survived.

Contacts with the men’s camp

**Drawing by Nina Jirsíková, after 1945**
After the war, the Czech artist composed a drawing of the view from the industrial yard of the women’s camp towards the men’s camp as she remembered it. It portrays women and men engaged in hard physical labour.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

In April 1941, the SS set up a men’s camp bordering on the women’s concentration camp. Most of the approximately 20,000 male prisoners were put to work on expanding the camp complex and in armaments production. Since 1944, their numbers also included children and juveniles from the age of 12.

In search of information on relatives or friends, the male and female inmates tried to establish contact. This usually came about at shared workplaces, for example at Siemens, in the industrial facility or during construction work at the women’s camp. In some cases, couples even managed to meet face-to-face. In 1944, for example, Walter Winter, a Sinto, managed to meet his pregnant wife Bluma, who died in childbirth shortly afterwards.

It was also possible to make secret contact in the prison camp since Frantisek Šil and Ladislav Pekárek, Czech prisoners who were also doctors, were allowed to operate sick men from 1942 onwards and used treatment rooms in the women’s camp for this purpose once a week. Some Polish women also managed to smuggle communion wafers to the men’s camp so that they could celebrate Holy Communion there.

Elizaveta Skobcova

**Mutter Marija, 1930s** Archiv Xenia Krivosheine; Photographer unknown

A mother of three, Ms Skobcova was a philosophy and theology student, poet, social revolutionary and Commissioner for Public Education and Health in Russia. After 1918, she turned her back on the Bolsheviks and married one of their opponents. In 1923, she emigrated with him to Paris, where she became involved in social work for the Russian Orthodox Church. After separating from her husband in 1932, she became a nun and subsequently founded an Orthodox aid organisation in 1935.

During the German occupation of France, Mother Marija as she was known, provided assistance to Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and members of the French resistance. In February 1943, she was imprisoned for these activities and was transferred to Ravensbrück in April of the same year. Mother Marija was an oasis of tranquillity and a beacon of hope for her fellow prisoners, holding political and spiritual discussions and praying together with them. She even cultivated close ties to the female Red Army soldiers. She was murdered in the gas chamber by the SS in 1945.

In 1985, Mother Marija was honoured with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” at the Yad Vashem Shrine of Remembrance. She was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2004.

Religious life

**France Audoul “Les prières interdites” (The forbidden prayers), around 1945**
In this picture, the French artist depicts a clandestine Catholic Sunday service held in her barrack. A cross on the table and an image of a saint above served as a substitute for an altar. The block she shows is overcrowded.
From: France Audoul „Ravensbrück. 150 000 femmes en enfer“ (150 000 women in Hell). Paris 1966; whereabouts of the original are unknown.

Camp regulations did not specifically prohibit the practising of one’s own religion. However, prisoners were neither allowed to own religious objects nor to practise their faith openly. The formation of groups was also forbidden. This meant that believers had to perform their common rituals in secret. Worship, masses and Bible readings were all held in the barracks. The women would pray together or discuss matters of faith during roll calls or free time on the camp road. Religious festivals and baptisms were celebrated solemnly but secretly. The women covertly acquired requisites such as Bibles, crosses or sacred images from the property storages facilities. They made rosaries of bread, berries or balls of fabric and they carved toothbrush handles to make crosses and figures of the Madonna. Some wrote prayers and religious songs, others copied verses from the Bible and passed these around.

Sometimes Christians such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses convinced other inmates to join their religious community. Religious practices, however, rarely extended across national or denominational boundaries, the backgrounds, education and languages of the prisoners being far too varied.

Antonia Bruha

**Toni Bruha, after 1945** Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes; Photographer unknown

The hairdresser and student of Slavistics from Vienna was arrested together with her husband Josef in 1941. As members of a Czech resistance group, they had distributed illegal publications and were involved in acts of sabotage, including arson attacks on Wehrmacht facilities. Josef Bruha was released due to lack of evidence. A neigh-bour took care of their three-month old daughter.

The Gestapo transferred Antonia, known as Toni, to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942. There she was first put to work buil-ding roads, then in the tailoring shop and finally in the infirmary. As a typist and courier, she managed to clandestinely collect medicine for her comrades.

Toni Bruha had been writing since the age of 18 and did not give up this activity, even in the concentration camp. In preparation for the children’s Christmas party in Ravensbrück in December 1944, she wrote a fairy tale for the puppet show.

In April 1945, she fled from a death march. Back in Vienna, she went into radio broadcasting. In 1947 she and some others founded the Austrian Ravensbrück camp community and she also volunteered at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance.

Children’s Christmas party

**Ceija Stojka “iN Ravenzbrük 1944”, 1995**
Ceija Stojka, a painter from Vienna, was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 at the age of eleven. In 1988, she became the first Romani to set down the history of the persecuted Sinti and Roma in writing. She used painting as a way of coping with the loss of her family and bringing back memories, as in this painting depicting the children’s Christmas party with an unusually richly laid table.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Although it was officially prohibited, the prisoners made an attempt to celebrate Christmas in a festive manner. They organised extra food, wax for candles and fir twigs, sang carols and gave each other presents.

In December 1944, inmates organised a party for the 500 or so children in the camp. Regardless of nationality, they collected food and made toys and clothes. The party highlight was a puppet show. Toni Bruha wrote a fairy tale “Little Hans in the Camp” for the show; Květuše Hniličková and Věra Hozáková, from Czecho slovakia, made figures out of wax, cotton wool and fabric, while others made the backdrops. They rehearsed for the show after work – and then the SS found out. Surprisingly, commandant Fritz Suhren nevertheless allowed them to hold the performance. Edmund Bräuning, in charge of protective custody, gave a speech, and chief overseer Dorothea Binz was also present. The celebrations took place in a decorated barracks building, complete with Christmas tree. Former prisoners recall that the children’s reactions were joyful, but rather reserved – the cruelty of camp life had left its mark on them. But these joint activities gave many prisoners the strength to continue.

Lidia Beccaria

This Italian primary school teacher had been assisting partisans as an informant and courier since 1943. She was arrested in spring 1944, tortured, sentenced to death and deported to Ravensbrück in June of the same year. Originally classified as being a “Verfügbare” (available prisoner), she was at first forced to accept any work that was assigned to her before the SS transferred her to the Siemens production site in October 1944.

Lidia Beccaria taught fellow prisoners history, literature and geography. She made sketches and secretly kept a diary. She learnt French from her fellow prisoner and friend Monique Nosley and noted down German – French vocabulary for her own use.

She experienced the liberation while on a death march and spent the following months in a British DP camp for homeless refugees in Lübeck. In September 1945 she returned to Italy, where she resumed her work as a teacher. She married in 1948 and became mother to a son. In 1978, together with Anna Maria Bruzzone, she published the first-ever book about Italian women who had been prisoners at Ravensbrück. Lidia Beccaria Rolfi was an active member of the Socialist Party and became deputy mayor of Mondovì. She had also been active in the International Ravensbrück Committee since 1958.

Secret lessons

**Home-made world atlas by Olga Benario-Prestes, 1941**
For her atlas, Ms. Benario-Prestes, a German communist, either drew maps by herself or cut them out of the “Völkischer Beobachter” magazine which she could obtain in the camp. She secretly gave geography lessons and, in doing so, helped fellow prisoners gain a better understanding of war events.
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG

Prisoners provided schooling, lectures and lessons for one another; this gave them moral support, boosted optimism for the future and distracted them from the constant hunger. These activities took place in small clandestine groups that met in the barracks, during work breaks, roll calls or free time on the camp roads. The communist prisoners educated each other on political issues such as the progress of their party in the Soviet Union. Other prisoners taught literature, geography, history and science. Learning German was particularly important, since it was the only language that prisoners were allowed to use when writing letters home.

Some Polish teachers organised a proper school system, including exams, for children and adolescents. There were programs for both primary and high school levels, as well as a preparatory course for the teaching profession. The required materials were either stolen from workplaces or produced by the inmates themselves. There had to be a lot of improvisation: pupils and teacher drew and wrote in the sand, and newspaper margins, packaging material and the reverse side of documents served as copybooks.

Aat Breur

The Dutch artist and art teacher was arrested together with her husband in 1942 for resistance to the German occupation. Her son was sent to live with relatives and her four-month-old daughter was initially sent to prison with her. Before Aat Breur was transferred to Germany, the infant was sent to live with its grandparents. Her husband was shot in 1943 and she was deported to Ravensbrück. She first worked in the lavatory and gardening brigade as well as for Siemens. In 1944, she was sent to the bookbindery, where she was ordered to paint greeting cards for the SS. Here, she secretly produced small booklets for her fellow prisoners. Above all, however, she made drawings of camp scenes and portraits of women and children.

In March 1945, the prison doctor, Adélaïde Hautval, and the block elder, Erika Buchmann, saved Aat Breur, seriously ill at the time, from the gas chamber. Having secretly acquired the number of a dead person, she went into hiding in the camp.

After liberation, she cared for the sick in Ravensbrück until summer 1945. She contracted tuberculosis and had to spend seven years in a sanatorium. Drawing remained her passion, right up to old age. Her relationship to her children remained difficult due to her long absence during their childhood.

Cultural activities

**Nina Jirsíková “Rawensbrück – Tanz N.”, undated**
Czech artist Nina Jirsíková drew sketches, danced and also acted as a choreographer. In 1944 and 1945 she held a performance in her block almost every Sunday. She captured one such scene in this drawing. In the camp, she also wrote the theatre play “Pawlatsch sings”, for which the prisoners provided props and costumes and which was staged secretly several times.
Národní Muzeum, Divadelní oddělení Historického muzea

Cultural activities helped prisoners to forget the reality of the camp for a while and to gather strength. Artistically active women were able to express both their own and their fellow prisoners’ feelings and, by doing so, learned how to cope with these. At the same time, they documented the crimes at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in their texts, drawings and compositions.

Prisoners wrote poems and stories and these were then read aloud, memorised and passed on. Two Czech women, Vlasta Kladivová and Vera Hozáková, even compiled the manuscript for an anthology of poetry titled “Europa u boji 1939–1944” (Europe at battle 1939–1944). Sometimes prisoners would dance in the barracks, sing songs or recite texts. Theatre plays were written and then per-formed, either secretly for each other or officially for the SS, for example Sonja Prin’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, performed at Christmas 1944, and the operetta “Le Verfügbar aux Enfers” by Germaine Tillion. Fellow prisoners pro-vided paper, pens and undisturbed places to write or draw.

Very few of the artistic works have been preserved. Food deprivation or solitary confinement was the punishment upon being discovered.

Joanna Szydłowska

Joanna Szydłowska grew up as one of three children in a middle-class neighbourhood in Lublin. She joined the girl scoutes at an early age. Her father introduced her to art, and after leaving school she studied painting, first in Warsaw and later on in Vilnius.

In 1940, she was arrested by the Gestapo for her role in resistance activities with the Association for Armed Struggle (Związku Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ) and was deported to Ravensbrück via the prison in Lublin Castle. She was subjected to three operations on her legs as part of medical experiments. Despite all that she had suffered, she was active in the camps as an artist. She sang, recited poetry and carved figures, often from toothbrush handles.

In 1945, she left the displaced persons’ camp in Rotenburg (Wümme) and returned to her daughter in Lublin. In 1959, she accepted an invitation for all women who had been subjected to surgical experiments to travel to the USA. There she took a course in enamelling on which she later based her profession as a goldsmith in Lublin. For the most part Joanna Szydłowska remained silent about what she had experienced in the concentration camp.

Documentation of the crimes

**Secret photographs of the injuries inflicted on Polish prisoners by medical experiments, autumn 1944**
The photographer took pictures of her fellow prisoners Maria Kuśmierczuk, Bogumiła Bąbińska and Barbara Pietrzyk, behind a camp barracks building at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Anna Hassa Jarosky; Photo: Joanna Szydłowska

In 1942 and 1943, Karl Gebhardt, head physician at the Waffen SS hospital in Hohenlychen, carried out medical experiments on female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. He wanted to prove that sulphonamide, an antibiotic, was ineffective against gangrene. 74 young women from Poland and twelve from other countries were chosen for the experiments. Some of these inmates had wide-ranging connections and tried to send information about these crimes to the world outside the concentration camp. They smuggled letters and documents out of the camp and gave them to Polish prisoners of war, who in turn were able to pass some of the documents on.

In autumn 1944, Joanna Szydłowska, herself a victim of surgical experiments, photographed the injuries of three fellow prisoners a year after they had been operated on. The women had managed to acquire a medium-format camera in the camp to take the photos. It is said to have been subsequently burned. French ethnologist Germaine Tillion took the film roll, hidden in a tin of powdered milk, with her when she was liberated by the White Buses operation.

Nadjeshda Kalnitzkaja

**Nadja Kalnitzkaja, 1973** Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/SBG; Photographer unknown

Nadjeshda Kalnitzkaja, a Ukrainian prisoner commonly known as Nadja, was deported in May 1942 and forced into labour at Keiper, a car company in Remscheid. She escaped from there following a fire, was apprehended in Poland and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp on 11 November 1942 on the charge of sabotage. Starting in 1943, her job was to wind wire onto coils at the Siemens production plant. She produced some of these incorrectly, thus stalling the production of parts vital to the war effort. When this came to light in 1944, fellow prisoners Rita Sprengel from the Siemens office and Ilse Hunger from the labour assignment office arranged her transfer to the Neubrandenburg satellite camp.

In April 1945, Nadja Kalnitzkaja managed to flee from a death march. Shortly afterwards, thanks to her good command of German, she was employed by the Soviet military authorities in Neubrandenburg.

After returning to Ukraine at the end of 1945, she worked as an economist. She later married a widower with two children and became a member of the Council of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters of Ukraine and the International Ravensbrück Committee.

Sabotage

Prisoners tried to obstruct armaments production so as not to support war against their own countries. Sabotage during forced labour was mainly seen as moral resistance, especially as no one could determine the scale of its impact. At the same time, punishment for sabotage in armaments factories was particularly severe, so the prisoners’ sabotage operations had to be especially careful and precise.

One location at the focus of such activities was the Siemens & Halske production centre for precision equipment, set up in Ravensbrück in August 1942. Here, prisoners damaged tools, machine accessories and materials. They made parts “disappear”, produced faulty parts, assembled devices incorrectly, delayed deliveries and manipulated administrative documents. By reducing their work pace, they were able to slow down production while at the same time obtaining some physical relief for their bodies, weakened by hard work. Prisoners also sabotaged production in the fur sewing workshop, for example by reducing the size of patterns for fur shoes and other army clothing.