The Sisterhood of Ravensbruck by Lynne Olson
Have you ever bought or borrowed a book only to realize that you aren’t in the mood for it? It looked appealing in the book store, or when your friend recommended it, or in desperation at the airport, but you never read it. And now you have stacks of unread books on every available surface of your house.
Ok. Maybe this is just me.
Any who, when cruising the ECW Bookstore earlier this summer, I ran across The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, a nonfiction book about the notorious all-female Nazi concentration camp, Ravensbrück. I’m not sure that anyone is in the “mood” for a book about concentration camps, but what struck me was the word Sisterhood in the title.
Lynne Olsonhighlights a group of French political prisoners who banded together in the camp. After the war, the surviving “sisters” remained fiercely supportive of each other. With little assistance from the government or their fellow citizens, who wanted to forget and move on, the women established an activist organization, ADIR (Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées et Internées de la Résistance), coordinated repatriation and medical assistance for survivors, testified at war crimes trials, lobbied for official recognition and compensation, published numerous plays, memoirs, and articles, and married and had families.
Perhaps because I knew so little about it, I found the survivors’ postwar lives as inspiring as their struggles in the camp.
Highly recommend.
(Some of you may know Ravensbrück as the setting for the historical novel Lilac Girls. And yes, the medical experiments conducted on a group of Polish women (“rabbits”) in the novel are based on true events.)
WHO WROTE IT
Lynne Olson, one of my favorite authors, is the author of many bestselling books, including Those Angry Days, Citizens of London, and Madame Fourcade’s Secret War. She has been a consulting historian for the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY
Erik Larson, author of The Demon of Unrest and In the Garden of Beasts: “Alternately chilling and inspiring, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück takes us into Nazi Germany’s notorious concentration camp for women as a band of captive French partisans struggles to survive and bolster one another against unimaginable cruelty.”
