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Suggestionsfor Further Reading OtherMemoirs Written by Former Prisoners of Ravensbriick We have been able to identify twelve memoirs, written by women about significant time they spent in Ravensbriick, which have been translated from various languages into English or were originally written in English. Few of these are easily available, and searches through out-of-print book search services have proved fruitless. They must be sought out instead through interlibrary loan, and a few are in the permanent collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is not a circulating collection. Because these memoirs are so difficult to locate, we include here a brief synopsis of each, with an emphasis on the similarities and differences between each and Herbermann's memoir. We refer readers to the bibliography for a list of other Ravensbriick memoirs, in their original languages, and for mention of anthologies of brief reminiscences by former prisoners. Genevieve de GaulleAnthonioz, The Dawn ofHope:A Memoirof Ravensbriick (1998) Translated from the French. This slender memoir was written by the niece of General Charles de Gaulle; she was Christian and a member of the French resistance movement. Arrested inJuly 1943, she spent six months in Fresnes Prison in France andwas deported to Ravensbriickin February 1944. Shewas assigned #27372. She waited until age seventy-eight to write her memoir, which mightbebetter termed a meditation. Anthonioz summons remarkably sharp images from herlong days ofsolitaryconfinement in the cell block. Her account of Ravensbriick shares much in common with that of Herbermann, including her reference to the camp as an "abyss," the sustenance she drew on from spirituality, her longing for books, her description of her early release, as well as references to Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the victims of "medical experiments." Since her return to France, Anthonioz has devoted herself to working with the homeless. 253 Suggestionsfor Further Reading SaraTuvel Bernstein, The Seamstress:A Memoir of Survival (1997) Written in English. Bernstein spent only four months in Ravensbruck, from September 1944 to January 1945. She was Romanian by birth, Jewish, and was conscripted by the Hungarian National Guard into a labor camp near Budapest; from there, shewas shippedwith her sister and two close friends to Ravensbruck. Assigned the number 85803, Bernstein, at twenty-six, was the oldest of the four and quickly established herself as their guardian. "Having a sister, a cousin, or a friend in the camp with you was sometimes the only thing that gave you the courage to go on; each lived solely for the other" (243). All four were assigned to a work detail unloading vegetables from arriving ships all day; such a work assignment gave access to extra food, a key to survival. Bernstein recounts the arrival of countless Jewish women from Auschwitz in January 1945. She also describes the process by which these new arrivals and otherJewish women in the camp, including Bernstein and her trio, were sent to the infamous huge tent, put up when all blocks were overflowing. Conditions there were execrable, making her long for the "luxury" of their former barracks. Shortly thereafter, the four were deported to Dachau; one of the friends died enroute. The other three were eventually liberated by American soldiers. Thinking back on her experiences in Ravensbruck as she departed, Bernstein wrote: "We had been in Ravensbruck for four months by calendar time. There are other kinds of time, however; immeasurable time, when the days and nights fall into a vast, black wasteland as deep and wide as the immensity of space. Such was the nature of time in Ravensbruck" (244). Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators (1949) Translated from the German. Buber-Neumann was a German Communist who had taken up residence in Moscow with her second husband, Heinz Neumann. There, she was initially arrested on June 19, 1938, and sent to a Russian prison camp in Siberia. In August 1940, the Russians turned her over to the Germans and she was sent to Ravensbruck, arriving about a year prior to Herbermann. Her prisoner number was 4208. (Buber-Neumanns memoir lists August 1941, as the date of her arrival in Ravensbruck, but this must be a printing error. Her prisoner number is lower than Herbermann^, suggesting earlier arrival. In addition, she states that upon her release in April 1945 that she had been imprisoned there for five years. Further evidence for the 1940 date appears in Tillion's memoir, where she cites 1940 as the date of Buber-Neumann's arrival in Ravensbruck [Tillion, xix].) BuberNeumann was a...

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