Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (review)

Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust. Reprint. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000. xviii + 314 pp. Ill. $16.95 (paperbound, 0-89096-970-1).

This is a very moving book, one by women about women, edited by a woman and a man. Jewish female nurses and physicians tell of their "sisters in sorrow," who were Jewish women captives of the SS in concentration and liquidation camps, and whom these caregivers tried to help. Their help was often inadequate, because those tending the sick were not properly trained, but their stories show, as is clear from other camp memoirs, that the mere wish to help could create miracles. (This parallels situations in which placebos were administered for lack of real medicine, with patients feeling better afterward.) Much of what I read here I found important, especially in light of the recently published memoirs by Victor Klemperer, who recorded that being shipped, as a Jew, from Dresden to Theresienstadt meant certain hardship, but exactly what, no one knew; when the name Auschwitz appeared in his dairy, by about 1942, it signified worse things, but its awful truth was still shrouded in darkness. ¹ The women of this book who found themselves in Theresienstadt knew that being shipped from there to Auschwitz was dangerous, but nobody knew about the mass murder there.

The volume repeats some well-known facts, such as that anyone who posed as a physician to the camp SS had a better chance of survival. It also exposes some not-so-well-known circumstances--for example, that women in the SS proved to be as cruel as the men. Moreover, it reveals ironies of the Holocaust often hidden: the paradox of survival through work in the Theresienstadt bakery, for instance, which guaranteed a cure for hunger--yet "in the end most people died because it was so exhausting" (p. 69). Making synthetic fiber in an SS-supervised factory in Lenzing near Linz also vastly increased one's survival chances, but inhaling sulphuric acid made the women sick and destined for an early death. During the liberation in Bergen-Belsen many hundreds ate everything they received from their saviors at once, especially canned foods, but they died because they were not used to it. One of the most stirring paradigms of the Holocaust, again a paradox, is written in this book: "Whenever you lost something in Auschwitz, you never found it, whatever it was" (p. 77). What is a search without a catch?

As valuable as the contents are, I am less impressed with the editing format. Almost every German word or title is misspelled. The mode of historical transmission is often not clear: if the book really is the result of interviews (oral history), as the editors claim, why does it contain diaries, letters, memoirs, and autobiography in mixed sequence? Much of what the narrators relate is obviously false and should have been automatically corrected by the editors, or visibly in the notes, which render the book a work of scholarship for appearances' sake. For example, Josef Mengele was not the chief physician of Auschwitz; there was enough to eat for German civilians during the war; and Austria is not anywhere near the Black Forest. Frequently, we are told that soap was made of human remains in Auschwitz--which to the best of my knowledge is a myth. Several important titles are missing from the bibliography, among them the classic study of Theresienstadt by H. G. Adler and the more recent chronicle of underground medical care in the Warsaw Ghetto by Charles G. Roland. ² And at the end, the integrity of the book is destroyed by too brief a conclusion and two utterly out-of-place appendices.

 

Michael H. Kater
Canadian Centre for German and European Studies
York University, Toronto

Notes

1. Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear...