A Narrow Bridge to Life: Jewish Forced Labor and Survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940–1945 (review)

In recent years, the number of scholarly works on the camp system, individual camps, and special aspects of life and death there has grown impressively, especially those in German. After the collapse of communism, memorial museums on former camp sites east of the former Iron Curtain came under more professional leadership and were integrated into international networks with superior scholarly standards. At the same time, access to source material expanded enormously with the opening of Eastern European archives, the declassification of vast materials in Western archives following the international debate on Holocaust-era restitution, and the systematic collection of Oral History testimony by institutions such as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and Germany’s Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung, und Zukunft.”¹ Public awareness grew and insights gained from the study of Jewish suffering in the camps stimulated research into other segments of the diverse inmate population as well as into the perpetrators—women and men, guards, commanders, camp doctors, and others.

Two competing reference works mirroring the boom in camp research and pointing out avenues for future research have appeared recently: the nine-volume Der Ort des Terrors (2005–2009); and volume 1 of the multi-volume The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933– 1945 (2009). Key problems of the overall history of the camps have been treated in works by Karin Orth and others,² and most larger camps under the Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager and quite a number of sub-camps have been the subject of devoted scholarly works.³ Such work increasingly draws upon theoretical methods from sociology, social psychology, literary studies, and memory studies to illuminate what has been predominantly a field of empirical historical research.⁴ Compared to the state of the literature as of the pioneering conference at Yad Vashem in 1980,⁵ 2010 is a whole new world.

Bella Gutterman, director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, has now contributed the first major non-Polish-language study of Gross-Rosen. Gross-Rosen was a concentration camp in the Lower Silesian part of Poland annexed directly into the German Reich in 1939. The camp was founded in May 1940 as a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen, attaining the status of Stammlager (main camp) in 1941. In 1944 it was the administrative center of a vast complex of more than a hundred sub-camps with some 250,000 inmates, primarily Poles and Soviet POWs. Originally a slave quarry devoted to producing stone for important building projects, by late 1943 Gross-Rosen was spreading its operations throughout the mountainous Silesia and the Sudeten region. Especially important were underground armaments factories producing electronic devices, munitions, and parts for fighter airplanes and rockets.

Gross-Rosen originally was erected in order to crush the traditionally strong labor movement in a region where the Nazis wanted local and immigrant Germans to form the upper stratum, Poles to perform forced labor, and Jews to disappear. But its camps became sites of the Holocaust as some fifty forced labor camps for Jews under the separate Organisation Schmelt, providing Jewish forced labor to local construction and other projects, were incorporated into the Gross-Rosen system. Other contingents of Jewish inmates arrived, including Hungarian Jews sent from Auschwitz to the underground factories, and others brought after Gross-Rosen became a major destination for the death marches when Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945. According to incomplete sources, some 60,000 Jews from various European countries spent time in the Gross-Rosen camps—a truly terrible time, of which one inmate who came from Auschwitz and had seen horrors already, recalls “the place was the very embodiment of hell.”

Gutterman has collected varied source material to describe many aspects of the history of the Gross-Rosen camp complex, and she makes many empathetic observations on prisoner...