vivien | (no subject)

(no subject)

This might be a strange request, but Jen's elder daughter is doing the History Day competition, and she and her partner have moved on to the city-wide competition. Their subject is Women in the Holocaust, with a focus on the Ravensbruck concentration camp. They need to locate either a person to interview (via phone or e-mail) who has expertise on the camp or knew a relative who was there - does anyone here have a connection to Ravensbruck? If so, would you be willing to help two enthusiastic high school sophomores?

They've e-mailed a few scholars, but a personal connection might help them find the documentation they need a little more quickly.

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I'm afraid I can't help you -- but hooray for History Day!!! I was a regional and state judge for several years. Good luck to them!

Eee, I know. We went to their high school presentation and were blown away. And they have a documentary category now! We are enthusiastic supporters, let me tell you.

It's very hard to just give ideas and guidance and not DO ALL THE RESEARCH OMG. :-P

I've got S here with me -- She says "it was sort of the "last" camp for women on Death Marches at the end of the war. They may want to contact the Holocaust Museum (http://ushmm.org) which can seem a little broad, but they have a huge database of survivor testimony, or I'll look into whether it became a DP camp or not, which Germany isn't so much my thing, but I'll check. I know Anne Frank's mother was sent there... she didn't so much survive, though."

(I figured she might have some advice, having researched the Holocaust before, albeit in a different geographical area. I'm sure that they have a lot of written resources, but I have a book called The Holocaust Chronicle, which has information on... just about anything. So they might want to look into that.)

Yeah, so, again, your best primary source for Ravensbruck will be Corrie ten Boom -- The Hiding Place is her big book. Ravensbruck was not a DP camp after the war -- it was a place where you checked in and didn't check out, a funneling camp to get these people back inside the Reich as the war ended, and finish them there -- so I'm not so sure what her teacher was doing by asking that she talk to someone who had a relative there. 30,000 people survived Ravensbruck and its subcamps, of which there were about 70. Not good numbers! Not the worst. But not good.

Ravensbruck was famous for its medical experiments, so anyone who did survive probably led a sad, disabled, and curtailed post-Liberation existence. There are pictures, at which I don't suggest she takes a gander, of women's legs just purulent from tests of early sulfonamide antibiotics.

Bleah.

Oh, no - about the interview part - that's a History Day thing to have as part of the exhibit. No teacher told them anything. I just thought it wouldn't hurt to ask if someone knew someone with experiences or expertise.

She and her partner found out about Ravensbruck on their own and did all of the research, including that on the the medical experiments. They've done a fabulous job so far of documenting the horrors and yet not making it morbid or exploitive.

Thanks for the info. We will figure out a way to slip the name of the book to her in a way that makes it look like she found it on her own. ;-P

Oh! Yay for History Day! I'm glad they've been able to do so much research so far. And not making it morbid or exploitive takes some skillz. :) Let me know if they need anything else!

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