The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those who have learned about this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, now much better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, Lilac Girls.

Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80% of the inmates were political prisoners. Among them was a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance.

Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, these women joined forces to defy their German captors and keep one another alive. The sisterhood’s members, amid unimaginable terror and brutality, subverted Germany’s war effort by refusing to do their assigned work. Knowing that they risked death for any infraction did not stop them from defying their SS tormentors at every turn—even staging a satirical musical revue about the horrors of the camp.

After the war, when many in France wanted to focus only on the future, the women from Ravensbrück refused to allow their achievements, needs, and sacrifices to be erased. They banded together once more, first to support one another in healing their bodies and minds, and then to continue their crusade for freedom and justice—an effort that would have repercussions for their country and the world into the twenty-first century.