If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (119 page)

Marching to work at the Siemens factory. The post-war painting, probably by the German artist Rudolf Lipus, was displayed in the first camp exhibition in 1959, when the memorial site was inaugurated

Le Rouleau
‘The roller’ by Felicie Mertens, a Belgian communist prisoner

The guard Maria Enserer with other guards and SS friends. Enserer wrote ‘A holiday at Hohenlychen’ on the back of the photograph, referring to the nearby lakeside town where the SS medical clinic was based

The guard Hilde Hulan

The guards (
left to right
) sister Maria and Anna Enserer, and Ottilie Kaiser, with their guard dogs Gundo and Castor. The photograph was taken in 1940, and handwritten on the reverse are the words ‘One Sunday morning out in the flowering heather’

Guards Helene Massar, Marga Löwenberg and one other out rowing on the Schwedtsee

The Polish ‘rabbit’ Maria Kuśmierczuk showing her deformed leg, which was injected with gas gangrene. The photograph was taken secretly behind a block by fellow Pole Joanna Szydlowska

A Christmas card given to Jadwiga Dzido, a ‘rabbit’, by another inmate. The card reads: ‘Jadzienko Bunny, for Christmas I wish that baby Jesus will grant you health and hope that you will get back home’

Koperta (envelope) no. 5 is one of the secret letters written in urine by the Polish ‘rabbit’ Krysia Czyż. Here she tells her family in Poland that surviving rabbits are able to rest in the block and knit socks

Jadwiga Dzido’s leg is examined by Dr Leo Alexander at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial in December 1946

Dr Karl Gebhardt, mastermind of the Ravensbrück medical experiments, with injured First World War veterans and sportsmen at the Hohenlychen SS clinic in the 1930s

The Children’s Christmas Party
, 1944. Painting by Ceija Stojka, the Austrian-Romani artist who was a child prisoner at the camp, having arrived from Auschwitz in 1944. The painting shows children with crosses on their backs, clearly identifying them should they escape

Zimni Apel
(‘winter
Appell
’) by the Czech prisoner Nina Jirsíková