Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

Day Three
Thursday, Dec 18
Theme: Remembrance and Beyond

8:30am
Guided tour of Memorial and Museum at former Concentration Camp Ravensbruck.
Ravensbruck was a women’s concentration camp during WWII. The camp is 90km north of Berlin in the village of Ravensbruck. An estimated 6,000 women were killed at Ravensbruck (this was a labor camp, not an extermination camp).

5:00pm Group Discussion about experience at Café Orange.

***Visiting Ravensbruck was an emotional experience. Obviously, there were a number of places/spaces on the tour that were emotional and disturbing—the barracks, labor yards, and crematorium. There were also some more subtle aspects of the experience that were even more disturbing. Ravensbruck is located roughly 300 yards from the nearest village. From outside the crematorium I was able to look across a lake and directly into town. On a clear spring/summer day residents of Ravensbruck could see exactly what was happening, and did nothing about it. The silence and acceptance toward the Holocaust was clear on this day. The second experience that was emotional for me was looking at the exhibit honoring the women who survived and perished at Ravensbruck. One portion of the exhibit was a wall of pictures—head shots—of roughly 40-50 women. Each of these women were photographed shortly before arriving at Ravensbruck, each was somewhere between 25-45 (guessing) and looking directly into the camera. I thought about my great grandmothers, who if they had stayed in Europe during this period could have suffered the same fate.

**I would love for my trip companions to continue to share their experiences here.