After the invasion of Poland initiated World War II in September , transports arrived every day from the countries that became occupied by the Nazis. The imprisoned women were forced to work at many kinds of slave labor, from heavy outdoor physical labor to eventually building V-2 rocket parts for the Siemens Electric Company. The camp also had a courtyard with factories to make and repair clothing, and other related industries.
Some women were sent to euthanasia facilities to be gassed. By May , a year after the camp opened, the number of inmates already exceeded the original capacity of 3, By the summer of there were about 5, women, and in April about 6, female inmates were listed in the ledger counts. The increased population caused a dramatic worsening of camp conditions. In mid and afterward the camp was enlarged several times, with the women prisoners doing much of the construction.
As the population grew to more than ten times the originally planned number of women, the living conditions and treatment rapidly deteriorated. For example, other prisoners could sometimes send and receive mail. There was also a transport of 1, Jewish women to Auschwitz on March 26, , and another Jewish women were sent there on October 6, However, this judenrein situation did not last long, and in a matter of weeks, or two months at most, there were again Jewish prisoners in the camp.
Camp records account for about 10, Jewish and non-Jewish new arrivals in , and in more than 70, inmate numbers were given out. The conditions, with so many women living together, were unimaginable. Some of the barracks built for a maximum of women eventually housed as many as 2,, with three or four to a bunk.
Thousands of women did not even have part of a bunk, but lay on the floor without even a blanket. Already insufficient rations became more and more meager as time went on. When Jewish women arrived from Hungary in the fall of , there was no place to put them and a big tent with a straw floor was erected.
The women lay in their own dirt in the freezing cold, and died in masses. Because of the changes in the situation at the camp during its six years of existence and the destruction of many records by the Nazis as the Soviet Army approached, it is difficult to present a complete and accurate picture. It is rare to find a Jewish survivor who arrived before or even during that year.
Most were sent on to satellite camps, and some remained at the main camp until liberation by the Soviet Army at the end of April. The Red Cross rescued about a thousand Jewish women from the camp toward the end of the war and brought them to Sweden to recuperate.
Leichter also wrote poetry and Prestes made a secret atlas to accompany her geography lessons. Often the recipes were shared orally, but sometimes the women were able to write down their remembered recipes. Despite the harsher conditions for Jewish prisoners, at least two recipe books compiled by Jewish women survived. These subcamps, many of which were established adjacent to armaments factories, were located throughout the so-called Greater German Reich, from Austria in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north.
Several subcamps also provided prisoner labor for construction projects or clearing rubble in cities damaged by Allied air attacks. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
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About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. More information about this image. Camp Administration The camp leadership was divided into five departments: the commandant's office, political department, "protective custody" camp, administration and camp doctor. Her sorrowing blue eyes looked like the eyes of someone who has almost died. She said she had always been thin; her torso now seemed to consist only of her broad shoulder bones.
Her black, curly hair looked lifeless, but, by whatever laws of chance account for the survival of anything in a Nazi camp, it had never been shaved. Her mind seemed quiet and clear. Her only trouble was loss of memory, which embarrassed her; she had suffered intermittent amnesia because she had been starved. They were on a flat, featureless marshland lying between Stettin and Berlin. The camp is made up of twenty-five buildings, each of which was intended to house five hundred but in the past year has been crammed with twelve hundred.
While Colette was there, the women slept four to a single bunk. They had to lie on their sides, the feet of two of them in the faces of the other two. Even the thirty to fifty who died every day afforded only a temporary relief, when their bedfellows carried them off to the pile of corpses which accumulated each night on the cold tile floor of the washroom and which crowded the living the next morning as they cleaned up for the first, pre-dawn roll call, in which there were always newcomers to take the places of the dead.
The first call came at 2 or A. Dressed in their blue-and-white striped prison dresses, with their numbers on their sleeves and a red triangle for political deportees, green for common criminals, and black for slave laborers who had refused to work, the horde lined up out of doors, in the cold and dark, to be counted.
They were speechless and motionless, even when the woman next in line fainted or fell dead. It took about two hours for the counting call, which conveniently overlapped with the work call, which ended at 6 A. The calls were supervised by uniformed women guards—superior Germans called Offizierinnen , who were the bosses, and inferior Poles called Blokowas , each of whom supervised a Blok , or house, and Stubewas , each of whom was merely in charge of a Stube , or room. Since Hitler had declared the Poles to be subhuman, the rank they had been accorded was apparently calculated to humiliate the other Europeans, who actually minded only their cruelty.
The Poles, terrified at the prospect of losing their jobs, all too humanly terrorized the prisoners as a means of holding onto those jobs, and they outdid the Offizierinnen in lashing the wavering women with the straps all the guards carried. Some of the straps had a heavy rubber weight at the tip. After what should have been the breakfast hour, some women were marched off to the neighboring sandy marshes to dig drainage ditches, part of a Geopolitik arable-land scheme.
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