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Info / context to the poem
In her first poem, recited to her fellow prisoners during the quarantine period in the late summer of 1943, the French poet Micheline Maurel describes the exile into which she had fallen as a descent into the realm of death.
The poem appeared, together with an accompanying letter, in December 1995 in the magazine "Ravensbrück". The French poet Micheline Maurel reconstructed the text encompassing two entire pages at the request of a comrade. She herself had written it during her imprisonment in Neubrandenburg, a satellite camp of Ravensbrück. In her opinion, the text was never worth the effort of being published since only women who were imprisoned in Ravensbrück could understand it. However, she felt that they would perhaps be "amused" at this "old text from our yet uninhibited starting time." An indication of how much worse it must have been for her in the period following. (C. Jaiser)
Close to the Memorial Ravensbrück
La loie du plus fort
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
Signatur: V813-9
Nourritoures terrestres
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
Signatur: V813-19E1
Historical photo
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
View of the site in winter 1941
Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
Photo album of the SS 1940/1941
The camp prison, also called "bunker" by the prisoners, consisted of 78 arrest cells.
Subcamp Neubrandenburg
The city of Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was an important armaments production site during the Nazi era. In the Mechanischen Werkstätten (Mechanical Workshops MWN), around 6,000 prisoners had to perform forced labor for German military production. As part of the inclusion of female concentration camp prisoners from Ravensbrück, the first subcamp was built on Ihlenfelder Strasse in 1943. In 1944, a second underground camp was built in the forest south of Neubrandenburg's city limits so as not to endanger production during bombing raids. In the confined space of the "Waldbau," there were six to seven factory buildings, some above-ground structures and about five prisoner barracks, some of which were dug into the ground, in which about 2,000 female concentration camp prisoners had to live and work.
© Photo: Carsten Büttner, zeitlupe | Stadt.Geschichte & Erinnerung
Dr. phil. Constanze Jaiser
Literature scholar and theologian
Publications on the subject, include:
Poetische Zeugnisse. Gedichte aus dem Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Stuttgart/Weimar 2000
Europa im Kampf 1939-1944. Internationale Poesie aus dem Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin 2009
Ein Schmuggelfund aus dem KZ – Erinnerung, Kunst und Menschenwürde. Berlin 2012
Violette Lecoq
1912 - 2003 France. Worked for the Red Cross as a nurse from 1939 on. She was active in the French Resistance and helped French soldiers to escape, but she was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo, and then deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943. Because she spoke German, she worked as a nurse at the Tbc-block. In April 1945 she could be evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross. The drawings she had made in Ravensbrück were used as evidence in court after the war, for example in the Ravensbrück Trials in Hamburg in 1946/47 against members of the security staff of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.