The untold horrors of Berlin’s concentration camp for women
Historical novels tend to revisit well-known places and events, but El Barracón de las Mujeres (The Women’s Hut) by Spanish writer Fermina Cañaveras has opened readers’ eyes to a little-known story of the Holocaust.
The novel describes the horrifying ordeal of a young Spanish woman forced to join the ranks of feld-huren or “camp whores” – they had the status tattooed onto their chests – selected to be repeatedly raped in a brothel section of Ravensbrück concentration camp. Fifty miles north of Berlin, Ravensbrück was built to house women prisoners: Poles, Soviet female POWs, communists, Roma women, prostitutes, lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and women who refused to marry. Between 50,000 and 90,000 were murdered.
“Ravensbrück is the unknown camp. It represents the systematic erasure of women,” says Cañaveras, when I meet her before she gives a talk in Madrid’s Mujeres & Compañía feminist bookstore. A historian by trade, Cañaveras was investigating female members of the Spanish Communist Party during the Franco regime when she came across the story of Isadora Ramírez García, a survivor of Ravensbrück. First published in January, the novel has proved a surprise hit and is already in its sixth edition.
Cañaveras, 46, explains that she was driven to using fiction to fill in the gaps, due largely to the lack of documentation regarding the victims at Ravensbrück. It was, she notes, one of the last camps to be liberated after weeks of frenzied activity to wipe out as many women and archives as possible in ovens brought in from Auschwitz as the Soviet forces moved westward.
Ramírez García was just 20 when she arrived at the camp in early 1942 along with her mother and aunt – the three had left Franco’s Spain just after the Spanish Civil War, and became involved with the French Resistance to Nazi occupation who helped them in a bid to find Isadora’s brother, who they believed had crossed into France to escape the conflict in Spain. Once at Ravensbrück, female guards selected the youngest women as potential feld-huren and they were deloused, tattooed and quarantined, undergoing a mysterious injection in their vaginas, apparently designed to sterilise them before what was called the initiation: a skills test for sex slaves in which failing meant death.
“This was the cruellest part of all. Once a woman had been assigned her prisoner’s triangle and had her arm number tattoo, she might expect to survive. But old men, high-ranking Nazis from outside the camp, would decide which ones were worthy of surviving on the basis of their techniques, fellations or whatever it was they wanted.”
Those who passed the test might be raped 20 times a day, with no limits on what the Nazi soldiers and officers could do to them. A feld-hure could get slightly better rations than other prisoners and not have her head shaved, but was also forced to participate in grim tasks such as collecting bodies of the gassed dead and loading them into the camp’s ovens. They were also subjected to ghastly gynaecological experiments.
For those unfortunate enough to become pregnant despite the sterilisation techniques tested on them, their babies were discarded or experimented on.
“Ravensbrück was the site of institutionalised gender crimes on a massive scale,” says Cañaveras.“The camp ended up being filled with other kinds of women – asocials and political degenerates – but it was first opened for prostitutes from Berlin, who were tricked by the Nazis into believing they would live better in a camp compared to the streets. Prostitution was at the dark core of Ravensbrück.”
In discovering the story of Ramírez García, who died in 2008, Cañaveras was struck by a photograph she had kept of her tattooed chest – defiantly baring what seemed intended to bring shame for a lifetime. Nazi camps generally tattooed prisoners’ numbers on their arms as part of the insane bureaucratisation of mass slaughter, but the feld-hure mark is unique in Holocaust history.
“The tattoo humiliated the women, literally branding them whores. I have letters from people saying their mother has the tattoo but she does not want to talk about it,” says Cañaveras, who has her own collection of tattoos on her arms: the names of her children in Hebrew, and a triangle in honour of all Holocaust victims.
“This process for me is an act of memory, and through a novel it can reach more people. I want to dignify as many names of these women as I can,” she says. Women such as Catherine Dior, probably the most famous survivor of the camp, due to her work for the Resistance and close connection with her brother Christian.
Some 400 Spanish women are known to have been at Ravensbrück, but the reality is that there were many more whose names were never recorded. Much of what is known is thanks to Neus Català, a survivor and founder of the Spanish Amical de Ravensbrück memory association who died in 2019 at the age of 103.
“I must tell what my eyes have seen as I have a duty to the forgotten women who perished in this death camp. My father said never lower your eyes before anyone. I never cried in front of a Nazi; it was my way of resisting. I cried at night because the nights were eternal,” Català wrote. It was the impact of the Holocaust that made Cañaveras a historian in the first place; she was studying tourism in London in the early 2000s when her life plans were turned on their head by a work-placement spell at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum.
Contemporary female suffering is also Cañaveras’s concern, particularly as debate rages in Spain over whether to prohibit or regulate modern-day prostitution. The Socialist Party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has outlined plans to abolish prostitution by making it a crime for pimps or landlords to gain rent or profit from the activity, as well as sanctioning clients. But some on the Left disagree with an abolitionist stance and believe prostitution should be regulated as a fully legal activity.
Both sides agree that the main problem is that the majority of sex workers in Spain are the victims of exploitation by people traffickers; the difference lies in how to approach it. Those in favour of regulation say that women would be enabled to make their own choices and not require pimps if sex work was a recognised occupation. Abolitionists, like Cañaveras, say all prostitution is exploitation and that unscrupulous traffickers will always control the market.
“If I think women of that camp are victims of gender violence, why would I not think the same about a woman in a brothel in Spain today? They are also victims of trafficking, albeit on a different scale and with more brutality. Many are deceived into thinking they will get decent work and have their passport taken away, ending up in a room in a brothel in Spain performing dozens of services a day.”
One year before the start of Spain’s civil war that brought Franco to power, the country’s Second Republic passed an abolitionist legislation.
“If that was possible in Spain in 1935,” she says, “why would it not be possible today?”
‘El Barracón de las Mujeres’ is published by Espasa; casadellibro.com
