Jerry > Recent Status Updates

So, he's gone to Africa & hiked to a distant tribal village. They seem welcoming & he seems to feel they can help him get over himself. But there's a drought & their cistern is inhabited by frogs they seem unwilling to deal with.

He seems to have lucked out into "fitting in" socially despite himself. Not sure if that will hold if he does something with the frogs, which he intends.

& I'm still not sure of the point.

Maybe it's character development, but it doesn't seem like this book has gone anywhere. We've got the main character and his two wives with a bit of depth, but nothing else, really.

Frankly, I've considered setting it aside, but I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt.

It's disturbing to learn Russian soldiers "systematically" raped pretty much all women, including Ravensbrück survivors. It's ironic the prisoners didn't need to fear rape from their German captors, who treated them as less than human otherwise. Only to find liberation brought about new and even more degrading horrors. Also, the Russian Army women had to contend with being treated as collaborators for being captured.

All thru the war the ICRC was aware of the concentration camps, many atrocities, and likely even the death camps, yet did nothing. Suddenly in the last 4 months or so of the war, they worked to get some prisoners released (in exchanges). Likely because the neutral Swedes were showing the Swiss up in rescuing camp prisoners.

Revensbrück has a gas chamber as of late 1944/early 1945. Even as the war is winding to its inevitable conclusion, the Nazis have become more fanatical. The only difference is rather than murdering on the basis of race, they're murdering those who can't work as slave laborers.

I think I will never understand the shear magnitude of the concentration camps and the logistics required for them.

As much as I try to assign some logic to it all, the challenge is logic didn't really apply. At the same time there were strict rules, so much happened as the result of arbitrary decisions. And the prisoner hierarchy played as much of a role as the Germans.

This is fundamentally how it all was allowed to happen. Civilian manager at Ravensbrück Siemens camp said to a prisoner worker, "'But you have all done something wrong, haven't you'...as if that justified it to him....But he was not a bad man." Ordinary Men similarly describes how evil triumphed because regular people let it.

As Germany's situation disintegrated, discipline failed; abuse became even worse.

The book makes clear slave labor at concentration camps was a key element in the war effort, especially as the situation became more dire for Germany. But I still don't comprehend how increasing transports of prisoners and the allocation of limited transport for this could even be a net positive for the Nazis in the war effort. It seems the more the world was imploding for them, the more focused they became on this.

Apparently Ravensbrück was used to hold Himmler's "hostage" prisoners, both male and female. These were believed to be potential leverage for Himmler, especially if things started to turn for the worse for Nazi Germany.

The more I read on the Holocaust, the less I understand & comprehend it! All kinds of rules, but they were followed only when it suited.

The Germany "Jew-free" decree applied to concentration camps. In 1943, Jews, even from Auschwitz, were showing back up at Ravensbrück (for forced labor purposes).

One thing books like this make clear: a lot of people knew what was going on. Yet even the Red Cross took a blind eye.

It is tragic to read about how so many who survived Ravensbrück and its subcamps became victims yet again after the war under Soviet and East German suspicion. And yet we are all aware of at least hundreds, likely thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of actual perpetrators who were never held to account.

I am always saddened when I learn about victims who end up being revictimized.

Even the “good doctor” isn’t so good and the prisoner doctors stopped doctoring when the Germans tried to bribe them. Turns out the “good doctor” was doing some experiments of his own. He as sentenced to death after the war but committed suicide.

The rabbits protest, experiments apparently end, and Langefeld is fired in 1943. We're about to have Soviet female POWs arrive at Ravensbrück.

"After we had talked for some time longer, I asked Zofia [Kawińska] if she had ever lost her faith in Ravensbrück. She paused and looked away. 'No. I have no less faith. You see we came to the camp with an iron will to survive.'"

I am amazed at the resilience of people like this. I don't know her religion, but she was part of a group, called "rabbits" that underwent horrendous (and inconclusive) medical experiments.

Senior Ravensbruck female guard sent to Auschwitz with 1000 kapos to set up and run the womens camp there. Because women prisoners, even Jews, were different from males. Despite female guards being "auxiliaries" and command still being male SS officers. The more I read and learn about the Holocaust, the more bizarre and incomprehensible it seems to me. There are just so many inconsistencies & things that defy logic.

In early 1942, some 1600 Ravensbrück prisoners were transported elsewhere to be gassed. They were "selected" by doctors, tho some were infirm, some not, and some happened to decline collaboration. Prisoners facilitated the bureaucracy of this, filling in certs of death. The medical-not medical aspect of this is bizarre to me. Relatives got an official letter; they could pay to get an urn of ashes.

We are gaining a perspective from a number of anecdotal stories. It is interesting to note how different Ravensbrück was from concentration camps in general. Yet it is also difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the system as a whole. And to realize Ravensbrück was just as arbitrary and capricious. Another cog in the terror wheel.