Oživené osudy žien z Ravensbrücku
The Revived Fates of the Ravensbrück Women

Summary/Abstract: In her monograph "Zpřetrhané životy: Československé ženy v nacistickém koncentračním táboře Ravensbrück v letech 1939–1945" [Broken Lives: Czechoslovak Women in the Nazi Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück, 1939–1945], Pavla Plachá focuses on the fate of women imprisoned in this camp who were citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic before 1 October 1938. This framework allows her to comprehensively and at the same time diversely examine women from diverse ethnic, social, cultural and territorial backgrounds: from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from the Czech borderlands occupied by the Germans after the Munich dictatorship, from the wartime Slovak Republic, and from the areas rewarded to Hungary after the First Vienna Arbitration. In the first part, Plachá traces the transformations of memorial culture in relation to Ravensbrück in different periods of post-war Czechoslovakia – which was selectively shaped according to the interests of the communist regime – focusing her research on the then overlooked groups of imprisoned women. In the second part, she presents the history of the Ravensbrück camp and various aspects of the status and camp life of the imprisoned women, not avoiding sensitive topics such as sexualized violence, homosexual relations and prostitution, pregnancy and abortion, and the violence and conflicts in the immediate aftermath of liberation. In the central third part, she categorizes and systematically examines Czechoslovak women in Ravensbrück, separately singling out groups of political convicts, the “anti-social and criminal”, Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. She enriches the collective analysis with dense biographies of selected women prisoners. The reviewer evaluates the monograph asa significant “Czechoslovak” contribution to international research on the history of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, cultures of memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as gender studies.

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