Book review: If This Is A Woman by Sarah Helm
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
Wow, this was a hefty book! 727 pages later and after a year of reading this after getting it in Berlin last year, I finally managed to finish reading If This Is A Woman, by Sarah Helm. I was questioning whether I would finish it because I was reading it for so long but I'm glad that I stuck with it because I now have a book review for you.
All I can say about this book is that it's incredibly detailed. No wonder it won the Longman-History Today Prize and got so many praises from different newspapers. As the Independent on Sunday said, 'Compelling... (Helm) has painstakingly sought out many survivors and talked to them herself. The results are devastating... What one is left with at the end of this momentous book is a sense of power of human nature, both for good and evil.'
Before reading this, I had no idea about Ravensbruck concentration camp for women; the most renouned camp that is always talked about in the history books, considering the effects of the final solution, always seems to be Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. No one ever really talks about the smaller camps that, contrary to popular belief, caused just as much damage. This was probably why, I honestly wasn't expecting to see as much damage done in this camp. However, from what I gather from this realistic and graphic account of this camp, I realise that the horrific abuse that these women faced was like nothing I've ever seen before.
The women were forced to work long hours, eat megre amounts of food that often gave them dysentery, face the potential threat of beating and death by gassing, and try to survive horrific deceases like typhus and TB. Alongside all this, to aid the Nazis goal in obtaining a master race, like at Auschwitz, the women were experimented on a lot in a small block called the Revier. Some experiments were not as bad as others but some caused them horrific amounts of pain, on their already strained bodies and many sadly died from this because they became so weak that they couldn't hold on any longer.
Not to mention, the brutality that these women had also faced after which they were finally liberated by the Soviet Red armies, who had also abused them as well.
That was the reality of the camp and it's sad to find out that after the war, many of these women were silenced because not many people actually knew about the camp and if they did, they didn't realise the true extent of the abuse. The courts that dealt with the war crimes had, understandably, a main focus and that was mainly on the camps like Auschwitz, Belsen, and Mauthausen. There was also a historian who, because of the sheer lack of available information, had believed that there weren't even any gas chambers at Ravensbruck, when in actual fact, thousands of minority groups were killed there under the hands of the Nazis. Many of those were also transported from Auschwitz. However, many of the records of the lists of names were burned before the liberation so many assumptions were easily made.
However, I think this is why I've really enjoyed reading this book. It reveals the truth about something I've never really heard about before and it provides these women with a voice so that everyone who reads that book realises what happened to them.
I really admire Sarah Helm for giving such an extensive account of this significant event that, until her publication, was often brushed under the carpet. She included every detail she possibly could so that her readers could understand what really happened. It must have taken her ages but I really do appreciate her work. She's written a lot of other history books that follow this account but I really liked reading this, even if some of the things were difficult to read about.
I've given you a short account of what this biography entails but you must read it yourself, to find out exactly what these women went through because despite it being difficult to read sometimes, it's also incredibly interesting! Take your time to read it because it is a long story.😂
Have you read this book before? Do you like non-fiction books? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!
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Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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