Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp

by Ruth Schwertfeger

Overview

This is the first book in English on the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in former Czechoslovakia and the only one of its kind which focuses on the women who were forced to live in it. Interwoven with the description of everyday life in the camp are memoirs and poems selected from the work of over twenty women. Carefully translated into English, these testimonies form an extraordinary and moving collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780854961924
Publisher:	Berg Publishers
Publication date:	12/01/1988
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d)

Editorial Reviews

A poignant Holocaust memoir with a unique feminist slant.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

A poignant Holocaust memoir with a unique feminist slant.

Booklist

From a unique concentration camp established by the Nazis in 1942 in Czechoslovakia at Terezin as a ``model ghetto'' are heard the voices of women inmates in this collection of their poetry and memoirs. During the three-and-one-half years of the camp's existence, the ugly reality of life inside was at sharp variance with its public image as a resettlement oasis for European Jews. The day-to-day life described here was a coexistence of brutality and culture, with starving Jews creating music and art. In gathering the memoirs of inmates who wrote during their internment or after their release, Schwertfeger, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, provides another dimension to the art of survival. From these fragments emerge insistent voices. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is an anthology of poems and memoirs of Theresienstadt inmates, with a history of the camp preceding the collection. Editor Schwertfeger (German, Univ. of Wisconsin) takes that history largely from Zdenek Lederer's Ghetto Theresienstadt ( 1953; Fertig, 1983. reprint) and H.G. Adler's Theresienstadt 1941-1945 ( Tubingen: Mohr, 1960. 2d ed.); the bulk of the primary material is from mostly unknown or unpublished sources. The focus is on women's writings. The most interesting contribution to Theresienstadt literature here is in the Epilogue, where Schwertfeger reports on her visit to Terezin, as it is now called, in the summer of 1987. She finds no meaningful memorial there. Let, therefore, this book be a memorial, at least to the women who suffered there.-- Gerda Haas, Holocaust Human Rights Ctr. of Maine, Lewiston

Library Journal