Travel to the Ravensbrück camp, the largest brothel in the Third Reich

The historian Fermina Cañaveras (Torrenueva, Ciudad Real, 46 years old) has been giving a name, face and dignity to the women forced to prostitute themselves in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest brothel of the Third Reich, since 2008, but she still retains the emotion intact.

With her voice breaking, she has not gotten used to the story of an infamy.

It is impossible to remain silent in the face of such horrifying work material: the project built in Nazi Germany exclusively to attack women's rights: rape, forced abortions and sterilization were the three pillars on which this concentration and extermination camp was built by where up to 130,000 women passed between 1942 and 1945. On the day of their liberation, 15,000 had survived, of which two hundred were Spanish.

Fermina Cañaveras has been able to locate 26 so far.

90 kilometers from Berlin, Ravensbrück was the largest camp for women in Germany and the second in Europe after Auschwitz.

However, little is known about him.

It was one of the last to be liberated by the allies and there was time to destroy much of the documentation that was preserved there.

So, buried in the quicklime of oblivion, the fact that Fermina Cañaveras is giving a name and face to the women converted into sexual slaves in Ravensbrück becomes literal.

Among all of them arises that of Isadora Ramírez García (Madrid, 1922-2008), the protagonist of

El barracón de las mujeres

(Espasa), the first novel by this historian specialized in the area of ​​women and repression during the conflicts of the 20th century.

“The story, unfortunately, is told mostly by men;

There has always been talk of exiles, wars, camps... from the suffering of men, but what about women?

Why is there this tendency to forget the memory of our country, but above all to forget women? ”Cañaveras asks during a brief visit to Seville, where she meets with EL PAÍS.

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The Ravensbrück pigeon

Cañaveras has had to fictionalize the story of Isadora and other companions on that trip to hell because fiction has been the only glue to unite the pieces found in her intense documentary search.

Even so, the names and, above all, the system of humiliation and human degradation perfectly orchestrated by the Third Reich to exploit and experiment on women under pseudoscientific pretexts are of extreme rigor and veracity.

“They were raped around 20 times a day, in front of many soldiers who came to watch, and many of them became pregnant.

It was with these that they experimented, they opened their bellies and let them die to see how much the fetuses could endure,” he says.

It is not morbid, the historian claims, “it is memory and that is how it must be told.”

The writer Fermina Cañaveras, with a copy of her book 'El barracón de las mujeres'.Hugo G. Pecellín

The context, then, that

The Women's Barracks

describes is chilling: along with everyday rapes, this camp was a laboratory for practices that escape any scientific or moral consideration, such as injecting women with chimpanzee semen to check if they could procreate. hybrids of woman and monkey.

Others had body parts removed and reimplanted to check their recovery.

But let's return to Isadora Ramírez García, one of the last known Spanish survivors, who died in Madrid in 2008, just the year in which Fermina Cañaveras decided to embark on the rescue of this story, and whom she could not meet.

The starting point was a photograph found while she was immersed in another historical memory recovery project: “I was investigating how the Communist Party was organized in an apartment in Atocha in secret after the Civil War, I am not an expert in World War II. World Cup, but a PC activist put me on the trail.”

She resisted at first out of professional neatness, but there were many voices that encouraged her to embark on this journey towards the dignity of those women.

Judge Baltasar Garzón, who signs the novel's sash;

and her colleagues on the History Commission of the Teatro del Barrio in Madrid, of which she was a member at the time, were fundamental in pushing Fermina Cañaveras to write this story from which she has not emerged “unscathed,” she confesses.

And so, in the faded photograph he found, he knew that he had to change his work: there appeared the image of a woman from the neck to the waist, with an inscription in German tattooed on her chest:

Feld-Hure

, country whore .

This is how they marked Isadora, who died at the age of 86 with the indelible memory of humiliation still written on her skin.

“I use the word puta because it is the literal translation of

hure

.”

In this novel there is no euphemism, there is truth.

Also in the cruelty of words.

“The pregnant women were the rabbits,” says the author, and the crazy women's barracks was the name she used to confine, in an even more ignominious ostracism, all those who could not endure so much pain and lost their minds.

A prisoner from the Ravensbrück concentration camp with the inscription 'Feld-Hure' (camp whore) on her chest.Editorial Espasa

That was the experience that forever marked the history of Isadora Ramírez García, daughter, niece and sister of Republicans.

At the end of the Civil War, precisely, she crossed the border to France in search of her brother Ignacio, who disappeared during the national conflict.

There she enrolled in the Resistance until she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück.

She was 20 years old.

But there are more real characters within

El barracón de las mujeres

, all survivors of the horror: Constanza Martínez (1917-1997), also a member of the Resistance, whose fragile health after the traces left on her by the concentration camp experience does not prevented her from becoming vice president of Amical de Mauthausen.

Or Neus Català (1915-2019), whom Fermina Cañaveras did know and whose testimony was key to reconstructing this story.

Neus, precisely, was the founder of the Amical of Ravensbrück.

Since the end of World War II she dedicated her life to trying not to forget the names of those who died and suffered captivity in that hell.

The Aragonese Elisa Garrido (1909-1990) also stars in a passage of the book that is moving because of her courage.

This dam caused the explosion that disabled the Nazi howitzer factory of the Hafag commando, to which she had been assigned as a slave.

She dedicated her life to helping those who had gone through the Resistance.

And in a chilling contrast, the Frenchwoman Catherine Dior (1917-2008), sister of the famous designer Christian Dior, walks through the pages of this novel enrolled in a Franco-Polish intelligence unit.

“Catherine was very unlucky because she was arrested on the eve of the liberation of Paris.

She was deported to Ravensbrück, but she survived,” Cañaveras recounts.

In 1947, her brother created a perfume in her honor and in memory of her classmates: Miss Dior.

Prisoners with their children in the barracks.Editorial Espasa

And the hell of Ravensbrück, also the message that the author wants to convey in

The Women's Barracks

, is “a story of resilience and sisterhood.

There they helped each other, accompanied each other, took care of each other and protected all these women to make the majority of them survive.

This novel is the consequence of his experiences, his fears, his silences and his feelings.

It is the work of many hours of research that have culminated in a tribute to all those who have remained in the shadow of history."

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