Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp, 1939-45

Attempting to reconstruct the workings of everyday life in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, the only camp in the Nazi system designed for women, Morrison examines the prisoners’ social relationships with each other and their overlords; prisoner activities, from bartering to storytelling, from political maneuvering to coping with body lice, and, of course, the kinds of forced labor performed (Ravensbrück was a labor camp, not an extermination camp); and the occurrences of sickness, death, and killing at the camp. The volume is illustrated with drawings by inmates, and photos by the SS.

This book is designed to make it possible for today’s generation of students and general readers to imagine what daily life in a concentration camp may have been like.


Jack G. Morrison, a professor of history at Shippensburg University, was a key contributor to the establishment of the archives of Ravensbrück after the departure of the Russian administrators.