Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
Today we see a newsletter from October of 1962. This 8-page bulletin was for written by and for survivors of Ravensbrück. I was surprised when I first came across this document among Helene’s belongings – I had never imagined that there might be an alumni newsletter for former concentration camp prisoners. And yet, it makes perfect sense – who else could understand and identify with their experiences? Today, it would be a Facebook group – in fact, in preparing today’s post, I found that there is a group with that name! The newsletter continues to be published.
Unsurprisingly, Helene was traumatized by her time in Ravensbrück, and it haunted her for the rest of her life. She referred to her experiences in some of her letters from Istanbul in 1945-1946 and in some of her memoirs. She felt close to women who shared her experience, continuing her correspondence with some of them at least into the early 1960s. There is a letter from Helene to Lucienne Simier and one from Lucienne to Harry, and a poem dedicated to Helene from Gemma La Guardia Gluck, and artwork by Jeanne Letourneau.
The human need for connection and communication is incredibly strong, and people will do everything they can to reach out to loved ones, especially in the darkest of times. As we have seen, family members found ways to contact their loved ones from a Siberian POW camp during World War I, from Vienna to the U.S. while the countries were at war, between the death camps. Nothing could quell their quest for contact.