It has happened,
and therefore, it could happen again:
this is the core of what we want to say.Primo Levi
Foreword
More than 60 years ago the women’s concentration camp St. Lambrecht was established in the Benedictine monastery St. Lambrecht, which had been confiscated by the National Socialists in 1938. Anyone who might want to follow the trail of this Ravensbrück sub camp, established in 1943, and the concentration camps brought under supervision of concentration camp Mauthausen in 1944 – as a matter of fact also in the case of the other Styrian sub camps – must make do with little evidence. The reasons are manyfold. To begin with, there is a dearth of sources available concerning the history of the small sub camps. Secondly historical investigations into the sub camps began only relatively late, and in addition there is no scientific institution in the field of the memorial monuments of the concentration camps. And thirdly, the prisoners in the women’s concentration camp St. Lambrecht after all belonged to a victimized group that until a few years ago was one of the ‘forgotten victims’ of National Socialism: die Bibelforscherinnen, as Jehovah’s Witnesses were called until 1931 and were still called by the National Socialists.
But not only in scientific publications are there hardly any clues to be found, neither have the 23 Bible Students who performed forced labour at St. Lambrecht left any marks in the public memory. For example, in the monastery St. Lambrecht nothing nowadays indicates that here for three consecutive years there were sub camps of the Ravensbrück, Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps respectively. The local population too hardly remembers the camp’s women – unlike the Spanish prisoners of the men’s concentration camp. Besides the small size of the women’s camp a reason might be the presence of other ’strangers’ there – Slovenian women in compulsory service, a few hundred female convicts from the East and French and British prisoners of war, all of whom had to perform forced labour in the dynamite factory in St. Lambrecht. The 23 women therefore were hardly conspicuous as a separate group – as prisoners from a concentration camp – when they had to work outside of the monastery.
Dietmar Seiler had already been confronted with the female prisoners going unnoticed during his investigations in the middle of the last decennium [of the previous century], when a female contemporary eyewitness heard of a women’s concentration camp for the first time during the interview.
This is the Black Hole of memory – into which not only the women of St. Lambrecht had fallen since 1945 – from which Anita Farkas has now hauled back the history of the monastery from 1938 to 1945. She focused on the ‘repressed’ history of the women’s concentration camp St. Lambrecht, and in particular that of the twenty-three women who endured forced labour on account of their religious beliefs.
The Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, cited above, has written in protest against such obliteration and repression. CLIO too strives to work for this same goal, using its publishing activities, lectures, exhibitions and the publication of this book.
Graz, April 2004
Heimo Halbreiner
CLIO – Verein für Geschichts- und Bildungsarbeit
Next →