Babies who survived Ravensbruck reflect on Nazi horrors and maternal heroism

Children born in Ravensbruck concentration camp owe their lives to solidarity among women prisoners.

Documents and photographs belonging to Father Mikolaj Sklodowski, who was born in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, are seen in Gdansk, Poland, on March 17, 2025. Photo by Mateusz Slodkowski/AFP

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

They were never supposed to survive. The babies who survived Ravensbruck, born amidst cruelty, starvation, and death in one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, exist today as living symbols of resilience and the unbreakable spirit of women who refused to give up on life—even in its most fragile form.

A miracle in hell

Ravensbruck, located in northern Germany, was the largest Nazi concentration camp for women and children, second only to Auschwitz-Birkenau in terms of scale and brutality. Between 1939 and 1945, some 130,000 people were imprisoned there. For much of the camp’s operation, giving birth meant an automatic death sentence—for both mother and child. But from late 1944 through early 1945, amid the chaos of the collapsing Third Reich, a handful of newborns beat the odds.

Guy Poirot, one of the babies who survived Ravensbruck, was born on March 11, 1945. Now 80 years old, the French survivor attributes his life to the bravery and selflessness of fellow prisoners.

“We are the children of all those women,” Poirot said. “They hid us, fed us, and protected us even when they had nothing.”

Ingelore Prochnow, a German woman born in the camp nearly a year before Poirot, calls them “my camp mothers.” These women risked everything to keep the newborns alive, smuggling food, hiding pregnancies, and fighting off despair with small acts of care and hope.

Hidden pregnancies and underground births

Until 1943, pregnancy in Ravensbruck almost always led to execution. Women who appeared pregnant were often sent to the "Revier," a medical ward known not for healing, but for lethal injections and horrific experiments. To avoid this fate, many concealed their pregnancies for months, binding their stomachs and enduring brutal labor with little food or rest.

In August 1944, thousands of women—including many who were pregnant—arrived from Warsaw after the failed uprising against Nazi rule. One of them was Polish prisoner Waleria Peitsch. Despite beatings and starvation, she gave birth to her son Mikolaj on March 25, 1945.

The shift toward tolerating childbirth came with the arrival of a new medical officer in late 1943, who allowed women to deliver in secret. Still, no resources were allocated for newborns. French resistance fighter Madeleine Aylmer-Roubenne described giving birth to her daughter Sylvie in “a sort of corridor,” with only a candle for light and no access to water or toilets. A criminal-turned-midwife risked her life to retrieve forceps and chloroform from the infirmary, where a fully equipped birthing room was off-limits to the prisoners.

Surviving the Kinderzimmer

By September 1944, the camp had designated a Kinderzimmer, or children's room. It was far from a haven. Medical student and fellow prisoner Marie-Jose Chombart de Lauwe recalled that babies there rarely lived more than three months. Rats gnawed at their fingers at night. Hunger, disease, and the bitter cold claimed most lives quickly.

With mothers working 12- to 14-hour shifts, breast milk was scarce. Milk powder was barely available and often had to be divided among dozens of infants. Two bottles were typically shared by 20 to 40 babies.

Jean-Claude Passerat-Palmbach, born in November 1944, survived because two other women—a Roma from Romania and a Russian—nursed him after losing their own children. “Mummy had no milk,” he remembered. “They fed me instead.”

Despite the physical hardships, women fought for every life. They scavenged cloth to make diapers and even fashioned makeshift teats from medical gloves. The children, however, bore the marks of suffering: triangular faces, bloated bellies, and wrinkled skin. Diarrhea, abscesses, and fever were constant.

Liberation and aftershock

The final months of the war brought more chaos. As Soviet forces advanced, the SS escalated killings, gassing around 6,000 prisoners. Others were deported to different camps like Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were even worse.

Between April 23 and 25, 1945, the Swedish Red Cross, led by Count Folke Bernadotte, evacuated around 7,500 prisoners from Ravensbruck. Guy Poirot and Sylvie Aylmer were among the infants smuggled out beneath women's skirts during this miraculous operation—enabled by SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s desperate attempt to seek favor with the Allies.

Not everyone was so lucky. Ingelore Prochnow and her mother were forced onto a 60-kilometer death march toward the Malchow sub-camp. Liberation came just days later, on the night of April 29–30, when the Red Army arrived.

The Nazis tried to erase their crimes. They burned documents, but a Czech escapee kept a secret birth register, recording 522 births between September 1944 and April 1945. Only 30 of those children were not marked as dead.

A legacy of trauma and strength

For many Ravensbruck child survivors, the truth came much later. Sylvie Aylmer grew up believing Ravensbruck was a quaint French village. It wasn't until age 13, during a visit to an exhibition, that she learned the reality. Former prisoners embraced her and her sister with tears—bringing the horror to life.

She never returned to the camp. “That place gives me the creeps,” she admitted. Her father, a fellow resistance member, never made it out alive.

Priest Mikolaj Sklodowski, Waleria Peitsch’s son, now leads Mass in Ravensbruck. He considers it a duty to educate others: “Talking about the suffering in the concentration camps is a duty to those who remain there forever.”

Guy Poirot dedicates his time to sharing the story with young people. Though he has led a full life, the psychological scars endure. “My health has always been fragile,” he said.

Ingelore Prochnow’s story adds another dimension to the enduring impact. Abandoned by her mother in a refugee camp at age three, she didn’t learn of her past until she was 42. Though she calls herself resilient, her daughter struggled with anorexia and passed away in 2019 at just 50. Doctors diagnosed her with “transgenerational trauma,” a term that continues to emerge in the study of descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Remembering the unseen heroes

The babies who survived Ravensbruck defy imagination. Their lives were saved not by luck alone, but by the fierce love and cooperation of women who chose compassion over despair, even in the darkest corners of history.

These child survivors, now elderly, carry forward the memory of those who didn’t make it. They live as evidence of courage, of solidarity, and of the enduring will to protect life even in a world designed to extinguish it.

Their existence is a tribute to the women who sheltered them, nursed them, and dared to bring life into a world of death. And as they speak today, they remind us that history is not just written in archives and monuments—it is living, breathing, and often marked by the smallest, most fragile hearts that somehow kept beating.