The roses in Ravensbrück

The rose is a key motif, not just in the culture of remembrance around the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Already during their imprisonment, the rose played a significant role among the women prisoners: whether in drawings, poems, embroidery or on secretly-made greetings cards, the rose appeared everywhere. It was seen as a sign of friendship, of hope and inner resistance. This book gathers the images and stories regarding roses that originated in Ravensbrück before and after 1945. It covers the genesis of the French Ravensbrück Rose “Résurrection”, rituals of commemoration, traditions in religious and cultural history as well as iconographic considerations on the motif of the rose and barbed wire.