Prisoners
The first prisoners at Ravensbruck were approximately 900 women. The SS had transferred these prisoners from the Lichtenburg women's concentration camp in Saxony in May 1939. By the end of 1942, the female inmate population of Ravensbruck had grown to about 10,000. In January 1945, the camp had more than 45,000 prisoners, mostly women.
There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Gypsies or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few of them at the time. There were a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany. Between April and October 1944 their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was comprised of Roma children with their mothers or sisters brought into the camp after the Roma camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbruck after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and Jewish children after the Budapest Ghetto was closed. With a few exceptions all these children died of starvation. Ravensbruck had 70 sub-camps used for slave labor that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.
Among the thousands executed by the Germans at Ravensbruck were four female members of the SOE (Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe, and Violette Szabo) as well as the Roman Catholic nun Elise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild, Russian Orthodox nun St.Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, and Olga Benбrio, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes. The largest group of executed women at the Ravensbruck camp, 200 in total, was the Polish group of young patriots, members of the Polish Home Army.
Among the survivors of Ravensbrьck camp was Christian author and speaker Corrie ten Boom. Corrie ten Boom and her family were arrested by the s for harbouring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The ordeal of Corrie and her sister, Betsie ten Boom, in the camp is documented in her book The Hiding Place which was also made into a movie.
*source: wikipedia.org