Births in Stutthof concentration camp Agnieszka Kłys
T
he tragic stories I am going to relate in this paper are well-nigh unbelievable, especially as they are the stories of the youngest inmates of a German concentration camp—the babies born in Stutthof—and their mothers.
As in other Nazi German concentration camps, some of the women inmates in
Stutthof were pregnant. Their fate was particularly dramatic. Some only learned they were pregnant when they arrived in the camp and had to go through a humiliating gynaecological examination. Pregnancy did not give them any privileges. Women prisoners who were pregnant had no access to medical care and had to do heavy labour. If they managed to carry the pregnancy to term, they had to give birth in the primitive conditions in the camp, and afterwards they struggled desperately to keep the baby alive. Straight after having the baby, when they should still have been in childbed, they were forced to go back to work. It was not until mid-1944, when the regime in the camp relaxed and the Germans were busy preparing to close it down, that babies born at the time (i.e. the latter half of 1944 and the first months of 1945) had a chance of survival. Though not all of them managed it. We shall never learn how many babies were born in Stutthof concentration
About the author: Agnieszka Kłys is a curator and achivist in the research department of the Stutthof Museum. She graduated from the Faculty of History at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and completed a museology postgraduate course at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has been working for the research department of the Museum of Stutthof since 2013. She has published numerous publications on the history of the Stutthof concentration and extermination camp.
