ABSTRACT
Using the International Tracing Service (ITS) collections can help us to learn about a little-known Holocaust site in Eastern Europe: Christianstadt, a women’s slave labour sub-camp of Gross-Rosen. Beyond individual person searches, the ITS collections elucidate numerous central topics in the study of the Holocaust: the structure and development of the concentration camp system; the social history of the camps, including issues of food, dress, work, solidarity and resistance, and gender-specific issues; the behaviour of camp guards; the ‘death marches’ and liberation; and ‘aftermath’ issues, including the restitution process, Cold War interactions and the history of the tracing process itself. Starting with a single, remarkable document unique to the ITS – a report sent to the ITS in 1987 by a group of forty-two Czechoslovak women, former inmates of Christianstadt – I show how ITS material, when supplemented by other sources, permits an unparalleled piecing together of one of the Nazis’ little-known camps.
