Ingelore's story

Ingelore Prochnow grew up with adoptive parents, to whom she had to promise at age 12 that she would never look for her biological parents. She made this promise, but knew that she would be unable to keep it. After completing school, Ingelore apprenticed as an insurance salesperson. At age 17, she met her future husband Klaus Prochnow, with whom she started a family. Ingelore never let go of the question of who her biological parents were. After her adoptive parents died, she began her search. She was 40 years old at the time. She found out that she had been born in Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp. This information stunned her and raised many questions. It was only after years of research that she found her mother. However, meeting her was a disappointment for Ingelore. Her mother hardly answered her questions and seemed uninterested in her life. They did not build a relationship. It was not until 2011 that Ingelore learnt the full name of her Polish father, who by then had already passed away. She never contacted her family in Poland for fear of being disappointed again.

Copy of the birth certificate of Ingelore Prochnow, April 2002

Ingelore began her search by looking at her adoption file at the youth welfare office in Detmold. It was only there that she learnt that she was born in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Private property Prochnow

Renate Lutz, née Rohde, 1990

Renate Lutz was active in the Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück, an association of survivors of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. But she never tried to find her daughter.

Photo: unknown. Private property Prochnow

The story of the parents

Jan Gawroński was 30 years old when he was taken prisoner of war by the Germans as a Polish soldier in 1939. In 1942, he was assigned the status of “civilian labourer”. He had to work on a farm near Magdeburg. There he came to know Ingelore’s mother, Renate Rohde. The two were denounced and subsequently arrested. Jan Gawroński was imprisoned in several concentration camps, including the Special SS Camp Hinzert near Trier. Here the SS reviewed his “Eindeutschungsfähigkeit” (eligibility for Germanisation), but he did not qualify. After liberation, he returned to Poland. Ingelore’s mother was 19 years old and five months pregnant when she was transferred to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in December 1943. After liberation, she and her daughter Ingelore were housed in a camp for displaced persons in Siegen, which Renate Rohde left in 1947 without her daughter.

Interview

Survivors and members of the second generation

Ingelore Prochnow was only one year old at the time of her liberation and has no recollection of her stay in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Nevertheless, her early childhood experiences of hunger, cold, violence, and fear left a lasting mark on her life. Ingelore repeatedly emphasises that these traumatic experiences are passed down through the generations and also have had an impact on her own children. It was only as an adult in the survivors’ association Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück that Ingelore found the comfort and support she had wished for all her life. Her most burning question was how she could have survived imprisonment in the concentration camp as an infant. The older survivors then told her about the solidarity among the women who had worked together to ensure the survival of the newborns.

Commemorative plaque at the Memorial Museum Ravensbrück for the children transported to or born in the concentration camp

Ingelore Prochnow had campaigned for the memorial plaque.

Memorial Museum Ravensbrück