Experience and Expression : Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust [1 ed.] 9780814338865, 9780814330630

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Experience and Expression WOMEN, THE NAZIS, AND THE HOLOCAUST

edited by

ELIZABETH R. BAER and

MYRNA GOLDENBERG

Wayne State University Press Detroit

Copyright 2003 © by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3063-0 ISBN-10: 0-8143-3063-0 (pbk.) 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Experience and expression : women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust / edited by Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-8143-3062-2 (cloth : alk paper)—ISBN 0-8143-3063-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jewish women in the Holocaust. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Personal narratives—History and criticism. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. I. Baer, Elizabeth Roberts. II. Goldenberg, Myrna. D804.47.E86 2003 940.53'18'082—dc21 2002008514

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Mary Dickey Masterton Fund for financial assistance in the publication of this volume. ISBN 978-0-8143-3886-5 (e-book)

Dedicated to the memory of Sybil Milton, 1941–2000, a singular Holocaust scholar whose work provided the groundwork, inspiration, scope, and, most importantly, the standard of excellence for the feminist scholars who followed. Thank you, Sybil.

Along the stations toward extinction . . . each gender lived its own journey. Mary Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era

The future historian would have to dedicate a proper page to the Jewish woman during this war. She will capture an important part in this Jewish history for her courage and ability to survive. Because of her, many families were able to get over the terror of those days. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Diary and Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg Chronology Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

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Part I. Proposing a Theoretical Framework ONE

TWO

Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust John K. Roth Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference Pascale Rachel Bos

5

23

Part II. Women’s Experiences: Gender, the Nazis, and the Holocaust THREE

Hidden Lives: Sinti and Roma Women Sybil Milton

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FOUR

Involuntary Abortions for Polish Forced Laborers Anna Rosmus

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FIVE

Caring While Killing: Nursing in the “Euthanasia” Centers Susan Benedict

SIX

The Nurses’ Trial at Hadamar and the Ethical Implications of Health Care Values Mary D. Lagerwey

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Contents

Part III. Gender and Memory: The Uses of Memoirs SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside Judith Greenberg

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Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps Myrna Goldenberg

161

Ruptured Lives and Shattered Beliefs: A Feminist Analysis of Tikkun Atzmi in Holocaust Literature Susan Nowak

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Anne Frank: The Cultivation of the Inspirational Victim Catherine A. Bernard

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Part IV. Women’s Expressions: Postwar Reflections in Art, Fiction, and Film ELEVEN

Jewish Women in Time: The Challenge of Feminist Artistic Installations about the Holocaust Stephen C. Feinstein

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TWELVE

Women in the Holocaust: Representation of Gendered Suffering and Coping Strategies in American Fiction 260 S. Lillian Kremer

THIRTEEN

The Uses of Memory and Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Film, Fiction, and Memoir Rebecca Scherr

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Contributors

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Th i s a n t h o l o g y g r e w o u t o f a h a l lway c o n v e r s at i o n at the 1997 Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. The conference that year featured two panels on the topic of women and the Holocaust, an amount of attention to the topic that was unprecedented at an American Holocaust conference. We believed that the time had come for an anthology on the topic to appear and began soliciting essays. Now, almost five years later, we look back upon a partnership that has included, and been enriched by, many of life’s significant events: children’s engagements and marriages, the arrival of a grandchild, the loss of a parent, changes in careers, serious illness, surviving a tornado, traveling together to present papers at other conferences, and constant communication. We would thus like to begin by thanking each other for a collaboration that has been marked by patience, persistence, teaching and learning, laughter and deep friendship. We would also like to thank Franklin and Marcie Littell for their long-standing work on the Annual Scholars’ Conference, where this book was conceived, and Carol Rittner and John Roth, who not only loaned us their gender-conscious chronology but encouraged us at every step of the way. Other consultants and advisers have included Joan Ringelheim, Oral History Division, and Leslie Swift and Judy Cohen, Photo Archives, and the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Hester Baer, assistant professor of German at the University of Oklahoma, Lisa Disch and Stephen Feinstein at the University of Minnesota, who collaborated with Elizabeth on the first national scholarly conference devoted to women and the Holocaust—entitled “Departures,” in April, 2001—allowing us to work through several of our ideas; and Lenore Weitzman, George Mason University. To all of them, we extend our special thanks. Arthur Evans, director of the Wayne State University Press, has been an advocate for the manuscript from our first communication with him and has demonstrated confidence in it at each stage of development. We thank him for his superb suggestions for revision and expansion, for his

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always prompt and courteous correspondence, and for his commitment to the topic of gender and the Holocaust. We thank also the anonymous external readers and the board reader who provided valuable advice through the manuscript review process. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to Adela Garcia, manuscript editor, for her careful attention to our work. Elizabeth would like to express particular gratitude to Clint, who brings coffee, asks hard questions, and bears absences and five a.m. wake-ups. Thanks also to Janine Genelin and Jean Heidcamp for their clerical support at several stages. The staff of the Folke Bernadotte Library at Gustavus Adolphus College has been unfailingly helpful. President Axel Steuer provided a sabbatical that afforded time for significant work on the manuscript. During that sabbatical, an appointment as visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota furnished space and access to a research collection. Special thanks also to Dr. Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, for an invitation to teach a course on gender and the Holocaust in the fall of 2000. Myrna extends deepest thanks to Neal for his unwavering support from the start, decades ago, and tireless patience, good humor, and loving energetic criticism. No small measure of gratitude goes to Liz, David, Eve, and Michel for their willingness to listen to my ideas and wait for my undivided attention. My colleagues—faculty, administrators, and staff— at Montgomery College and its foundation deserve my appreciation for their very generous support and constant encouragement. Finally, special thanks to my friends in the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium at Wroxton College whose questions and responses sharpened my thinking and strengthened my confidence in this work.

INTRODUCTION Experience and Expression: Women and the Holocaust Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg

“If you are sisterless, you do not have the pressure, the

absolute responsibility to end the day alive.” 1 Isabella Leitner’s eloquent declaration provides a clue for contemporary scholars who undertake a gendered study of the Holocaust. In her provocative memoir, Leitner reveals the consciousness of women during the Holocaust to nurture and be nurtured by other women—natural or surrogate sisters, mothers, or daughters. In the poetic narrative None of Us Will Return, Charlotte Delbo also acknowledges the women prisoners’ mutual dependence. She describes her sister prisoners trying to keep warm during roll call in Birkenau: “Each places her hands under the arms of the one in front of her. Since they cannot do it in the first row, we rotate. Back to chests, we stand pressed against each other, yet, as we establish a single circulatory system, we remain frozen through and through. . . . When they [SS women officers] have passed by, each one of us places her hands back in another’s armpits.” Later, when Delbo is forced to dig a ditch alone, separated from her friends, she despairs: “Now that they have left I am desperate. I cannot believe I will ever return when I am alone. . . . No one believes she will return when she is alone.” 2 In both physical and emotional ways, the women need one another to survive. In a related way, Giuliana Tedeschi uses knitting, a traditionally female activity, as a metaphor to describe the importance of bonding as a factor in survival: “Prison life is like a piece of knitting whose stitches are strong as long as they remain woven together; but if the woolen strand breaks, the invisible stitch that comes undone slips off among the others and is lost.” 3 Here Tedeschi demonstrates gender difference not only as a difference of experience, as Leitner and Delbo

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explain, but also as a difference in the expressions of that experience. That is, Tedeschi points out that even as women experienced imprisonment differently than men, they also remembered the experience differently and expressed their memories by evoking experiences that are traditionally gendered. Her choice of metaphor strongly suggests that being female influenced behavior as well as reflection about behavior before, during, and after the Holocaust. That is, gender-based experience before the rise of Hitler conspicuously shaped women’s responses to the Holocaust; moreover, gender-based experience influenced the way women survivors interpreted and transmitted their experiences.

Scope and Aim of This Study Experience and Expression grew out of the conviction that the insights expressed by Leitner, Tedeschi, and other survivors about being female during the Nazi period are significant and demand scholarly investigation. We have undertaken this task in a variety of ways: by including essays which study particular women, particular texts, particular gender-based roles, and ethnically defined groups of women. We have also included essays on post-Holocaust representations of women as well as new efforts at theorizing gender in the context of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Additionally, this introduction provides a historiography of gendered approaches to the Holocaust to date. With such content, we transgress some of the givens and the constructs of the field of Holocaust Studies. First, as a scholarly field now more than twenty-five years old, Holocaust Studies is firmly rooted in the discipline of history. At a major conference held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in December 1999, with the goal of looking at future directions for the field in the approaching millennium, participants discussed the fact that while historians continue to have hegemony in Holocaust Studies, literature, philosophy, and religion are areas of rapid development; participants also commented on the curious lack of scholarly work on the Holocaust in the social sciences, especially sociology. Given the profound significance of the Holocaust for the future of humanity and for moral and ethical issues, historical understanding and accuracy is obviously critically important. However, we believe that the expansion of the field into interdisciplinary studies is a significant and welcome evo-

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lution and one that will ineluctably yield new insights and enriched understanding. This volume contributes to such an expansion. Another area of controversy—the one between scholars who “do history” and those who “do theory”—is a fervently and hotly contested one in Holocaust Studies, and it surfaces at virtually every Holocaust conference. Those who study representation in the field fall somewhere in the middle of the split, but the belief continues on the part of many— especially historians—that such studies are and must remain subordinate to the study of what “really happened.” Although historians increasingly recognize their own work as a construct, a representation, the sacral nature of the history of the Holocaust has served as a barrier to recognition of this “linguistic turn” in the field. Indeed, as Pascale Bos points out in her essay, until recently the memoirs of survivors were read and used as unalloyed truth, with little recognition of the impact of the shaping (or lapsing) of memory. In any event, we believe that the effort to theorize gender and the Holocaust, and to explore representations of women’s experiences, is rooted in history and is a central goal of this anthology. Yet another highly sensitive area in Holocaust Studies is the place of the non-Jewish victim. The fate of Europe’s Jewish population at the hands of the Nazis has been the central focus of the field since its inception. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been paid to the fate of the Roma and Sinti, the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally and physically disabled, the slave laborers, those involved in various non-Jewish resistance groups, and others. 4 This broadened perspective is reflected in our table of contents and raises yet another issue: the charged nature of the word Holocaust and the current debate over its definition. 5 We wish to ally ourselves with those who reserve the term for Jewish victims and survivors. Fraught though it has become with issues of misplaced martyrdom as well as dilution to designate an uneven battle, Holocaust is nevertheless a well-recognized word that means the destruction of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. Thus, our effort in this anthology has been to create an interdisciplinary set of original essays which address the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish women; to include studies of particular women who, to date, have been little studied in English language publications, with attention to the roles (both helpful and harmful) of German nurses, the experiences of Roma and Sinti women, and the fate of non-Jewish female forced labors; and to suggest innovative theoretical approaches to the study of gender and the Holocaust.

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We have entitled the anthology Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust to reflect the inclusion of non-Jews and, in so doing, indicate the broader boundaries of Hitler’s war. We also intend to signal that we have chosen an emphasis on the social construction of women and on women’s construction of their own memories and experiences through various forms of representation. “There is no hierarchy of oppression,” said the African American lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, and indeed we do not wish to measure or compare suffering or victimhood. Joan Ringelheim’s simple eloquent statement that “oppression does not make people better; oppression makes people oppressed” 6 puts to rest the valorization of oppression, regardless of its gendered, cultural, or political causes and effects. By the same token, we do not wish to engage in essentialist sorting, attributing to one gender immutable essences not found in the other. Anyone who has done work in Holocaust Studies knows the risks of sweeping generalization, of claims of “always” or “never.” Instead, we have sought contributors who could enhance our understanding of difference, as this is the best route to enhancing our understanding of that most compelling and intractable topic, the Holocaust. As Myrna Goldenberg has stated elsewhere: We study each concentration camp as a separate entity because each differed from the next; we track the experiences of Jews according to their country of origin. . . . We examine the behavior and attitudes of religious and secular Jews, of urban and rural Jews, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, and of Jews and non-Jews. In the same way, we are obligated to examine, separately, the lives of women and of men to determine the differences and the similarities in the way they were treated as well as in the way they responded. 7

We believe the essays in this volume make a substantial contribution to this goal. What our volume does not intend or attempt to do is provide a comprehensive overview of the history of women in the Holocaust. Such a volume remains to be written and would provide substantial material from which to gain a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of this period. But several strong steps toward such a history have already been taken, and these texts are delineated below. We are pleased to include here, with the permission of its creators, Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, the excellent chronology which appeared in their 1993 Different Voices. It

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will provide a helpful reference to events, dates, and women during the period 1933–1946 for our readers.

Historiography of Gendered Approaches to the Holocaust In the early 1980s, the subject of women and the Holocaust attracted those feminist scholars, primarily but not exclusively scholars of German history and culture, whose intellectual interests led them to investigate the daily lives of women during the Holocaust. The transformation of the subject from an intellectual inquiry into a scholarly area of research in both feminist and Holocaust Studies began in 1983, when Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz convened a two-day conference on women and the Holocaust. That the time was ripe for such a conference is demonstrated by the fact that it drew about 400 women each day. Ringelheim’s rationale was direct and clear: we need to study the lives of women because they comprised approximately half the Jewish population that experienced the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews. 8 As Alice Eckardt, professor of religion at Lehigh University and chair of the first conference session stated, the mission of the conference was, first of all, to add to the general knowledge about both the Holocaust and women’s experiences during the period; and, second, to identify and understand the response of Jewish women to this catastrophe, their coping strategies, if any, and their specific vulnerabilities as women. Rather than generalize from the male experience, Ringelheim and other feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines challenged the received body of knowledge about the Holocaust, which, they quickly discovered, was as male-centered as the body of knowledge in history and other subjects and disciplines. Thus, in the United States, by focusing on recovering the narratives of Jewish women in ghettos, camps, and in hiding, the study of women and the Holocaust followed the course of “traditional” feminist scholarship. The 1983 conference was extraordinary in several ways. Among the hundreds of participants and attendees were survivors, scholars, and interested people who came to learn and perhaps to try to begin to understand what happened in those terrible twelve years. The dialogue that ensued crossed the boundaries of “survivorship,” age, profession, and class. Further, the conference set the parameters for the study of Jewish women in the Holocaust for the next several decades: women’s daily lives, their particular vulnerabilities, and their ways of succumbing

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to or coping with Nazi oppression. In Ringelheim’s words, “What was it that women did to get through the day?” From the first, scholarship and testimony focused on women as victims, or more precisely as intended victims, although a small but emerging body of literature dealt with the experiences of women who actively fought Nazi oppression individually, and, less often, as acknowledged but lesser members of resistance groups. 9 Women as victims and as resistance fighters are topics that still inform the research on women in the Holocaust, for new information is uncovered continuously, particularly from the documents that the Russians captured in 1944 and 1945, which were not shared with the West until after the end of the cold war in 1989. The 1983 conference is the wellspring that shaped the field and established the parameters, almost presciently. It uncovered the seeds of resentment evoked by a gendered study, for such an approach inevitably invites comparison and then judgment. Did men or women have a harder time? Did men or women cope better and have more resources? Who was stronger? And so on. In raising such questions, the conference unwittingly anticipated the controversy centered in essentialism, which remains one of the current scholarly challenges not only to the subject of women and the Holocaust but also to feminist theory itself. In 1983 survivors and a relatively small group of feminist scholars, rather than journalists and academics as was the case in the 1990s, questioned the legitimacy of a gendered perspective. Moreover, while the conference unearthed the difficulties that some women survivors have in speaking about their experiences from a woman’s perspective, the introduction of the subject of lesbians generated tensions that reflected moral judgments against certain victims. 10 Homophobic reactions surfaced then and persist today, sometimes expressed by aggregating lesbians with homosexual men, as if the Nazis proscribed both male and female homosexuality. The reluctance to discuss lesbians, instances of indifference, or even cruelty among the women in ghettos and camps—in other words, the unwillingness to demythologize Jewish women’s behavior—foreshadowed the later sacralization of the Holocaust and the tensions between scholarly and experiential interpretations. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these tensions escalated into debates among the academic disciplines and between theoretical and content-based approaches. Vera Laska, a survivor, was motivated by a passion to inform the public about the “role of women in the cataclysm of World War II.” When she was liberated in April 1945, Laska faced GIs who were “surprised to hear

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that women had also been in concentration camps, and equally incredulous to find out that women were also in the resistance, facing the same dangers, torture, execution or gas chambers as men.” Laska calls herself “not an interpreter, or a psychologist, or a philosopher” but a “gatherer of memories.” 11 Her book, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, a trailblazer in this field, was published by Greenwood Press in its Women’s Studies, not its Holocaust Studies, series. Laska recovered unknown and unheard voices and established—as fact—the bravery, resourcefulness, and endurance of Jewish and nonJewish women in resistance groups and concentration camps. She also introduced the subject of lesbianism or same sex relationships. While her language is not quite neutral, neither is it as pejorative as that of some writers and memoirists. In addition, she provides a bibliography that includes many listings of women’s memoirs, enumerating the handful of unique memoirs published from 1945 to 1948. 12 Another collection, Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiographies Since 1933—a compilation of unpublished personal narratives written by Jewish women who fled Nazi Germany after 1933—is often overlooked. Andreas Lixl-Purcell, the editor, was driven to his research by his conviction that the Nazi regime used Jewish women as instruments to carry out their policies: After the pogrom [Kristallnacht], married women were singled out and targeted as mediators of Nazi policies in order to enforce the departure of all Jews from Germany. Within days . . . the wives of prisoners were informed that their husbands would not be released from the camps unless they could produce emigration papers. The subsequent efforts of these women to obtain valid exit visas saved a large number of men and led to a mass exodus of married couples from Germany shortly before the outbreak of the war. 13

On the other hand, we know that from 1933 to 1939 more Jewish men left Germany than women, leaving a ratio of 136 Jewish women to every 100 Jewish men. 14 That gender was a complex and often subtle issue in Nazi Germany is made very clear in Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann’s discussion of life immediately after Kristallnacht: The Jewish women in my environment allowed and encouraged their male partners, fathers of their children, to leave the country—especially after the 11–10–38 incarceration—when exit visas and booked pas-

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German Jewish women were isolated and thus later became more vulnerable to deportation than men. The first explicitly feminist scholarly book on women in Nazi Germany—in contrast to the narrower topic of women and the Holocaust— was When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, edited by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan. They “intended the book as a contribution to the debate on how feminists and the left—and leftist feminists in particular—could respond to the New Right’s assault on women’s reproductive rights.” These scholars investigated the subject of Jewish and non-Jewish women and Nazi Germany by limiting their research geographically. The editors were stimulated by a desire to alert feminists and leftists to the similarities between the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan and the rise of fascism under Hitler, “where those issues [the politics of reproduction and family values] were dramatically, unequivocally, and in the end horrifically decided.” They wove feminist theory and historical analysis, thereby explicitly expressing the tensions inherent in women’s “negotiation of the double burden . . . [of] home and workplace” and the delicate relationship of the state to its individual citizens—in this case, women. They examined official government policy that “celebrated separate spheres and differences between the sexes, glorified motherhood and women’s bodies,” and thus controlled women’s and families’ lives in service to the state. 16 The authors contextualized the lives of both Jewish and non-Jewish women in Weimar and Nazi Germany by characterizing these eras as virtually obsessed by biological interpretations of citizenry. Nevertheless, the authors emphasize, Jewishness, not gender, destined Jewish women for death although gender shaped the ways in which they were treated before they died—or survived. Chapters analyzing the influence of gender on the daily family and work lives of non-Jewish German women comprise the bulk of their book; only two chapters deal directly and exclusively with German Jewish women. Recent books on women and fascism address the subtle complexities of state policy toward all women, irrespective of religion or race, in an era of nationalism, militarism, and technology. 17 Social histories of the Nazi era examine the lives of non-Jewish women and the impact of

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fascism on daily life, especially as political policy shaped women’s participation in the economy. Richard Grunberger points out the subtle effects of “material and technical change” and the erosion of women’s real status: “the persistence of the ‘Gretchen image’ of womanhood in Germany: while more and more women lived physically in the shadow of sewing (and other) machines, they were mentally still regarded as plying the spinning wheel.” 18 The effects of World War I—namely, “drastic economic deterioration [which] made the three K’s Kinder, Kirche, Küche . . . attractive”—helped Hitler convince women that “inequality between the sexes [was] as immutable as that between the races. . . . Anti-feminism served as a non-lethal variant of antisemitism.” 19 As a case in point, in 1936, Gertrud Scholz-Klink, Reich Leader of the German Women, delivered a tirade against Bolshevism and its exploitation of women. Hitler exhorted the same audience to “stand by the movement steadfastly” with all their heart and “be loyal to me for ever” and consider, just as he did, that German children belonged “just as much to their mothers as to me.” 20 Wartime necessities eventually led to official accommodations of women’s roles, and the home expanded to include the Third Reich, but women, regardless of their professional roles, were relegated to women’s spheres. Their influence diminished and their major role became clearly a biological, in contrast to a sexual, one. 21 In fact, their participation in the labor force was a source of tensions among Nazi bureaucrats. The ideal of the home-centered woman had a practical and a threatening impact on the building of a wartime labor force. Thus, the study of women and the Holocaust must be expanded to include the role of women as perpetrators—whether actively as guards, nurses, and other functionaries—or as passive bystanders and the range of behavior between these two extremes. From ancient times until the twentieth century, which witnessed the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge, instances of women as perpetrators are rare, and even in these two modern genocides, women perpetrators were subordinate to their male superiors. However, as Roger Smith explains, although patriarchy and its sexist underpinning reinforce the role of women as victims, the “image of woman as the provider of life and man as the taker of life has been shattered by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.” 22 Alison Owings’s remarkable book about unremarkable German women during the Nazi era reveals the persistence among them of a deep-seated reverence for Hitler—“a father figure for a generation that had lost its own fathers in World War I”—as well as their discomfort or embarrassment in recalling Nazi treatment of Jews while simultaneously condemning Jews as having

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brought their troubles on themselves, their remembered fear of dissent as a justification of their passivity, and their susceptibility to Goebbels’ ubiquitous propaganda. Owings is saddened that German women, represented by those she interviewed, “faced an enormous test of morality and courage and intelligence, and for the most part failed it.” 23 In 1988, Claudia Koonz, also a historian of modern Germany, examined women’s daily lives through both historical and feminist lenses, categorizing women primarily by religion and moral resistance rather than by chronology. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics follows the scholarly standards set by her predecessors. In her chapter on Jewish women, Koonz suggests that Jewish women, while ignored by Nazi thugs and virtually safe from physical attack until 1941, felt the sting of antisemitism before their husbands and fathers because “gossip, schoolchildren’s insults, neighbors’ indifference, friends’ aloofness, community excommunication—all made life wretched for Jewish women as their husbands’ earnings began to diminish.” Koonz recounts the energy and resourcefulness of Jewish women who tried to emigrate; their preferred reading, she says, quoting a German Jewish émigré, was “the Manhattan phone book. We spent many hours, days looking for Jewish-sounding names and writing letters. It was our only chance. And many, many answered back. But not enough.” 24 In the face of antisemitism, German Christian women’s groups were silent and passive, unsupportive of Jewish women’s groups with whom they had worked before the Nazi rise to power. 25 This apparent inconsistency between moral and political responsibility is also evident in the interviews of the wives of the leaders of the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler. Most of the eleven widows reveal a belated awareness of the effects of Nazi antisemitism. Their attention was fixed on Hitler’s attack on religious and political freedom; only in reflection, decades later, do they acknowledge their failure to reach out to Jewish women. 26 Feminist German scholars contributed to Elaine Martin’s Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, which was based on a 1987 conference on German literature about the Nazi era. This book approaches the relationship of non-Jewish German women to Nazism through analyses of autobiographies, poetry, short stories, and novels written by German feminists. The contributors face the difficult issues of German guilt and responsibility and the more complex matter of honest writing about such culpability, of the connections between fascism and sexuality and fascism to German myth, and of the persistence of fascism into the twenty-first century. 27 In a valuable histori-

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ographical essay, Ann Taylor Allen examines the assumptions of modernity that ignored gender and the practical implications of Nazi policy on German women’s lives and the ways in which German women interpreted their moral responsibility. 28 Marion Kaplan studied the lives of German Jews who did not leave Germany in 1933. In Between Dignity and Despair, she traces the life of the German Jew who remained after 1933: “Well before the physical death of German Jews, the German racial community;— the man and woman on the street, the real ‘ordinary Germans’— made Jews suffer social death every day. This social death was the prerequisite for deportation and genocide.” Examining women’s daily lives through feminist eyes, Kaplan argues that the two-fifths of German Jewry that remained after November 1938 were neither passive nor patriotic. They were trapped and tried to adapt to the brutality they faced. Women carried the bulk of this burden as they maintained, insofar as it was possible, the normality of everyday life, including caring for the young and the old, both of whom suffered disproportionately under the Nazis. Furthermore, both Nazi policy toward the Jews and Jewish reactions to that policy differed by gender and in response to the progressive stages of Nazi oppression. 29 As noted above, historical approaches have dominated Holocaust Studies, including those limited to women. Marking a shift, Marlene Heinemann’s Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (1986) focuses on literary texts. Her title echoes When Biology Became Destiny, and she is the first to use both feminist and literary theory in analyzing theme, characterization, and intimate relations in Holocaust memoirs and fiction. Like Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan’s work, Heinemann’s holds Holocaust memoirs and novels to high standards of literary criteria and analysis. She identifies recurrent gender specific themes in women’s memoirs and novels, namely, menstruation, rape and the fear of it, verbal and physical sexual abuse and humiliation, and, of course, childbirth. In a groundbreaking discussion, Heinemann explores gender and memory, particularly as women recall the “value of friendship and relationships in the camps much more than men.” These memories and autobiographical stories emphasize emotional ties built on repeated instances of mutual help and sustained conversation, reflecting less anger and depression than those authored by men. 30 Related subjects surface between sessions at Holocaust conferences: the relative value of early and later written memoirs, between written memoirs and oral histories, and—probably most controversial of all— between memoirs, however literary, and fiction. The last point is com-

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plicated by the propensity of women survivors to write memoirs rather than structured novels. However, most of the controversy arises from claims made for the value of Holocaust fiction as a reliable source of historical information. As a subject, women and the Holocaust poses a challenge to traditional definitions of heroism and resistance. One of the rare Sonderkommando manuscripts, found in the ashes of the crematoria shortly after liberation, relates the words of an eight-year-old girl who protected her younger brother as they stood in the anteroom of the gas chamber. Her words are sobering and force us to rethink the definition of a hero. She shouted at the Sonderkommando who was ordered to help her undress her brother and thus speed up the killing process: “Go away, you Jewish murderer! Don’t put your hand covered in Jewish blood on my sweet brother. I am his good mother now, and he will die in my arms.” 31 Resistance traditionally denotes two extremes: the use of weapons and the strategy of passivity. Lenore Weitzman argues that resistance in the Holocaust included “passing” or living on the Aryan side, which was a safer strategy for Jewish women than for Jewish men, as well as rescue activities, generally of children. She challenges the prevailing practice of defining resistance in terms of organized, armed, male-based activities. Many women, she found, were engaged in individual acts of rescue, which were most often secretly executed and not publicized after the war. 32 The category of resistance must also be expanded to include the Rosenstrasse Frauen, the non-Jewish women who in February 1943 gathered in front of 2 Rosenstrasse to demand the return of their Jewish husbands who were picked up as part of Goebbel’s obsession to make Berlin Judenfrei. Their one-week demonstration attracted thousands of others, and their husbands were returned—even those who had already been deported to Auschwitz. 33 If we encourage the development of a society infused with the ethic of caring, despite the ubiquity of the urge to power, are we not compelled to redefine the concepts of heroism and resistance? Can we classify the Rosenstrasse Frauen, Rose Meth and the other women who provided the powder to fuel the October 7, 1944, revolt in Birkenau, and Mala Zimetbaum, who manipulated the camp system to help women in Birkenau survive, as anything less than heroic? Their names have begun to be included in the pantheon of Holocaust heroes and resisters, but they have not yet had the recognition that Warsaw ghetto fighters and other “traditional” resisters have. In retrospect, scholarly books about women and the Holocaust generally fall into two categories. In the first category are anthologies of

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memoirs or oral histories compiled by researchers whose purpose is largely the recovery of narratives/women’s lives within a thematic pattern. For the most part, the editors of these anthologies resist evaluation of the memoirs, although clearly the selection of texts proves the editors’ hypotheses. Works in this category include those of Laska, Shelley, LixlPurcell, Gurewitsch, Ritvo and Plotkin, and Miller. 34 The second category emerged largely in the middle and late 90s, which saw an outburst of feminist interpretation of women’s Holocaust experience, both in anthologies and individually authored works that have comprised the body of scholarly interpretation on the subject of women and the Holocaust. 35 The first and still influential book in this group is Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, which took first “steps to repair” the neglect of women. 36 If it can be said that a book legitimizes a field, then Different Voices established the academic study of women and the Holocaust and set the boundaries of such courses. Organized in three parts, it includes a section on personal narrative, a section on historical interpretation, and a final section on poetic and philosophical reflection. Rittner and Roth’s brilliant prologue and epilogue and Joan Ringelheim’s piercing essay are analytical classics. Rittner and Roth’s woman-centered chronology (reprinted here following the introduction) is the keystone of further study. Half a decade later, Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman edited Women in the Holocaust, a chronologically organized anthology of original essays by scholar and survivor contributors that is more social science than humanities; the focus of this book is almost exclusively the experiences of Jewish women during and immediately before and after the Holocaust. The dominant approach in Ofer and Weitzman is historical, and many of its essays contextualize first-person accounts in memoirs and oral histories. This volume has sold extremely well, attracting a large number of positive reviews that reflect the current status and acceptance of gendered studies of the Holocaust. Shelley Baranowski describes the value of the anthology thus: “Women in the Holocaust emphasizes the agency of Jewish women that Holocaust narratives, most of them produced by male survivors, have underplayed. . . . [I]n highlighting the gender-specific aspects of Nazi persecution on the one hand and the gendered upbringing of Jewish women on the other, [the essays] elevate the complexity of women’s lives during the Holocaust above obvious observations as to their victimization.” 37 A dissenting voice was that of Gabriel Schoenfeld, in his June 1998 essay in Commentary, adapted to appear in the Wall Street Journal, where he describes feminist scholarship

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on the Holocaust as “serving the purposes of consciousness raising.” Letters to the editor of the Journal by some of the scholars whom he had impugned, including Ofer and Weitzman, took issue with Schoenfeld’s political attack on their work. Esther Fuchs’s Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation is also an anthology of essays, loosely structured to include such varied topics as lesbians, Edith Stein, Israeli daughters of survivors, and the poet Nelly Sachs, as well as excerpts from testimony and two book reviews. Judith Baumel’s Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust is a collection of her own writings, most of which have been previously published; together with Bonnie Gurewitsch’s collection of personal narratives, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women who Survived the Holocaust, Baumel’s book constitutes the only scholarly work available in English on Orthodox Jewish women’s experiences. 38 Baumel’s introductory chapters contain useful summaries of scholarly work done thus far on the topic of women and the Holocaust; she also traces her own and others’ work on family and children during this period. Lillian Kremer’s Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination is a pioneering study of fiction written in English about women’s experiences by Ilona Karmel, Elzbieta Ettinger, Hana Demetz, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, and Norma Rosen. In Love Carried Me Home, Joy Erlichman Miller brings a psychoanalytic interpretation to her review of the narratives of sixteen female survivors, concluding what historians, literary critics, and even survivors have repeatedly stated: “Reestablishing a new community or family by bonding with other women assisted the surviving prisoners in creating a reason to live.” 39 This body of work parallels the historiography of women’s studies. That is, the first goal is to recover the past and evaluate the impact of new knowledge on the discipline. Theoretical works can then follow. Although the publication rate of books on women and the Holocaust suggests an eruption rather than an evolution (five in 1993 and another five in 1998), it is absurd to consider that we have gathered the bulk of what there is to know. In fact, it may be argued that the study of women and the Holocaust encouraged the emergence, and most probably the establishment, of the even broader field of gender and genocide. Helen Fein’s discussion of gender and genocide draws upon historical, political, and sociological sources to differentiate among genocide goals, methods, and victims. Although she types the Holocaust as an attempt at total, albeit “gender-neutral,” genocide—primarily because Nazism, rooted in racist ideology, precluded social interaction as well as phys-

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ical intercourse with the victims 40—we cannot ignore the scholarship that paradoxically supports and challenges her assertion. It is precisely the examination of gender in her research on comparative genocide that leads her to conclude that ideology was far more significant than sexism in the attempt to annihilate the Jews, a conclusion in which virtually all serious scholars concur. Each of these recent books provides a piece of the mosaic yet to be finished which will help contemporary readers and scholars understand the significance of gender in the Holocaust.

Controversies and Backlash In his 2001 volume aptly entitled Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, one of the most respected historians of the Shoah, revisits a number of the thorniest issues in the field, as a sampling of his chapter titles reveals: “Is the Holocaust Explicable?” “Comparisons with Other Genocides,” and “Jewish Resistance: Myth or Reality?” Yet another chapter is entitled “The Problem of Gender: The Case of Gisi Fleischmann,” and here Bauer puts to rest, in his opening paragraph, the “problem” of gender. After acknowledging that the fate of Jewish women has to date “just barely been touched upon” by scholars, Bauer asserts: “And if all human experience has a gender-related agenda, as women’s studies tells us, the Holocaust can be no exception. Indeed, it seems to me,” he continues, “that the problems facing women as women and men as men have a special poignancy in an extreme situation such as the Holocaust.” 41 Bauer goes on to recount the life of this amazing woman, Gisi Fleischmann, concluding that the “Holocaust engendered a special fate for Jewish women . . [which] we should investigate.” 42 Although Bauer’s chapter is more awe than analysis and his sources do not suggest a familiarity with the body of feminist scholarship and theory, his affirmation of gendered approaches to the Shoah is a significant validation. By now, arguments that validate or stimulate gendered studies of the Holocaust far outweigh, in both substance and quantity, those proffered by critics and skeptics. 43 Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that critics and skeptics do remain. We would like to briefly touch upon three who have raised concerns about such an approach. Ofer and Weitzman include two essays in their anthology, described above, which take issue with the critical stance of their volume. Gisela Bock, for

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example, insists that similarities rather than differences between men and women perpetrators and victims should be our research focus, yet “the fact that for the Nazis race as a political category was more crucial than sex should not blind us to the importance of gender as a historical category.” 44 Lawrence Langer contests a gendered approach pragmatically; i.e., gender differences, including the sporadic instances of “mutual support among women in the camps,” were insignificant in the larger context of ubiquitous suffering and mass death. 45 He rejects notions of “comparative endurance” as unworthy of the victims and survivors. 46 But Langer seems to have missed the point. As evidence that such an approach is useless, he quotes at length from an oral history of a woman who gave birth in Auschwitz; he concludes: “Indeed, in some instances, women were forced to reject what they regarded as one of their natural roles, as a result of their ordeals in the camps.” 47 But that is exactly the point of gendered analysis: not solely a focus on traditional notions of womanhood, but a perceptive articulation of how those roles have been constructed under various circumstances. Langer’s conclusion— “the sooner we abandon this design [the effort to find a hierarchy based on gender], the quicker we will learn to face such chaos with unshielded eyes” 48—is consistent with the thrust of all his later writings: that indeed the Shoah is inexplicable and will not yield to analysis. Cynthia Ozick, author of the profoundly sad novel The Shawl, as well as a number of other fictional and nonfictional treatments of the Holocaust, has on occasion been caustic in her critique of feminist stances. In a letter to Joan Ringelheim, she objected to the 1983 conference on women and the Holocaust on the grounds that a focus on women “leads us further down the road of eradicating Jews from history” because it detracts from the centrality of the Nazi goal to eradicate all Jews [emphasis added]. Ozick feels strongly that a gendered approach trivializes the suffering of all Jews at the hands of the Nazis. “The Holocaust happened to victims who were not seen as men, women, or children, but as Jews.” 49 These critics notwithstanding, it is clear that gendered perspectives are necessary for a balanced and therefore more truthful study of the Holocaust because “while Nazi policy in regard to the destruction of its enemies was not gender specific, Nazi practice was.” 50 More broadly, it is necessary to bring gendered perspectives to bear on the study of genocide because “women have seldom participated directly in genocide . . . ; women have been victimized in ways different from men . . . ; and the consequences of genocide . . . have often been different as well.” 51

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Conclusion Responding to these necessities, the essays in this book break new ground and expand our knowledge about women and the Holocaust. Moreover, by doing so they stimulate a host of research questions that are particularly urgent because of the aging of both the survivors and perpetrators. For example, we need to recover and interpret documents on women’s smaller and lesser known camps, such as Penig, and to fill in other gaps in knowledge. Although we can surmise that the retreating Nazis burned or otherwise destroyed such condemning records, we need to interview doctors and nurses who assisted in the murders. We need to interview survivors and, if possible, examine their psychological and medical records after liberation. To understand more about male and female bonding patterns, it is important to interview pairs of parents and children and other family members who survived or hid together; it is perhaps more important to interview the members of surrogate families with an eye toward motivations for bonding. Although many feminist Holocaust survivors have demonstrated the shared characteristics and recurrent motifs in women’s works, there have been few comparative studies by gender—for example, of Livia Bitton Jackson and her mother compared to Elie Wiesel and his father, all four of whom were religious Hungarians when the Nazis deported them. As Sybil Milton advised, we need to learn more about the lives of Roma and Sinti women before we can draw reasonable conclusions about them. Also in the vein of recovery of information, we have little systematic knowledge of childbearing in the various camps; what we know is fragmentary and primarily anecdotal. Additionally, in the same way that has been achieved for Germany, there is a need to synthesize the information about Jewish and non-Jewish women by nationality. For this information and for more knowledge of women perpetrators, we might look at the largely untapped source of information that lies in the sealed and all but forgotten boxes of depositions taken in preparation of the trials of Nazi functionaries, stored as War Crimes, Cases Not Tried, Records of the US Army Commands, National Archives. The cases were shelved in 1947 and 1948 when cold war self-interest led Americans to ally with West Germany and even befriend its formerly Nazi scientists. We need to convene German speaking feminist scholars with scholars who work in English and Hebrew as well as feminist scholars from a variety of countries so that comparative studies can reflect broad and even competing interests and insights.

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Scholars have begun to ask the question, “Is memory gendered?” and to examine the content, language, and metaphor of male and female narratives. Are the differences they have found so far merely the result of biology? That is, is memory—including imagination, interpretation, organization of great and small details—shaped by biological rhythms and experiences? How will these new insights, coupled with postmodern theory and principles, illuminate our understanding of women’s Holocaust narratives? In full recognition of the trailblazing work that precedes it, we believe that Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust provides an original contribution to the field. It differs from its predecessors in two distinct ways. First, it is more interdisciplinary and analytical, highlighting literary, aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, and historical interpretations informed by feminist theory. Second, with the exception of Different Voices—which includes five discussions of non-Jewish women out of a total of twenty-six chapters—and unlike other extant anthologies— which for the most part are dedicated to a narrowly focused theme— fully one-third of the essays here are devoted to the lives of non-Jewish women: Roma and Sinti, Nazi nurses, Polish forced laborers, and French resisters. Thus, Experience and Expression comprises a substantial groundwork for continuing the crucial work of dialogue with the survivors, of research and of writing in the service of illuminating the experiences, the memories, and the expressions of Jewish and non-Jewish women in the Holocaust.

NOTES 1. Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Dell, 1978), 44. 2. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 63, 66, 103. 3. Giuliana Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 124. 4. See, for example, Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York University Press, 1990); Hester Baer and Elizabeth R. Baer, eds., The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), especially the introduction; Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle:

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The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Henry Holt, 1986); Gad Beck, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 5. See, especially, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 45–52. 6. Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 387. 7. Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 152. 8. Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz, eds., Proceedings of the Conference on Women Surviving the Holocaust (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983). 9. See, for example, Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (1948; NY: Holocaust Library, 1979); Vera Laska, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, Contributions in Women’s Studies, no. 37 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983). 10. Electronic correspondence between Joan Ringelheim and Myrna Goldenberg, June 19, 1999. 11. Laska, Women in the Resistance, 3. 12. Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary by Mary Berg (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945); Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (1947; New York: Granada, 1972); Gisela Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (1948; Salem, NH: Ayer, 1984); Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz (Paris: Nagel, 1949; excerpted in Rittner and Roth, eds., Different Voices). 13. Andreas Lixl-Purcell, Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiographies since 1933 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 3. 14. Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 50. 15. Electronic correspondence from Charlotte G. Opfermann to the Holocaust listserve, [email protected], February 14, 1999. 16. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), xi–xiv. 17. See, for example, Martin Durham, Women and Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Sybil Oldfield, Women against the Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900–1989 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 18. Richard Grunberger, The Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 251. 19. Ibid., 252–53.

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20. “The Task of the Woman of Today” (Conference of Women at the Reich Party Rally of Honour, 1936, issued by the Deutsches Frauenwerk, trans. unknown). 21. Grunberger, Twelve-Year Reich, 261–62. 22. Roger W. Smith, “Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8:3 (Winter 1994): 315–34 and, in particular, 329. 23. Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 474. See also a fascinating study of right-wing women in the US during World War II: Glen Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22. 24. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), 375. 25. For further analysis of the role of women in Christian resistance, see Baer and Baer, eds., Blessed Abyss, a memoir by Nanda Herbermann, who was arrested in 1941 for her involvement with antifascist clergy in Münster. 26. Dorothee Von Meding, Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997). 27. Elaine Martin, ed., Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). 28. Ann Taylor Allen, “The Holocaust and the Modernization of Gender: A Historiographical Essay,” Central European History 30 (1997): 349–64. 29. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); see esp. 5 and 235–36. 30. Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), esp. 110. 31. Ber Mark, ed., The Scrolls of Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985), 208. 32. Lenore Weitzman, “Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing, and the Nature of Resistance,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 216–18. 33. Nathan Stolzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 34. See Laska, Women in the Resistance, and Lixl-Purcell, Women of Exile; see also Lore Shelley, ed., Auschwitz: The Nazi Civilization: Twenty-Three Women Prisoners’ Accounts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992); Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, and Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Roger Ritvo and Diane Plotkin, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998); and Joy Erlichman Miller, Love Carried Me Home: Women Surviving Auschwitz (Deerfield Beach, FL: Simcha Press, 2000). 35. Another growing source of information about women and the Holocaust is the Web, which is largely unjuried and only loosely moderated, if at all.

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36. Rittner and Roth, eds., Different Voices, xii. 37. Shelley Baranowski, review of Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, Historian 63:1 (Fall 2000): 203. See also the following reviews, all equally affirmative: Elizabeth R. Baer, Journal of Genocide Research 3:1 (March 2001): 127–33; Judith Baskin, Signs 27:1 (Fall 2001): 268; Ann Taylor Allen, American Historical Review 104:5 (December 1999): 1779; Lynn Rapaport, Central European History 3:3 (Summer 1999): 364–66; Mark Roseman, “Recent Writing on the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History 36:2 (April 2001) 361; Sandi E Cooper, “ ‘Managing’ Women in War and Peace,” International History Review 20:4 (1998): 904–19; Lawrence D. Stokes, Dalhousie Review 77:3 (Autumn 1997): 434–35; Joan Wolf, American Journal of Sociology 105:1 (July 1999): 296. 38. Jeshoshua and Anna Eibeschitz, Women in the Holocaust, 2 vols. (Brooklyn, NY: Remember, 1993, 1994), comprises undocumented and largely unedited translations of the writings of selected Orthodox Jewish women survivors. 39. Miller, Love Carried Me Home, 190. In her discussion about genderspecific coping mechanisms, Miller draws on many disciplines, especially psychotherapy and literature. 40. Helen Fein, “Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Women and Group Destiny,” Journal of Genocide Research 1:1 (March 1999): 43–63. This penetrating article cites earlier substantial studies of women and genocide, particularly the use of rape as an instrument of war; see, for example, Roger Smith, “Genocide and the Politics of Rape” (presented at the Association of Genocide Scholars conference, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1995); and Smith, “Women and Genocide.” 41. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 167. Note that an earlier version of this essay appears in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women and the Holocaust. 42. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 185. 43. See, for example, an extended attack on the academic study of the Holocaust, and on feminist approaches in particular, culminating in Gabriel Schoenfeld’s diatribe, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” in Commentary, June 1998. His attitude seems more informed by ideology than by familiarity with the work of feminist scholars in the field. 44. Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women and the Holocaust, 96. 45. Ibid., 351. 46. Ibid., 362. 47. Ibid., 356–57. 48. Ibid., 362. 49. Joan Ringelheim, “The Split Between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women and the Holocaust, 348–49. 50. Myrna Goldenberg, “ ‘From a World Beyond’: Women and the Holocaust,” review essay, Feminist Studies 22:3 (Fall 1996): 667–87, esp. 669. 51. Smith, “Women and Genocide,” 316.

CHRONOLOGY

The editors are grateful to Carol Rittner and John K. Roth whose chronology is included here. It originally appeared in their book, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, published by Paragon House in 1993, who has kindly granted permission for its use. In addition to noting major events during the Third Reich, World War II, and the Holocaust, this chronology pays attention to incidents and episodes that are particularly relevant to the subject of women and the Holocaust.

1933 January 30

March 20

May 10 May 26

July 14

July 20 October

Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. German Jews soon feel the effects of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies of segregation and forced emigration. Dachau, one of the first concentration camps in Germany, is established about ten miles northwest of Munich. The Nazis instigate public burnings of books by Jewish authors and authors opposed to Nazism. Nazi legislation restricts abortion and prohibits voluntary sterilization but also legalizes race-hygiene sterilization. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring is passed in Germany. Taking effect on January 1, 1934, it orders sterilization to prevent the propagation of lebensunwertes Leben (lives unworthy of life). Some 200,000 to 350,000 persons were sterilized by 1939. The Vatican signs a concordat with Germany. The first centralized concentration camp for women opens at Moringen.

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1934 January 26 February 24

July 3

August 2

Germany and Poland sign a ten-year nonaggression pact. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink becomes the leader (Reichsführerin) of the National Socialist Women’s Union and the German Women’s Agency. In November 1934 she receives the title Reich Women’s Führerin (Reichsfrauenführerin). Nazi Germany creates a centralized system of State Health Offices with departments for gene and race care. Laws prohibiting marriage with “alien races” and with the “defective” among the “German-blooded” are also passed. The German president, Paul von Hindenburg, dies. Subsequently Hitler combines the offices of chancellor and president and declares himself Führer of the Third Reich.

1935 September 15

November 14

The Nuremberg Laws are decreed at a Nazi party rally. They contain two especially important provisions: (1) The Reich Citizenship Law states that German citizenship belongs only to those of “German or related blood.” (2) The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibits marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and persons of “German or related blood.” The First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law specifies that “a Jew cannot be a Reich citizen.” It also enacts a classification system to define various degrees of Jewishness. One is defined as a full Jew if “descended from at least three grandparents who are fully Jewish by race,” or if “descended from two fully Jewish grandparents” and subject to other conditions specified by the ordinance. A grandparent is defined as fully Jewish if he or she “belonged to the Jewish religious community.”

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1936 July 12 October 25

The concentration camp at Sachsenhausen is established. The Rome-Berlin Axis agreement is signed.

1937 July 16

The concentration camp at Buchenwald is established.

1938 March 13

Anschluss: The Third Reich annexes Austria.

March 21

The women’s concentration camp at Moringen closes. The last women imprisoned there are sent to a newly formed women’s concentration camp at Lichtenburg, which becomes available when its male inmates and SS guard units are transferred to Buchenwald. Fifteen hundred German Jews are sent to concentration camps. Representatives from thirty-two nations attend the Evian Conference to discuss the German refugee problem, but no significant action toward solving it is taken. Jewish women in Nazi Germany are required to add “Sarah” to their names, and all Jewish men “Israel.” Munich Conference parties agree to the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia. The passports of German Jews are marked with a large red J, for Jude. Some 17,000 Polish Jews are expelled from Germany to Zbaszyn on the Polish border.

June 15 July 6–15

August 17 September 29–30 October 5 October 28

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November 15

Following the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a minor German diplomat in Paris, by a Jewish youth named Herschel Grynszpan, the Kristallnacht pogrom—instigated by Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda—erupts in Germany and Austria. Synagogues are burned, Jewish businesses looted, and Jews are beaten by Nazi thugs. Some 30,000 Jews are interned in concentration camps. Jewish children are excluded from German schools.

1939 January 30 May 15

June 29 August 23 September 1 September 3 September 17 September 21

September 28 November 20

Hitler tells the German Reichstag that a world war will mean “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Situated some fifty miles north of Berlin and near the railway station at Fürstenberg, the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women is established. On May 18, the first prisoners—867 women from Lichtenburg—are transferred there. More than four hundred Gypsy women from Austria are deported to Ravensbrück. The Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact is signed. World War II begins with Germany’s invasion of Poland. France and Great Britain declare war on Germany. Soviet troops invade Poland and occupy the eastern half of the country. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, orders the establishment of Jewish councils (Judenräte) in Poland and the concentration of Polish Jews. Germany and the USSR partition Poland. German forces occupy Warsaw. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, orders the arrest and incarceration of all Gypsy women, astrologers, and fortune-tellers in areas controlled by the Nazis.

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1940 Early January

February 8 April 9– June 22 April 27

Mid- October

The first experimental gassing of mental patients, Jewish and others, occurs in German hospitals. The order for this so-called Euthanasia Program, codenamed T4, was given by Hitler in October 1939 and backdated to September 1. More than 70,000 persons perished before protests, spurred by a few church leaders, brought about the program’s official termination on September 1, 1941. In fact, however, the operation continued until the end of World War II. The establishment of the Lodz ghetto is ordered. The ghetto is sealed on April 30. Germany conquers Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. Himmler orders the establishment of a concentration camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland. Located about forty miles west of Cracow, the camp has major railway lines nearby, a key factor in making Auschwitz the main killing center in the Nazi system. The Jews of Warsaw are ghettoized. By mid-November the ghetto is sealed.

1941 March 1

March 3

March 30 June 22

Himmler inspects Auschwitz, orders the construction of an additional camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and makes prisoners available to I. G. Farben for construction of an industrial plant near Auschwitz. Adolf Eichmann is appointed head of the Gestapo’s Section for Jewish Affairs, a position that gives him responsibility for deportation of Jews to the camps and killing centers in the East. Hitler tells his military leaders that the forthcoming war against Russia will be one of “extermination.” Germany attacks the USSR. The Einsatzgruppen engage in mass killing. All of Poland falls under German domination.

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September 3

September 29–30 October 6 October 15

October 23 November 1 Late November

December 7 December 8

December 11

Hermann Göring signs orders that give Heydrich authority to prepare “the final solution of the Jewish question.” Six hundred Soviet POWs are gassed with Zyklon B in Auschwitz as the Nazis experiment to find efficient methods of mass extermination. More than 33,000 Jews from Kiev are murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a at the Babi Yar ravine. Labor detention camp in Yugoslavia, a camp for mostly Jewish women and children, opens. The Nazis begin the deportation of 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and Czechoslovakia eastward to ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Emigration—but not deportation—of Jews from Germany is prohibited. Construction of a killing center at Belzec begins in Poland. Killing operations start on March 17, 1942. Following orders from Heydrich, the first Jews arrive at Theresienstadt, a ghetto/concentration camp established to serve as a “model Jewish settlement” suitable for Red Cross inspection. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The United States declares war on Japan. The first gassing of Jews in a killing center is carried out at Chelmno in Poland. About 320,000 Jews were killed there. The United States declares war on Germany and Italy.

1942 January 20

February 15

At Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, Heydrich presides at a meeting of top Nazi officials to coordinate the “Final Solution.” First transport of Jews killed with Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz I.

Chronology March 1

March 8

March 20

March 26

April 27 May 4

May 21

May 30

xli

Construction of the Sobibor killing center begins in Poland. Jews are first killed there in early May 1942. Russian POWs are moved from the main Auschwitz camp to become the first inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II). At Auschwitz I, a temporary fence that segregated the now-relocated Russian POWs is torn down and replaced by a concrete wall that isolates Blocks 1– 10. Camp rumors say that female prisoners will be housed in this area. In a farmhouse renovated for the purpose, gas chambers are put into operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Polish Jews from Upper Silesia are the first victims. A separate women’s camp is established at Auschwitz when 999 German female prisoners—classified as asocial, criminal, or political—arrive from Ravensbrück. Its director is SS Chief Supervisor Johanna Langefeldt. On this same date, 999 Jewish women from Slovakia are also sent to Auschwitz. This transport is the first of its kind under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, director of Section IV B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office. The new arrivals from these transports occupy the blocks in Auschwitz I that formerly housed Russian POWs. The first transport of female Polish political prisoners arrives at Auschwitz. For the first time, a “selection” takes place among prisoners who have been at Auschwitz-Birkenau for several months. Those found “unfit for work” go to the gas chambers. Operated by I. G. Farben, a synthetic rubber and petroleum plant opens at Monowitz (also known as Buna or Auschwitz III). It uses Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz I. Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg solicits Himmler’s help to carry out sterilization experiments on female prisoners in Auschwitz.

xlii

Chronology July 4

July 7

July 10

July 15–16 July 17–18

July 19

July 22 July 22– September 12 August 5–10 August 8

For the first time at Auschwitz, the camp administration carries out a selection at the railroad unloading platform. The transport involved contains Jews from Slovakia. Himmler discusses the sterilization of Jewish women with Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg and others. Himmler informs Clauberg that Auschwitz is at his disposal for experiments on the prisoners. Clauberg is informed that Himmler wants him to go to Ravensbrück to carry out sterilization procedures on Jewish women. Himmler specifically wants to learn how much time is required to sterilize 1,000 Jewish women. Dutch Jews are first deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Himmler inspects the Auschwitz camp complex, takes part in the killing of a transport of Jews, attends roll call in the women’s camp, and approves the flogging of female prisoners. He also orders Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, to proceed faster with construction of the Birkenau camp. Himmler orders the extermination of the Jews of the Government-General of Poland completed by the end of the year. The killing center at Treblinka is operational. By August 1943, some 870,000 Jews have perished there. Mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto are under way. Some 300,000 Jews are deported, 265,000 of them to Treblinka. The women’s section at Auschwitz I is moved to Section B-Ia in Birkenau. Edith Stein (aka Sister Theresa Benedicta of the Cross), a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, arrives in Auschwitz after deportation from Westerbork. After a “selection,” she is murdered in the gas chambers with other Jews. In 1987, she is beatified by Pope John Paul II.

Chronology October 8

November 19 December 28

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Maria Mandel, formerly SS supervisor in Lichtenburg (1938–1939) and Ravensbrück (1939–1942) concentration camps, replaces Johanna Langefeldt as Head Supervisor in Auschwitz. She organizes the female orchestra in Birkenau. Langefeldt returns to her former post as Head Supervisor at Ravensbrück. Mandel was executed in December 1947 after a Polish court sentenced her to death. Soviet troops launch a key counterattack against German forces near Stalingrad. Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg begins sterilization “experiments” on female prisoners in Barracks 28 of the Birkenau women’s camp. Other female prisoners are kept in Barracks 27 for his exclusive use. He performs experiments on approximately 700 women.

1943 January 18

The first Warsaw ghetto uprising breaks out.

February 2

Soviet forces defeat the German army at Stalingrad.

February 22

Sophie Scholl, a member of “The White Rose,” a resistance group consisting of students from the University of Munich, is executed after being found guilty of treason by the Nazi People’s Court. The first transport of Gypsies from Germany arrives at Auschwitz. They are placed in a special Gypsy camp. Construction is completed on four crematoriums and gas chambers, and they are made operational at Auschwitz-Birkenau. American and British representatives meet in Bermuda to discuss rescue for European Jews, but no significant plans emerge. The Warsaw ghetto uprising occurs, and the ghetto is destroyed. The women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau contains 18,659 prisoners; 6,119 of the women are incapable of working.

February 26 March 22– June 25 April 19–30

April 19– May 16 April 30

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Chronology June 8

Mid-June July 11 August 2 October 1–2

A transport with 3,000 children and their mothers leaves the Netherlands for Sobibor. All are gassed on arrival. Himmler orders the liquidation of remaining ghettos. Hitler bans public reference to the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Prisoners in Treblinka revolt. The Danes begin the rescue of 7,200 Danish Jews.

October 14

Prisoners in Sobibor revolt.

October 23

Some 1,800 Polish Jews arrive in Auschwitz from Bergen-Belsen. The women are taken to Crematorium II, where they are ordered to undress. One woman, a beautiful young dancer named Franceska Mann, flings part of her clothing at the head of SS Staff Sergeant Schillinger, grabs his revolver, and shoots him twice. She also shoots SS Sergeant Emmerich. Other women attack the SS men with their bare hands. Schillinger dies; Emmerich recovers; all the women are gassed. News of this resistance becomes legendary in the camp.

1944 March 19

June 6

Germany occupies Hungary and begins subjecting Hungary’s Jewish population (some 825,000) to the Final Solution. D-Day: Allied forces land at Normandy.

July 20

German officers attempt to assassinate Hitler.

August 2 October 7

Early November

The Gypsy family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau is liquidated. Revolt by a Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. With explosives smuggled by women prisoners, the men in the Sonderkommando wreck Crematorium IV before the uprising is crushed. Killing with Zyklon B gas in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is discontinued.

Chronology November 7

November 26

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Hannah Senesh, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish poet who volunteered in Palestine for a secret mission to aid the Hungarian Jews, is executed after her capture in Hungary. Himmler orders the destruction of the crematoriums in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

1945 January 6

January 17–18

January 27 April 11 April 15 April 29–30 April 30 May 7–8 September 17– November 17

Four Jewish female prisoners—Ella Gärtner, Roza Robota, Regina Safir, and Estera Wajsblum—are hanged in the women’s camp of Auschwitz. By smuggling explosives, they made the October 7, 1944, Sonderkommando uprising possible. Forced SS evacuation of prisoners from Auschwitz gets under way. The last roll call includes 31,894 prisoners, among them 16,577 women. The Red Army liberates Auschwitz. Buchenwald concentration camp is liberated by American forces. Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated by British forces. Ravensbrück concentration camp is liberated by Soviet forces, who find some 3,500 female prisoners. Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide in Hitler’s Berlin bunker. Germany surrenders; V-E Day, the war in Europe ends. Bergen-Belsen war crimes trials are held. About 20 women, including Irma Griese, are tried for assaulting and torturing prisoners. Found guilty, Griese is sentenced to death.

1946 October 25– August 20, 1947

Trial of Nazi doctors. Dr. Herta Oberheuser, the only female defendant at the doctors’ trial, is found guilty of giving lethal injections and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Part I

PROPOSING A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

This opening section of

Experience and Expr ession introduces the reader to the practice of gendered analysis of the Holocaust in two ways: by placing that endeavor in the context of what John Roth aptly calls “Holocaust politics” and then in the context of current theoretical debates. 1 As the new millennium begins, Holocaust Studies is arguably the most hotly contested, controversial, and “jealously guarded” 2 field of study. As Elizabeth Baer has written elsewhere: “The stakes are high when teaching and writing about death of such magnitude, moral failure of such proportions, the technology that enabled it, and the people who perpetrated it.” She outlines some of the familiar issues which have led to jealous, even bitter debates among scholars: How much did German civilians know? Did the Jews go ‘like sheep to the slaughter’? What about the role of the Judenrat? What about the role of the churches? What about the role of the Wehrmacht? Did the Nazis intend to kill all Jews from the outset (the intentionalist view) or did they arrive at that Endlösung as the most “expedient” (the functionalist view)? Is it possible to believe in a deity after the Holocaust? What did T. W. Adorno mean by his exhortation that there was to be no poetry after Auschwitz? How can the Holocaust be represented and memorialized? Are the Germans “uniquely” anti-Semitic as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has claimed?” 3

Of all these debates in this controversial field, the question of whether gender mattered is one of the most inflammatory. Roth, a pioneer in the study of women in the Holocaust, reviews the critiques and the stakes of this debate. He persuasively argues that the history of the Holocaust is incomplete without the inclusion of women as victims, perpetrators, resisters, and bystanders. His essay emphasizes the

1

2

Introduction to Part I

importance of particularity in such an undertaking: “[S]ound Holocaust teaching and research must concentrate on the particularity of the Holocaust, for the evil—and the good—exists in the details.” Roth goes on to say, “As one explores how those details developed, how those events took place, they lead outward in spiraling, concentric circles to wider historical perspectives.” Such an assertion at the outset of this book sets the stage for the many essays to follow: they study particular women in particular locations, particular roles and behaviors, particular memories and representations, all with the goal of arriving at larger understandings through such particularity. Roth’s own essay is a model in this regard: he has succeeded in presenting a sliver of a story about women and baby carriages in Auschwitz on one Sunday in 1944, through the painstaking scholarly work of piecing together that story from three sources. By comparing images and accounts, he arrives at insights about Nazi policy toward women and the resulting, and profoundly chilling, experience of women in the largest death camp. Pascale Bos’s essay asks questions in new ways and succeeds in reformulating approaches to gendered analysis, moving us beyond essentialist approaches to women’s Holocaust experiences. “Essentialism,” says Diana Fuss, “is a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity.” 4 While such a framework cannot be entirely dismissed, feminist theory largely rejects the idea that men and women can be identified on the basis of such immutable essences. Rather, the emphasis in recent scholarship has turned to an exploration of the ways in which gender differences are constructed. Bos argues that “most differences in their testimony can and need to be explained by the fact that men and women experience, remember, and recount events differently. In other words, men and women experience the same treatment in different ways because of gender, gender plays a role as it inflects the memory of these war experiences . . . , and gender plays a role in how men and women narrate, how they write and speak about their memories of the experiences.” Bos’s provocative essay thus brings the insights of contemporary feminist theory to Holocaust Studies. Bos’s formulation has influenced the structure of our anthology: instead of traditional chronological or thematic approaches, we include a section on women’s experiences in the Holocaust, another on women’s memories of those experiences, and a final section on the expressions

Proposing a Theoretical Framework

3

and representations of women’s experiences in film, fiction, and the plastic arts.

NOTES 1. John K. Roth, Holocaust Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). 2. This phrase is borrowed from Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–4. 3. Elizabeth R. Baer, “Complicating the Holocaust: Who Is a Victim? What Is a Holocaust Memoir?” in John K. Roth, and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 16. 4. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), xi.

ONE

Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust John K. Roth The mother stood there facing the grave. A German walked up to the woman and asked: “Whom shall I shoot first?” When she did not answer, he tore her daughter from her hands. The child cried out and was killed. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? Gertrud Kolmar, “The Woman Poet”

At frequent intervals, especially after a severe typhus epidemic broke out at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the summer of 1942, an Auschwitz truck went to Dessau, Germany. It returned with large quantities of 200-gram, hermetically sealed tin canisters. They contained Zyklon-Blausäure, or Zyklon B, whose trade name—meaning “cyclone”—also referred to prussic acid, which in German is called Blausäure because it produces deep blue stains. In the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zyklon B crystals would asphyxiate more than a million Jews. 1 A powerful pesticide developed during World War I, Zyklon B was used to combat contagious disease by fumigating lice-infested buildings. First used at Auschwitz in July 1940, it initially served those purposes in that vast camp complex, where overcrowded barracks, malnutrition, and poor sanitation made dysentery, typhoid fever, and especially typhus constant threats. By the late summer of 1941, however, much more

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John K. Roth

destructive uses for Zyklon B were found. Experiments on Soviet POWs confirmed that Zyklon B’s vaporizing pellets offered a particularly reliable and efficient way to advance the Final Solution. Two German companies—Degesch, or the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (The German Vermin-combating Corporation) and Tesch and Stabenow Verlag—profited immensely by supplying Zyklon B to the SS and the German army. They even modified it for Auschwitz by removing the special odor that ordinarily warned people about their product’s deadly presence. Especially in 1942 and 1943, Auschwitz used tons of Zyklon B. Most of it went to conventional fumigation, but there was plenty left to pour into gas chambers packed with Jews. Once exposed to properly heated air—bodies tightly packed in the gas chambers helped to ensure that the temperature was right—the crystals produced lethal gas. Minutes later its human victims were dead. One of the particular burdens of the Holocaust is that the Zyklon B trucked from Dessau to Auschwitz-Birkenau was used to murder hundreds of thousands of Jewish women. That number soars into the millions when the death toll includes the Jewish women who were killed at the Holocaust’s other major death camps—Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek—as well as in the Third Reich’s concentration camps and ghettos. In the most basic way, of course, the Holocaust’s killing drew no distinctions among Jews: Hitler and his followers intended oblivion for them all—every man, woman, and child. That fact incited Gabriel Schoenfeld’s blast against what he called “the voguish hybrid known as gender studies,” whose practitioners, he argued, were committing “the worst excess of all on today’s campuses” when it came to what he labeled “witless and malicious theorizing” about the Holocaust. 2 Numerous Holocaust scholars—men and women alike—took vigorous exception to Schoenfeld’s position. 3 I argued that sound Holocaust teaching and research must concentrate on the particularity of the Holocaust, for the evil—and the good—exists in the details. Therefore, study about what happened to women is legitimate and necessary in Holocaust Studies. Some years ago, the students in my own Holocaust courses drove home this point for me by asking questions about women during the Holocaust years. I will return to these points in more detail, but one result was Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, a volume I edited with Carol Rittner. Although Schoenfeld mentioned this book, there was no evidence at the time that he had studied it with much care. Drawing on survivor testimony and the insightful, at times controversial, work of pioneering scholars, Different Voices takes a position that

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is representative of most teaching and scholarship about women in the Holocaust. Supporting the pioneering efforts by significant scholars such as Joan Ringelheim, Myrna Goldenberg, Dalia Ofer, Lenore Weitzman, and others, its position is that the hell was the same for Jewish women and men during the Holocaust, but the horrors were frequently different. 4 Attention and respect need to be paid to testimony, teaching, and scholarship that reflect those differences. One can share Schoenfeld’s concern that study about women in the Holocaust must meet the highest standards, but his attack led to nearly wholesale, and therefore unwarranted, condemnation of scholars who are doing key work in an area of Holocaust Studies that is basic, serious, and still lacking the regard it deserves. To follow up on those claims, consider further how some points about equality, neutrality, and particularity can provide significant perspectives on women and the Holocaust. On July 30, 1997, I received a fax from Laureen Enright, an editor at Paragon House, the publisher of Different Voices. Enright’s message indicated that Judy Cohen, a Holocaust survivor, wanted permission to include portions of the book on the Web site that she was constructing. This site would deal specifically with the experiences of women in the Holocaust. Copyright restrictions limited the fulfillment of Cohen’s requests, but as the twenty-first century unfolds, her Web site, “Women and the Holocaust: A Cyberspace of Their Own,” makes important contributions. It opens with a dedication that reveals some of the wide and varied scope of women’s experiences, and Jewish women’s experiences in particular, during the Holocaust. 5 The Web site, she indicates, is “dedicated to all those women who were murdered while pregnant. Holding little hands of children or carrying infants in their arms on the way to be gassed. In hiding. To the mothers who gave their children to be hidden, many never to find them again. Or as fighters in the resistance: in ghettos, forests, partisan units. And to the lives of those few who survived and bravely carried on.” In addition to an extensive and often updated bibliography, which includes hundreds of entries, Cohen’s Web site includes a preface by Holocaust scholar Joan Ringelheim, who has long been a leader in urging that attention ought to be paid specifically to the experiences of women during the Holocaust years. Those experiences were many and varied. While German women, for example, were expected to bear children for the Third Reich (and they were decorated for doing so abundantly), Jewish women had to be prevented from becoming mothers. The Nazis invested considerable

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time and energy to find the most effective ways to sterilize them, but the “final solution” for this “problem” was death. Of course, if they were healthy and neither too old nor too young, Jewish women could be used before they were used up or killed. At Auschwitz, for example, some were “selected” for slave labor; others became objects for the “scientific” experiments that were intended to advance Nazi programs of racial hygiene and purity. Women could be found among other victim groups during the Holocaust: Roma and Sinti, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the so-called “asocials” to name a few. In addition, women were among the neighbors who stood by while Jews were rounded up and deported all over Europe. They were among those who rescued Jews as well. Women could be found in virtually every intersection and intricacy of the Holocaust’s web. Some of the victims trapped in the Holocaust’s web were non-Jewish German women, but German women, in particular, had other parts to play in the Final Solution as well. Organized by figures such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann, the Final Solution was instigated and dominated by men. The same can be said of virtually all modern genocides. In the case of Nazi Germany, however, some women held positions of responsibility in the Third Reich’s concentration camps and killing centers. Others were officials in the Nazi Party. Still others aided and abetted the destruction process as medical personnel, civil servants, secretaries, and members of other sectors of the home front’s manpower-depleted workforce. Some German women stood trial and were convicted by postwar tribunals that judged war crimes and crimes against humanity. 6 Nevertheless, German women were not the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust. In general, their role was different: They worked in the German economy, and they were the sympathetic mothers, sisters, and daughters, the reassuring wives, friends, and lovers, of the German men who were usually more directly implicated in that disaster. In general, one could scarcely say that German women were defenders of Jews or protesters against the Nazi regime, although significant exceptions to that rule could be found. Depending on the extent of their knowledge about the destruction of the European Jews, awareness that could have been greater or smaller depending on individual circumstances, many German women occupied for the most part a position between that of perpetrator and bystander —two of the categories that are often used to classify the various parts that people played during the

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Holocaust. We might speak of them as partners, for in multiple ways that is what they were in relationship to the German men who launched and carried out the Holocaust. As Judy Cohen’s Web site illustrates, times are changing as far as serious study about women and the Holocaust is concerned. 7 It remains true, however, that issues in this area have not received the attention they deserve. Three areas of research that need further attention are the following: (1) As the particularity of women’s Holocaust experience is identified and documented, what conclusions, if any, are to be drawn from that particularity? Is it enough to clarify and report what happened, or is more than that at stake? (2) What will happen when, not if, the theories of gender analysis are brought fully to bear on the Holocaust? What are the promises and pitfalls of such work? (3) Is there more to be learned about Nazi policy where women, especially Jewish women, were concerned? As Dalia Ofer has argued, for example, Nazi policy increasingly dictated the unlimited intervention that brutalized Jewish family life. 8 No doubt race relations had priority over gender relations in Nazi ideology, 9 but did the Nazi destruction process still take more cognizance of the differences between Jewish men and Jewish women than previous research has emphasized? Study about women in the Holocaust is still too much in its early stages to answer such questions definitively, but Schoenfeld’s wishes to the contrary notwithstanding, there will be more Holocaust scholarship about women. Overall, acknowledging and admitting the history that informs it, as well as taking responsibility for the implications of that research, will be a desirable outcome of Holocaust Studies. In such considerations, the concept of equality has a place. The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s planned total destruction of the Jewish people and the actual murder of nearly six million of them. Millions of other people were also destroyed in the Holocaust’s complex web, but the primary targets were Jews. As far as the Jews were concerned, the Nazis were equal opportunity killers. The Nazis’ intentionality, if not all their actions, made clear that all Jews—young or old, male or female, it made no difference—ought to disappear. I believe that it is with this perspective in mind that one should read the opening line of Joan Ringelheim’s contribution to Judy Cohen’s Web site. “Every Jew, regardless of gender,” writes Ringelheim, “was equally a victim in the Holocaust.” During the Final Solution, Jews were destroyed because they were Jews. In the Holocaust, no bottom line was more basic, undeniable, or

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deadly than that. That fact accounts for the gender neutrality that most Holocaust scholarship has typically displayed. Although many Holocaust memoirs written by women have existed for a long time, questions specifically about women, or about gender differences in any respect, got relatively little attention in Holocaust scholarship until the 1990s were well along. The scholarship had proceeded as if neither the writers, nor their texts, nor their readers were gendered. Victims and witnesses, for instance, were mentioned often, but it was as if they were genderless. In fact, of course, this was not the case at all. It could even be argued that the gender “neutrality” was not quite what it appeared because most of the Holocaust scholarship was being written by men, and it is probably not accidental that the canon of Holocaust literature—its chief authors include Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry, to mention only a few—was implicitly, if not explicitly, influenced by gendered perspectives. My own example illustrates this analysis. It was almost twenty years after beginning my study, teaching, and writing about the Holocaust that I was nudged to think more explicitly about what happened to women as women, and to men as men, during the Holocaust. My students at Claremont McKenna College did much of that nudging. Commonly, women are a majority of the students who take my courses on the Holocaust. As they kept asking questions about what happened to women, I had to study more and learn more. I found my understanding challenged, expanded, and revised by extensive listening to women, especially to survivors and the relatively small but increasing number of scholars who have focused attention on the particularity of women’s Holocaust experiences. As my work advanced, I discovered something more. While attention has been paid to the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust, until recently studies about the particular roles played by fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, men and women have not only been neutralized: to some extent they have also been resisted. The fundamental reasons for that resistance are four in number. Each plays its part in Holocaust politics. The first argument, voiced mainly—but fortunately not too often—by men has been that such approaches were either not interesting or unimportant. It took time, but now it goes without saying that those points were not convincing. More specifically, it has been argued that bringing gender perspectives to bear on the Holocaust might (1) detract from the fact that Jews as Jews were its victims, (2) lead to a hijacking of the Holocaust by gender studies advocates, or (3)

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wrongly privilege the suffering, survival skills, cooperation, and caring of Jewish women and girls over that of Jewish men and boys, an outcome that Lawrence Langer regards as reflecting “only our own need to plant a life-sustaining seed in the barren soil that conceals the remnants of two-thirds of European Jewry. The sooner we abandon this design, the quicker we will learn to face such chaos with unshielded eyes.” 10 Some of these claims have more merit than others, but neither individually nor collectively do they warrant setting aside an emphasis on women in the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism meant that race— specifically the “purity” of German blood and culture—counted for everything. Nothing could be tolerated that might pollute the racial strength on which the Third Reich depended. According to Nazi theory, Jewish life posed this threat to a degree that surpassed every other. Germans could not afford to let Jews remain in their midst. As the history of Nazi Germany so emphatically shows, racism’s “logic” ultimately entails genocide, for if you take seriously the idea that one race endangers the well-being of another, the only way to remove that menace completely is to do away, once and for all, with everyone and everything that embodies it. The racism of Nazi ideology ultimately implied that the existence of Jewish families, and especially the Jewish women who mothered them, constituted a deadly obstacle to the racial purity and cultural superiority that Germany “deserved.” Jewish women constituted that threat fundamentally because they could bear children. Precisely because the Nazis targeted Jews and others in racial terms, they had to see those victims in their male and female particularity. To destroy Jews in general—and to destroy them forever—they had to override any protection that cultural convention afforded even Jewish women and girls, and decimate in particular those potential mothers who might bear the next Jewish generation. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, clearly understood this point. “We had to answer the question: What about the women and children?” Himmler remembered in one of his speeches. “Here, too, I had made up my mind. . . . I did not feel that I had the right to exterminate the men,” he went on to say, “and then allow their children to grow into avengers, threatening our sons and grandchildren. A fateful decision had to be made: This people had to vanish from the earth.” 11 It took the targeting of Jewish women as women to implement that decision. Far from reducing the Holocaust to an example of sexism, let alone making the Holocaust prone to some alleged hijacking by gender studies, an emphasis on what happened to women during the Holocaust reveals what otherwise would remain

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hidden: a fuller picture of the unprecedented and unrelenting killing that was the Final Solution. As for the protest that such an emphasis will somehow privilege the suffering or the endurance and survival skills of Jewish women and girls over against that of Jewish men and boys, Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg makes a persuasive point: “The Final Solution was intended by its creators to ensure the annihilation of all Jews. . . . Yet the road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as women.” 12 Related points made by another eminent Holocaust historian, Yehuda Bauer, resonate with Hilberg’s. The “feminist perspective” should not be the primary one in Holocaust Studies, but it is important nonetheless because “the Holocaust engendered a special fate for Jewish women, to be sure, just as it did for men.” 13 Neither Hilberg’s phrase “specifically affected” nor Bauer’s “special fate” privileges one gender over another; both emphasize the particularity that deserves attention. On the other hand, Lawrence Langer may appear to be uncertain that gender-related outlooks deserve even a secondary perspective in Holocaust Studies. Certainly he is suspicious of attempts to privilege one gender over another on the grounds, for example, that solidarity among women was greater than that among men. Instead, Langer’s emphasis falls on the devastation that seemingly made no gender distinctions. The Holocaust’s “ultimate sense of loss,” he argues, “unites former victims in a violated world beyond gender.” 14 Nevertheless, two features of Langer’s analysis deserve closer attention. First, his extensive study of Holocaust testimonies makes clear that he must and does pay close attention to gender differences lest he fail to grasp what men and women alike are saying. So it can scarcely be said that Langer dismisses gender-related outlooks. To the contrary, his own work involves versions of them. Second, it is also important to observe that Langer’s unavoidable involvement in gender-related outlooks calls into question the consistency of a key part of his Holocaust analysis. Importantly, Langer acknowledges that women’s childbearing capacity “had a singular impact on their efforts to confront their ordeal, an impact that they could not and cannot share with male inmates.” 15 If that singular impact existed—and it is Langer himself who provides key evidence that it did—then one wonders how the “ultimate sense” of Holocaust loss could blot out that singularity and replace it with an ungendered unity of experience. At times, Langer’s mission to debunk “the rhetoric of renewal and self-discovery,” which he associates with some

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gendered approaches to Holocaust Studies, inclines him to underplay gendered distinctions that remain embedded in the very narratives on which his accounts depend. 16 Similar experiences are not identical. In the Holocaust, distinctions between men and women made a vital difference. That difference reflected the fact that human experience, suffering included, is usually gendered experience as well. More than Langer admits, the Holocaust helps to show that reality. But if he sometimes minimizes those vital differences, Langer is closer to the mark in affirming another view, which I share: namely, that the goal should not be to argue that what happened to women during the Holocaust was worse than what happened to men, that one gender’s endurance and survival skills were necessarily superior to the other’s, or that one gender’s reflections and memories are clearer, more truthful, or important than the other’s. Nevertheless, it is a legitimate and important aspect of Holocaust Studies to advance the growing realization that the history of the Holocaust is incomplete without responses to questions that focus explicitly on what women did and on what happened to them during those dark years. Testimony and scholarship that reflect gender differences deserve more attention and respect. Holocaust history, however, grants no comfort, and therefore differentiating does not entail privileging. Done well, differentiating leads to increased insight and greater depth of understanding. As we learn more about what women and girls did and what happened to them during the Holocaust, we should and will learn more about what men and boys did and what happened to them during the Holocaust. The words women and gender, after all, are neither identical nor synonymous. Gender involves both women and men, and we cannot learn well about either without getting specific about the other. As the title of one of Raul Hilberg’s books suggests, such learning would involve perpetrators, victims, bystanders—all sorts of people, men and women, who were within the Holocaust’s web. Fortunately, wisdom on these matters prevails in Holocaust Studies more than it used to. In the early 1990s, for example, it would have been unusual for a Holocaust conference to feature topics about women in the Holocaust. Now it would be unusual if such topics did not appear. As this volume of essays indicates, more and more publication in the field of women and the Holocaust is taking place too. How did women respond to their circumstances during the Holocaust? What was most important to women who had to live under conditions of deprivation, humiliation, terror, and death? Were there gender-related resources that women

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drew upon to sustain hope as well as life in the ghettos and camps? What vulnerabilities exposed them to particular kinds of suffering and death? What parts did women play or not play in partisan groups and other resistance efforts during the Holocaust? Does the study of women and the Holocaust highlight new or at least different questions that we should be asking, not just about women but about every human being who had to endure the Holocaust’s darkness? As scholars not only raise these previously unasked questions but also present and debate their responses to them, we will learn more of what we need to know about the Holocaust. Particularity helps to point out what we need to know. Having taught about the Holocaust for many years, I have discovered that the best learning strategies often involve concentrating on small details, on events that are utterly particular but charged with intensity. As one explores how those details developed, how those events took place, they lead outward in spiraling concentric circles to wider historical perspectives. In my college’s library a few years ago, I was looking for some lines and themes that could become part of Different Voices, which Carol Rittner and I were then preparing for publication. I discovered what I needed in a poem called “The Woman Poet,” which includes these words: . . . You do not think A person lives within the page you thumb. To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink, Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb, And cannot touch you. . . . ....................... [But] you hold me now completely in your hands. . . . So then, to tell my story, here I stand. . . . You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? 17

As I read those lines and felt tears well up in my eyes, I knew I had found the right words for Different Voice’s governing epigraph. This poem was written by Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943). She was one of the most promising writers of her generation. Like so many in her time and place, however, her talent and her life were taken from her by antisemitism, racism, and genocide. Gertrud Kolmar was a German, but she was also a Jew and a woman. She managed to survive in Berlin until the winter of 1943. In February of that year the Germans made a special

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drive to deport the last Jews from that city, even those who worked in war-essential industries. The last writing we have from Gertrud Kolmar is a letter dated February 20–21, 1943. She was most likely caught in the roundup of Jewish workers that took place a few days later. Camp records indicate that from late February until mid-March 1943, numerous transports brought several thousand Jews from Berlin to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of the women and children were gassed on arrival. The circumstances of Gertrud Kolmar’s death are uncertain, but she was probably among those who were immediately killed by Zyklon B. Berlin was declared Judenfrei in June. The liquidation of German Jewry was officially completed in July. “You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?” Gertrud Kolmar wrote those words some time before she entered Auschwitz, but especially after Auschwitz her words speak even more poignantly, tragically, and urgently than before. Much of the detail we possess about transports to Auschwitz comes from the careful work done by Danuta Czech, a woman who painstakingly collated the data that forms the Auschwitz Chronicle, a day-by-day, night-by-night record of what transpired there. Drawing on documents that the Germans left behind or that the camp resistance kept, she lists how transport after transport arrived, and she indicates how many men and women were selected for immediate death or for slave labor. Gertrud Kolmar’s name does not appear in that more than 800-page book, but again and again its entries remind us that Jewish women were targeted for destruction. Where women in the Holocaust are concerned, one event in Czech’s book is particularly poignant. It happened on June 25, 1944. In a two-sentence paragraph, awesome not only for what it says but also for the questions its silence contains, Czech reports: “Empty children’s strollers are taken away from the storerooms of the personal effects camp, known as ‘Canada,’ which is located behind Camp B-IIf between Crematoriums III and IV. The strollers are pushed in rows of five along the path from the crematoriums to the train station; the removal takes an hour.” 18 Although Czech states the facts without embellishment or commentary, one may surmise what went on. Probably some of those baby carriages had arrived with Hungarian Jewish mothers. Perhaps they had been permitted to bring that equipment along—all the way to the gas chambers—to prolong the deception that made murder simpler. True, sometimes children were born in Auschwitz-Birkenau; some even lived long enough to have numbers tattooed on their frail bodies. But most mothers and children, especially Jewish ones, could not keep their lives,

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let alone their strollers, in that place. Having no utility, mothers and children usually disappeared in fire and smoke. German efficiency, however, could not let their empty prams be wasted. They had value. So off the carriages went, first to “Canada” and then to the train station in the camp’s official five-row formation. Probably they were headed to Germany, where there still were mothers, raising children for the Reich, who could use them. Czech says simply that the strollers were pushed to the train station. The removal, she adds, took about an hour. Testimony from an Italian Jewish woman named Giuliana Tedeschi brings the stark brevity of Czech’s account to life. Part of a transport of 935 Italian Jews who reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 10, 1944, she was one of the eighty women and 154 men who did not go directly to the gas. 19 Those women were tattooed with numbers ranging from 76776 to 76855. Tedeschi’s was 76847. Tedeschi was the wife of an architect and the mother of two children, but as a woman in Birkenau she was alone, at least until she made friends with some of the other prisoners. Her moving memoir, There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, not only recalls and records the horrors that surrounded her, but also repeatedly draws attention to those human relationships that helped her to survive. With a remarkably sensitive and insightful feminine touch she describes, for example, how much it meant to discover “Zilly’s hand, a small, warm hand, modest and patient, which held mine in the evening, which pulled up the blankets around my shoulders, while a calm, motherly voice whispered in my ear, ‘Good night, dear—I have a daughter your age!’ ” 20 A feeling and a need for connectedness, for relationships with others, for sisterhood, permeate Tedeschi’s book. 21 Zilly comforted her when she was overcome by wild desperation. Also there was Olga, the woman who became her soul mate: “I came across Olga one day and we hid ourselves away together in a corner of the hut. I suddenly felt I would be able to speak to her and she would understand. . . . The huts disappeared, we forgot the barbed wire, and an unbounded liberty of spirit intoxicated us beyond any limit imposed by human bestiality. We decided to be friends.” 22 There were moments of reprieve, but in Birkenau friendship meant sharing and resisting the limits imposed by human bestiality. As Tedeschi would learn, that bestiality involved children’s strollers. There had been times in the camp when, at least comparatively speaking, Sundays were days of rest. During Tedeschi’s time, however,

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that tradition was abolished and special Sunday tasks were assigned. Sometimes she had to work along the railroad tracks that brought the Hungarian Jews to Birkenau during those late spring and summer days of 1944 when the Third Reich was collapsing but the gas chambers were operating at full and frenzied capacity. Close up, she saw the transports unload. She knew what the new arrivals did not, that death was imminent for all but a few. She also associates those Sundays with a smell: “The whole camp was gradually pervaded by a smell that only we old hands could recognize, the smell that haunted our nostrils, that impregnated our clothing, a smell we tried in vain to escape by hiding away inside our bunks, that destroyed any hope of return, of seeing our countries and children again—the smell of burning human flesh.” 23 Sundays could make Tedeschi feel “morally destroyed, physically exhausted; the awareness of our impotence humiliated us, the instinct to rebel choked us.” 24 June 25, 1944, was a Sunday. That day Tedeschi was one of fifty women who turned right when she went through the gate from her part of the camp. Ordinarily her work column went left, toward Birkenau’s main gate and the road that led beyond. But on this particular Sunday, the route was different. It led in the direction that most of the Hungarian Jews took only once. Up ahead, at the end of the rail spur, were Crematoriums II and III. It might be their turn, some of the women thought, but they were directed on, turned right again, and followed a path through the birch trees from which Birkenau takes its name. The path led to another crematorium. “The women went in through the big door,” Tedeschi recalls, “and stood in the hall.” 25 There death met them—not directly but in the form of fifty empty baby carriages. The Germans ordered them to push these strollers to safekeeping. Tedeschi says the distance was two miles; Czech says the removal took about an hour. That was neither far nor long—even to push a child’s stroller— on any normal Sunday, but for Giuliana Tedeschi, June 25, 1944, was a Sunday she would never forget, nor in all likelihood could any woman who experienced it as Tedeschi did. Fear for their own lives “drained away,” Tedeschi writes, “yet each face was stamped with a grimace of pain.” Her description of “this place on earth” continues: The strange procession moved forward: the mothers who had left children behind rested their hands on the push bars, instinctively feeling for the most natural position, promptly lifting the front wheels whenever they came to a bump. They saw gardens, avenues, rosy infants

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The accounts of Danuta Czech and Giuliana Tedeschi are close but not identical. Czech does not say who pushed the children’s strollers. Tedeschi says that women were assigned the task and that her company’s strollers came directly from a crematorium. Neither report mentions that men got stroller duty, but perhaps they did, for the fifty carriages mentioned in Tedeschi’s report were by no means the only ones that reached Birkenau. More of them can be seen in Lili Meier’s photographic Auschwitz Album, and there is at least one woman survivor whose testimony at the Nuremberg trials recounts that sometimes hundreds of children’s carriages arrived during a day’s work in Birkenau. 27 If men got such assignments, their feelings would be no less important than those of Tedeschi and the other women she describes. But Tedeschi’s report, a woman’s testimony, is certainly one that needs to be heard and felt. Was it an accident that women in Birkenau were assigned to move those baby carriages, a task whose yearning and pain, grief and hopelessness, so far exceeded the hour and two miles that it took? It is hard to think so. Far more likely, the mentality that created Birkenau would have reasoned precisely: Who better than women—Jewish especially, mothers even—to move empty baby carriages from a crematorium to safekeeping for the Reich? That possibility was a real limit imposed on Tedeschi and her sisters by human bestiality. The Holocaust leaves behind heartbreaking memories and images—so many they cannot be counted. But none symbolizes more poignantly the plight of women during the Holocaust than the one offered by Giuliana Tedeschi: a Jewish woman prisoner pushing an empty baby carriage in Birkenau. In that vision, the unrelentingly cruel calculation of the Final Solution’s impact on women—theft, enslavement, and murder—is reflected in ways that no words can express, let alone forgive and redeem. “There is a place on earth,” Tedeschi’s memoir begins, “a desolate heath, where the shadows of the dead are multitudes, where the living

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are dead, where there is only death, hate, and pain.” 28 Birkenau stood in the very heart of Western civilization, within easy reach of the great universities, cathedrals, and institutions of European culture. In that “place on earth,” so many of Western culture’s humanizing promises failed. “Birkenau,” says Tedeschi, “existed to suffocate hope and annihilate logic, to provoke madness and death.” 29 To remember that “there is a place on earth,” to excavate the scraps of time that remain in the ruins of memory, even to feel what we hear from the particular voices of women in the Holocaust—none of this can restore what was lost. Yet Gertrud Kolmar’s question remains: “You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?” If we hear that question well, it should beckon us to be suspicious of generalities that equalize experience too much. It should make us aware that neutralizing differences can obscure too much. Hearing Gertrud Kolmar’s question well should lead to our keeping attention focused on the Holocaust’s particularity, which entails never overlooking or underestimating the importance of the fact that the Holocaust’s history—and its legacies and lessons, whatever they may be—are unavoidably about men and women, boys and girls, who were not so different from us.

NOTES 1. My discussion of Zyklon B is informed by Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 218–21, 292–95; The Irving Judgment: David Irving v. Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 195–206; Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols., rev. and definitive ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 3:885–92. 2. Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary, June 1998, 44, 46. See also Schoenfeld’s “The ‘Cutting Edge’ of Holocaust Studies,” Wall Street Journal, May 21, 1998, A16. 3. Sara R. Horowitz, a distinguished scholar who writes about Holocaust literature and issues about women in the Holocaust, is one who has done so with vigor and lucidity. During the year 2000, she carried on an instructive debate with Gabriel Schoenfeld in the pages of Prooftexts, a journal of Jewish literary history published at Brandeis University. 4. See Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust, in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 150–66.

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5. Cohen’s Web site can be found at http://www.interlog.com/~mighty. For another example of this kind, see http://www.rememberwomen.org, the Web site for the Remember the Women Institute, founded by Holocaust scholar Rochelle Saidel. Its special emphasis on women in the Holocaust features extensive information about Ravensbrück, a concentration camp situated not far from Berlin that the Nazis established for women. Thousands of women, Jews and non-Jews, were enslaved, subjected to brutal medical experiments, and murdered there. 6. As illustrated by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Pantheon, 1997), even Holocaust-related fiction can become involved in debates about women and the Holocaust. Schlink’s widely read and controversial novel focuses on Hanna Schmitz, who is tried and convicted of wartime crimes against Jews. Partly because Schlink portrayed this fictional SS guard as illiterate—in fact an unlikely scenario—his novel created sympathy for Hanna but also provoked dissent about the legitimacy and authenticity of Schlink’s interpretation of the Holocaust and the part of ordinary Germans in it. 7. Holocaust memoirs by women are more numerous than ever. Arguably none is more important than Charlotte Delbo’s. As a non-Jew and a member of the French resistance, she survived both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. See the trilogy contained in her Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Among the most important scholarly books about women in the Holocaust, the following are representative: Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Mary Lagerwey, Reading Auschwitz (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998); Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Michael Phayer and Eva Fleischner, Cries in the Night: Women Who Challenged the Holocaust (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997); and Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998). As illustrated by these writings, major areas of research interest about women in the Holocaust currently include the roles that women—Jews and non-Jews—played in resistance against the Holocaust, the responsibilities Jewish women had for maintaining families and households that were increasingly savaged by Nazi policy, the distinctive ways in which women in the Nazi camps established and sustained relationships of caring with one another, and women’s activities—both among the perpetrators and the victims—as nurses, physicians, and other health professionals. 8. My source is “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish Family in the East

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European Ghettos during the Holocaust,” a paper presented by Dalia Ofer at the 1998 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Her paper was part of a session on “Women in the Holocaust: New Research.” 9. See Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, Bystanders,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 85–100, esp. 95–97. 10. Lawrence L. Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 362. 11. The quotation is from a speech that Himmler gave to SS leaders in October 1943. See Paul Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 685. 12. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933– 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 126. 13. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 184–85. Bauer makes these points in the context of his discussion of Gisi Fleischmann, an exceptional leader among Slovakian Jewry during the Holocaust. For an earlier version of Bauer’s discussion on these topics, see his article “Gisi Fleischmann,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 253–64. 14. Langer, “Gendered Suffering?” 362. 15. Ibid., 353. 16. Ibid., 361. 17. See Gertrud Kolmar, Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar, trans. Henry A. Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 55–57. 18. Danuta Czech, The Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945, trans. Barbara Harshav, Martha Humphreys, and Stephen Shearier (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 652. 19. Ibid., 608. Often Czech’s data about the arriving transports at AuschwitzBirkenau make clear that more women than men were immediately dispatched to the gas chambers and that fewer women than men were spared for slave labor and the survival chances, however remote, that such a fate might offer. 20. Giuliana Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 9–10. 21. Some scholarship about women in the Nazi camps emphasizes the distinctive qualities of sisterly relationships—rooted in friendship as well as in family connections—that could be found in those places. Examples appear in Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters. 22. Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth, 10. 23. Ibid., 90. 24. Ibid., 89. 25. Ibid., 94. 26. Ibid., 95.

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27. See Peter Hellman, The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier (New York: Random House, 1981), 38. Although The Auschwitz Album identifies her only as S. Szmaglewska, it is likely that this woman is the Polish author of early memoirs about Birkenau, which, unfortunately, have long been out of print. See Seweryna Szmaglewska, Smoke over Birkenau, trans. Jadwiga Rynas (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), and United in Wrath (Warsaw: “Polonia” Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955). Szmaglewska’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trials can be found in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg: 1947), 8:317–23. In this testimony, Szmaglewska, who says she was in Birkenau from October 7, 1942, until January 1945, is identified as Severina Shmaglevskaya. For another reference to the baby strollers in Auschwitz, see Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic, I Cannot Forgive (New York: Grove Press, 1964). With help from the camp resistance, Vrba, a Slovakian Jew, escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and reported what was happening there. Before his escape, he worked in “Canada,” the storehouse area in Auschwitz-Birkenau. 28. Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth, 1. 29. Ibid., 138.

TWO

Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference Pascale Rachel Bos Pitiful men, bleeding from misery like all men here Charlotte Delbo 1 Ich glaubte fest . . . dass Frauen lebensfähiger als Männer sind Ruth Klüger 2

In the past fifteen years, the experiences of women during the Holocaust have been examined extensively. Often these analyses were based on autobiographical accounts written or told by female survivors. 3 These pioneering works filled a gap in Holocaust research: they mapped out the divergent experiences of women during the Holocaust and attempted to integrate their literature and histories into the larger history of the Holocaust. This effort was important. Remarkably little had been known about the historical experience of Jewish women during the Holocaust, and women’s autobiographical texts were examined less often than those of male survivors. 4 Moreover, feminist historians had also long suspected that in looking at women’s experiences, “traditional conceptions of Jewish history” might have to be reshaped “thoroughly . . . to include the historical reality of women.” 5 It seems obvious enough that “the” history of the Holocaust cannot be told without looking in depth at the experiences and narratives of half the population which experienced it, that is, at (Jewish) women as subjects. Nevertheless, in many traditional versions of Jewish cultural history, women are, as Paula Hyman points out, treated as “passive appendages of male actors.” 6 As historians presumed that the experiences

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of women and men were essentially identical, they “spoke explicitly of men but implied that women were included in the category of man.” 7 Moreover, because many male researchers are inclined to read “autobiographically,” they have simply excluded the experiences and literature of women. 8 That is, in reading another’s life story, Holocaust scholars in particular tend to “read for those aspects which resonate with [their] own experiences and sensibilities.” 9 This desire for selfrecognition influences what we as scholars choose to read and write about. As the field of Holocaust Studies is still male-dominated, and as men seek to identify with other men rather than with women, the “Holocaust canon” has in turn remained predominantly male. 10 By focusing specifically on the history and literature of Jewish women, feminist studies have attempted to remedy this phallocentric view. Based on the groundwork of early feminist history, most of this research presumed that since gender accounts for noticeably divergent experiences for men and women in everyday life, gender must also have had significance in the lives of women, especially Jewish women, caught up in the Holocaust. 11 On the one hand, this research has led to an increase in the number of historical studies focusing on women during the Holocaust. On the other hand, these studies have also led to “a fundamental revamping of the categories with which we conceptualize the past.” 12 Feminists have shown that when one introduces gender as an analytic tool, culturally dominant and male ways of categorizing what is historically important and what is not are challenged. This challenge has indeed led to unexpected and important new historical findings on women and the Holocaust, even though this scholarship was, at times, considered controversial. 13 I support the underlying assumption of these studies (gender makes a difference) and believe that research on specifically gendered experiences is relevant, important, and often sound. Nevertheless, it is important to take stock of what has been accomplished and review our methods. In reevaluating the research thus far, it remains necessary to question critically how we study gender. Indeed, some studies on women or gender and the Holocaust have demonstrated methodological problems. 14 Not all scholars agree on how we can or should study gender in less contested spaces, let alone in such a historically charged arena, and not everyone takes gender to mean the same thing. It is also necessary to ask how we come to know what we know about gender and the Holocaust. For instance, when we come across gender differences in survivor narratives, we need to question how these are relevant. How

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do they come about? What do they mean? How should we interpret the relationship between these narratives and historical experience? Finally, we also need to ask ourselves critically what conclusions we mean to draw from perceived differences. What do we mean when we say, for instance, that women had “gender-specific coping skills,” to quote from the introduction of a recently published anthology on women in the Holocaust? 15 Or conversely, that we need to “pay attention to the particularity of gendered wounding”? 16 By choosing to focus on women and gender, do we merely “enlarge our understanding of the impossible choices most Jews faced”? 17 Is this our (only) aim in looking at women or gender and the Holocaust, or are other issues at stake as well? These and other questions need to be examined in more depth in order to better understand and assess what gender difference within Holocaust Studies has come to mean, and what direction this research should take. In the following essay I suggest that the way in which Holocaust history changes when gender is used as a category of analysis might be more complex than previously thought, and more ambiguous. At the same time, I show why a careful analysis of gender is nevertheless indispensable and should become an integral part of Holocaust research. To open this discussion, I first briefly consider some of the earlier research on women and the Holocaust and address some of the problems inherent in these studies. I then propose a conceptual framework for a different, discursive kind of gender analysis. This analysis seeks to bring to center stage questions about (gendered) subjectivity and autobiographical representation, the politics of memory and narrative, and the psychological function of testimony. The result, I hope, will be the start of a new dialogue on how we may (or may not) want to use gender as a category of analysis, and how to assess its importance in our reading of both Holocaust history and (autobiographical) Holocaust literature. Furthermore, I suggest that precisely in acknowledging (and highlighting) the elements of choice and subversive power in the creation of (gendered) personal narratives we can conceive of survivors’ agency in compelling new ways.

Early Research: Women’s “Resources” and “Vulnerabilities” In order to pinpoint some of the problems in early feminist Holocaust research, I discuss briefly some of the work of Joan Ringelheim and a few other pioneers whose research has long been central to the field.

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Ringelheim has worked on the topic of women and the Holocaust as a philosopher since the 1970s. She has published extensively on the subject and co-organized the first conference on women and the Holocaust in 1983. This conference, “Women Surviving the Holocaust,” was the first major research effort on the Holocaust and women. It also coincided with the early days of women’s studies as an academic discipline. Its explicit aim was to gather information on the presence of women within Holocaust history: “Examine the role of women in ghettos; in resistance groups; in hiding, passing and escaping; and in the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Europe.” 18 Ringelheim suggested that up to the early 1980s, most Holocaust historians focused on the “lives of men as written and perceived by men” and that the exclusion of women was problematic. 19 She called for more research, and some of the research performed in later years proved indeed to be of great value for specific areas of study within Holocaust Studies. 20 In addition, Ringelheim and the 1983 conference organizers posed some specific questions, including: How did the survival rates of men and women compare, and what “kinds of special vulnerabilities and/or strengths” did women have? 21 These two questions, women’s particular vulnerability under the Nazis on the one hand, and their gendered resourcefulness on the other, were the main focus of Ringelheim’s work and of other feminist scholars of the first generation, such as Marlene Heinemann, Myrna Goldenberg, and Ellen S. Fine. 22 What follows is a brief outline of this research and its findings. First, of particular interest to Ringelheim was a comparison of the conditions to which Jewish women and Jewish men were subjected, since she wondered whether the misogyny of the Nazis might have led to “dual” oppression for Jewish women as women. She concluded that “While it appears that anti-semitism contains a monolithic view of Jews, in fact it looks at and treats Jews who are male and female quite differently. . . . Jewish women suffered both as Jews and as women from anti-semitism and sexism in their genocidal forms.” 23 She believed that this “different” treatment actually translated into lower survival rates of women. 24 Ringelheim determined that women were more vulnerable than men, even though some other feminist research suggested that perhaps women were more resourceful. 25 The problem with this research focus, however, is that the emphasis on Nazi sexism seems exaggerated or misplaced. It has become clear that racism, even more than sexism, determined the Nazis’ actions toward Jewish men and women. Overwhelmingly, race determined whether

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gender was a consideration. The Nazis constructed women as different types: “superior” Aryans or “subhuman” Jews. 26 Furthermore, Ringelheim did not initially provide numbers to back up her claim that more women were killed than men, and some other sources contradicted this claim. 27 It seems, as Anna Pawelczynska suggests in her sociological study of life in Auschwitz, that factors other than gender, such as physical strength, accounted for survival. 28 Once this has been admitted, it seems unclear whether women’s odds were worse or better than men’s, and other demographic factors were certainly as influential as gender itself. 29 The second research focus, the special or different resources of (Jewish) women under Nazi oppression, turned out to be problematic as well. By the very nature of their research, Ringelheim and others searched for a specific “women’s culture,” a culture among women which made them share resources and depend on each other. Historian Sybil Milton, for example, emphasized gender-specific differences in response to malnutrition, lack of hygiene, and oppression. 30 On the basis of her reading of memoirs, Milton concluded that women bonded with each other under oppression and that, together with other inmates, they created “artificial families” which sustained them. 31 She concluded that women survived “better” than men because of their gender-specific patterns of socialization which, in turn, strengthened certain capabilities. Relying on interviews that she conducted, Ringelheim, too, concluded that women used their socialization as nurturers to create networks in the camps and that these networks helped women survive. 32 The first problem with this focus on women’s specific strengths is that such an emphasis led in some cases to a rather generalized (and sometimes essentialized) analysis of gender difference which glorified women in general instead of cataloguing the historical experiences of individual women. Certain events and experiences described in memoirs and interviews that were perhaps unique or even exceptional were thus subsumed into a model which was meant to apply to all (Jewish) women and which suggested a (sometimes not so) subtle idealization of women’s strengths. From the start, such a generalizing interpretation was resisted by some scholars as well as by some survivors themselves, the “subjects” under examination. Some of the female survivors present at the first women’s Holocaust conference, for instance, initially rejected organizers’ assumptions about gender. 33 Especially at the beginning of this conference, the tension between the agenda of the organizers and that of

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some of the survivors was palpable. 34 Some of the survivors seemed to indicate that the researchers’ feminist lens, which reflected the newfound possibility of conceptualizing identity and experiences as gendered, did not necessarily match their own wartime self-perception. Nor were survivors willing or able to conceive retroactively of their experiences as affected by gender. Although I mention the objections of a number of survivors, I do not wish to suggest that survivors are necessarily objective or uncomplicated witnesses with regard to the question of gender difference. Survivors too have their own reasons for denying—or in some cases exaggerating—sexual difference. Sometimes this denial stems from a lack of (political) awareness about the constructed nature of these differences or the potential importance of these differences (not uncommon among women who were raised in the first three decades of this century), and/or the impression that under the threat of racial or political persecution and death, sexual differences and sexual discrimination seemed less important. What these confrontations between survivors and researchers did bring to light early on are the tremendous stakes involved in research on women (or gender) and the Holocaust for both parties. Survivors seek to represent themselves through their narratives in a certain way; they are not likely to concur easily when someone poses a challenge to their particular memories or the depiction of these memories. On the other hand, whether survivors are aware of it or not, and whether they like it or not, notions about gender (or what it means to conform or not conform to one’s perceived gender role) and ideas about the role of gender oppression during the Holocaust do filter into the self-portraits they produce. Survivors may see these concerns as central to their experiences or as peripheral, but they cannot prevent researchers from analyzing them for their meaning. Nor should we condemn scholars for doing so, because gender does play a role here. Another, more serious objection to research comparing the “strength” of women to that of men is that it seems to suggest the Nazis’ extermination plan somehow created room for women’s “superior” survival skills to be developed and showcased. Ringelheim herself recognized this to be problematic. In the mid-eighties, in a rather unprecedented move within academia, she republished parts of one of her earlier essays. 35 Ringelheim acknowledged the problematic reliance in her original research on “cultural feminism,” which argues that “women will be freed via an alternate women’s culture.” 36 Her use

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of this framework changed respect for the stories of Jewish women into glorification, she concluded, and led her to suggest that women survivors transformed “a world of death and inhumanity into one more act of human life.” 37 The problem with this approach, she now stated, is that “to suggest that among those Jews who lived through the Holocaust, women rather than men survived better is to move toward an acceptance or valorization of oppression, even if one uses a cultural and not a biological argument.” 38 If we do find differences between men and women, she declares, we need to question how we interpret these differences. With this essay, Ringelheim opened a discussion of the shortcomings of her own generation’s scholarship: the tendency to research women’s history with a set agenda; the risk of overgeneralizing male/female difference; and the tendency to glorify women’s culture. The focus on women’s strengths and vulnerabilities elicited a certain methodological bias that today needs reviewing. Such historiographic bias has its place in the evolution of a research area, however. Moreover, Ringelheim’s own critical analysis allowed a new generation of feminist scholars to examine their work and formulate new questions and methods. The starting point of my work, too, has been this important essay. Yet in this discussion I propose a different kind of analysis of narrative and gender, for which I need to draw attention to another methodological issue: the assessment of “narrative truth.” It is necessary to reconsider the ways in which survivor testimony may (or may not be) used as a factual basis for historical findings, and at the same time explore how these narratives form the locus of survivors’ subjectivity and agency.

Deconstructing Narrative In much first-generation research on the Holocaust and gender (as in much research on the Holocaust which does not focus on gender), there is no discussion of how Holocaust narratives (written or spoken) relate to reality. Instead, narratives are generally assumed to be trustworthy historical sources. 39 This is rather remarkable. Perhaps there is something so inherently overwhelming about the experience of the Holocaust— and in particular about our direct encounter with survivors and their trauma—that makes us feel that sophisticated theoretical (poststructuralist) models are inappropriate and makes us fall back on older, more familiar ones.

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Thus in virtually all early and even some current Holocaust scholarship, testimony is read or interpreted as if it were a reflection of an easily accessible truth. Toril Moi dubs this tendency “reflectionism.” A reflectionist reading fails to see the narrative as a (re)construction of a confusing, multi-faceted experienced reality; instead it considers the text “a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have equal and unbiased access.” 40 This kind of viewpoint neglects “to consider the proposition that the real is not only something we construct, but a controversial construct at that.” 41 Reservations about reflectionism are central to a recent historical approach which relies on poststructuralist notions of language (sometimes referred to as the “linguistic turn” in history). Language and textuality occupy a pivotal place in this kind of historical analysis, for, as Kathleen Canning suggests, “Rather than simply reflecting social reality or historical context, language is seen instead as constituting historical events, and human consciousness.” 42 This kind of analysis can be of use to our research on gender as it considers that reality is not only positional and subjective but also constructed in and through language. The process of narrating is embedded in both the cultural understanding and the linguistic capacities of the survivor. Individuals’ experience or consciousness of events needs to be seen in relation to their previous experiences as well as in relation to how they conceptualized these experiences and articulated them. Where an individual was positioned in relation to the discourses that determine his or her reality will affect one’s narrative. Is this person in a position to deconstruct, challenge, and subvert the discourses he or she internalized? Scholars need to factor in as well the dislocating effects of trauma on memory and on narrative. 43 Understanding and analyzing experience along these lines means that survivor testimonies (either by women or by men) do not allow us simple access to historical reality or “objective” history. 44 For “history never unfolds independently of the ways we have understood it.” 45 Experience is both uniquely personal and positional, influenced by the different lenses and discourses through which we at different times understand and describe ourselves and the world. As academics, we are engaged in performing historical analyses of these reconstructions, these representations. We perform an analysis of discourse. This shift in the understanding of narrative truth has important implications for our historical research. What do women’s Holocaust narratives reconstruct, one may ask. What do these representations mean?

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Are they not truthful? Or do (some) women, as Ringelheim wonders, lie, mythologize, or “engage in self-deception?” 46 How can we analyze these narratives effectively to understand more of women’s historical experiences? I argue that it is possible to discern in Holocaust narratives several distinct levels on which survivors (both male and female) “create meaning,” different levels on which a personal selection comes into play. A selection takes place (consciously or unconsciously) on at least three separate (but not always easily separable) levels: first, experience. Survivors cannot tell us everything, so they select certain experiences to tell us about. Second, memory. By necessity, there will be certain events they can remember or choose to remember, but not others. Third, narrative emplotment. Survivors select a rhetorical strategy, a structure, a tone, a narrative order. Furthermore, these three levels are also already textual, for they are narratives. The elements the survivor selects will be chosen from so many options that these choices must hold particular if often unknown significance. What survivors select therefore reflects their version of reality, filtered in part through the changing lens of trauma (that what cannot be told), time (bringing both aging and the possibility for reflexive distance), the psychological process of self-preservation, and the narrative conventions of that process. This selection process is not at all unusual, even in Holocaust testimony. As Dan Bar-On, an Israeli research psychologist working with survivors and their families, suggests, one can find in survivor stories “an endless process of choice, both forward and backward, patterns that reflect . . . tension between conservation and change.” 47 In their (written or spoken) testimony, survivors reconstruct some of their own meaning. Moreover, I contend that the significance of their selection is almost always also linked to (and affected by) their self-perception as gendered, because belonging to a certain sex is at the heart of our self-image as human beings and thus at the heart of the desire to “normalize” life. 48 This active, subjective, and constructive aspect of the testimonies was often overlooked in many earlier studies. 49 Acknowledging the constructed nature of testimony, however, offers us an important window not only on understanding gender difference but on conceptualizing survivors’ agency. For these constructions suggest that survivors are able to renegotiate the past and produce meaning as subjects. This can be a healing process. 50 Reconstruction of the life story is therefore not coincidental; it reveals normalization strategies which “allow people to

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‘smooth corners’ in their stories, especially corners they find difficult to confront in the present.” 51 Thus it is not only necessary for us as readers and researchers to acknowledge the constructed nature of testimony so we can understand the material in this context; this approach permits us to appreciate the function of the narrative in providing the survivor with a certain measure of agency. If one takes this discursive aspect of experience, memory, and testimony into consideration while underscoring that the subject’s ability to select and reframe the meaning of her experiences constitutes agency, our understanding of the gender differences that are evident in much testimony of Jewish women and men will change. So what is it that Jewish women select and reframe in their narratives, and how is this different from men? In general, the events undergone by Jewish men and women caught in the Nazi nets were probably quite similar and comparable. Sometimes women and men were treated differently because of their sex, and these differences should be noted. (I will return to these differences in a moment.) However, I argue that the most striking differences demonstrated in interviews and autobiographical narratives are most likely due to gender socialization of the subjects, who grew up and lived with certain specific discourses on gender. In other words, I suggest that the lens of gender accounts for the fact that similar events and circumstances were sometimes experienced differently, were remembered differently, and are written or spoken about differently. The socialization of those involved, the discourses in and through which one is constituted and understands one’s self, affect what kinds of narratives one employs to relate one’s traumas. This is not to deny the fact that ideas about sex differences also affected the events of the war itself: Jewish women, as a group, were sometimes treated differently from men, by both Nazis and the Jewish community as a whole; and sometimes a similar treatment was experienced differently. 52 Moreover, although Gisela Bock and others have convincingly argued that “the core of Nazi rule and its novelty . . . was not patriarchy but racism” and “racial hierarchy prevailed over gender hierarchy,” 53 the Nazis also made a number of decisions based on gender which would indeed affect the experiences of men and women. These gender-based differences fall roughly into three categories. First, the Nazis selected mostly men for the (relatively privileged) positions of Jewish leadership. Second, because Jewish men were more often selected to work than women, women were more often killed immediately. Finally,

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as is to be expected, women were especially vulnerable with respect to their sexuality and reproductive function. 54 Yet women’s sexuality could work both to their advantage and disadvantage. Women were at risk of being assaulted (although rape by German soldiers or camp guards was relatively rare, due to the prohibition of Rassenschande, interracial sexual relations, or literally: racial shame or sin), but sometimes women were in a position to barter sex for food rations, an option that could prove life saving. Even though gender sometimes did affect historical events and decisions in these ways, more often it was the case that men and women were treated similarly by the Nazis. Most differences in their testimony can and need to be explained by the fact that men and women assign meaning disparately on three different levels: men and women experience, remember, and recount events differently. In other words, because of gender, men and women experience the same treatment in different ways. Gender plays a role as it inflects the memory of these war experiences (women and men tend to emphasize different kinds of experiences in their process of remembering), and gender plays a role in how men and women narrate, how they write and speak about their memories of the experiences. The historical “truth” of Holocaust survivors is thus necessarily tied up with various uses of narrative, which in turn are gendered. Therefore, even as we find noticeable gender differences in the interviews and the memoirs of survivors, we still need to analyze how and when these gender differences operate to be able to understand and appreciate them. Let us now consider the impact of gendered discourse.

Gendered Experience, Gendered Memory, Gendered Narrative Were the historical experiences of men and women in fact different, and if so, how and why? Did the Nazis treat men and women differently? (Did they, for instance, target women because of a sexist notion that they were less valuable labor?) Or, as I have suggested, was the treatment often similar but were the effects different for men and for women? Let us briefly consider two examples. First: the shaving off of inmates’ hair. This was customary at a number of concentration camps and affected both women and men, but it may have had a much greater emotional and psychological impact on women than on men, as comparisons of Auschwitz memoirs by male

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and female survivors suggest. 55 Concluding from these narratives that the Nazis targeted women for this procedure (exploiting their sense of modesty) is incorrect. 56 If men and women were subjected to the same treatment, how can we argue that women were “targeted”? In fact, the Nazis generally did not discriminate in their treatment of Jewish men and women in concentration camps—apart from selection at which women, because of their frailty or motherhood stood less of a chance. However, the treatment itself was experienced differently. Starvation, on the other hand, may have had a quicker and more dramatic physical impact on men than on women. But concluding that women were socialized to cope with hunger “better” because they hoarded and saved up food, as is sometimes suggested, is deceptive and also incorrect. 57 The different starvation rates may simply reflect the fact that women did not succumb at the same rate as men because of such biological differences as a slower metabolism. Such historical-sociological facts can and should be situated vis-à-vis survivor texts. Yet “historical facts” are not knowable outside the narratives we are presented with, and that alters the narratives in some way. Sometimes, for example, the stories we find might differ because men and women remember different events or the same events differently. What about gendered memory? Research on memory suggests that gender does in fact play a role in remembering. 58 Men and women do not differ in overall memory ability, but men and women do assume that there are distinct sex differences in memory, and this expectation of difference, the desire or need to conform to one’s sense of what is gender-appropriate, affects their recall years later. Selective recall of memories and the narratives used to form and share them thus become gendered. Gender differences in memory are the effect of preference, a preference which in turn is caused by socialization. 59 To acknowledge the potential importance of gendered recall for our understanding of the experiences of Jewish men and women under the Nazis, we should ideally compare narratives of men and women who lived under “equivalent” circumstances. Only then could we potentially weed out what the effects of gendered memory are on one’s recollection of the events, and what patterns of difference between men’s and women’s testimonies are either coincidental or related to other factors. Marlene Heinemann has attempted such a comparison in her study of women’s Holocaust literature, but her endeavor shows precisely where such an analysis falls short: there are too many factors to include to make the comparison a useful one. Besides gender, one would have to find a

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match between survivors’ age, class, Jewish identity, nationality, education level, personality, and so on, and thus such a comparison simply cannot be achieved. These findings on gendered memory nevertheless have important consequences for our historical research. If we now know that the memories of men and women differ, we will need to consider how these differences have affected our perception of Holocaust history. Since testimony by male survivors has been examined much more than testimony by female survivors, is our image of “what it was like” incorrect or incomplete? Have we only been reading historical experiences through the lens of (male) gendered recall? Work of the first generation of scholars does indeed suggest so, and our increased understanding of the gendered functioning of memory makes it even more important to take women’s testimony into account. Finally, in another kind of textuality, men and women might write differently about their experiences, not only because their experiences may have in fact differed and their memory of the events is gendered, but also because their style or mode of narration may differ. Feminist theories of autobiography consider the possibility that female authors are influenced by different literary and cultural models as they fashion their narrative. Some theorists even argue that women have different styles of writing than men because of their different psychological makeup. Although some of these claims risk essentializing gender difference once more, they are worth further inquiry. 60 Furthermore, as suggested earlier, bearing witness, articulating one’s story, has an important function for survivors. It can allow them to reconsider events, rethink their own role in them, and create a bridge between the past and present—in short, reassert their subjectivity and agency. The narrative strategy, the emplotment underlying the story, inevitably serves the narrator’s goals (whatever these may be) from his or her present perspective. 61 More specifically, these narratives function both to make sense of one’s past and to justify and normalize it. Because “normalizing” strategies rely so heavily on normative discourse, however, and because traditional gender roles are such a central part of this discourse, the perspective from which one writes will also by necessity be gendered. Let me illustrate this with an example that relates back to an earlier feminist research focus: the existence of gendered support systems in camps. As men were (and are) generally socialized to value independence and autonomy, these qualities are often what they will strive to

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include and choose to emphasize in their narratives. Thus one finds these traits both in their memories and in the narrative recollection of these memories. I would not wish to conclude on the basis of these statements, however, that, unlike women, men did not have important relationships (“dyads”) with other men in the camps. 62 What the discovery of such a pattern in Holocaust narratives does suggest to me is that perhaps unconsciously, most men born in the first decades of this century tend to under-emphasize these bonds and place greater importance on recollections that contain instances of individual strength, heroism, or autonomy. Women, on the other hand, had been generally socialized to value relationships and interdependence, and therefore they tend to remember friendships and connections more fondly and choose to emphasize them in a narrative, even to the point of personal effacement. (Some female survivors create texts more akin to “collective biography” than autobiography.) The women’s tendency to foreground these gendered memories in their narratives might strike us readers as particularly significant, but it should be understood as a “normalizing” strategy; this tendency does not necessarily generate reliable testimony that can serve as a basis for historical conclusions about differences between male and female behavior. Conforming to one’s discursive domain’s (sometimes competing) medical, biological and bourgeois discourses on gender, which become internalized and shape one’s sense of expectations about gender roles, is thus at the heart of one’s self-image, and in turn this will inform one’s memories and narratives. In a situation as extreme as the Holocaust, such socialization does not become irrelevant. On the contrary, it may become strengthened, even exaggerated, as a survivor seeks to hold on to the last vestiges of decency and normalcy—to a normative (heterosexual) bourgeois discourse—to create some kind of narrative logic out of traumatic experiences. In the narrative recollection of these events, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty years after the events occurred, one can expect gendered patterns to be emphasized, especially when an individual tries to justify certain decisions and make personal sense of the inherently senseless. This form of subjectivity does not make survivors’ testimony less valuable, though. It is in fact precisely here that we can localize survivors’ agency: in the opportunity to renegotiate their histories and produce (narrate and emplot) their own stories. Scholars need to take these strategies and the process of producing testimony into consideration in a historical analysis, however, and resist neutralizing

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them through the treatment of survivors as objective and disinterested observers. Gender must certainly remain a relevant factor in current research on the Holocaust, but in a more complex way than has been suggested thus far. The danger of the particular approach much early feminist research used is connected to taking the statements about gender differences made by both men and women in memoirs and interviews at face value, then deriving rather general conclusions from them about men and women. What I am suggesting instead is that the answers to why experiences between men and women as written about in memoirs and recounted in interviews differ at times are neither simple nor clear-cut. They are not all located in Nazi policies aimed specifically at women (women’s “particular vulnerability”). Nor can they be attributed so easily to certain gendered coping mechanisms (women’s “particular resourcefulness”). Instead, we first need to look more carefully into the effects of men’s and women’s different prewar socialization. For as James Young suggests, “each victim ‘saw’—i.e. understood and witnessed— his predicament differently, depending on his own historical past, religious paradigms, and ideological explanations.” 63 Secondly, the survivors’ present-day location vis-à-vis the competing discourses of gender, class, Jewishness—and their ensuing ways of acting in, looking at, describing and experiencing the world—need to be considered as central to the narratives they will produce. 64

Some Conclusions In closing, let us consider the first quotation with which I opened this essay. The fragment from Charlotte Delbo, a French gentile imprisoned in Auschwitz because of her connections with the French resistance, comes from a short piece entitled “The Men,” which describes the female protagonist’s (presumably Delbo) daily encounters with columns of male prisoners. She depicts the men as looking miserable, vulnerable, ready for death: as useless. In a reading of this piece, one needs to carefully question whether, as Delbo seems to suggest, the men are pitiful because they are imprisoned, tortured, and on the verge of dying, or whether they are perhaps more so in Delbo’s eyes, specifically because they are men. Does what is depicted here suggest the contrast Delbo experienced in Auschwitz between a

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prewar discourse of men as strong, as protectors of women? Does the text suggest that all men in Auschwitz were pitiful? That men in general did not endure suffering well? Does this mean women did better? Several interpretations of this text are possible, whether on the basis of a social-historical focus or discursive analyses. If one seeks to confirm a generalized notion about the different natures (or socialization) of men and women, one could possibly find it in Delbo’s text. Similarly, if one wants to glorify female physical and moral strength, one could use this passage. (The women in Delbo’s story save up food and toss it to the men, who fight for it like animals.) The gender reading I have previously outlined, however, suggests that the text does not mean to provide such straightforward answers or generalizations. In discursive, textual ways, a gendered reading yields a puzzling observation of an event, written down from memory, soon after it occurred. The complexity of the gender roles, then and now, and of gendered memory, plays into it. I sense that Delbo’s text means to speak not of males and females per se but rather of a universe in which even though all rules were broken, the self, her self, a female self, was somehow preserved. This text, as part of a much larger body of work, testifies to her survival, to her preservation of (a gendered) self through her ability to make narrative sense of her experience. Gender thus becomes important in texts by survivors such as Delbo’s not because the Nazis were inherently sexist (even though this might be true), or because women or men displayed certain distinct (gendered) behaviors which survivors felt compelled to write about, but because gender is one of the important lenses through which survivors perceive and understand themselves as members of their community. As it stands now, Ringelheim’s generation’s hopes have not been fulfilled. Texts written by male Holocaust survivors are still being analyzed far more often than texts written by females. Women’s perspectives and, in general, the effect of gender (for men and women) have largely been overlooked or ignored. A supposedly “neutral” (but really “male”) emphasis is reinforced within the scholarship—the studies tend to be about men—and the tendency by male authors to read autobiographically leads to the neglect of scholarship on women. Texts by women and the role played by gender are still written about much less often and are thus not as well known. This means they are not used as often in academic discussions or in class syllabi, and so the cycle of neglect continues, as do the generalizations about the Holocaust and Holocaust literature, based as they are on texts written almost exclusively by men. 65

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My analysis of the inevitably gendered nature of experience, memory, and narrative suggests that texts by female authors need to be as widely read as texts by men, by male as well as female scholars, students, and the general audience, because they provide a perspective which differs from that of men. Inevitably these texts will produce a differently gendered discourse on Holocaust experience. Moreover, the example of a possibly simplistic interpretation of Delbo’s short text, as well as the problems with some other earlier approaches, illustrate the additional need for adopting a new focus while examining the evidence we have on gender and the Holocaust. No longer can we approach oral testimony or autobiographical texts as transparent documents that represent the past “as it was.” We need to see them instead as gendered discourses which serve to construct, reshape and contest the memory of the past for various present purposes (personal and social) as much as they serve to preserve that past itself. For this very reason, these testimonies and texts will not yield quick and unequivocal answers to why the Holocaust meant different things to men and women, but they do suggest a locus of agency for survivors.

NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 1997 Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches in Tampa, Florida, and the Women’s History Workshop at the University of Minnesota. I wish to thank the following readers for their feedback: Rebecca Raham at the University of Minnesota, and Katie Arens, Nina Berman, and Kit Belgum at the University of Texas at Austin. I also wish to thank Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg for inviting me to contribute to this anthology, and for challenging and encouraging me with their comments. 1. Charlotte Delbo, “None of Us Will Return,” trans. Rosette C. Lamont, in Auschwitz and After (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 21. 2. Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: Eine Jugend (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1992), 237. My translation: “I was convinced . . . that women are more fit [have more stamina] for life than men.” 3. See the following articles, monographs, and anthologies, which share a number of common strategies in analyzing women and the Holocaust, and most of which I take under consideration in this essay: Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press,

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1984), 297–333. Ellen S. Fine, “Women Writers and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival,” in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 79–95. Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, Women Surviving: The Holocaust (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983). Essays by Joan Ringelheim: “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs 10:4 (1985): 741–61, as well as two revised reprints of this essay in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 243–64, and in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 373–418. Also by Ringelheim: “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual I, ed. Alex Grobman (Chappaqua, NY: 1984), 69–87, and “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), 141–49. In this same anthology, see also Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” 150–66. Other essays by Goldenberg: “Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust,” in Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture, ed. Maurie Sachs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 94–106, and “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women’s Holocaust Narratives,” AAAPSS 548 (1996): 78–93. Monographs: Vera Laska, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) (contains a chapter on Jewish women); Ruth Schwertfeger, Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp (Oxford: Berg, 1989). In the past ten years, a number of monographs and articles were published that take on a somewhat different (methodological) perspective: R. Ruth Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Karen Remmler, “Gender Identities and the Remembrance of the Holocaust,” Women in German Yearbook 10 (1994): 167–87; Sara R. Horowitz, “Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996) 258–82; Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); and S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). There are now also several anthologies on women and the Holocaust: Rittner and Roth, eds., Different Voices; Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Esther Fuchs, ed., Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999).

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4. The only woman’s Holocaust narrative that can be considered to be universally well known is the diary of Anne Frank. However, as Frank was very young, and wrote while in hiding, her work cannot in any way be called representative of that of most Jewish women during the Holocaust. In contrast, a much more mature and important work by a female survivor-author, Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz et après—consisting of Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Paris: Editions de Gauthier, 1965), Une connaissance inutile (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1970), and Mesure de nos jours (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971)—did not appear in its entirety in an English translation until thirty years after its initial publication in French. Parts of Delbo’s work were translated in the 1960s, but they were not well known and did not become part of the Holocaust canon until the 1990s. 5. Shulamit Magnus, “ ‘Out of the Ghetto’: Integrating the Study of Jewish Women into the Study of ‘The Jews,’ ” Judaism 39:1 (1990): 1. A similar essay by Magnus was first published in Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, eds., The Jewish Woman in America (NY: NAL, 1975). 6. Paula Hyman, “Gender and Jewish History,” Tikkun 3:1 (1988): 35. 7. Ibid. 8. Susan Rubin Suleiman suggests that just as one can write in an autobiographic mode, one can also read “autobiographically” in order to recognize something of oneself in someone else’s life story. Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Thanks to Gary Weissman, who led me to this text. 9. Contrary to the widespread notion that Holocaust literature is read out of a sense of obligation that is selfless and neutral, Gary Weissman argues that more self-centered mechanisms may be at work. The canon of Holocaust literature “has taken shape in no small part because scholars have sought to use survivor memoirs . . . to identify with ‘someone like themselves who was caught up by the Holocaust’ ” (3). Most Holocaust scholars are thus “self-seeking readers” (3). Gary Weissman, “Gender and the Autobiographical Reading of Holocaust Memoirs” (paper presented at the 28th Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, University of Washington, Seattle, March 3, 1998). Permission to quote by author. 10. Female scholars write about male authors as often as male scholars do and do not usually seek out texts by women. This is possibly because male experience is seen as “universal” and female experience is seen as “particular.” Furthermore, female readers are used to identifying with male protagonists. 11. Since the mid-1970s, the growth of the new field of feminist or “women’s” history has been phenomenal. The initial focus was on the gathering of material to write a “her-story” that would add women to a history from which they had been excluded. See Joan Kelly-Gadol, “The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs 1:4 (1976): 809–23. More recently, the efforts of feminist historians are directed toward

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conceptualizing gender as a category of analysis. Gender is seen as a social construct rather than a biological or essential given. The result, as Joan Wallach Scott argues, is that “feminist history then becomes . . . the exposure of the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies” (Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 27). Young feminist historians such as Kathleen Canning take this gender analysis still one step further. They postulate that language itself constitutes historical events and human consciousness, and that our analyses should thus focus on representations and on the power of discourses to construct socially textual difference and anchor these differences in social practices and institutions. Canning thus suggests an analysis of gender as a symbolic system (369). Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19.2 (1994): 368–403. 12. Magnus, “ ‘Out of the Ghetto,’ ” 28–30. 13. Consider the unpleasant exchange between Cynthia Ozick and Joan Ringelheim in 1982, for instance. See Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women,” 144. More recently, Gabriel Schoenfeld’s virulent critique of Holocaust scholarship in general, and women’s studies research in particular, illustrates that dislike for any research labeled “feminist” can lead to intentional misreading and vicious attacks. Schoenfeld’s essay misrepresents the research—for example, he takes quotes out of context and persistently ignores studies that are of high quality—and thus it is not worthy of a serious response. Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary, June 1998, 42–46. 14. Nor do I mean to suggest that studies which do not deal with gender are automatically free of such problems. It is only the former that I focus on in this article, however. 15. Ofer and Weitzman, “Introduction: The Role of Gender in the Holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust, 11. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Quotes are from the published conference proceedings. Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, 1. 19. Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable,” 69. 20. For instance, an analysis of women’s experience turned out to be particularly relevant for the question of Jewish identity and assimilation. As Marion Kaplan and Paula Hyman show in their respective studies on assimilation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jews, the experience of assimilation of exclusively German-Jewish men formed the basis for works dealing with German-Jewish identity and culture, which in turn characterized all (upper)middle-class German Jews as highly assimilated. Hyman and Kaplan show that if one takes female experience into account as well, the identity question becomes much more complex and diverse. Thus Hyman argues that “Jewish women dis-

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played fewer signs of radical assimilation: they had lower rates of intermarriage and conversion” (20). Kaplan concludes in her study that “By ignoring women . . . historians have inadvertently overestimated both the desire of Jews to assimilate and even their capacity to do so” (viii). Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 21. Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, 2. 22. Heinemann’s work (Gender and Destiny) discusses six memoirs by female survivors and compares them with male testimonies. Heinemann examines the “preponderance of selfishness over cooperation” (81) in the camps and comes to the conclusion that “What has been described as a universal adoption by inmates of Nazi values of domination by the weak is apparently much less true for women than for men in memoirs” (110). Heinemann accounts for this difference between men and women by referring to the different psychic structures produced in men and women in the patriarchal family. She bases her analysis on Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). In much of her work Goldenberg looks specifically for women’s unique strengths. In one recent article she focuses on women’s “resourcefulness” as she seeks the “characteristics of an alternative social structure based on traditional feminine values. The experience of women during the Holocaust shows that traditionally feminist [sic ] values of cooperating and caring are important conditions for the perpetuation of civilization.” Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism” AAPSS 548 (1996): 78. Fine looks both at “traumas that were unique to women”—such as sexual abuse and humiliation, fear of infertility, and maternity and childbirth—and at the “strategies for specific women’s survival” (“Women Writers and the Holocaust,” 80). “Women’s coping strategies” are substitute mothering and other nurturing behavior. She also considers literature to be a “life sustaining force” (93). The latter form of “spiritual resistance” is not exclusively a “female means of sustenance,” Fine admits, but she then suggests that “it does present itself in many of the memoirs written by women” (81). 23. Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women,” 145, 147. 24. Ibid., 147. 25. See Goldenberg, “Different Horrors”; Milton, “Issues and Resources,” in Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, 17–19; and examples cited in note 22. 26. The presence of a greater number of female victims does not necessarily indicate a desire on the part of the Nazis to “target” (Jewish) women but may be indicative of other historical circumstances, as I shall discuss later. Nonetheless, as Atina Grossmann points out, this does not mean that gender did not matter at

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all. Atina Grossmann, “Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism,” Gender and History 3:3 (Autumn 1991): 356. 27. In a personal conversation, Ringelheim informed me that she did have figures at the time of this article’s publication but she did not include them because of space limitations. In a later article, in an addendum to a reprint of one of her essays—“Women and the Holocaust”—she does provide numbers on comparative survival rates among men and women. The problem, however, is that she attributes the greater number of deportations, imprisonment, and murder of women solely to the Nazi’s intent to kill “Jewish women . . . as Jewish women not simply as Jews” (392), rather than to a combination of factors, including sexism within the Jewish community itself. In contrast, Myrna Goldenberg argues that women had better chances for surviving than men because of certain gendered skills. She suggests that “Women survivors compare themselves favorably to men who had ‘to learn behaviors that women already knew’ ” (“Different Horrors,” 151). To support her case, Goldenberg suggests that there are several sources that report lower mortality rates for women inmates than for men, but she does not provide details about those sources (153). 28. Pawelczynska, who does not use gender as an analytical category, suggests that “Any form of physical weakness reduced the chances of surviving the camp nearly to zero. In most cases it canceled the chance to be admitted into the camp, and instead formed the basis of the decision for immediate, assemblyline-style death.” Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 53. 29. Most women and men under age sixteen and over age forty, and all women between the ages of sixteen and forty with small children or who were visibly pregnant, would be killed on arrival at a concentration/extermination camp. Age and physical frailty are mentioned as risk factors in all studies. Other personal factors that proved beneficial to one’s chance of survival which I have come across in survivor memoirs included: being accustomed to the harsh climate in Poland or having the ability to adjust to it; understanding and speaking German; having a special skill; and having political or other ties which connected one to a group of inmates in the camp. Other general factors that affected survival included: the degree of German control over a certain region or country; the attitude of the local government toward the Nazis and toward Jews; the availability of escape routes; and the logistics of the deportations, which differed from place to place. (Deportation date and destination obviously were significant factors in personal survival.) 30. Milton suggests that women tolerated hunger and starvation better than men, and that women inmates shared their food. She also reports that, early in their incarceration, there were fewer outbreaks of disease among the women because they cleaned themselves, and their surroundings, more often and more thoroughly. Subsequent overcrowding made such hygienic measures impossible. (“Issues and Resources,” 17–19).

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31. Ibid. 32. Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust” (in Different Voices), 378–79. Ringelheim does point out, however, that survival was ultimately a matter of luck. Such an analysis is not particularly satisfying to her, because luck, she suggests, “tells us very little if we want to find out about their maintenance strategies and how these strategies relate to their survival” (383). 33. A survivor who was asked whether there was a “community of women” answered carefully that relationships between inmates were important but that these were not unique to women: “It was a closer bond because the destiny was the same for all of us. I cannot find any other difference [between men and women].” Quoted in Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, 39. 34. Apparently feeling a considerable (internal?) pressure to conform to a story the feminist organizers were looking for, a survivor participant spoke up: “I see that the people who run the panel are a little disappointed that the feminine side of the Holocaust experience does not come forward enough. Now, when you talk about the war experience, you are not a man or a woman; you were primarily a human being and those are situations that brought out the primordial instincts of fear, hunger, thirst, love, hope or hate.” Quoted in Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference, 71–72. 35.Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust.” 36. Brooke, quoted in Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust,” (in Different Voices), 387. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. In the related context of fiction, Goldenberg writes: “[S]urvivor narratives are invaluable because they provide a major source of historical evidence about the social context that has become . . . the setting for Holocaust fiction. . . . [T]hese narratives not only generate fiction about the Holocaust but they also validate such fiction and verify historical accounts.” Goldenberg, “Different Horrors,” 150 (my emphasis). There are a few exceptions here; see Heinemann, several of the chapters in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, and essays by Sara R. Horowitz and Karen Remmler. 40. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985), 45. 41. Ibid. 42. Canning, “Feminist History,” 370 (my emphasis). 43. A number of important works that discuss this issue have been published in the past decade. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), and, in particular, Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For an

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interesting critique of Caruth, see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 44. The question of how to understand and interpret eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust (whether written or oral testimony) has long been central to Holocaust Studies, and it is no longer an issue discussed solely by historians. Instead it has been placed in the context of broader theoretical debates about the problems of representation and reference, as well as in regard to the problematic relationship between private and cultural memory and (official) history. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) is often considered the starting point for later theoretical discussion on Holocaust representation; also seminal is a Holocaust conference organized by Saul Friedlander in 1990, of which many papers were collected in his Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). In the latter work, historians and literary scholars debate whether there are indeed limits to the representation of the Holocaust, especially in light of “two possibly contrary constraints: a need for truth, and the problems raised by the opaqueness of the events and the opaqueness of language as such” (4). See in particular the essays in this volume by Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Eric Santner, and Geoffrey Hartman. White does not question the possibility of assessing historical reality, but he suggests that a specific framework of interpretation is always necessary to place these events within the context of a historical narrative. It is language, then, not the events themselves, which imposes a limited choice of rhetorical forms on the historical narrative, and the chosen form in turn implies certain “specific emplotments, explicative models, and ideological stances” (“Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,”6). Subsequent important studies which have taken issue with this question of the (im)possibility of historical and/or literary representation of the Holocaust include: Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Sara Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1994); David Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Hanover, RI: Brown University Press, 1991); and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Although these issues are now clearly central to the field, they are noticeably absent in earlier feminist work, but treated seriously in such recent books as Sara R. Horowitz’s Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), Marianne

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Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Lori Lefkovitz’s Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, edited with Julia Epstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 45. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 5. 46. Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust” (in Different Voices), 389. 47. Dan Bar-On, “Transgenerational Aftereffects of the Holocaust in Israel: Three Generations,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 111. 48. One might argue that gender as we define it today, a social and discursive construct, was a nonexistent category in Europe in the 1940s and therefore could not then have played a role in human consciousness similar to the one it does today. Nevertheless, sex as a biologically determined “trait” and ideas about the behavior appropriate for a person of one or the other sex were certainly as much a part of people’s worldview as they are now. In fact, “gender” as an analytical category has simply allowed people to see these roles as constructed, and thus more flexible, and has allowed for a less rigid view of sex-specific traits and behaviors than the one that circulated among Europeans in the early decades of this century. 49. Or if it is touched upon, it is with suspicion. Thus Ringelheim speaks with some concern about the possibility that survivors “transform” their narratives or that they create a “cover story” which deceives, softens, or mythologizes (Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust” [in Different Voices], 389). 50. Bar-On, “Transgenerational Aftereffects,” 93. 51. Ibid., 112. 52. For instance, both Marion Kaplan and Michal Unger suggest that during the late 1930s and early 1940s, decisions were made within the Jewish community on the basis of gender which would affect Jewish women’s experiences during the Holocaust. For example, Jewish men were more often encouraged to flee occupied Europe than were women, since it was believed they were in greater danger. Women more often than men were left to take care of elderly parents because caretaking was expected of daughters more often than of sons. As a result of these two factors alone, more women than men were left in Europe when deportations began, and more women were rounded up and taken to ghettos and camps. Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 45–51; Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 124–25. 53. Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 95.

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54. In some camps, women who were pregnant when they entered or who were accompanied by young children faced an automatic death sentence. (Of those gassed immediately upon arrival, 60–70 percent were elderly Jews and women with children). For this reason, many secret abortions were performed by inmates themselves (or by Jewish doctors in the camps) in order to give female inmates an increased chance of survival. Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” 348. 55. Compare, for instance, the depictions of the shaving in Elie Wiesel’s Auschwitz memoir with those of Isabella Leitner and Judith Magyar-Isaacson. All three were imprisoned in Auschwitz and may be said to have been subjected to similar events. Wiesel writes about the shaving: “Blows continued to rain down. ‘To the Barber!’ Belt and shoes in hand, I let myself be dragged off to the barbers. They took our hair off with clippers, and shaved off all the hair on our bodies. The same thought blazed all the time in my head—not to be separated from my father.” (Night in The Night Trilogy. Trans. Stella Rodway. [New York: Noonday Press, 1988], 44). Compare this to Magyar-Isaacson and Leitner, whose depictions are not only much longer but who also use very different images. Magyar-Isaacson: “A woman . . . attacked me with scissors. Another drove a razor around my crown. I stood in a heap of my own hair, fingering my scalp; the stubble foreign to the touch. . . . A razor moved into my crotch. A shower of disinfectant hit my armpits and scalp. A sudden spray scorched my vulva” (Seed of Sarah: Memoir of a Survivor [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990], 66–67). She describes the shaving as a violation, and the effects are much more dramatic, for she no longer recognizes the other female inmates as women, not even her own mother. Thus the shaving has profoundly alienating effects. Leitner writes about the experience in similar length and tone as Magyar-Isaacson (Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz, ed. Irving A. Leitner [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978]. 56. For instance, relying on a number of other accounts of female survivors who describe the degrading experience of shaving, Goldenberg suggests: “Sheltered or urbane, Jewish women were targeted for nefarious degradation” (“Different Horrors,” 155). 57. Michal Unger suggests that “women adjusted better than men to ghetto conditions and coped better with the hunger and the harsh and changing circumstances” (“Status and Plight of Women,” 125). She bases this conclusion on 1940–42 mortality figures of the Lodz ghetto indicating that “starvation claimed more than 18,018 victims, approximately 40 percent women and 60 percent men” (125). Deducing a possible explanation from the figures, she suggests that women “exercised superior self-restraint; dividing their bread into daily portions, while many men frequently consumed several days’ bread in one sitting” (136). This tendency to “outperform” men, as she calls it, is not an explanation, however, and dividing up portions did not provide an inmate with more calories to sustain life. A discussion of physiological differences between

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the sexes is thus relevant and needed here. Ringelheim already hinted at this question in “Women and the Holocaust” (in Different Voices), 378. 58. See Elizabeth Loftus et al., “Who Remembers What? Gender Differences in Memory,” Michigan Quarterly Review 26:1 (1987): 64–85. This research suggests that although males and females do not differ in overall memory ability, motivation and training (i.e., socialization) do affect the content of what is remembered. One of the striking outcomes of their tests was that even though, empirically speaking, memory differences were very small, men and women subjects believed there are in fact very distinct sex differences in memory, and this belief affected later recall. For instance, difference in “emotionality” in answers to a questionnaire testing memory “may be confounded by differences in men’s and women’s willingness to disclose ” (74, my emphasis). Loftus et al. conclude that “differences in the unverified memories that men and women elicit when asked to generate a memory are more indicative of their memory preferences than their memory ability” (76, my emphasis). 59. Heinemann hints at this problem of locating gender difference as she argues that survivors’ memories of relationships in the camps are tied to socially and psychologically determined roles, which are in turn gender-based (Gender and Destiny, 82). Thus she leaves open the possibility that the memories themselves could in fact be gendered, and that women simply emphasize and value friendships more in memory and therefore mention them more often in texts than men do. Nevertheless, she does not draw this conclusion in her work. 60. For a good overview of feminist theory of (women’s) autobiography, see Marjanne E. Gooze, “The Definitions of Self and Form in Feminist Autobiography Theory,” Women’s Studies 21:4 (1992): 411–29. By comparison, note, for instance, the remarkable stylistic differences between the writing of Wiesel versus that of Magyar-Isaacson and Leitner, mentioned briefly in note 55. 61. Bar-On, “Transgenerational Aftereffects,” 112. 62. One can see such relationships described in the works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, for instance. 63. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 26. 64. One of the few texts that also hints at these questions is Sara Horowitz’s “Memory and Testimony.” Horowitz argues that “generally speaking, the testimony of male and female survivors corroborate one another and verify the same sets of historical facts. Yet women’s testimony reveals distinctly different patterns of experience and reflection” (264). She then goes on to suggest, in an argument similar to the one I make here, that “women may remember differently, or they may remember different things” (264). 65. See, for instance, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, who mentions about sixty male authors in her study but only discusses about sixteen female authors; By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Young (Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust) mentions close to two hundred male authors but only about one hundred narratives by women. Even Felman and

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Laub repeat this pattern: about twenty texts or interviews by male survivors are mentioned in Testimony but less than five by female survivors, and the female survivors and their work are mentioned only briefly. Most striking to me was to find that even in Sara R. Horowitz’s recent work, Voicing the Void, she discusses in depth the writings of about thirty male authors but only a few works by women. One exception to this pattern is Rachel Feldhay Brenner’s Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), which focuses exclusively on the works of four female authors: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum. Brenner, however, does not problematize gender very effectively in her work, and at times she comes dangerously close to essentializing her authors’ behavior and conflating it with “women’s destiny.” Another exception is S. Lillian Kremer’s Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination. Kremer combines feminist and literary analyses of women’s memoirs and fiction; her study includes Ilona Karmel, Elzbieta Ettinger, Hana Demetz, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, and Norma Rosen.

Part II

WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES: GENDER, THE NAZIS, AND THE HOLOCAUST

Th i s s e c t i o n e x p l o r e s t h e e x p e r i e n c e s o f n o n - J e w i s h women who fall into two, mutually exclusive, categories of victim and perpetrator. Roma and Sinti women, popularly and often pejoratively called Gypsy women, were targets in a manner similar but not identical to the German victimization of the Jews. Sybil Milton has stated that the Roma and Sinti were Nazi targets of genocide, while Guenter Lewy argues that they were maligned, oppressed, and sporadically murdered but not systematically annihilated as were the Jews. 1 Milton acknowledges the paucity of data and documents on the Roma, particularly on the women, but she provides a clear narrative of their suffering in the camps and as subjects of medical experiments. Anna Rosmus investigates the use of Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian women for slave farm labor and the ensuing sexual exploitation that led to hundreds of involuntary abortions. This study is a continuation of Rosmus’s extensive exploration of Bavaria under the Third Reich and the exposure of “secrets” about the complicity and collusion of local townspeople and officials. She questions too the silence of members of the clergy in the face of church ethics and teachings. Both Susan Benedict and Mary Lagerwey examine testimony and medical records to shed light on the collusion of nurses in the euthanasia program. Benedict analyzes trial testimony of nurses in the context of the history of nursing education and nursing ethics in Germany, juxtaposing this against the laws of sterilization imposed during the Third Reich. Lagerwey tracks the history and sociology of the nursing profession, especially in the context of women’s roles, and the distortion of nursing ethics as practiced in Hadamar and as exposed in the Hadamar trials.

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These chapters make extensive use of public documents that, though available, are not always readily accessible. The authors treat groups of people less familiar to the general reader than Jewish victims or Nazi doctors, but subjects nonetheless that were part of the German process of building a “master race.”

NOTES 1. Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 224–28.

THREE

Hidden Lives: Sinti and Roma Women Sybil Milton

Th e fat e o f f e m a l e S i n t i a n d R o m a ( ‘‘ G y p s i e s ’’ ) i n t h e concentration camps and killing fields of the Holocaust has been largely invisible in current historiography about Nazi genocide, despite the increasing availability of a differentiated scholarly literature about them. 1 Inevitably, research about Sinti and Roma women could logically not be expected before more knowledge was available about the entire group. Similarly, publications about women from all victim groups during the Holocaust are also limited in number and scope; of those, few deal explicitly with female Sinti and Roma. 2 The paucity of sources for a more systematic study of Sinti and Roma women in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe poses a serious, but not insurmountable, problem. A few first-person Sinti and Roma narratives by German and Austrian women survivors are sometimes included in local and regional histories. 3 These local studies sometimes also comprise oral and written testimonies by male Sinti and Roma survivors that incorporate passages about the daily life and experiences of female family members. Occasionally, brief narratives by female Sinti and Roma are found in monographs and memorial volumes about individual concentration camps, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau “Gypsy family camp.” 4 There are also a few published accounts by Sinti women of their forced sterilization in Nazi Germany, although it is difficult for most Sinti women to overcome social taboos about discussing such sexual matters with outsiders. 5 There are also individual memoirs published by a few Sinti and Roma women as, for example, Ceija Stojka’s Wir leben im Verborgenen (We Live Concealed Lives) and Philomena Franz’s

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autobiographical account of survival and escape from Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. 6 Moreover, there are diverse published and unpublished individual documents and photographs that contain limited and diffuse data about Sinti and Roma women under Nazi rule. 7 Nevertheless, these sources are episodic and scattered, often published only in obscure journals and anthologies, or by small presses, limiting access to all but the most tenacious. Although this fragmentary literature has many gaps, it nevertheless provides sporadic glimpses of the daily lives of Sinti and Roma women in Nazi Germany and incorporated Austria during the Holocaust. The aggregate published record of Sinti and Roma memoirs and testimonies does not cover all aspects of their exclusion, concentration, annihilation, resistance, or survival. Indeed, we know very little about Sinti and Roma family life, cultural values, and social organization; consequently, a gender-sensitive approach for analyzing distinctions between the experiences of female and male Sinti and Roma during the Holocaust is probably premature, since we are not always certain that we are asking the right questions. It is not clear whether we can speak of Sinti and Roma women as a cohesive group, or whether differences in economic standing, educational levels, and degree of acculturation contributed significantly to their fate. Furthermore, we do not know what role male dominance by their own group or by outsiders affected Sinti and Roma women. Before proceeding further, it is important to deal with language and terminology. The traditional term “Gypsy,” in German “Zigeuner,” is usually used only by outsiders from the majority society and has pejorative connotations. The term Roma is a term of ethnic self-description and refers to the language, Romani, spoken by the group. In Germany, the largest population group is called Sinti (Sintezza for females and Sinto for males), a term based on their linguistic origins in the Sind region of India. Some survivors, like Theresia Seible, refer to themselves both as “Sintezza” (a term of self-identification) and “Zigeunerin” (the majority society’s term). In Austria, Roma are the larger group, whereas in Germany Sinti are more numerous. There are also linguistic subgroups, such as the Lalleri, who are generally considered Sinti. Moreover, some Sinti and Roma have designated themselves by their profession although they belong to one of the two main language groups. For example, Roma in Austria involved in itinerant horse trading were known as Lowara. Prevailing stereotypes in German laws and “scientific” literature assumed that “Gypsies” were a single ethnic group characterized by certain negative behavioral stereotypes. Although the Sinti and Roma minor-

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ity represented only about 0.05 percent of the 1933 German population of about 65 million, they were stigmatized by the Nazi government and majority society as socially marginal, economically unproductive, nomadic, sexually licentious, criminally “inclined,” and racially inferior. These stereotypes were not gender differentiated and applied equally to women and men, to infants and the elderly; they defined Sinti and Roma as social outsiders, thereby facilitating their persecution by health, welfare, and police bureaucracies and providing the rationale for their exclusion, concentration, and annihilation. 8 The Sinti and Roma were a tiny minority of about 30 to 40,000 individuals in Nazi Germany. We do not know the subdivisions within this population by gender, age, or profession. Furthermore, there is no statistical data available about the female Sinti and Roma population. 9 Nevertheless, it is probable that the ratio of Sinti and Roma women to men had increased substantially during the 1920s and 1930s. This disparity between the life expectancy of women and men could be due either to a higher mortality rate for male Sinti and Roma or to demographic changes in the general German population effected by World War I. 10 Regarded as social pariahs in Weimar Germany, Sinti and Roma faced escalating persecution after the Nazis assumed power in 1933. This small minority was subjected to ruthless ostracism, surveillance, disenfranchisement, registration, and internment. Increasing restrictions on their freedom of movement, police surveillance, and denial of licenses for itinerant trades limited their possibilities of employment as itinerant vendors (circus performers, musicians, fortune tellers, horse traders, textile and lace sellers, and so on) and as small business owners, skilled craftsmen, factory workers. Sinti and Roma families faced increasing poverty and unemployment during the 1930s, a period when municipal welfare payments for the indigent created by the Depression were frequently unavailable to non-Aryans. Sinti and Roma women, who had always provided additional family income by selling pots, handwoven baskets, textiles, and lace, and by telling fortunes, were seriously affected by new restrictions. This income was further curtailed as many Sinti and Roma lost their civil service jobs in the state railways and postal system after early April 1933, when supplemental provisions to the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” provided for the dismissal of non-Aryans. 11 Thus, Wanda Michaelis, a Frankfurt Sintezza, explained that her mother appealed to her German women customers to secure a construction job for her husband after he had been fired from his post office job. Her activity

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selling piecework as a seamstress provided supplemental income for the entire family. 12 Similarly, several dozen Sinti and Roma musicians, makers of musical instruments, and owners of movie theaters were dismissed from the Reich Music Chamber and Reich Film Chamber later in the 1930s, since they were unable to prove their Aryan ancestry. 13 After the incorporation of Austria in March 1938, Maria Kohlberger, an Austrian Roma, lost her license as a commercial exhibitor because of her “Gypsy ancestry”; denied employment in her occupation, Kohlberger was subsequently conscripted for forced labor in an armaments factory. 14 Job availability and economic prospects for Sinti and Roma were bleak after 1933. Many Sinti and Roma had lost their family businesses because of the increasingly strict racial criteria used for licensing trade and professions in Nazi Germany. Moreover, Sinti and Roma women had few opportunities to secure apprenticeships to train for first-time employment. Thus, Elisabeth Guttenberger recalled that she had “tried to learn a profession and found an apprenticeship in a café bakery. This lasted only two weeks. One evening, shortly after closing time, my supervisor, a woman, took me aside and asked: ‘Elisabeth, why are you so black?’ I was upset and felt my blood boil. The woman held me in her arms and explained to me that two Gestapo men had visited her that afternoon and demanded that I be immediately dismissed or she would be indicted.” 15 Overt bigotry against non-Caucasians was routine in Nazi Germany. Thus, Elisabeth Guttenberger’s “blackness” jeopardized her job prospects; in Austria hateful neighbors described Sidonie Adelsburg, a young Roma girl, as “a black object.” 16 Financial hardship for all Sinti and Roma increased with new police measures implementing Heinrich Himmler’s decree of December 8, 1938, for “combatting the Gypsy Plague,” and Reinhard Heydrich’s subsequent so-called Festsetzungserlaß of October 17, 1939, prohibiting all “Gypsies and part-Gypsies” not already interned in camps from changing their registered domiciles. This measure was essential for securing registration data and later for implementing deportations. After the war began, employment restrictions expanded; Sinti and Roma could no longer receive identity papers, work permits, and licenses. Also, on November 20, 1939, Office V of the Central Office for Reich Security issued orders that “all suspected and previously convicted female Gypsy fortune tellers are to be imprisoned as ‘asocials’ using preventive detention and sent to concentration camps. The concept of female Gypsy is to be broadly interpreted and to include even persons with small amounts of Gypsy blood. . . . Children who are thereby left behind and require

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supervision, cannot be left on their own and their care should be assumed by other family members and relatives or by the welfare authorities.” 17 Consequently, German police arbitrarily arrested Sinti and Roma women and incarcerated them in Ravensbrück concentration camp. We do not know the total number of Sinti and Roma women thus detained. Using racial criteria, the November 1939 law automatically extended the definition of “asocials” to include female Sinti and Roma fortune-tellers, mandating their indefinite detention in concentration camps. Despite lack of evidence or any previous sentence for fortune-telling, the sixty-seven-year-old Sintezza Hulda Steinbach was remanded from the Magdeburg internment camp for Gypsies, where she had been previously detained, to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was subsequently returned to Magdeburg because “of age”; she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. 18 Obviously, such arrests led to a radical deterioration in the situation of Sinti and Roma women and their families. The devastating loss of even scanty and irregular income from telling fortunes meant increasing deprivation and poverty for these women and their families. Moreover, many families were broken up when involuntarily abandoned children were transferred to special schools and youth concentration camps. The November 20, 1939, fortune-teller decree was issued the same day as a confidential SS Security Service report about the deleterious effects of fortune-telling on public morale. “An increase in rumors spread by clairvoyants, fortunetellers, and Gypsy women has been recently observed, especially in the countryside. Most rumors are concerned with the end of the war, usually predicted for the near future. Similar predictions were also spread by vagrant Gypsy women near Reichenberg, Salzburg, and Bayreuth. Königsberg has reported that a gypsy village located at the city limits is overrun by those seeking to have their future told.” 19 Financial difficulties for Sinti and Roma families were also intensified by increasingly oppressive restrictions on contact between Sinti and Roma and other Germans, including the criminalization of sexual relationships, prohibition of intermarriage, harassment and expulsion of Sinti and Roma children from public schools, denial of medical care, and eviction from housing. These measures paralleled the arbitrary preventive arrest and involuntary detention of Sinti and Roma in special local Gypsy internment camps known as “Zigeunerlager,” where anthropologists, physicians, and geneticists completed the genealogical registration of all Sinti and Roma. 20 These internment camps also facilitated

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the involuntary sterilization of interned Sinti and Roma, thereby revealing growing interagency cooperation between the police and the public health bureaucracy. 21 The drive by Nazi authorities to create racially homogenous housing targeted Sinti and Roma alongside Jews. Already in late October 1935, the Solingen Nazi party district office complained to the city administration that “Gypsies lived in a house on Ketternbergerstr. 48. . . . Since Gypsies are a type of Mongolian species . . . they should not under any circumstances be allowed to mingle with Germans.” They further requested that the “Gypsy residents be removed to prevent contact with Germans, because of the danger of racial fraternization.” 22 At 4:00 a.m. on July 16, 1936, 600 Berlin Sinti and Roma were arrested and evicted from legally rented domiciles. They were marched under police guard in horse-drawn caravans to a sewage dump adjacent to the municipal cemetery in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. The official justification for the removal of entire Sinti and Roma families from their legally rented domiciles in Berlin was ostensibly the need to control crime and panhandling in the capital prior to the 1936 Olympics. The mass eviction of Sinti and Roma from legally rented housing was a precursor of the later invalidation of legal protection for Jewish tenants in the spring of 1939. Further, on June 9, 1938, the mayor of Reutlingen stated that “we urgently request that the entire population not conclude rental agreements with Gypsies and that they terminate existing contracts as quickly as possible.” 23 The loss of established residences during the late 1930s as a result of internal resettlement in special municipal camps for Sinti and Roma, and their subsequent automatic removal to concentration camps, meant that whole Sinti and Roma families were repeatedly uprooted and that Sinti and Roma women were forced repeatedly to reinvent the actuality of “home” as a concept and as a specific location. The exigencies of daily life for Sinti and Roma families in prewar Germany also included a hostile environment for their children in public schools, where they were exposed to verbal taunts and physical assault by their classmates while facing harassment from teachers and principals. Elisabeth Guttenberger recalled that when she first entered school in Stuttgart in 1933, her teacher was “a Nazi and especially harsh to her.” She also remembered that after her family moved to Munich, she was beaten in school by classmates belonging to the German Girls League (the female auxiliary of the Hitler Youth); she was subsequently blamed for the incident by the school principal, who struck her six

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Two Gypsy women are publicly humiliated near a halted train, ca. 1941–44. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Photo Archives.

times. “For the first time, I experienced open racial hatred,” said Guttenberger. Despite her excellent grades, she was not allowed to continue her education; moreover, two of her cousins were expelled from a music conservatory. 24 Despite compulsory attendance requirements, Sinti and Roma children were frequently absent from public schools. Many were involuntarily removed from public to remedial schools because of truancy, attention deficits caused by hunger or illness, and inability to write or understand German (rather than Romani). Their impoverished parents often could afford neither books nor school supplies. Even in remedial schools, Sinti and Roma children were segregated; instead of learning to read and write, they were often assigned to draw pictures. 25 Moreover, children in municipal internment camps, such as Düsseldorf Höherweg, were often assigned to work cleaning the camp and thus prevented from attending schools outside the camp. 26 Despite school attendance requirements, Sinti and Roma children were frequently segregated in German schools by the late 1930s, although formal decrees expelling

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them “to protect the safety and health of German children” followed somewhat later (in incorporated Austria in mid-June 1939 and for the entire German Reich in late March 1941). 27 Sinti and Roma children were also excluded from public playgrounds, sports facilities (including swimming pools), cinemas, and other entertainment facilities. These draconian restrictions affected all Sinti and Roma children, irrespective of gender.

In the Camps After 1935, female Sinti and Roma were arrested and detained for indefinite periods, together with their families, in special Gypsy camps (Zigeunerlager) in Berlin-Marzahn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Königsberg, Magdeburg, Pölitz near Stettin, and, after the incorporation of Austria, at Salzburg-Maxglan and Lackenbach in the Burgenland. 28 These municipal internment camps became permanent places of incarceration for families who had been arrested arbitrarily for indefinite detention. In essence, these camps, holding entire families, were a hybrid, incorporating elements of the concentration camp and the ghetto. They were usually guarded by the SS, the gendarmerie, or uniformed city police. The inmates served as an accessible pool for forced labor, genealogical registration, and compulsory sterilization. After 1936, Berlin-Marzahn became an oppressive camp, providing only the barest necessities for between 600 and 800 Sinti and Roma prisoners. No surviving statistics yield information about the prisoners’ gender, marital status, or age. Housing consisted of 130 caravans condemned as uninhabitable by the Reich Labor Service as well as several quickly constructed barracks. The ten-year-old Sintezza Elisabeth Lehmann, arrested together with her parents at their Berlin apartment, later noted that they were not permitted to take any belongings with them and remarked on the absence of space and privacy. 29 Few amenities existed at Marzahn, and its hygienic facilities were totally inadequate. Two toilets and three water pumps had to serve the entire camp; since the pumps often froze in winter, the prisoners had to carry water from the nearby village of Marzahn. One survivor remembered that during the winter of 1940–1941, his mother was attacked and badly bitten by police guard dogs when she took a short-cut to carry water back to the camp. 30 The camp had no commissary, but women were permitted to leave the camp to make household purchases.

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Marzahn functioned as an apartheid township, with a spurious daily routine of normality. Passing references to marriage and the birth of children indicate that daily life included friendship, courtship, marriage, and the care of children. In addition, adults incarcerated at BerlinMarzahn were assigned to compulsory labor in agriculture and construction; during the war male inmates were also detailed to the stone quarries at the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp and to clearing rubble and unexploded Allied bombs from Berlin streets. It is generally believed that women and men faced similar difficulties in adapting to this new milieu, but the paucity of archival documentation limits more detailed gender analysis. It is possible that gender differences among Sinti and Roma at Marzahn were not as significant as other factors, such as the prisoner’s age and assistance by extended family networks. The Gypsy camps coexisted alongside the concentration camps. Although Gypsies could be transferred at any time to concentration camps as punishment for noncompliance with regulations or attempted escapes, most transfers occurred after 1938 to provide forced labor for the expanding concentration camp system. In fact, while Berlin Sinti and Roma were concentrated in Berlin-Marzahn, 400 Bavarian Sinti and Roma men were deported directly to Dachau. In June 1938 an additional 1,000 Sinti and Roma men “able to work” were arrested in raids throughout Germany and deported to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen. Female Sinti and Roma arrested during these raids were initially sent to the concentration camp for women at Lichtenburg (Saxony). In June 1939 an additional 3,000 allegedly “work shy” Sinti and Roma from Lower Austria and the Burgenland were deported to German concentration camps: 2,000 men above the age of sixteen were sent to Dachau and later remanded to Buchenwald, and 1,000 women above the age of fifteen were sent to the newly opened central concentration camp for women at Ravensbrück. 31 Ravensbrück was constructed on reclaimed swamp land by male prisoners from Sachsenhausen during the winter of 1938–1939. Designed to hold 15,000 prisoners, it eventually housed more than 42,000 women from twenty-three nations. More than 130,000 female and about 20,000 male prisoners passed through Ravensbrück between 1939 and 1945. During the first two years, German and Austrian inmates formed the largest group; after 1941, they were outnumbered by new arrivals from every country of German-occupied Europe. During the war, the average female camp population consisted of 25 percent from Poland, 18 percent from Germany and Austria, 19 percent from the Soviet Union;

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15 percent were Jews from all over Europe, and 21 percent represented other groups. Among this latter category, Sinti and Roma made up 5.4 percent. 32 Recent statistical analyses of the extant, albeit incomplete, records of 55,549 prisoners arriving at Ravensbrück provide approximate figures for Sinti and Roma incarcerated at Ravensbrück and its subcamps: there were a minimum of 1,921 and a probable maximum of 4,567 mostly female Sinti and Roma prisoners of various nationalities. 33 As the expanding war caused increasing labor shortages, women were also assigned to labor details in satellite barracks of various concentration camps. Quarters at Ravensbrück were initially assigned by prisoner categories—designated by the color-coded triangles sewn on the inmates’ uniforms—later by nationality, and finally, during the massive overcrowding of 1944, without regard to either category or nationality. At first, only Sinti and Roma as well as Jewish women were segregated at Ravensbrück. In June 1940, female Sinti and Roma were initially assigned to barrack 4; later they were distributed among barracks 8, 19, 22, and 25. 34 Although we have only limited information about Sinti and Roma women incarcerated at Ravensbrück, we can document certain aspects of their fate. Six weeks after Ravensbrück opened, on June 29, 1939, the first 440 female Roma prisoners arrived from Lower Austria and the Burgenland and received prisoner numbers 1514 to 1953. 35 This transport included the first infants and young children. 36 The trauma of this deportation was described by other prisoners, who told of distraught and bewildered Austrian Roma women sitting on sandy soil for two days after their arrival, with children clinging to their skirts. 37 On October 6, 1942, Sinti and Roma were among the 622 women transported from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz, arriving there before the “Gypsy family camp” was built at Birkenau. 38 In 1944, as the eastern front moved closer, transports moved in the opposite direction, leaving AuschwitzBirkenau for Ravensbrück and its subcamps. Thus, on April 15,1944, 473 Roma and Sinti women were transferred from the “Gypsy family camp” to Ravensbrück; a similar transport of 144 Sinti and Roma women, ages seventeen to twenty-five, departed Auschwitz for Ravensbrück on May 24th. On August 2nd, the Germans liquidated the “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, killing all prisoners except 918 male and 490 female Sinti and Roma, who were transferred to Buchenwald. The transferred prisoners had been selected for their ability to work, and after arriving in Buchenwald they were sent to Ohrdruf, Taucha, and

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other subcamps. 39 On March 10, 1945, 447 Sinti and Roma women, accompanied by their infants and young children, were evacuated from Ravensbrück to Mauthausen as part of a transport of 1,981 women. Most of the children were killed on arrival by the SS. 40 At Ravensbrück, female and male children under the age of twelve were often housed together with their mothers. There is probably no need to stress that children were among the most vulnerable of prisoners. Often present at the death of parents or siblings, they also faced malnutrition, epidemics, physical abuse, medical experimentation, and long hours of work. Unlike adults, younger children were not equipped with specific strategies of survival and depended heavily on assistance from supportive adults. In late 1943, a larger group of Sinti and Roma children arrived at Ravensbrück. One eyewitness described their “appalling condition”: “They had to stand through roll call but received neither shoes nor socks. Young boys ages 12 to 14 slept between women prisoners and shared a common washroom.” 41 The deprivations of living in claustrophobically cramped barracks intensified the sense of shock and despair among Sinti and Roma women, who had already confronted the multiple traumas of deportation, loss, and separation from their traditionally close-knit family structures. Although the presence of male youngsters in women’s barracks transgressed Sinti and Roma cultural taboos and mores, some women created imitation “families,” usually not biologically related, to increase mutual assistance for themselves and the younger children. One Sintezza reported stealing potatoes and turnips for her “camp sisters” when she had limited access to food during her temporary assignment to the camp kitchen. She also protected an eight-year-old girl who was distantly related to her husband; the child’s mother had perished in Auschwitz and, after initial reluctance, she presented the child as her own daughter, thereby contributing to the child’s survival at Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Sinti and other women prisoners at Ravensbrück were housed in separate compounds from their husbands, brothers, fathers, and other male relatives. Despite the risk of detection, the border zones between the men’s and women’s subcamps became a place for occasional reassuring visual contacts, signals, and covertly exchanged messages. Contact between wives and husbands at Ravensbrück was perilous; Sintezza P. explained that a brief clandestine conversation with her husband, who was imprisoned in the men’s camp, resulted in corporal punishment (whipping) and “assignment to a penal labor road construction crew.” 42

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Sinti and Roma women were assigned to compulsory labor details inside Ravensbrück: weaving straw, making clothing, and construction work on roads, train tracks, and buildings inside the camp. After mid1942, Sinti and Roma women were also allocated to labor details outside the camp, including fabricating SS uniforms, manufacturing airplane parts, and producing armaments. 43 Gender distinctions in labor were minimal. Labor crews initially worked eight-hour shifts. In 1942 this was increased to daily eleven- or twelve-hour shifts in daytime or at night. In addition, prisoners had to stand outdoors for brutally long roll calls before and after each shift. Ravensbrück prisoners were assigned to labor crews, the so-called Kommandos, within the camp as well. Inside Ravensbrück, prisoners were assigned to heavy construction labor as the camp and its infrastructure expanded; labor included sewing and manufacturing clothing, cleaning SS offices and homes, and working as skilled plumbers, carpenters, and stonemasons. They also served as clerks in SS administrative offices and as messengers, as well as in prisoner laundries and kitchens, in gardening and agricultural work, and as garbage collectors. The basic maintenance of the camp itself required prisoner labor, which of course was plentiful and unpaid. There was also senseless labor that had to be completed at a running pace, such as the “sand detail,” used as a form of punishment to exhaust and kill prisoners. 44 The Sintezza Rosa Wiegand from Wiesbaden, Ravensbrück prisoner 64454, was a veteran of all types of forced labor in Ravensbrück. First arrested in Worms, she was deported from Germany to Poland in May 1940. With the help of a guard, she escaped to Czechoslovakia, where she secured false identity papers and then returned to Wiesbaden. There she was rearrested and, at age twenty-one, committed to Ravensbrück in May 1941: I did practically every type of work. I was assigned to weaving mats, sewing, building streets and houses, and digging ditches. In summer and winter, I often stood in trenches shoveling soil with water up to my hips. I worked in the woods . . . and unloaded stones from barges. We worked 12 hours a day. . . . In May or June 1942, I was transferred to the Heinkel aircraft plant in Barth. . . . There, I was at first assigned to rivet wings and afterwards to inspect planes. I got this work assignment because I could read and write and also could understand technical drawings.

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Rosa Wiegand described twelve-hour work shifts, rigid discipline, and punishments for actual and imagined infractions, including whipping by SS women guards. Once she was beaten so badly that she could hardly move, but she continued working in order not to be remanded to a solitary confinement cell in the Ravensbrück camp prison. “Other times I was beaten without cause. . . . Once I was disciplined for laughing briefly during my shift and forced to stand outside the factory for an entire day back-to-back with a 12-hour night shift.” Approximately 180 Sinti and Roma women were assigned to the Heinkel aircraft factories in Barth in August 1943; their number increased to 250–300 women with the arrival of more prisoners from Auschwitz in 1944. 45 Shortly before the war ended, Rosa Wiegand was transferred with 200 Sinti and Roma women from the Heinkel plants at Barth to the subterranean production facility that Heinkel established at Rostock-Schwarzenforst; both were Ravensbrück subcamps. Food rations for prisoners at Ravensbrück were never adequate. In 1939, the daily allotment of food generally included one-half to onethird liter of vegetable soup with a few potatoes twice a day, and once a day about 500 grams of bread and 20 grams of margarine, totaling 900– 1,000 calories. On Sundays a bit of wurst or cheese was also distributed. In 1941 rations decreased, and all fat disappeared from the prisoner diet. By 1944 daily rations were cut again: daily allotments included one bowl of black, unsugared coffee-substitute in the morning, a half-liter of thin watery soup made from rotten turnips or potatoes at lunch, and 200 grams of bread in the evening. No salt or fat was distributed. In early 1945, the bread ration was further reduced to 100 grams per day. This diet—at most 900 calories—resulted in malnutrition and starvation. 46 Hard labor, insufficient food, inadequate shelter, and draconian punishments were not the only torments imposed on the women at Ravensbrück. Many were also subjected to brutal medical experiments, including among others Professor Karl Gebhardt’s sulfonamide experiments and bone transplants, and Professor Carl Clauberg’s sterilization experiments performed without anesthesia. 47 Although the 1933 sterilization law, directed against persons with mental or physical disabilities, did not apply to persons without disabilities, individual Sinti or Roma, as well as Afro-Germans, were nevertheless sterilized in violation of the law. 48 To identify targeted groups, the state attempted to establish an inventory of race and heredity (erbbiologische Bestandsaufnahme) of the entire German nation; as part of this enterprise

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the public health service embarked on the genealogical and anthropological registration of all Sinti and Roma. Such registration was considered especially urgent if the so-called marriage law, promulgated one month after the Nuremberg racial laws, was to be implemented against Sinti and Roma. 49 On November 26, 1935, the Reich Ministry of the Interior clarified the Nuremberg racial laws by notifying all registry offices for vital statistics that the prohibition of mixed marriages between those of German blood and Jews applied also to “Gypsies, Negroes, or their bastard offspring.” 50 To coordinate and implement this policy, the Reich Ministry of the Interior attempted in 1936 to draft a national Gypsy law (Reichszigeunergesetz) and thus enact a “total solution of the Gypsy problem on either a national or international level.” The interim recommendations included the sterilization of Gypsies of mixed German and Gypsy ancestry (so-called Mischlinge), the registration of all Gypsies in the Reich, and their confinement in a special Gypsy reservation. 51 Moreover, in the summer of 1938, the Burgenland Gauleiter Tobias Portschy argued for the forced labor and sterilization of Gypsies as “hereditarily tainted . . . a people of habitual criminals, parasites causing enormous damage to the national body (Volkskörper).” 52 Although no national Gypsy law was ever enacted, the exclusion and sterilization of Sinti and Roma became a nationally coordinated policy aim. The deportation of German Sinti and Roma began shortly after the outbreak of war. In the second half of October 1939, Arthur Nebe, chief of the Reich detective forces, tried to expedite the deportation of Berlin Gypsies by requesting that Adolf Eichmann “add three or four train cars of Gypsies” to the Nisko Jewish transports departing from Vienna. 53 However, the failure of the Nisko resettlement scheme at the end of 1939 precluded the early expulsion of 30,000 Gypsies from Germany and Austria to the General Government of Poland. The official attitude toward Sinti and Roma was best expressed by Leonardi Conti, secretary of state for health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, in a communication to the Central Office of Reich Security and the Reich Health Department in late January 1940: It is known that the lives of Gypsies and part-Gypsies is to be regulated by a Gypsy law (Zigeunergesetz). Moreover, the mixing of Gypsy with German blood is to be resisted and if necessary, this could be legally achieved by creating a statutory basis for the sterilization of partGypsies (Zigeunermischlinge). These questions were already in a state of flux before the war started. The war has apparently suddenly created a

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new situation, since the possibility of expelling Gypsies to the General Government is available. Certainly, such an expulsion appears to have particular advantages at the moment. However, in my opinion, the implementation of such a plan would mean that because it is expedient to do this at the moment, a genuine radicalization would not be achieved. I firmly believe, now as before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem (endgültige Lösung des Zigeunerproblems) can be achieved only through the sterilization of full and part-Gypsies. . . . I think that the time for a legal resolution of these problems is over, and that we must immediately try to sterilize the Gypsies and part-Gypsies as a special measure, using analogous precedents . . . . Once sterilization is completed and these people are rendered biologically harmless, it is of no great consequence whether they are expelled or used as labor on the home front. 54

As mass murder replaced ghettoization and sterilization as the final exclusionary policy, Sinti and Roma were among the first victims. Thus about 1,400 Ravensbrück women prisoners, including Sinti and Roma, were killed in early 1942 in the gas chamber at the Bernburg “euthanasia” killing center as part of Operation “14f13.” 55 Space limitations do not permit a detailed analysis of the experiences of women in the “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. On February 26, 1943, the first transport of German Sinti and Roma arrived at the newly erected Gypsy “family camp” (BIIe) in Birkenau; Sinti and Roma from occupied Europe arrived after March 7, 1943. The history and fate of Sinti and Roma in the Birkenau “Gypsy family camp” paralleled that of the Jews in the so-called “Theresienstadt family camp” in Birkenau (BIIb). On August 2, 1944, the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liquidated and its inmates killed. 56 During the period Auschwitz-Birkenau existed, at least 10,849 female and 10,097 male Sinti and Roma were registered in Auschwitz-Birkenau; another unknown number, probably several thousand, were never registered. And about 20,000 German and Austrian Sinti and Roma deported to Auschwitz were killed there. 57 To date, we do not have any gender analysis for the experiences of Sinti and Roma of various nationalities at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sinti and Roma women who survived the liquidation of the “Gypsy camp” were evacuated from Auschwitz to the interior of Germany together with all other prisoners in January 1945. Many of these women traversed various camps before ending up in Bergen-Belsen near Celle.

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Although Bergen-Belsen had no gas chambers, starvation, exposure, and epidemics accounted for an extremely high death rate in the months prior to liberation. Hanna Levy-Haas, a Yugoslav Jewish survivor, noted that “In Auschwitz it is a quick, ruthless procedure, mass murder in the gas chambers; in Belsen it is a sadistic, long drawn-out process of starvation, of violence, of terror, of the deliberate spreading of infection and disease.” 58 We do not know the numbers of Sinti and Roma women who died at Bergen-Belsen, but we do know that there were 2,000–3,000 Sinti and Roma among the 40,000 prisoners liberated by the British, and that at least 500 were Sinti and Roma women. 59 Despite the growth of specialized monographs, the lacunae in Holocaust literature about the fate of Sinti and Roma are still vast, and this applies especially to the women. For example, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Book lists the names of 145 French Roma—seventy-four women and seventy-one men—who were included in the transport of January 15, 1944, from Malines to Auschwitz. This raw data is all we know about these women. 60 The lack of information is even greater for nonGerman Roma. We know that after October 1940 Roma in occupied France and unoccupied Vichy were interned as “security risks” in the French camps de concentration. 61 We also know that some were deported to the German camps, although the deportation of French Roma was not fully implemented before the liberation of France ended such efforts. We know of one example of resistance in Rieucros by the Gypsy women prisoner “Kali,” whose repeated escape attempts always ended in the camp jail, until she was deported to another camp. 62 Otherwise, we know very little about resistance, flight, evasion, and noncompliance among Sinti and Roma. The lacunae in our knowledge of Roma in occupied Europe are extensive. The scattered and isolated references to gender among non-German Sinti and Roma is fragmentary at best, and thus there are so far no existing analyses of Sinti and Roma women in occupied Europe. Hopefully, this subject will be the focus of future historical studies.

NOTES 1. For a discussion of Roma and Sinti in Holocaust historiography, see Sybil Milton, “The Context of the Holocaust,” German Studies Review 13 (1990): 269– 83; idem, “Gypsies and the Holocaust,” History Teacher 24:4 (August 1991): 375– 87; idem, “Correspondence,” History Teacher 25:4 (August 1992): 515–21; idem,

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“Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. William S. Parsons, Israel W. Charny, and Samuel Totten (New York: Garland, 1995), 209–64; and idem, “Vorstufe zur Vernichtung: Die Zigeunerlager nach 1933,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 43:1 (January 1995), 115–30. See also Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 246– 62; and Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others; Germany, 1933–1945, trans. George R. Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 2. The only explicit publication about Sinti and Roma women is the special issue “Das Vergangene ist nicht vergangen: Roma- und Sinti-Frauen,” Jekh Chib 4 (May 1995), published by Rom e.V. in Cologne. 3. See, for example, Eva von Hase-Mihalik and Doris Kreuzkamp, “Du kriegst auch einen schönen Wohnwagen”: Zwangslager für Sinti und Roma während des Nationalsozialismus in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt: Brandes and Apsel, 1990), 17–21, 27–32; Peter Sandner, Frankfurt-Auschwitz: Die nationalsozialistische Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt: Brandes and Apsel, 1998), 258– 62; Ludwig Eiber, “Ich wußte, es wird schlimm”: Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in München 1933–1945 (Munich: Buchendorfer Verlag, 1993), 102–3, 110–11; and Günter Heuzeroth and Karl-Heinz Martinß, “Vom Ziegelhof nach Auschwitz: Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Sinti und Roma,” in Günter Heuzeroth, ed., Unter der Gewaltherrschaft des Nationalsozialismus 1933–1945, dargestellt an den Ereignissen im Oldenburger Land, 4 vols. (Oldenburg: Zentrum für pädagogische Berufspraxis, 1985), 2: 268–71. 4. See H. G. Adler, Hermann Langbein, and Ella Lingens-Reiner, eds., Auschwitz: Zeugnisse und Berichte, 3d rev. exp. ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1984), 131–34; and Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” 199–203 (Elisabeth Guttenberger). See also Romani Rose, ed., Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 1995), 123 (Barbara Adler), 139, 171–74 (Amilie Schaich), 180–84 (Else Schmidt). 5. Theresia Seible, “Sintezza und Zigeunerin,” in Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus (Nördlingen: Delphi Politik bei Greno, 1987), 302–16. 6. Ceija Stojka, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin, ed. Karin Berger (Vienna: Picus, 1988); and Philomena Franz, Zwischen Liebe und Haß: Ein Zigeunerleben (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1985). See also Michael Krausnick, “Da wollten wir frei sein!”: Eine Sinti Familie erzählt (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz & Gelberg, 1983), 13–53. 7. See Romani Rose, ed., “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen”: Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1999). 8. See Jacqueline Giere, ed., Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Zigeuners: Zur

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Genese eines Vorurteils (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1996); Michael Jäger, “ ‘Gemeinschaftsfremd’ im Nationalsozialismus: ‘Zigeuner’ und ‘Asoziale,’ ” in Feindbilder in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Christoph Jahr, Uwe Mai, and Kathrin Roller (Berlin: Metropol, 1994), 173–200; Susan Tebbutt, ed., Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-speaking Society and Literature (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998); and Wolfgang Wippermann, Wie die Zigeuner: Antisemitismus und Antiziganismus im Vergleich (Berlin: Elefanten, 1997). 9. In February 1941, Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle) in the Reich Department of Health, prepared a statistical summary of Sinti and Roma in Germany, incorporated Austria, and the Sudetenland. Ritter estimated a total population of approximately 30,000 “Gypsies,” consisting of “19,000 in Germany and 11,000 in the Ostmark and Sudetenland.” Ritter regarded these statistics as provisional, since “a relatively large number of Gypsies and Gypsy-hybrids (Zigeunermischlinge) were neither specifically identified nor registered.” Ritter’s research was based on family names and genealogical data; his statistics are subdivided by region, not by gender. Moreover, his figures for Germany are probably too low, since some German Sinti had fled from the Reich to adjacent European countries of potential asylum and his summary was published after the first deportations of German Sinti and Roma to Poland in mid-May 1940. See Robert Ritter, “Die Bestandsaufnahme der Zigeuner und Zigeunermischlinge in Deutschland,” Der Öffentliche Gesundheitsdienst 6:21 (February 5, 1941), 483. 10. The demographic ratio of women to men in the Sinti and Roma population may be similar to that of German Jews, although there are enormous differences in family size. See Leo Baeck Institute, New York: Bruno Blau, “Die Entwicklung der Jüdischen Bevölkerung in Deutschland,” New York, 1950. 11. “Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums,” April 7, 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt (hereafter RGBl ) 1933, 1: 175–77. 12. Sandner, Frankfurt - Auschwitz, 258–60. 13. See National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, Microfilm Publication T-70, reel 109, frames 3632755–56: Peter Raabe’s remarks as president of the Reich Music Chamber, published in Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer, May 1, 1939; ibid., frames 3632796–68: list of musicians expelled from the Chamber, February 15, 1940. This material is cited in Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 126–27, 132. The Sinto Hugo Franz was born in Dresden in 1913 to a family that had lived in Germany for 300 years. When Franz graduated from academic secondary school (Gymnasium), Nazi racial laws prevented him from entering law school. Instead he attended the Saxon state orchestral school and then formed his own band in Hamburg together with his three brothers; after 1939 his identity pa-

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pers were confiscated and he was not permitted to accept road engagements for his band. Franz was compelled to abandon his profession as a musician and was forced to work at the Blohm and Voss copper plant. Arrested in January 1942, he survived Sachsenhausen, Gross Rosen, and Flossenbürg-Litomerice. His experiences are published in Jörn-Erik Gutheil et al., eds., Einer muß überleben: Gespräche mit Auschwitzhäftlinge 40 Jahre danach (Düsseldorf: Der Kleine Verlag, 1984), 50– 52. Similarly, the Rose family lost their permit for their family business, a movie theater in Darmstadt, when the Reich Film Chamber required proof of Aryan ancestry. See Rose, “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen,” 82–83. 14. Vienna, Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (herafter DÖW), file 13457. 15. Rose, “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen,” 83. 16. Erich Hackl, Abschied von Sidonie (Zürich: Diogenes, 1989), 31, 59, 79. 17. Office V of the Central Office for Reich Security was the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA) in Berlin. In 1939, it was headed by Arthur Nebe. Decree from RSHA V (RKPA), Berlin, November 20, 1939, no. 6001/474.39, re: preventive police measures for combatting criminality. These laws were reprinted in an official publication with limited distribution: Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, Berlin, Vorbeugende Verbrechensbekämpfung: Erlaßsammlung, no. 15, ed. SS Captain Richrath of the RSHA (Berlin: RSHA Office V, 1941), 162 (available in Bundesarchiv Koblenz Library). 18. Reimar Gilsenbach, Weltchronik der Zigeuner von 1930 bis 1950 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998), 79. 19. Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, 1938–1945, 17 vols. (Herrsching: Pawlak Verlag, 1984), 3:475. 20. Sybil Milton, “Antechamber to Birkenau: The Zigeunerlager after 1933,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 387–400. 21. See Hansjörg Riechert, Im Schatten von Auschwitz: Die natioanlsozialistische Sterilisationspolitik gegenüber Sinti und Roma (Münster: Waxmann, 1995), 135. Riechert estimates that a minimum of 2,500–3,000 Sinti had been sterilized. 22. Rose, “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen,” 79, letter from the NSDAP, District Solingen, to the City Administration of Solingen, October 30, 1935. 23. Reutlinger Tageblatt, June 10, 1938. 24. Michael Krausnick, Wo sind sie hingekommen? Der unterschlagene Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1995), 84–85. The Sintezza survivor Elisabeth Guttenberger, née Schneck, was born in Stuttgart in 1926. Together with four brothers and sisters, she had lived “in a very beautiful part of Stuttgart with many gardens and parks. My father earned his living selling antiques and stringed instruments. We lived peacefully together with our neighbours.” She started school in Stuttgart in 1933, where “her first teacher, a Nazi, was especially

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harsh to her.” After her family moved to Munich in 1936, she completed five more years of primary school, receiving excellent grades. She was not permitted to continue her education and attempted to work as an apprentice in a bakery. This employment lasted two weeks before she was fired for racial reasons. She was then assigned to forced labor in an ammunition factory, and subsequently arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1943. She attributes her survival to her excellent handwriting, which she learned at school and which resulted in her assignment to an office in Birkenau. 25. See Karola Fings and Franz Sparing, “tunlichst als erzieungsunfähig hinzustellen”; Zigeunerkinder und -jugendliche: Aus der Fürsorge in die Vernichtung,” Dachauer Hefte 9 (1993): 159–80. 26. Idem, “z. Zt. Zigeunerlager”: Die Verfolgung der Düsseldorfer Sinti und Roma im Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Volksblatt Verlag, 1992), 38–41. 27. Dr. Tobias Portschy, after Anschluss appointed Gauleiter and Governor of the Burgenland, forbade school attendance by Roma in the Burgenland in mid-May 1938. On June 15, 1939, the Ministry for Cultural Affairs in Vienna extended this ban to all of incorporated Austria, and on November 22, 1941, a circular by the Central Office for Reich Security (RSHA) extended it to the entire German Reich. 28. Gudrun Schwarz, “Sinti und Roma in den nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Ein allgemeiner Überblick,” in Waclaw Dlugoborski, ed., Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–44: Vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Verfolgung unter der Naziherrschaft (Oswiecim: Verlag Staatliches Museum AuschwitzBirkenau, 1998), 229–58. 29. Rose, “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen,” 66–67. For BerlinMarzahn, see Wolfgang Wippermann and Ute Brucker-Boroujerdi, “Nationalsozialistische Zwangslager in Berlin III: Das ‘Zigeunerlager’ Marzahn,” Berlin Forschungen 2 (1987): 189–201; idem, “Das ‘Zigeunerlager’ Berlin-Marzahn, 1936–1945: Zur Geschichte und Funktion eines nationalsozialistischen Zwangslagers,” Pogrom 18/130 (June 1987): 77–80; Reimar Gilsenbach, “Marzahn, Hitlers erstes Lager für ‘Fremdrassige’: Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Naziverbrechen,” Pogrom 17:122 (1986): 15–17; and Wolfgang Benz, “Das Lager Marzahn: Zur nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma und ihrer anhaltenden Diskriminierung,” in Die Normalität des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen; Festschrift für Wolfgang Scheffler zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein, Johannes Tuchel et al. (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), 260–79. 30. Rose, “Den Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen,” 68. 31. For Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück, see Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marian Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 305–11; Klaus Drobisch, “Frauenkonzentrationslager im Schloß Licht-

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enburg,” Dachauer Hefte 3 (1987): 101–15; and Ino Arndt, “Das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” 125–57. 32. Arndt, “Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” 148, based on the statistical analysis by the Polish political prisoner Wanda Kiedrzynska. 33. Monika Herzog and Bernhard Strebel, “Das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” in Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, ed. Claus Füllberg-Stolberg, Martina Jung, Renata Riebe, and Martina Scheitenberger (Bremen: Temmen, 1994), 18. 34. Arndt, “Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” 139 n. 51; and Heike Krokowski and Bianca Voigt, “Das Schicksal von Wanda P.: Zur Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma,” in Frauen in Konzentrationslagern, 265. 35. Selma Steinmetz, Österreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966), 30, 60–61. 36. Charlotte Müller, Die Klempnerkolonne in Ravensbrück: Erinnerungen des Häftlings Nr. 10787 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 44. 37. Steinmetz, Österreichs Zigeuner, 29–30. 38. Ibid., 61; and Danuta Czech, ed., Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939–1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 315. 39. Czech, Kalendarium, 756, 783, 838, 840. See also Schwarz, in Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–44, 236–38. 40. Hans Marsalek, Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen: Dokumentation, 2d ed. (Vienna: Österreicheichische Lagergemeinschaft Mauthausen, 1980), 118 n. 14. For women prisoners at Mauthausen, see Milton, “Women and the Holocaust,” 310. 41. Cited in Heike Krokowski and Bianca Voigt, “Das Schicksal von Wanda P.,” 264. 42. Ibid., 266; and Milton, “Women and the Holocaust,” 314–16. 43. Romani Rose and Walter Weiss, Sinti und Roma im “Dritten Reich”: Das Programm der Vernichtung durch Arbeit (Göttingen: Lamuv, 1991), 40–71. 44. Anja Lundholm, Das Höllentor: Bericht einer Überlebenden (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1988), 20–26. 45. Rose and Weiss, Sinti und Roma im “Dritten Reich,” 49–52 (Rosa Wiegand). 46. Herzog and Strebel, “Das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” 16–17. 47. Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, 15 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 1: 411–13. 48. See Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide; Müller-Hill, Murderous Science; and Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986).

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49. “Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes,” RGBl 1935, 1:1246. 50. Ministerialblatt für die innere Verwaltung (1935), no. 49, cols. 1429–34. 51. Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BAB): R18/5644, pp. 215–27, cover letter and six-page memorandum from Oberregierungsrat Zindel to Staatssekretär Pfundtner, “Gedanken über den Aufbau des Reichszigeunergesetzes,” March 4, 1936. 52. DÖW, file 8085: Tobias Portschy, Die Zigeunerfrage: Denkschrift des Landeshauptmannes für das Burgenland (Eisenstadt, 1938), 39-page typescript. 53. See Jonny Moser, “Nisko: The First Experiment in Deportation,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985): 1–30; and Milton, “Antechamber to Birkenau,” 394. 54. BAB, R18/5644, pp. 229–30: Leonardi Conti letter, January 24, 1940. 55. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 143–47; and Ute Hoffmann, Todesursache “Angina”: Zwangssterilisation und “Euthanasie” in der Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg (Magdeburg: Ministerium des Innern des Landes SachsenAnhalt, 1996), 87–95. 56. An earlier SS attempt to liquidate it in mid-May of 1944 failed because of armed resistance; the prisoners fought the SS with improvised knives, shovels, wooden sticks, and stones. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim, and Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, Heidelberg, eds., Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz- Birkenau, 2 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 2: 1547; and Czech, Kalendarium, 774. 57. See Franciszek Piper, “Estimating the Number of Deportees to and Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp,” Yad Vashem Studies 21 (1991): 49– 103; Jan Parcer, ed., Das Schicksal der Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim: Stowarzyszenie Romow w Polsce, 1994); Waclaw Dlugoborski, ed., 50–lecie zaglady Romów w KL Auschwitz-Birkenau; Der 50. Jahrestag der Vernichtung der Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim: Stowarzyszenie Romów w Polsce, 1994); and Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For the recollections of Elisabeth Guttenberger, see Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” 254–59. 58. Hanna Levy-Haas, Inside Belsen (Brighton, England: Barnes and Noble and Harvester Press, 1982), 176–79. 59. Wolfgang Günther, “Ach, Schwesterm ich kann nicht mehr tanzen . . .”: Sinti und Roma im KZ Bergen-Belsen (Hanover: SOAK, 1990), 1–2, 77. Günther’s study includes interviews with several German and Burgenland Sinti and Roma women liberated in the Bergen-Belsen “women’s small camp.” Ceija Stojka, Wir leben im Verborgenen, 55–74 describes her liberation in the “women’s large camp” at Bergen-Belsen. 60. Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and José Gotovitch, “Quelques donées relatives a l’extermination des Tsiganes de Belgique,” Cahiérs d’histoire de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Brussels) 4 (1976), 161–80. 61. See “France, 1939–1946: L’internement des Tsiganes,” Études Tsiganes

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(special issue) 2 (1995); and Marie Christine Hubert, “The Internment of Gypsies in France,” in Donald Kenrick, ed., In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Gypsies during the Second World War (Hertfordshire, England: University of Hertforshire Press, 1999), 59–88. 62. Mechtild Gilzmer, Fraueninternierungslager in Südfrankreich: Riecros und Brens, 1939–1944 (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1994), 64.

FOUR

Involuntary Abortions for Polish Forced Laborers Anna Rosmus

M

uch has been published about former inmates of concentration camps and the Second Generation. Much has been published about Nazi doctors and their experiments, but with the exception of some minor local studies, primarily by students and journalists, there is little reliable information about the crimes systematically committed against the foreign forced laborers. Neither the Allied nations nor the German prosecutors seemed to have much interest in pursuing the issue of these crimes; historians, political scientists, sociologists, and physicians have likewise left it untouched. I decided to find out the truth. In 1992 and 1993, I conducted extensive research, involving approximately sixty interviews with local farmers who employed and/or witnessed the treatment of slave laborers from Eastern European countries during World War II. After searching for files at both Lower Bavaria’s state archives in Landshut and Bavaria’s central archives in Munich, I asked the farmers who were named in these files for detailed information, written documents, and photos of the laborers. I went to their neighbors and relatives. I went to all the churches and local town halls, looking for birth and death registries as well as additional eyewitnesses. To locate the grave sites of the laborers and their families, I went to church cemeteries, and I talked to neighbors who knew about the other, “secret” sites. I inquired about burial procedures, possibly different burial rituals, and about the current ownership of the land in question. To find further evidence for how much the population knew about the

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murders, and to find out how the various legal systems (German and Allied nations’) treated these cases, I looked through bishopric newsletters and local newspapers from 1943 to 1949, and then I went to all local and appeals courts. To trace possibly seized records and administrative papers, created by the US army offices, I also searched the National Archives in Washington, DC. Finally, I began to search for some of the former slave laborers themselves and managed to locate one who still lived at the same farm in Lower Bavaria. Others had returned to Poland, where they willingly answered even the most painful questions. After six months, I had gathered enough evidence to prove not only that the four secret mass graves near my hometown of Passau contained at least one thousand corpses, but also that many people had detailed knowledge about these sad cases. Furthermore, I could prove that the victims were so young and indisputably innocent that even some Germans went out of their way to save their lives, albeit in vain. Although these murders were committed by local people, they were not isolated incidents. They were organized by the Nazi state, nationwide. I had stumbled upon some of the most heinous crimes—forced abortions and the killing of newborn babies. In March 1938, Austria was “annexed”; a few months later, the Czech Republic was conquered. On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. Soon, other countries would be similarly invaded, even the Soviet Union. When German farmers left for the front by the hundreds of thousands, replacements were needed to keep their farms going. But unemployment was low; most families were struggling to keep their farms and their own positions, and rural work brought paltry pay. It was almost impossible to find substitutes. At first prisoners of war were conscripted for work, but that was not enough. Between 1939 and 1945, almost ten million foreign women and men, mostly from Poland and the Soviet Union, were deported to do forced labor in the German Reich. Young girls and women were hired in these now occupied, eastern territories. Many were starving and desperate enough to voluntarily work for food. Many others were forcibly deported to Germany. In 1941 the first transports from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia arrived in Lower Bavaria. These women received passes and working permits. To this day, they are remembered as “hard working, very nice, and good looking, too.” 1 Kazimiera Wronska from Warsaw recounts that “back then,” when they were “hunting down people” in the vicinity of Warsaw, she was captured along with her husband, brother, and a neighbor and was deported to Germany. She says,

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Anna Rosmus When the train transport arrived in Eggenfelden, south of Passau, the farmers were already waiting to pick us up. My husband and I were assigned to a farmer on whose farm there were already Ukrainians—an old woman and a man, as well as two young Germans, who, however, did not live on the farm. My husband and I had to perform heavy work in the fields as well as at the farm, because the farmer had been wounded in the war in 1918 and was unable to work. He always said to us that after the German victory, all of us foreigners would be killed. Not until he died did things go better for us. His wife was kinder. 2

Many of these girls and women became pregnant, and their offspring were usually unwelcome because many of the children had been fathered by local men who took sexual advantage of these young foreign girls who had neither rights nor advocates to speak out for them. Had these babies been born, the neighbors would have talked about the obvious “evidence” of infidelity. More than this, since it was also forbidden by law to fraternize and especially to have sex with the “enemy” from the east, incarceration, deportation, and perhaps even death might have been among the consequences. 3 Despite this prohibition the children might have been considered “Aryans,” thus eligible to inherit a share of the farms and the assets. By being eliminated before birth, they had no chance to “cause trouble” or rival the legitimate children. The mass murder of foreign infants was one of the most shameful crimes committed during the Third Reich. Throughout Germany, unborn fetuses and newborn babies were killed. Fetuses were cut out of their mothers’ wombs, some of them even piecemeal, and killed, sometimes only shortly before birth. It is estimated that about fifty thousand unborn and newborn babies died. 4 Not all pregnancies were discovered and aborted; some babies were born and then taken away from their mothers and placed in so-called children’s homes. There they were allowed to die a lingering, painful death. The total number of these victims is estimated at five hundred thousand. 5 In the small region of Passau, in eastern Bavaria, at least 220 6 forced abortions took place and at least 700 7 infants were fed spoiled milk so that they would become ill and die a painful death. All this occurred because their mothers and fathers were Poles, Russians, or Ukrainians who had been brought to Germany to do forced labor and because their children would only be “useless consumers of food” from whom Germany would not profit. The local community bears primary responsibility for

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these murders, especially peasant wives whose husbands fathered “foreign” babies and who insisted that the abortions be carried out. 8

Forced Abortions: Trial Records In a regulation of March 9, 1943, the ministerial counselor in the Ministry of Defense 9 strictly forbade abortion and the destruction of reproductive organs of German citizens. In September 1943, however, it became known that on March 11 the top administrator of German doctors, Dr. Leonardo Conti, had decreed that the pregnancies of female workers from the East and of Ukrainian women could be terminated without punishment. On September 24, 1943, the German Conference of Bishops immediately submitted objections to this practice, declaring that the fifth commandant forbids the taking of innocent life. 10 But by October 1, the German Medical Council in Berlin had granted doctors permission to perform abortions on Polish women. The mass murder of foreign fetuses began with a vengeance. Subsequent to a decision by the doctors of the Passau district medical association, one of its members, Dr. Franz Maria Clarenz, carried out at least 220 abortions on forced laborers at the little hospital of Hutthurm, just nine miles north of Passau. Clarenz was an active member of the Nazi Party and the propaganda leader of his district group. 11 Evidently he preferred wearing his Nazi uniform rather than his white doctor’s coat. During a hearing in 1949, Hutthurm Hospital’s operating room nurse, Sister Nathana, confirmed, “He always wore a . . . uniform,” and on “special occasions such as the 1st of May [Germany’s Labor Day, first introduced in 1933] he was always very busy, as . . . he was always the leader on such occasions.” Clarenz performed abortions from 1943 on, but he only operated on slave laborers. About a dozen of these cases came from the district where he had his own practice; the other cases were referred to him from farther afield, even from districts in different regions. But there was opposition to this practice. On December 30, 1943, Johann Winkler, the local priest in Hutthurm, turned to the bishop in Passau “deferentially and obediently.” He felt he should inform him that “Dr. Clarenz had recently carried out an abortion on an unmarried Polish mother. The baby was cut into pieces inside its mother’s womb.” Even though no other surgeon in the region was prepared to

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kill fetuses, “the prospect of further cases of this kind existed.” Winkler also informed him that the Sisters of Mercy assisted at the abortions, which would not have been possible “without the assistance of helpers.” 12 The Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy working at that time in Hutthurm Hospital confirmed that abortions had been performed on three Polish women and girls, during which she herself had administered the anesthetic and another sister of the same religious order had assisted. Vicar-general Franz Seraph Riemer said, “Both Sisters were aware of the fact that they could not perform this service with a clear conscience,” and he observed, “During the final operation, the assisting Sister even broke out into violent sobbing, declaring that her conscience was being placed under unbearable strain.” He added, “In the third case Dr. Clarenz showed some consideration towards the misgivings of the Sisters to the extent that he did not—as he had intended—dismember the already seven-month-old fetus inside the mother’s womb, but instead delivered it in one piece. The baby lived for about half an hour and therefore could be baptized. Of course, even in this case the intention was to kill the fetus.” 13 While the Maternity Home in Munich merely advised that midwives should be employed instead of the religious sisters, Dr. Riemer forbade the nuns from any further participation, and he observed that the doctor himself admitted that had he performed an abortion “to any German woman, he would have landed in prison.” One day later Winkler notified the vicar-general that Clarenz had in the meantime asked the Mother Superior to be ready to assist on the next abortion. But she refused, and the woman was sent home. The Mother Superior was threatened, however, that her case would be turned over to the Gestapo if she continued to refuse. The ministry for Germany’s churches had assured the Conference of Bishops in 1943 that no doctor could be forced to perform abortions. Cardinal Faulhaber argued, “[I]t followed from this that no pressure should be applied to the conscience of sisters working as nurses.” It was then decided that the sisters would only have to prepare for the operations and to nurse the women operated on—they should be exempt from taking part in the operations. Vicar-general Riemer also passed on the cardinal’s conclusion: “Threats of taking away nursing duties from the nuns in one ward or another must be disregarded.” After the war, Sister Nathana was interrogated at the Hutthurm District Hospital and asked, “What about the butchery of Dr. Clarenz,

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were you forced to take part?” She replied, “Forced—yes, indeed. . . . We were threatened with the Gestapo.” Later Sister Nathana testified: “Dr. Clarenz asked us why we did not want to take part any longer. We told him that we did not want to cooperate in murder. Whereupon Dr. Clarenz asked: ‘Am I a murderer then?’ Dr. Clarenz went on to say that he would report us to the Gestapo.” 14 The abortions continued. On March 17, 1944, Winkler again wrote to the bishop, reporting that during the fifteenth abortion the temporary midwife could not be there. Since the sisters refused to assist, Clarenz was on his own. “He was furious about this, and he insulted the Sisters most rudely. He reportedly said: ‘One should do to you what is being done to them’—the Poles. . . . Whether he meant the fetuses or the treatment of the Poles in general, is not clear.” Winkler also told the bishop that he had asked the Mother Superior “not to put up with these insults” and at least to present the case to their employers in the maternity clinic, whereupon Dr. Riemer offered protection in writing to the Mother Superior. 15 In April 1944 the Mother Superior reported that between three and five abortions were performed daily, even in the eighth month of pregnancy. Women’s screams could be heard in the streets, and people outside wondered what was happening. When asked after the war if girls had their pregnancies terminated without their consent, Sister Nathana said: “Yes, but they were forced to have abortions by the labor offices. . . . Some women who came were not even aware of what was going to happen to them.” When asked whether Clarenz attempted to persuade the pregnant women or forced them to have an abortion, Sister Nathana replied, “Sometimes he cursed them when they refused. He was not able to make himself understood easily.” One of the women, however, who refused an abortion after she had heard the dreadful screams coming from the hospital, was sent home, only to be called back in for an abortion during her seventh month. 16 Asked if “body pieces had been strewn about in the yard,” the sister said that she had not heard of it. Initially they were burned and later collected in boxes and cartons and interred. Benefiziat 17 Georg Reis, together with the sexton, secretly dug up the corpses of the children at night from hastily dug graves. They then buried them along the walls of the cemetery in “sanctified earth.” 18 Benefiziat Reis was greatly loved in the hospital and in the community. He was not popular, however, with Clarenz, who, according to Sister Nathana, “did not tolerate Benefiziat Reis making visits. He

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always used to say: ‘Either Benefiziat Reis makes visits or I. One of us is superfluous.’ ” 19 On September 15, 1944, the vicar-general noted: “According to a report by Benefiziat Reis, incidents of killing of foreign children prior to their birth have recently substantially increased. The clergy has the impression that the main burden of guilt for the increase in these sad cases must be borne by the local community—namely the peasants’ wives who insisted on the pregnant women being given treatment.” The assertion was soon confirmed. 20 In April 1945 Winkler wrote the following to the bishopric authority: “The murder of children at the Hutthurm Hospital is continuing. There have been more than 200. Last week saw the funeral of a Polish woman who died in one such incident. This was the first case of a death after an abortion. Her coffin also contained eight small corpses of children of various sizes.” 21 This was Winkler’s last letter. A few days later he was denounced by a local resident and the SS gunned him down at the edge of the woods. Although it has always been known where Winkler was buried, his body has never been exhumed and properly buried; now there is a parking lot covering his grave. 22 According to witnesses, directly after liberation Clarenz is said to have donated “a large white wreath” for the May church service when Mary, the mother of Jesus and the patron of all children, is especially honored. Benefiziat Reis was not silenced by this hypocritical gesture. He brought criminal charges against Clarenz. He could not and did not want to forget the dead children. The public prosecutor does not seem to have been informed: “The information was given to the Civil Intelligence Corps, because it was feared that Dr. Clarenz might destroy the still existing lists of all the abortions.” 23 Up to that time Clarenz was still free. Dr. Worlitscheck, the chief consulting physician at Hutthurm Hospital during the Nazi period, was dismissed from his post immediately after the war; he had been a member of the Nazi Party, but according to witnesses he never attached much importance to the abortions going on in the clinic. 24 Pressed by Benefiziat Reis, Judge Reitberger issued a summons on June 4, 1945, which said among other things, “As far as could be determined we are dealing with a unique case in the whole of Germany, at least as far as known to the church authorities. . . . At the beginning of pregnancy the fetus was simply aborted. At a later stage the child—born alive—was left to starve to death. . . . As far as is known by witnesses, the

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Third Reich Health Minister Conti gave the order to exterminate the Poles, Ukrainians, etc.” 25 At least 220 abortions are officially entered in the lists. Whether and to what extent this number was exceeded can no longer be determined. In his handwritten confessions of October 4, 1945, Clarenz admitted that he received only three reichsmarks for “live births,” but for abortions almost twenty times that amount—about fifty reichsmarks. 26 He also admitted that abortions were performed without anesthesia. And because of the “scarcity of anesthetics” from January 1945 on, additional personnel were allowed to remain in the operating room to hold patients down. As verified in the report of the October 22, 1949, Passauer Neue Press, Clarenz was introduced to the American public as the “Herod of Hutthurm.” Clarenz was interned for two years in various camps by the military government. He was forbidden to work as a surgeon in Hutthurm Hospital, but he was not charged with war crimes. After serving his sentence, he settled down as a general practitioner in Fuerstenzell, and on June 24, 1947, with considerable boldness, he applied for the post of chief consultant at Hutthurm Hospital. In August 1948 Clarenz resumed his private medical practice in Hutthurm, and the Superior Denazification Court in Passau suspended the criminal investigations against him. The chief prosecutor had never bothered to interrogate the most important eyewitness, Benefiziat Reis. The doctor and district leader of propaganda—Clarenz—was declared only a “fellow traveler” and sentenced to pay a small fine of 500 reichsmarks. The public prosecutor did not appeal and the judgment was handed down. Only the bishopric persisted: “The judges of the Nuremburg Trials determined that nobody can be forced to commit obvious criminal acts and that such acts are punishable even if they were committed under compulsion. . . . Unfortunately, the Bavarian Supreme Court did not deem itself in a position to make a judicial decision of this kind due to the lack of jurisdiction.” 27 However, at the urging of the Church and the new mayor of Hutthurm, the post of chief consultant was offered to someone else. 28 The new man was Dr. Braunhofer, who was seen as a man “close to the Church.” 29 Moreover, an “old account” was settled. Even today the story is told that Seibold, the mayor of Hutthurm after the war, fell off a scaffolding during the Nazi occupation and broke his ribs and one arm. His entire right side was put in a cast, and he had to seek medical treatment from Clarenz several times. Once Clarenz ordered him to lift his arm for

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the “Heil Hitler” salute. It was impossible for Seibold, encased in plaster, to do so, nor did he want to do it. Thereupon Clarenz “grabbed his arm and pulled it up,” again asking him to give the salute. Screaming in pain, Seibold finally gave in. Only then was he treated. 30 Seibold swore never to forget this episode. When he had the opportunity to take part in the decision to appoint the new chief consultant, not only did he vote for Dr. Braunhofer, he fought on his behalf until other appointing officials agreed. As reported in the Passauer Neue Presse exactly one month later, in October 1949, the Kassationshof (Court of Appeals) rescinded the decision of the denazification court, in accordance with Article 52 of the Law of Liberation, and ordered that the case against Clarenz be retried. The new decision of the appeals court once again confirmed him to have been a “fellow traveler.” And this time the state paid all the legal fees. Clarenz died in 1965. 31 His lawyer, Hans Maul, told me that the Hutthurm community questioned how a man who had brutally violated church laws could be buried next to the church. 32 Today, nobody wants to talk about Dr. Clarenz or the issue of forced abortions. Most of the foreign babies were killed before birth, but twenty-one of them lived long enough to be secretly christened. 33 Whether there were Jews among them is not known; these babies and one adult are registered as Polish on the church’s death certificates. It is also not known exactly where they were buried. The current vicar, Josef Groeger, believes they were interred in the back part of the cemetery, which is not divided into individual plots. The graves of the children lie in a fallow, overgrown field. There has never been any memorial tablet or other commemorative symbol, neither in the hospital, community, cemetery, nor at any other public location. Nor are there any plans for a memorial; town officials refuse to even discuss such an idea. And Passau is not the only place where such things happened. Unfortunately, there are many such places all over Germany.

Infants’ Homes ”Infants’ homes” were established to eliminate infants of Eastern European slave laborers. Sallach, a tiny village that once had one of these homes, does not welcome strangers who ask about what happened in the building on Gangkofener Street 7. Some residents even threaten “revenge.” 34

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In November 1943, the Sallach infants’ home was set up in a vacant agricultural building. At least 120 Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian women were required to deliver their babies there. 35 The women were told that this was a children’s home in which all foreign children would be housed and cared for so that their mothers could continue to perform their work “undistracted.” Josef Roehrnboeck and Saalschutz Abteilung Karl Steiger, two local Nazis, were employed there as “guards” and were also responsible for obtaining food. 36 Several eyewitnesses report how desperately some women begged to be permitted to take their babies with them after birth. “They knew with certainty that they would not see their children again,” said one woman. “When they were driven here by the farmers in horse carts, all of them cried. They pleaded, they begged to be allowed to deliver at home, on the farm where they worked. But that was forbidden.” 37 Some farmers were willing to accept the child of “their” worker into their own family and raise it so that mother and child would not be separated. But the Nazi Party did not allow that. Female slave laborers even had to turn over to the home their children born earlier. 38 The Nazi Party also forbade any kind of medical assistance that Dr. Oswald, the assigned general practitioner, had offered and strictly recommended. 39 He was ordered instead to certify the children’s deaths. 40 Children’s homes like the one in Sallach were located all over Germany. After Schutzstaffel Gruppenführer Hilgenfeldt visited one of these homes, he wrote to Himmler: The present treatment of the children is intolerable in my opinion. In this there can only be an “either-or.” Either it is not desirable that children remain alive, in which case they should not be allowed to starve to death slowly, for with this method many liters of milk are being subtracted from the general food supply. There are ways to accomplish this painlessly, without torturing them. Or it is the intention to bring up the children so that later they can be utilized as workers. Then, however, they should be nourished in such a way that someday they will be of full worth in employment. 41

Theoretically, on some weekends there was an opportunity for a mother to visit her child in the home, but reality was quite different. In the middle of November 1943, Stanislaus Kokoszenko and his common-law wife were ordered to bring their four-month-old son to the home in Sallach. Elsa Kerscher, a neighbor, remembers “a handsome

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little fellow, plump, healthy, with a pacifier in his mouth and a hot-water bottle in the baby carriage. In desperation, the parents of the little boy told me that even the farmer for whom the mother worked had declared that he was willing to raise the child in his own household, but that this had not been approved.” 42 Just a few days later, on November 22, 1943, the little boy was dead. 43 Approximately every third day another child died. Witnesses who are still alive report that newborn infants were deliberately fed spoiled milk, resulting in serious intestinal illnesses and then death. Children who were three or four years old often suffered for several weeks before they died. “There were pretty children among them, such pretty children. But every time we were there, new children were again there. New faces, different children. None was there long,” recalls Xaver Rothlehner, a farmer from the neighboring village. 44 Kazimiera Wronska recalls, My daughter Maria was born in the hospital. When she was six weeks old, we had to take her to Sallach. I knew that all the children were dying, and I asked for permission to go with my daughter to the home, as an unskilled laborer. I was permitted to go, and I nursed the child for four months. There were two other women working there besides me, a Russian with her two children, Michal and Kati; her husband was missing, and she was very sad. In addition, there was Vera, a Ukrainian woman who was older. She had the most authority. She could, for example, allow parents to take their child home for a day. A German cook also lived in the home. And after a birthing room had been provisionally outfitted, a midwife came once in a while. . . . The children all died of diarrhea. Each child was fed from a particular bottle. The only ones who survived were those whose parents brought food.

In response to my question whether the food supplied at the children’s home was spoiled, Kazimiera’s husband nodded his head, “Yes, yes, that is quite possible.” 45 After four weeks, Kazimiera Wronska was replaced in the home by Palaska, a Ukrainian woman who was already old and sick and could no longer work hard on the farm. 46 A grocer and his wife, whose shop was across the street from the children’s home, supplied the home with food and brought the dead children to the cemetery. 47 Large holes served as graves; these were loosely covered with plain boards until the holes were filled to the top with corpses. Not until then were they covered with a little earth. 48 The local

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priest, Father Beslmeisl, who was fully aware that many deaths were occurring in this home, complained about foreigners who simply did not belong in the Reicheneibach cemetery. After the first child died there in November, he stated in writing that this burial would be an exception, and he refused to accept any more foreigners. But the murders and burials went on. In January 1944, Father Beslmeisl complained: “An expansion of the cemetery is absolutely out of the question during the war, and most certainly not . . . for the sake of foreigners.” 49 At that time, according to the death registry of Reicheneibach, a child died each week. On February 7, 1944, he wrote that “once the home is fully utilized, this number will climb further. . . . The population is indignant that the corpses of these Polish and Russian children are being buried in our cemetery,” and he demanded that this practice be abolished. 50 During the next three weeks, eleven children and one woman died—more than the community normally experienced in an entire year. On May 4, 1944, after another mass grave had been dug for fifteen more children, Father Beslmeisl protested again: “The people have become quite exasperated and impatient about the untidy appearance of the entire cemetery due to the jumble of so many grave mounds.” 51 Once again he insisted that foreigners be buried elsewhere, perhaps right next to the home. The neighbors protested against that location as well because there were three water pipes running under that piece of land. In addition, that particular spot was located near the entrance to Sallach, and it would not be a welcoming sight for visitors. 52 As a result of this uproar, from July 1944 on, prisoners of war had to carry the children’s caskets to an unused field outside the village. 53 The last thirty children to die and at least three women were buried there. Atop each casket, a coin, a piece of sausage, and some bread were placed to accompany the dead into eternity. The local residents later observed that cats and dogs were digging in the graves to get at the food. 54 On April 27, 1945, the last child died in the children’s home of Sallach; 55 the Nazi Party closed the home after several women died from childbed fever. 56 Subsequent children of foreign workers were born at a hospital nearby, and these babies were not killed. 57 On May 3, 1945, the Americans arrived. 58 One day later Kazimiera Wronska, who was pregnant again, was handed her daughter in the new children’s home. About twenty other children had survived as well. 59 When the Americans marched into Ruhstorf, they also came upon the Barhof farm, another “infants’ home” where children were murdered “as on an assembly line,” 60 as some neighbors recall. Little coffins

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and pacifiers lay around in piles. The farm belonged to Anna Sichardt, an unmarried mother. Panicked by the arrival of the Americans, some of the local women had helped her scrub the walls. 61 Only a few infants were liberated; the rest lay dead somewhere in Hader. 62 One hundred fourteen children are entered in the death registry of Sallach, but according to several eyewitnesses the number should be close to two hundred. Ninety-one children are listed on the death registry for the Barhof farm, but eyewitnesses are sure that at least three hundred were killed there. 63 The public prosecutor has never investigated either case.

Contemporary Attitudes Originally the “temporary” cemetery at Sallach was fenced off and there was a cross on each grave. In the 1950s, however, the municipality sold the land to the elder Mr. Haas. He removed the rickety fence and the crosses and planted trees. Today there is hardly any reminder of those human beings and their suffering. In 1992 his son Otto built a weekend cottage on the land. Above the entrance is a painted wooden panel with an inscription in red—“Zur Gemuetlichkeit” (cozy cottage) and next to it a seating group made of some tree trunks cut in half. People have parties atop the bodies. Erika Haas recounts, “At first it gave us the creeps. But now not anymore. From time to time we sit there and drink, and sometimes we say, ‘Cheers, you women, cheers!’ ” 64 I exposed the owners to journalists of several countries, including Morley Safer of 60 Minutes. 65 Only after that publicity did Otto Haas offer to relocate his weekend cottage. A representative of the government also promised to take care of these graves. Both promises were made in 1993, but nothing has been done. While the bodies of the murdered children from the Barhof farm are scattered in various spots at the local cemetery of Kleeberg, the body of local Nazi hero and aristocrat Rudolf von Moreau 66 was buried with official pomp. 67 All the houses of Kleeberg and Hader added black cloth to the proudly displayed swastika flag. In the endless funeral parade from the family castle to Moreau’s glorious memorial chapel at the local cemetery marched, accompanied by military drum music, celebrities such as General Mußhoff, Generaloberst Milch, General Sperrle, and Generalleutnant Udet. Hitler and Göring had a wreath laid at Moreau’s grave. Near Moreau’s ornate memorial chapel lay

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a small granite grave marker. Immediately after World War II, it was purchased and erected by a former slave laborer whose son, Max Simonovic, was killed at the Barhof farm. 68 After the father left Germany, the marker was ripped out twice. It became illegible, and for many years it was tossed in a corner of the cemetery with all kind of trash. The memorial chapel over Moreau’s body has always been well kept, however, and it is lavishly restored—including the five swastikas underneath his name. Unlike Max Simonovic, Moreau was not Polish; he was German. Unlike the little boy, he was not an innocent victim of the Nazis but one of their activists and celebrated heroes; he did not have to suffer before he died. Moreau was a celebrated combat pilot, fighting the international brigades in Spain. One of his bombers was named “Peter and Paul,” 69 after two of the apostles, but it brought death to others. His name is forever linked with the first ship bombarded on August 13, 1936, in the harbor of Malaga. Many other deaths followed. But in particular, Moreau’s name is associated with the targeted civilian population at the Alcazar of Toledo, where democratic residents held out against the fascist dictator—until Moreau came. In Hader, there is even a street named after him—but none, of course in memory of the murdered children. In 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the Passauer Neue Presse, the only local newspaper, published a romanticized threecolumn article about him, portraying him as a noble pilot for a civilian airline. It did not reveal his guilty past. By thus manipulating what the public knows, the newspaper capitalized upon his popularity. At the Barhof farm, things are handled differently but not much better. Since 1992, shortly after I investigated the case, Sophie Behr, a journalist for Der Spiegel, has kept copies of the death registry. Eightynine children died in the part of the building where she is living. She purchased it in the 1970s with another single mother and admits she was not eager to learn more about the building, even though neighbors talked about it from time to time. 70 Behr loves guests, and she loves roses. On June 12, 1992, she invited twelve women to celebrate the summer solstice “with dancing and foot stamping.” The theme for the evening was “flesh and blood.” The invitation requested that guests wear red and purple dresses only, and they were expected to contribute something having to do with “fire, blood, flesh, sun, light and dance.” One woman cooked “red roses in jelly.” “Wine, blood and soil, along with blood freshening salads” were prepared at the Barhof. One of the tables was decorated with dead roses

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and loose petals as well as a gun. Thus contemporary local residents remember the deaths through a bizarre ritual. The Passauer Neue Presse and the Passauer Bistumsblatt, the bishopric newsletter, have published a great deal over the years about local and regional resistance to the Nazis, be it true, untrue, or questionable. Diocese custodian Franz Mader wrote extensively about the difficult duties of the pastoral caretaker during the Nazi period, and the bishop, Dr. Antonius Hoffmann, honored the resistance publicly. 71 Dr. Emil Janik, the late editor-in-chief of the bishopric newsletter, wrote a book titled Klerus und Kloester des Bistums im Dritten Reich (Clergy and Monasteries of the Bishopric in the Third Reich). 72 But none of these men mentioned the forced abortions or the children’s homes which, as we have seen, were known to the church—not even in a footnote. None of these crimes is alluded to, even in the highly acclaimed book by Dr. Walter Ziegler titled Die kirchliche Lage in Bayern (The Situation of the Churches in Bavaria). 73 Opportunities for proper research are less than slim. Citing privacy laws and data protection, the Passau local court denied my requests for access to some denazification files that most likely contain relevant information. The Physicians Chamber routinely rejects inquiries concerning the Nazi past of its members. Helga Gahbauer, the deputy mayor of Hutthurm, claims that there are no records in the town’s archive and that neither the birth registry nor the death books contain anything about the births or the abortions. 74 She falsely claims that she has never heard of them. 75 The hospital administration insists that it handed over its records to the central medical records repository in Berlin, but inquiries there indicated that the records never arrived—a suspicious claim. In 1993, Dr. Herbert Wurster, the director of the bishopric archives, admitted he had seen some old newspaper articles about the forced abortions in the Amtsblatt for the Bistum Passau and in the Bistumsblatt, but in a letter to me he constructed a weird chain of evidence to prove that nothing could have happened. He claimed that he had not found “the faintest trace of such abortions” in the documents and correspondence between the bishop’s chancellery and the order of the Sisters of Mercy. To support this assertion, he offered, in writing, “the most natural explanation in the world: Where nothing happened, there are no files.” He considered this conclusion to be in “accordance with the [protest] declaration [of the vicar-general against the mild verdict against Clarenz] of 1949.” 76 Erwin Hall Huber, the mayor of Ruhstorf, claims that all the records concerning the Barhof were eliminated long ago. 77 The local historian

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of Eggenfelden says there are no files concerning the children’s home in Sallach either. 78 Most of the eyewitnesses are dead or will be dead in the near future. I think that truth is always specific; it is necessary to give names and places. Now as before there are ugly tendencies in the Federal Republic that must first be brought to the attention of the general public before they can be combated. Now as before there are circumstances that some people like to term “unfortunate” but that I find terrifying. And there are facts that have to be called by their true names. Otherwise, the consequences will be devastating. In Germany today there is a distressing and dangerous gap growing between reality and the way reality is represented with regard to the Third Reich and the Shoah. Whether this takes place at the local or national level, whether it is accidental—a result of a local journalist’s ignorance or naiveté—or whether it is planned by scholars and generously funded in the name of our government, what emerges is a picture of history that is often simply false. Sometimes this picture is drawn so irresponsibly that as a citizen of Germany I am immensely ashamed, especially now that I am living abroad. When I first wrote about these murdered children in my book Wintergrün: Verdrängte Morde (Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, 1993), there was a tremendous outcry throughout Europe, but this did not stimulate any further investigation. 79 Instead, alluding to a movie made about me and my research in 1990, journalists created headlines such as “Nasty Girl’s Babies.” 80 As long as the functions and roles, as well as people’s acts, continue to be falsely represented, I will continue to feel obligated to take a position publicly opposed to it, to point out the truth.

NOTES 1. In the fall of 1992 I asked eighteen farmers in the Ruhstorf and Eggenfelden area to describe their former workers, and nearly the same words, usually in the same order, were used by all of them. 2. Interviews conducted in Warsaw in October 1992; interpreted by Dr. Barbara Ceranovic. 3. There are hundreds of secret files in which such cases are documented listed in the so-called blue books at the Central State Archive in Munich. 4. Each district had its own abortion clinic. Calculated on the basis of a low rate such as in Hutthurm, the total would be about fifty thousand.

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5. Each district had its own infants’ home. Calculated on a low death rate such those as in Sallach and Barhof, the total would be about five hundred thousand. 6. According to the death registry of the Catholic church in Hutthurm, which is not open to the public, 220 abortions took place in this hospital. Several eyewitnesses, however, report that similar abortions took place at another hospital nearby. 7. In three children’s homes, located in Sallach, Barhof, and Kirchheim. 8. Church authorities had already suspected this by 1945. Numerous interviews with local farmers and their former maids and neighbors confirmed this motive. 9. RGB 1. Reich Law Gazette I:27, paragraph 5. 10. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 11. This is according to investigations of the CIC (Civil Intelligence Corps). 12. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. That was confirmed in 1984 by Clarenz’s lawyer, Dr. Hans Maul. 16. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 17. A Benefiziat works almost independently. Although he has a higher rank than a chaplain, he has fewer privileges than a priest. 18. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. The State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, even holds the testimony of an eyewitness. 23. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 24. Protocol from Vicar-General Franz Seraph Riemer on February 9, 1944. 25. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 26. Today, two German marks equal less than one US dollar, but in 1944 and early 1945, a month’s rent for a two-bedroom apartment cost only 25 marks. Thus, six abortions paid a family’s rent for a full year. 27. Passauer Neue Presse, July 26, 1949. 28. Passauer Neue Presse, October 22, 1949. 29. State Archive in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Rep.164/13 No. 3904. 30. The victim’s daughter testified during an interview in 1993. 31. The death registry of the Catholic church in Hutthurm confirms the report of local residents. 32. Interview with Hans Maul, 1984. 33. The death registry of the Catholic church in Hutthurm. 34. Interview with Xaver Rothenaicher, Sallach, 1992.

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35. This is according to the death registry of the Catholic church in Reicheneibach. 36. Interview with Xaver Rothenaicher, Sallach, 1992. 37. Ibid. 38. Interview with Elsa Kerscher, Sallach, 1992. 39. Interview with Xaver Rothenaicher, Sallach, 1992. 40. Interview with Anna Maria, the sister of the late midwife Kathy Schandl, 1992. 41. Quoted in Ulrich Herbert, “Geschichte der Auslaenderbeschaeftigung,” Deutschland 1880–1980. 42. Interview with Elsa Kerscher, Sallach, 1992. 43. Death registry of the Catholic church in Reicheneibach. 44. Interview with Xaver Rothlehner, 1992. 45. Interview conducted in Warsaw, October 1992; translation from Polish by Dr. Barbara Ceranovic. 46. Interview with Xaver Rothlehner, Brandstetten, 1992. 47. Interview with Xaver Rothenaicher, Sallach, 1992. 48. Interview with Erika Haas, a neighbor, Sallach, 1992. 49. In a letter to the Landrat in Eggenfelden. 50. In a letter to the municipal health office on Eggenfelden. 51. In a letter to the Landrat in Eggenfelden. 52. In a letter of May 7, 1944, to the Landrat in Eggenfelden. 53. According to a letter from July 14, 1944, written by the Landrat in Eggenfelden. 54. Interview with Erika Haas, Sallach, May 5, 1992. 55. According to the death registry of the Catholic church in Reicheneibach. 56. Interview with Xaver Rothenaicher, Sallach, 1992. 57. Interview with Anna Maria, the sister of the late midwife Kathy Schandl, 1992. 58. Daily reports of the Third Army at National Archives in College Park, Maryland. 59. Interview conducted in Warsaw, October 1992; interpreted by Dr. Barbara Ceranovic. 60. Interview with Alois Stoeckl, Barhof, 1992. 61. Interview with Sophie von Behr, Barhof, 1992. 62. Interview with Alois Stoeckl, Barhof, 1992. 63. This is a serious possibility. In the book Schreiberinnen des Todes some of the Polish former inmates at the registry in Auschwitz report, for instance, that it was the practice to hand out a registration form for only one person among a group of new arrivals. 64. Interview with Erika Haas, Sallach, May 5, 1992.

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65. It was broadcast twice, in January and June 1994. 66. He was the scion of an aristocratic family. “Castle Kleeberg” near Hader is family property. During the war, at least forty slave laborers were kept there. For details, see Rosmus, Wintergrün: Verdrängte Morde (Constance: Labhard, 1993), 43–45. 67. For details, see Anna E. Rosmus, Out of Passau (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), 56–60. See also Rosmus, Wintergrün, 42. 68. Interview with Sophie von Behr, Barhof, 1992. 69. Interview with Dr. Hermann Gantenberg, Buechlberg, 1981, who recalled a heated discussion among the clergy about this name. 70. Sophie von Behr, “Das Gedaechtnis fuer erduldete Leiden bewahren,” Lichtung, Ostbayerisches Magazin ½ (1994). 71. Especially before and after January 1983, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s seizing power. 72. Published in 1980, by Passavia Passau. 73. Published in 1980. 74. In an interview on June 19, 1983. Mayor Baumann wrote in a letter dated October 1983 that “nothing appropriate” is available. 75. Telephone interview on June 16, 1992. 76. Letter dated June 5, 1992. 77. Three interviews, June 1992. 78. Interview, May 5, 1992. 79. Wintergrün, 9–49. 80. The title of the film is The Nasty Girl, directed by Dr. Michael Verhoeven.

FIVE

Caring While Killing: Nursing in the “Euthanasia” Centers Susan Benedict When giving the dissolved medicine, I proceeded with a lot of compassion. I had told patients that they would have to take a cure. Of course I could tell these fairy tales only to those patients who were still in their right minds to the extent that they could understand it. I took them lovingly into my arms and stroked them when I gave the medicine. If, for example, a patient did not empty the entire cup because it was too bitter, I talked to her nicely, telling her that she had already drunk so much that she should drink the rest, otherwise her cure couldn’t be finished. Some could be convinced to empty the cup completely. In other cases, I gave the medicine by the spoonful. Like I already told you, our procedure depended on the condition of the patients. Old women, for example, who had to be fed couldn’t drink on their own so it wasn’t possible to give them the medicine by the spoonful. They were not to be tortured more than necessary and I thought it would be better to give them an injection. In this connection, I would like to say that, like me, Luise E. [Erdmann], Margarete Ratajczak, and Erna E. thought that the patients were not to be tortured more than necessary. 1

This was the testimony of Anna G., a nurse charged with killing 150 patients at Meseritz-Obrawalde, one of the German Third Reich euthanasia centers. This testimony was given at the nurses’ trial held in Munich in 1965. Today Meseritz-Obrawalde remains a functioning psychiatric hospital and is located in Poland.

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In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement was actively supported in both Europe and the United States. This movement sought to apply the scientific principles of genetics to human society with the goal of improving and strengthening the human race. In the United States, eugenics courses were taught in such universities as Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and Wisconsin. 2 Involuntary sterilizations were carried out on both continents. In the United States, thirty states enacted legislation to allow involuntary sterilization of people with mental and/or physical handicaps. In fact, the United States led the Western world in involuntary sterilization, with the enactment of such laws twenty years before Germany did so. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact legislation to sterilize people judged to be feebleminded or genetically unfit. From 1907 through 1917, ten more states passed similar laws, and involuntary sterilizations were carried out in some states until the 1950s. By the time the German law for sterilization was enacted in 1933, at least thirty states in the US, as well as Alberta, Canada; Denmark; Finland; Sweden; and Iceland had similar legislation. 3 Involuntary sterilizations were carried out in Germany beginning in 1933 and provided a first step in the “Healing of the Volk.” Sterilizations were, however, a means of improving the race slowly and over generations. A more expeditious remedy was the killing of the mentally and physically handicapped. In the 1920s and 1930s, involuntary euthanasia of the mentally and physically handicapped was widely discussed in Germany. Books and movies lauding euthanasia were popular, including Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past), which was produced under Hitler’s direct order and shown by law in all 5,300 German movie theaters. 4 Throughout the country posters were displayed that showed a strong and healthy German supporting on his shoulders the weight of handicapped individuals. The slogan on the poster was inflammatory: “You are sharing the load! A genetically ill individual costs approximately 50,000 Reichsmark by the age of sixty.” 5 Similarly, a high school mathematics textbook of that time included problems based on the calculated cost of caring for the mentally ill. 6 In 1935 Hitler told a leading Reich physician, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, that he would implement euthanasia once war began. 7 Two years later, a secret Reich Committee for Research of Inherited and Other Severe Illnesses was established in Hitler’s Chancellory. In 1939 this committee drafted a prospective law calling for the “destruction of life unworthy of life,” which would have provided legal sanction for “killing people

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suffering from serious congenital mental or physical ‘malformation,’ because they required long-term care, aroused ‘horror’ in other people, and were situated on ‘the lowest animal level.’ ” 8 Although never enacted into law, the following was proposed by a Ministry of Justice commission in 1939: Clause 1: Whoever is suffering from an incurable or terminal illness which is a major burden to himself or others, can request mercy killing by a doctor, provided it is his express wish and has the approval of a specially empowered doctor. Clause 2: The life of a person who because of incurable mental illness requires permanent institutionalization and is not able to sustain an independent existence, may be prematurely terminated by medical measures in a painless and covert manner. 9

The registration of all “malformed” newborn children with the Reich Committee became compulsory. The committee “was an organization for the killing of children who were born mentally deficient or bodily deformed. All physicians attending at births, midwives, and maternity hospitals were ordered by the Ministry of Interior to report such cases.” 10 Three referees, two pediatricians and one physician director of a psychiatric institution, were to decide which of the reported children would be killed. When the public health offices were notified of a decision, they were to arrange for the child’s admission to one of approximately thirty inpatient pediatric clinics. The Reich Committee promised parents that their child would be treated by specialists in the clinic, and this promise often allowed parents to believe they were acting in the child’s best interest. Other parents were persuaded to part with their child by their family doctor or by public health or National Socialist People’s Welfare nurses. 11 Often the government would force the mother into the war industry so that home child care was impossible. 12 In 1939 Hitler issued an order to expand the euthanasia program to “the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients.” 13 In addition to contributing to the goal of racial hygiene, this expansion would save operating costs at hospitals. Six killing centers were set up in existing psychiatric hospitals—Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. 14 Documents reveal that in 1941, Hadamar “celebrated the cremation of its ten-thousandth patient in a special ceremony, where everyone in attendance [including] secretaries, nurses, and psychiatrists, received a bottle of beer for the occasion.” 15

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Although the children who were victims of the euthanasia programs were killed by injections or starvation, these methods were not efficient enough to apply to the large number of adults at the killing centers. In these locations, gas was used. Accompanied by nurses, patients were transported by bus from local and regional hospitals to the killing centers. There they received cursory examinations by physicians and were photographed and measured, giving them confidence that they were receiving legitimate physical care. Then nurses told them they were to have showers and took them to gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. By 1941 more than 70,000 patients from German mental hospitals had been killed. 16 In August 1941, Hitler ordered the organized euthanasia program for adults to end. The killings had become public knowledge, and opposition to the program came from individuals and churches. 17 Even more important, the desired number of deaths had been attained. However, the children’s euthanasia program continued without interruption; the stop order applied only to killings in the gas chambers at the killing centers. After the stop order, physicians and nurses continued to kill handicapped adults with tablets, injections, and starvation. In fact, more victims of euthanasia perished after the stop order was issued than before, 18 as the killings continued on an individual basis. Just as the children were killed by medication or starvation rather than in gas chambers, the “selected” adults were killed by physicians and nurses in designated institutions. Those involved in the killings called this phase “wild” euthanasia. 19 During the “wild” euthanasia phase, handicapped patients who were to be killed at the killing centers arrived by transport, often in the middle of the night. The staff selected patients who were unable to work as well as those who were deaf-mute, undisciplined, or annoying. 20 Those selected to be killed were taken from a ward to a private room where they were killed by injection or oral medication. Fraudulent death certificates were prepared and signed by the doctors working in the institution. The bodies were cremated. Families were notified of the deaths of their relatives and could receive an urn purportedly containing the ashes of their loved one. In reality, the urns contained combined ashes of many people from the crematorium. 21 The sequence described in the 1965 trial states that the first trains began arriving at Meseritz-Obrawalde in 1942 and that each train carried about 700 patients. Later the trains arrived with increasing frequency and brought patients from all parts of Germany, all of whom were to be killed at Meseritz-Obrawalde:

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All the nurses and orderlies, according to their statements, had to “unload” the patients. The ill persons were in horrible condition: many were emaciated and they were very dirty. This condition contributed to the fact that the nursing personnel were able to distance themselves emotionally from those people who had been brought into such a condition beneath human dignity and that the personnel, without considerable pressure, could be convinced to kill thousands of people. 22

An estimated 10,000 patients were killed by the nursing personnel of Meseritz-Obrawalde. 23 One nurse described the killing process: The killing of patients was never done by only one nurse. Practical experience had shown that it was absolutely necessary for the killing to be done by at least two nurses. I will give the reasons for this necessity. Nurses are also only humans and the strength of their nerves is limited. I think the two nurses had to support and help each other when doing the killings. The killing of a person is a hard strain on the nerves of the person doing it. After all, it could have been possible that the strong nerves of one nurse wouldn’t have been enough. I will express by this that one nurse could have fainted or she could have shrunk back. But when two or more worked together, the other would have helped to surmount the weak moment. But the cooperation was not only absolutely necessary for psychological, but also for practical, reasons. I didn’t experience it one single time that a patient would take such a large quantity of dissolved medicine voluntarily. It’s a fact of experience that medicine doesn’t taste good and people generally are not readily prepared to take medicine. The same can be said with regard to injections. Almost all of our patients were scared of injections. In order to give the dissolved medicine, particularly the injections, the cooperation of at least two nurses was necessary. 24

It is apparent from this nurse’s testimony that she, as well as her accomplice, not only knew they were killing but that the killing required some degree of force and unpleasantness for the patient. It is impossible to imagine the interaction between the two nurse-murderers and the bond they would have formed as partners-in-murder. Did they talk about their murders afterward? Did they plan ways to improve their “technique” for future killings? To provide a context for the nurses’ participation in the killings, it is essential to understand the societal values of the Nazi era. The concept

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of the “life not worthy of life” was valued widely. The severely mentally and physically ill were considered to be living less than a human existence. The Third Reich’s quest for the development of a superior race called for the elimination of those judged to be “inferior,” whether because of handicap, race, or ethnicity. Humans with physical or mental imperfections were to be prevented from reproducing through involuntary sterilization, and others who were deemed to be inferior were to be eliminated. The term “useless eaters” was often applied to severely handicapped and others regarded as nonproductive. 25 Added to the prevailing quest for “racial purity” were the economic needs of the time. Valuable resources should go to the war effort and to those who could work and be productive. 26 It is significant to note that the vast majority of the nurses involved in the euthanasia program were not “Nazi” nurses. In 1939 only 9 percent of the nurses were members of the Nazi Sisterhood. 27 In fact, the majority of nurses were members of religion-based nursing organizations such as the Protestant Nursing Orders and the Catholic Sisterhoods. Others were members of the Red Cross Sisterhoods, Federation of Professional Nurses, and the Sisterhood of the National Socialists. The great preponderance of participants in the euthanasia programs were not Nazi nurses. Before attempting to understand the nurses’ actions, it is important to note that the trial of the nurses of Meseritz-Obrawalde who provided this testimony took place in 1965, a full twenty years after the euthanasia program ended. Within this considerable time span, memories were no doubt altered and attempts to reconcile conscience and action were surely made. These same nurses undoubtedly knew the outcomes of trials of other accused perpetrators and were made aware through legal counsel of successful strategies for minimizing and justifying actions. At their trial the accused nurses offered various reasons for participating in the killings at Meseritz-Obrawalde. Luise Erdmann was the main defendant; she was accused of participating in the killing of 210 patients. She testified that she believed she was releasing patients from their suffering and would have wanted the same treatment for herself had she been incurably ill: Through the behavior of Dr. Wernicke I realized that incurable patients were to be released by giving them Veronal [barbituric acid] or another medicine. I also declare that I, neither by Dr. Wernicke nor any

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other person at the home, have been informed about the euthanasia. I wasn’t sworn to secrecy in this respect. . . . I was of the opinion that one took it for granted or believed that I would approve of euthanasia. My attitude to euthanasia was, should I become incurably ill[, and] I don’t make a difference between mental or physical illness, I would consider it as a release if a physician or, on direction of a physician, another person would give me a dose releasing me from everything. Despite my attitude to euthanasia, I have, when confronted with the problem, fought out serious inner conflicts. Euthanasia, in the form I experienced it at that time, after all was a killing of people and I asked myself if a legislator had the right at all to order or permit the killing of people. Never, however, did I hear about a corresponding law on the use of euthanasia but, on the other hand, Dr. Mootz explained to me once that there was no need for reservation as, should the situation arise, he would cover up for me. From this statement I concluded that there had to be a legality for euthanasia. 28

Erdmann stated that she believed there were both justified and unjustified cases of euthanasia. To have not helped in those cases she felt were justified would have been “illogical.” She continues: It was different with the cases where I didn’t regard the killing as necessary or appropriate. When I did participate in those killings and thus acted against my inner attitude and conviction, this happened because I was used to obeying strictly the orders of the physicians. I was brought up and instructed to do so. As a nurse or orderly, you don’t have the level of education of a physician and thus one can’t evaluate if the order of the physician is right. The permanent process of obeying the order of a physician becomes second nature to the extent that one’s own thinking is switched off. I was and still am without interruption of the Protestant faith. I must say that basically I describe the whole Protestant faith also as my faith. I would like to express by this that the commandment “Du sollst nicht töten” [thou shall not kill] is truth for me. When I did the killings, I must admit that I offended this commandment. But as I expressed in my questioning, I didn’t do it with a light heart but only after serious inner fights I obeyed the orders. 29

Luise concluded her testimony by stating that she was hopeful the doctors did not make mistakes in their selection of those to die. She

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stated that she did not see the killings as murder but as a release from suffering. 30 The dissonance between religious beliefs and the nurses’ actions was apparent in the testimony of other nurses as well as Erdmann’s. Religion affected the nurses’ participation in three ways: as an effect upon the individual, as an element of nursing education, and by its effects upon society. Individual religious commitment and its conflict with participation in the euthanasia program was established in the testimony of several nurses at their trials. Some of them saw themselves as religious persons, and some, although not all, admitted to having guilty consciences over their killings. During the period when they were in training, nursing education was closely associated with religion. 31 Catholic and Deaconess nursing programs incorporated the study of religion into their nursing curricula. Similarly, the religious affiliation of the hospitals was an influence. Catholic hospitals were not used as euthanasia sites, although patients from these institutions were transferred elsewhere for euthanasia with the knowledge of those employed there. It was religion, in the person of Bishop Galen, that is thought to have contributed to a cessation of the organized euthanasia program (but not an end to euthanasia). Knowledge of the euthanasia program became widespread among the population, and on August 3, 1941, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Münster, delivered a sermon in which he described the killing of patients, including details of their registration and transfer. 32 Copies of the sermon were dropped over Germany by the RAF. 33 On August 24, 1941, all killings were temporarily halted. 34 Anna G. was accused of participating in the killing of 150 patients. Her testimony exemplifies the rationalization used to convert the act of murder to one of mercy within the context of her Christianity. Interestingly, she regarded theft as a crime she would have been unwilling to commit, yet murder was transformed into an “act of mercy”: It is true that I was brought up as a Christian and that for my whole life I was convinced of the Christian faith. On the other hand, during my work, especially on the ward for the insane, I have seen such horrible misery and have seen all of the different sicknesses until the terminal stage. In view of these experiences, I have seen it as an act of mercy and a release when the killings were done. . . . I herewith declare that I have never been forced by anybody to participate. . . . I would never have committed a bank robbery or other theft because that is just not done.

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In addition, theft wouldn’t have belonged to my tasks. I would never have committed a theft because I know one isn’t allowed to do it. 35

Martha W. was also accused of taking part in the killing of 150 patients. Her testimony seems to indicate more of a continued burden of conscience. Amazingly, even after a full twenty years to reflect on her activities, she was still unable to articulate a plausible explanation for her actions: I’ve always disapproved of euthanasia. In the course of my work as a nurse, I could see that a lot of patients were sent to the mental institution who before had been very estimable people. It was a big injustice for me to kill those people because of their illness. When I’m reproached for the fact that I was brought up as a Catholic and the commandments also represent my convictions, this is correct. Until today, it is my conviction that people are not allowed to interfere. Nevertheless, I participated in the killings and I recognize that I acted against the commandments and my conviction and have burdened my conscience seriously. The only explanation I can give is that I didn’t have enough time to think about it at that time because the nurses were put under a lot of stress. 36

Like Anna G. and Martha W., Margarete T. was accused of killing 150 patients. She considered herself to be a religious person and admitted to still feeling guilty at the time of her trial. She gave as her primary reason for committing the murders her obedience to physicians and higher ranking nurses: I was brought up as a Christian and still today I’m a very religious person and, as far as possible, I attend the service regularly. For this reason, when the killings began at Ward U1, I felt deeply guilty and still do today. Due to the many years of working as a nurse, practically from since I was young, I was educated to strict obedience, and discipline and obedience were the supreme rules among the nurses. We all, including myself, took the orders of the physicians, head nurses, and ward nurses as orders to be strictly obeyed and didn’t or couldn’t form our own opinion about the legality of these orders. I was a civil servant at that time and, on one hand, I was sworn to secrecy and, on the other hand, I was obliged to obey given orders. I think at that time, I’ve always lived in conflict with my own opinion and the fact that I

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Susan Benedict was a civil servant. On the one hand, I saw the killing of people, even though they were incurably mentally handicapped people who exclusively were accommodated on Ward U1, as a big injustice and often asked myself why it was done. On the other hand, I was a civil servant and obliged to do my work and didn’t see a possibility of getting around the orders. You ask me if I had also committed a theft on order, I say that I wouldn’t have done it. I saw, however, the act of giving medicine, even in order to kill mentally handicapped persons, as an obligation I wasn’t allowed to refuse. In case of refusal, I always imagined my dismissal from the job of nurse and civil servant, which is why I didn’t refuse. 37

Erna Elfriede E., who was accused of participating in the killing of 200 patients, testified: They didn’t make me swear on a secret matter of the Reich and I wasn’t sworn to silence. I considered the killings as injustice. Something like that was not supposed to happen, because nobody was allowed to order it. I was brought up quite as a Christian. I already learned as a child what one may and mustn’t do. I learned that one mustn’t steal and mustn’t kill. [When asked why she didn’t refuse to participate in the killings:] Because I was ordered to do it. When I am asked again, why I didn’t refuse, although I realized that it was an injustice, I can’t give an answer to this question. I do and did in the past have a strong feeling of guilt but it is impossible for me to give a reason for the fact that I didn’t refuse. It simply was ordered and I had to execute the orders. 38

Obedience was greatly valued in Germany, and nurses were to be obedient to their senior ranking nurses as well as to physicians. This trait reverberates throughout the nurses’ testimony as a reason for participating in the murders. In the hierarchical German hospital system, as in those of most other countries at that time, nurses were trained to obey physicians and often had a dependent relationship with the physicians they assisted. Although this was hardly a justification for following orders to kill—as demonstrated by the refusal of some nurses to do so—it helps explain the motives of some nurses. 39 This theme of obedience to physicians and to what the nurses believed was the lawfulness of euthanasia is further evident in the testimony of Meta P., who stated that “Among the nurses there was strict discipline and every subordinate nurse was obliged to strictly execute the orders of the superior.” 40

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Fear of the consequences of refusing to participate in the killings was not frequently cited by these nurses but has been given by other nurses as the reason for noncompliance with the order to help with the killings. 41 Certainly the Gestapo were greatly feared during this era. In more than one institution, nurses were made to sign pledges of silence under threat of death if they discussed the euthanasia program at their institution. 42 However, it is important to note that after almost fifty years of postwar proceedings, there has not been proof of a single case of retaliatory action against someone who refused to participate in killing operations, except for transfer to the eastern front. 43 Helene Wieczorek, accused of killing “several hundred” patients, testified: Director Grabowski told us we had to help the senior nurses—it was too much for them. We also would have to give the injections. First I refused and he said that there was no point in it because, being a civil servant of many years standing, I would perform my duty, especially in times of war. He added, it would be a law that the incurable mentally ill persons were to be released from their suffering. . . . I only did my duty and I did everything on order of my superiors. The Director Grabowski always warned us of the Gestapo. He said he would inform the Gestapo if we didn’t do what he ordered. 44

Martha Elisabeth G., accused of killing twenty-eight patients, stated: Certainly I felt guilty about it at that time and, although I didn’t do any killings by myself, I did help and I had a certain feeling of guilt. I’m only an ordinary nurse . . . and never realized that, legally speaking, I had become implicated in the killings. When I had to assist in the killings, I acted under duress and never with the intention to kill a person. At that time, nobody would have helped us at Obrawalde if we had refused to do the work and there wasn’t anybody to pour out one’s heart to and who we could trust. As a sort of slaves we were completely at the mercy of the rulers and their political line. 45

Gertrude F., accused of killing five patients, testified: When I did it by preparing the medicine, I did it without any knowledge of legal consequences. The preparation of medicine in order to give it to the patient actually was one of my duties which was one of the reasons

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Susan Benedict why I didn’t realize that I did something wrong. I wasn’t able to see a direct connection between my work and the killings. In addition you have to consider that I had worked in a mental institution for years and that the nurses were obliged to strictly obey their superiors, the senior nurses, the physicians and, last but not least, the director of the institution. In addition, I was the youngest nurse at our ward. Still today, I haven’t completely become aware of my wrongdoing. 46

Economic factors influenced some nurses. Nurses working on the euthanasia units received pay raises and/or bonus payments. For example, the nurses in the children’s euthanasia wards at Eglfing-Haar received about $10 extra per month. 47 Other nurses later testified that they continued to work in the euthanasia programs because they were afraid of losing their jobs. 48 As civil servants, the nurses had benefits not available in other employment positions. Margarete Maria M. was accused of killing three patients. “If I had refused to execute her [another nurse’s] orders,” she said, “I would have been dismissed. I could have quit the job, but at that time I was obliged to support my grandparents in Meseritz.” 49 Her testimony seems to imply: “I’d rather kill than lose my job.” This contrasts sharply with the testimony of other nurses from the other killing centers who consistently testified that they were not allowed to resign. They submitted resignations only to have them rejected. 50 Even though twenty years had elapsed and the nurses had time to prepare statements based upon the outcomes of other postwar trials of nurses, several were still unable to explain why they killed their patients. Erna D. declared, “Please believe me, that I didn’t do it readily because I really detested it. I repeat, I didn’t do it readily. In fact, I can’t say why I didn’t refuse.” 51 Other nurses testified that they didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing. Edith B. stated she knew “that at Ward U2 killings were done and the patients I moved to that ward possibly were condemned women. I didn’t see anything wrong with it.” 52 Gertrude D. said that even twenty years afterward, she still had not yet become aware of her wrongdoing. Perhaps these nurses saw their actions as congruent with their values. This interpretation is similar to the view of the ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan, who stated his belief that physicians did not set aside their ethics during the Holocaust but saw their actions as consistent with their ethical commitment to heal the nation by eliminating undesirable ele-

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ments. 53 Furthermore, many people believed that euthanasia was not “illegal,” even though no law permitting euthanasia had ever been enacted in Germany. 54 The belief that they were doing nothing wrong or even doing something of benefit was apparent in the statements of several of the nurses who seemed surprised that there were “legal consequences” to their actions. Three others saw the killings as releasing people from their suffering. Only seven of these fourteen Meseritz-Obrawalde nurses indicated feeling some degree of guilt with regard to their participation in the killings. Perceptions of powerlessness were evident in the statements of several of the nurses; they “didn’t see a way around the orders, didn’t have anyone to talk to, had no one to trust if they told”; one was in the position of being “the youngest nurse on the ward.” Others, however, did not remain powerless. Although it is impossible to know their number, some nurses relocated, changed jobs, asked for transfers, or became pregnant and left work. 55 When the Russians invaded and discovered the conditions at Obrawalde, they made the senior nurse, Ratajczak, reenact the killings. She admitted to having poisoned between 1,000 and 1,500 patients herself. 56 A few days later, she was shot, along with an orderly, by the Russian army. 57 The other nurses of Obrawalde were later tried for the killings. On March 12, 1965, “all fourteen women accused in the Munchner Schwesternprossess [nurses’ trial at Munich] were acquitted on the charge of acting as an accessory to murder.” 58 The paradoxical behavior of nurses gently holding patients while feeding them lethal doses of medication, killing while caring, should remain a visible part of nursing history so that nurses will remember that at a time in the not too distant past personal morality was set aside for political purposes. It will never be possible to understand the participation of nurses in crimes that seem unthinkable today, yet their participation must continue to be studied so that nurses never again find themselves in the role of killers.

NOTES This study is the result of a fellowship for Research on Medical Ethics and the Holocaust granted to Susan Benedict by the Research Institute of the

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with funds provided by the Merck Company Foundation. Portions of this chapter were published as part of Susan Benedict and Jochen Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 21:2 (April 1999): 246–63. 1. A. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen (Germany: Delphi Poiliti, 1987), 239. 2. L. Lapon, Mass Murderers in White Coats (Springfield, MA: Psychiatric Genocide Research Institute, 1986). 3. H. Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed (Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1995), 51, 52, 53. 4. J. Michalczyk, “Euthanasia in Nazi Propaganda Films: Selling Murder,” in Medicine, Ethics and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues, ed. J. J. Michalczyk (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1994), 65. 5. W. Gross, Drei Jahre Rassenpolitische Aufklärungsarbeit, Volk und Rasse, 10, 1935. Cited in Robert Proctor, “The Destruction of “Lives Not Worth Living,” in Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 6. A. Donner, Mathematik im Dienste der nationalpolitischen Erziehung, cited in Proctor, “The Destruction of ‘Lives Not Worth Living.’ ” 7. US Military Tribunal, Transcripts of the Proceedings in Case 1, p. 2482, Testimony of Karl Brandt. 8. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98. 9. Ibid., 99. 10. Landgericht Frankfurt. Urteil gg Hans-Joachim Becker und Friedrich Robert Lorent. Ks 1/69 (GstA). May 27, 1970, 720. 11. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 102. 12. G. Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 172. 13. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 63. 14. Landgericht Frankfurt, 738. 15. Robert Proctor, “Nazi Doctors, Racial Medicine, and Human Experimentation,” in The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, ed. G. Annas and M. Grodin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25. 16. United States National Archives and Records, Record Group 338, Microfilm Publication T-1021, roll 18, frame 98. 17. Landgericht Frankfurt, 752. 18. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 151. 19. United States National Archives and Records, Record Group 238, Microfilm Publication M-1019, roll 46.

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20. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 160. 21. Landgericht Frankfurt, 744. 22. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 224. 23. Ibid., 246. 24. Ibid., 239. 25. Landgericht Frankfurt, 716. 26. Ibid. 27. H. Steppe. “Nursing Under Totalitarian Regimes: The Case of National Socialism,” in Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare, ed. A. Rafferty, J. Robinson, and R. Elkan (London: Routledge, 1997), 19. 28. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 232. 29. Ibid., 234. 30. Ibid., 236. 31. H. Steppe, Krankenpflege im Nationalsozialismus, (Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse Verlag, 1989). 32. Landgericht Frankfurt, 752. 33. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 178. 34. Landgericht Frankfurt, 752. 35. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 236. 36. Ibid., 246. 37. Ibid., 244. 38. Ibid., 246. 39. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 231. 40. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 244. 41. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 236. 42. B. Richarz, Heilen, Pflegen, Töten (Göttingen: Verlag für Med. Psychologie im Verl. Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1987), 188. 43. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 235–36. 44. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 219. 45. Ibid., 245. 46. Ibid. 47. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 104–5, 48.United States National Archives and Records, Record Group 338, Case File 12–449, US v. Alfons Klein; Testimony of Pauline Kneissler, Document No. 470 US Military Tribunal Case Number 1, Tribunal 1, US v. Karl Brandt et al. 49. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 245. 50. E. Kintner, “Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Philipp Blumm (The Hadamar Trial),” in War Crimes Trials, vol. IV: The Hadamar Trial (London: William Hodge, 1949). 51. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 243. 52. Ibid., 245.

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53. A. Caplan, In the Shadow of the Third Reich: Nazi Medicine, a film by John Michalczyk, Boston College, 1992. 54. Landgericht Frankfurt, 723. 55. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 236. 56. Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, 246. 57. Ibid., 218. 58. Ibid., 246.

SIX

The Nurses’ Trial at Hadamar and the Ethical Implications of Health Care Values Mary D. Lagerwey

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tudies of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust generally ignore nurses and the nursing profession, or subsume them under studies of medicine. Although scholars have begun looking at day-to-day patient care typically given by nurses, 1 most discussions of health care ethics within the context of the Holocaust focus on research experiments typically designed by physicians and carried out on prisoners at concentration camps. Not only was nursing practice of that era distinct from medicine, but the sociohistorical status of the profession and its largely female composition also made it uniquely susceptible to particular ethical misconduct and pivotal in the designs of Nazi ideology. Nurses in Nazi Germany were the largest health care provider group. 2 They were given special attention and duties by the Third Reich in public health education and in carrying out the eugenic will of the state. From 1933–1945, German nurses participated in killing over 5,000 German children in children’s hospital wards and an additional 70,000 handicapped adults. They accompanied patients to killing centers, killed patients with “tablets, injections, and starvation,” 3 and performed clerical and housekeeping duties at the killing centers. 4 Yet most of the nurses who committed acts of murder in Nazi Germany were neither sadistic nor without ethical standards; they were “ordinary women.” The majority of nurses who participated in these killings “tried to remain good nurses.” It is estimated that less than ten percent of nurses were enthusiastic supporters of Nazi practice. 5 Although Nazi

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ideology demanded radical changes in nursing practice, it built upon existing professional values and vulnerabilities. This analysis places nurses’ roles within a framework of Nazi ideology regarding women’s roles and socialization as well as specific values held by nurses. Moreover, it details a chilling example of how women’s roles were appropriated by the state during this period. 6 An examination of the trial documents regarding one nurse, Irmgard Huber of Hadamar, Germany, yields insight into nurses’ active participation in killing thousands of innocents. The details of the first Hadamar trial of 1945 are taken primarily from trial documents edited by Earl Kintner 7 as part of a War Crimes Trials Series, from Staff Judge Advocate Colonel Bard’s military report, and from recommendations regarding the verdicts, 8 and from an analysis of the trial by Patricia Heberer. 9 Before turning to specific prosecution and defense attorney’s arguments, we must ask how the nursing profession in Germany became central to such Nazi practices as T4 euthanasia and “wild” euthanasia. 10 Although two of the three nurses on trial at Hadamar were male, this proportion was not representative of nursing in Germany during the Nazi period. At that time, most nurses were female, 11 and since the nineteenth century nursing in Germany was deemed the ideal profession for women and a specifically female contribution to war efforts of the Fatherland. 12 Historian Claudia Koonz argues that “[i]f the victims [of the Holocaust] lost their gendered identities, the perpetrators certainly did not.” 13 By the third decade of the twentieth century, nursing was also becoming increasingly dependent on the medical profession: The price that women had to pay for the support of the men was the subordination of nursing to the absolute domination of medicine and the accompanying surrender of any shred of independence. Serving, giving of oneself, self-sacrifice, and obedience became the intrinsic values of middle-class women’s nursing and so constituted the perfect professional ethical pitfall for all nurses. Self-awareness and selfdetermination were declared to be inappropriate and irreconcilable with the “ideal” professional stance. 14

Nazi ideology demanded that women’s occupations echo traditional maternal characteristics such as subservient nurturing, obedience, and duty. 15 Within this framework, nursing was an ideal profession for the German woman of the 1930s. It was a separate yet subordinate sphere

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from male-dominated medicine and contributed to key nationally defined priorities for women: avoiding depopulation and maintaining high health standards for Germans. 16 On the one hand, nurses entered the Nazi era with individualistic approaches to their practice; their notions of professionalism were shaped by the concept of personal virtue, by the lack of a unifying independent nursing organization, and by a strong middle-class identity. On the other hand, the focus of their practice became increasingly collective, emphasizing the health of the national race and a hierarchical decision making process. Neither aspect gave nurses or nursing independent professional identity or ethical standards, nor engaged nurses in interactive narrative ethics with patients, however defined. Furthermore, the profession was becoming less uniformly tied to religious organizations. In addition to the existing religious nursing orders, another “brand of nursing emerged, that of independent nurses.” 17 With various ideological groups claiming their allegiance, nurses’ primary identification and standards were attached to specific organizational forms and institutions rather than to the profession of nursing. The profession itself was not prepared for the challenges of Nazism. Individual nurses, particularly those not closely affiliated with religious structures, were often left to make ethical decisions in isolation and without professional support to counter or challenge Nazi ideology. After 1933, nursing increasingly emphasized the preventive health needs of the nation, even to the exclusion of health care of individuals and their families. Koonz argues that Nazi ideology called on practitioners to shift “the center of moral gravity” from individual patients to the state. 18 Although the notion of subordinating individual health needs to the collective health status of the state can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth century and the aftermath of German unification, 19 this shift represented an unprecedented change for nursing. 20 In 1933 the minister of the interior, Dr. Friederich Bartels, deputy leader of the Reich’s professional medical organization, called on nurses to “secure and promote a genetically sound, valuable race and, in contrast to the past, not to expend an exaggerated effort on the care for genetically or racially inferior people . . . at the cost of the more valuable people.” He urged them to “increase [the health of the sick and weak] only so far as their inherited biological predisposition allows.” 21 In an effort to increase the number of nurses, the 1938 Law on the Regulation of Nursing was enacted, requiring public hospitals and clinics to maintain nursing schools. The law also specified admission and

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training requirements for nurses. 22 To enter nursing training, an applicant had to be Aryan, at least eighteen years old, of good reputation as shown by a certificate of good conduct, a graduate of a “normal school” (roughly equivalent to high school), healthy, and politically reliable. Training consisted of eighteen months’ education, including 200 hours of theory, 100 of which were taught by physicians. Didactic learning covered professional honor and vocation, hereditary and racial studies, eugenics, population policy, anatomy and physiology, hygiene, diseases, nutrition, nursing care (including following physician orders), National Health Care (including prenatal care and childbirth), laws and regulations, and national insurance regulations regarding the prevention of accidents. After completing the training, nurses were required to take a state examination before practicing their profession. 23 In 1935 the Reich’s Association of Nurses became part of the Nazi Party, and in 1936 all free nursing associations were unified into a federation of professional nurses, the Reich’s Union of German Nurses and Nursing Assistants. All nurses completing their training took an oath of allegiance: “I solemnly swear that I will be steadfastly faithful and obedient to Adolf Hitler, my Führer. I promise to fulfill my duties, wherever I may be designated to work, faithfully and conscientiously as a National Socialist nurse in service to the national community, so help me God.” 24 In this context, nursing offered women social esteem and a sense of being needed for government service and its health policy. Nursing publications during the early Nazi period glorified nursing in World War I. The Third Reich encouraged a military model for the profession and raised its status by calling it a service to the people, a service to the Führer, and a service to “motherliness” (the ideal fulfillment of womanhood); indeed, nurses could be civil soldiers. Military-type awards such as the Iron Cross were given to nurses. In exchange, they were expected to sacrifice their own personalities to carry out the duties called for by the Nazi State. These included fostering people’s trust in physicians, promoting sterilization, communicating optimism regarding the war, and focusing on treating those who could return to society ready to contribute to the national agenda. 25 Throughout this period, one aspect of nursing practice, namely, individual character, remained central; character was expressed as humility, modesty, duty, selfless service, and loving care. 26 (Character has traditionally been the highest ethic in nursing, 27 and its centrality to nursing in the Third Reich is not unique.) It was therefore reasonable that defense arguments at the first Hadamar trial—which took place in

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Weisbaden on October 8–15, 1945—focused on two of these character traits, duty and selfless service. At this trial, known as United States v. Alfons Klein et al., seven German citizens, including three nurses—Irmgard Huber, Heinrich Ruoff, and Karl Willig—faced a United States military commission. Huber, the chief female nurse at the Landesheilanstalt Institution at Hadamar, received her nurse’s training at the institute and had worked there since 1932. Ruoff was the chief male nurse and a member of the Nazi party; he had worked at the institute since 1926. Willig, a member of the Nazi party since 1930, 28 had been at Hadamar only since 1941, working as both an assistant male nurse and undertaker. Judith Thomas, the sanitarium secretary, was not tried. The first Hadamar Trial is important not only for the three nurses who were tried but also for its status as a landmark legal action—under the auspices of the United Nations War Crimes Trial—Group I—testing the issue of jurisdiction under international law. The trial was held one month before the Nuremberg trials began, at a time when little was known about health care providers’ participation in Nazi euthanasia and genocide. The defendants were charged with “violating international law by murdering 476 Russian and Polish (also including one Italian, one or two Serbians, and one or two Lithuanians,” 29 who were slave laborers deported from the eastern sectors to the Landesheilanstalt Institution at Hadamar, beginning in the summer of 1944. The Landesheilanstalt Institution, located in the small town of Hadamar, was a state institution under the jurisdiction of the Weisbaden Province. It was established in the nineteenth century as a nursing home and state hospital, 30 and beginning in January 1941 it became a designated site for the murder of German citizens diagnosed with mental illnesses. 31 In 1940 all the institution’s employees were required to take an oath of secrecy, swearing not to discuss anything about what transpired there. 32 According to the Landesheilanstalt Institution’s administrator, Alfons Klein, from October 1940 through July 1942 the institution was run by a Berlin-based foundation and functioned as one of six designated T4 sites in Germany for killing the mentally ill. In 1939 Hitler issued an order to expand the euthanasia program to “the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients” to bring about “certain savings in terms of hospitals, doctors and nursing staff.” 33 In order to do this, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments was expanded from the original three members to include a number of academics and asylum directors. “The medical

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office . . . appointed and instructed the physicians and nurses assigned to the killing centers.” 34 The organization went by the name “Aktion T4,” after the location of the offices, Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Charlottenburg (a district of Berlin). In July 1939 committee members were told that a number of psychiatric patients had to be killed to clear hospital space for war casualties and free up nursing staff. 35 Six killing centers were set up in existing psychiatric hospitals: Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. Klein’s testimony indicates that about 10,000 patients were killed at Hadamar from January–August 1941. 36 Although a stop order officially ended the T4 program in August 1941, the murders continued through 1945 at Hadamar and throughout Germany, as part of “wild” euthanasia—decentralized killing of handicapped patients, particularly children. 37 At least 3,000–3,500 additional patients were killed at Hadamar after the T4 program ended. 38 (At the first Hadamar trial, however, the nurses were not charged with either T4 or “wild” euthanasia murders, because the mentally ill killed there were German citizens and thus not under jurisdiction of international courts.) In the summer of 1944 Hadamar expanded its scope of killing. A letter from the Gan Employment Office in Frankfurt requested “that some institution be designated to care for incurable tubercular laborers, and it was decided to bring that class of patient to Hadamar. Two weeks later Bernatot [administration councilor at Wiesbaden] visited Klein [administrative head of the Hadamar Institution and local Nazi Party leader] and Wahlmann [chief physician at Hadamar] and informed them that ‘incurable eastern workers should be transferred to Hadamar and that they should die there.’ ” 39 Little time was wasted before adding Russian and Polish workers to the victims of Hadamar. On June 5 or 6, 1944, seventy-five laborers arrived, including fourteen women and two children. The nurses were told that the prisoners had tuberculosis—but they neither examined nor treated the disease. 40 The chief nurse, Irmgard Huber, ordered the nurses under her supervision to prepare rooms for the prisoners. Working in rotation, they moved German patients to other rooms and put arriving patients into the vacant beds, complete with fresh linen. Ruoff and Willig told the new arrivals that they were to be treated for communicable diseases and gave them injections and/or oral medications. Within two hours of arriving on the wards, the patients were dead. All were buried in mass graves. Approximately twenty other groups of prisoners followed from “various other institutions and work-camps in Germany and German-occupied other territory.” 41 None

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survived. The sanitarium secretary, Judith Thomas, prepared death certificates, which were completed and signed by the physician, Adolph Wahlmann. Cause of death was listed as lung disease, and dates of death were falsified by as much as a month. 42 The extent of Irmgard Huber’s involvement in these murders is unclear. She was an active participant in the murders of German patients but denied such involvement with the Russians and Poles. We do know that she prepared these patients for their deaths, directed the entire nursing staff of the institution, and was present at the daily conferences at which death certificates were completed. She also controlled the key to the medications used by Willig and Ruoff in the killings and may have determined amounts of the drugs to be used. 43 On March 29, 1945, United States troops overran the Hadamar Institution. They arrested Irmgard Huber, not knowing if she was a witness or a perpetrator, questioned and released her, then apprehended her again five months later. 44 As the head nurse, she ultimately could not evade a trial. The two male nurses were also arrested, Willig on April 20 and Ruoff in late summer 1945, in the village of Hadamar. Although all three nurses were arraigned on the same charge, Huber was treated much more leniently. She was accused of being present “at these conferences every morning where the despicable death certificates were filled out with falsified reasons assigned as the cause of death, with spurious dates of death,” of controlling access to and furnishing the drugs used in the killings, and of “knowing and participating, aiding and abetting.” 45 At least seven other female nurses were central characters in the drama of Hadamar, but none of them was formally tried at this time. In September 1945, other female nurses were taken into custody as witnesses. All admitted that they had killed German mental patients but denied killing Russian and Polish prisoners. 46 Their testimony established the roles and identities of the defendants. Although it was apparent that the killings of Russians and Poles continued when Willig and Ruoff were not at the Landesheilanstalt Institution, and that Huber may have been more directly involved during these periods, the other nurses apparently agreed to place responsibility for the murders primarily on the shoulders of the two male nurses, Ruoff and Willig, who admitted to the killings. 47 Other defendants included the institute’s director, thirty-one-yearold Alfons Klein; sixty-five-year-old Adolph Wahlman, the institution’s physician since 1942; thirty-year-old Phillip Blum, doorman, switchboard operator, undertaker, and nephew of Klein, and an employee of Hadamar since before 1940; and thirty-five-year-old Adolf Merkle, who

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Irmgard Huber, Chief Nurse at Hadamar, April 1945. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

had kept case histories, sick lists, and the death register since August 1942. Of these, only Klein and Blum were Nazi Party members. Each of the seven defendants at Hadamar was charged with a single crime: violation of international law—that is, acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent and acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich, [they] did, from on or about 1 July, 1944, to on or about 1 April, 1945, at Hadamar, Germany, willfully, deliberately and wrongfully, aid, abet and participate in the killing of human beings of Polish and Russian nationality, their exact names and number being unknown but aggregating in excess of 400, and who were then and there confined by the then German Reich as an exercise of belligerent control. 48

All seven pleaded “not guilty” to the charge. Defense attorneys made no direct reference to nursing standards, nor did they call expert witnesses from the nursing profession, yet they

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based their defense on character, claiming that the nurses’ actions were consistent with professional values. They emphasized the nurses’ good character, addressing legal arguments primarily in the context of extenuating circumstances and attempting to support nurse Willig’s tearful claim: “It is a hard fate that we the smallest ones who never had anything to say and only had to obey have to be here accused of such a charge.” 49 The trial also demonstrated the emphasis placed on collective health. The defense argued the foreign laborers were going to die anyway: they arrived with presumed diagnosis of tuberculosis, a threat to the German nation and its workers. Thus, “accelerating” their deaths was not only permissible, but also necessary: “[T]here was a grave danger of infecting other foreign workers, so that the removal of these Russians and Poles was in the interests of the rest. . . . in general the people killed were those faced with permanent illness, for whom a completely painless death was a relief.” 50 Good character on the part of nurses implied loyalty to duty as articulated by the administration of the sanitarium and representatives of the major institutions of the area: the priest and a local magistrate. As civil soldiers, nurses had duties (enforced by oaths of secrecy) to the Hadamar institution, to medicine, to the Führer, and to the Fatherland, but not necessarily to individual patients or to the nursing profession. One character witness, the local magistrate Eduard Kuhl, framed his testimony in terms of Huber’s loyalty to her duties. His wife Elisabeth had been a secretary at the Hadamar institution since the late 1930s and a confidante of Huber. Kuhl stated that when Huber came to Elisabeth in tears over the euthanasia practices at the institution, Frau Kuhl reminded her of her oath of secrecy and successfully convinced her to continue her duties. The defense attorney argued: Yes, [Huber] heard of [the deaths of the Russians and Poles] at the conferences, but by then those people were dead. . . . She had to take part in these conferences as it was part of her duty. She was head nurse of the women’s section, and at these conferences the fate of hundreds of sick men and women was decided. In these conferences she could do much good, and that without a doubt she did. I consider her to be the good spirit of that Institution to whom everyone could turn, and the death certificates themselves never went through her hands. 51

For the nurses at Hadamar, duty encompassed a particular obligation of obedience within the hierarchies of the institution, the profes-

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sion of medicine, and the state. This duty not only entailed humble subservience; it also implied no inclination to work independently of the institution, medicine, or the state, despite grave doubts about the morality of one’s individual actions. The defense emphasized all three nurses’ lack of independent knowledge, and thus accountability, claiming that they were not in positions to determine whether people were as ill as they were led to believe. It also claimed ambiguity as to whether German law, which called for killing German citizens with physical or mental illnesses, applied equally to killing foreigners. Nurse Kate Gumbmann testified, “I thought it was assumed by a nurse that she followed all orders that were given her.” 52 The duty argument was employed on behalf of every defendant. All of the accused alluded to their duties to remain at their assigned posts, regardless of personal feelings. Another defense theme was patient care, and this was specific to the nursing defendants. A nurse was expected to be selfless and kind to patients, the argument went. Therefore all patient care was to be accomplished with selflessness and loving care, regardless of the outcome. The defense used this reasoning to argue that individual acts of kindness implied that a person of good character would not participate in any activity known to be evil. The defense gave examples of Huber’s acts of kindness and described her as “a goodly woman,” telling the court that “she brought toys for the children and bread and cake for the grownups, and all that came out of the little money which she had. That shows character, and a character does not change.” 53 Father Ernst Gobel, parish priest for the Hadamar district since 1930 and a regular visitor to the institution, also cited Huber’s reputation for kindness and emotional distress. He quoted her reaction to euthanasia: “How can we win the war if such crimes are happening?” Magistrate Kuhl also emphasized Huber’s self-sacrifice and kindness. He “considered Irmgard Huber a ‘good and soft person.’ She gave bread and cakes to German patients and toys and cookies to children of one-half Jewish blood.” 54 If the nurses could be portrayed as powerless, unable to deter the final outcome of death, their participation in the killings could be framed as acts of kindness preventing disruption on the ward and assuaging patients’ fear of death. The defense argued that “because great care was taken that none of the others was seen to die, nobody saw a thing of what was going on.” 55 “Huber wished to render a last service to these people. She did not want to do them any harm. She did not even want to give them any idea that death awaited them, but wanted to do them

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good since they were there, and then she left them. . . . She had a clear conscience.” 56 One theme articulated here resurfaced in subsequent war crimes trials. Defendants argued that if they did not participate in the murders, someone else would. Since it was impossible to prevent murders by refusing to act, one’s obligation was to ease suffering by smoothing the process, staying in one’s position so that someone less kind did not take one’s place. Huber’s defense attorney characterized her as “the only one who did not belong to the Party and was therefore exposed to certain accusations. If she had left her position, then most certainly a more willing person would have been put there and she could no longer have cared for the many poor and ill people. . . . I am equally convinced that this Commission would not wish to find a person guilty who still carried out great works of neighborly love.” 57 Further denying the relevance of the issue of accountability, the defense argued that the killings were in fact, or were perceived by the defendants to be, within the laws of Germany—that mitigating circumstances justified any violation of international law that occurred: Shortly after the beginning of the war the government passed a law whereby people who were afflicted mentally should be put out of the way. . . . He [Dr. Wahlmann] was told that the killing [of Russians and Poles] came under the same law as ordered the killing of the diseased. . . . Wahlmann was justified in assuming that this killing had been legally ordered, since no charges of any sort were levied. . . . The accused did not think they would be judged for an action committed by them which they had been told was legal. 58

The defense claimed that the accused were acting under orders of the Nazi Grauleiter Jakob Springer and the Landesrat (admisistrator counselor) Wilhelm Bernotat, both of whom committed suicide, and that the murders of Hadamar were the sole responsibility of Hitler and the Third Reich, the regime then ruling. This regime was one of atrocities, of concentration camps, of destruction of the just, of gas chambers and so forth. . . . The law-maker at that time in Germany was Hitler, a dictator who alone ruled the country. . . . [T]hrough propaganda put out by the Party the value of human life had little meaning. . . . Nazi propaganda always declared that the individual counted for nothing and that the important

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The defense also tried to portray the nurses as victims of Nazi propaganda: For many years our philosophers have been [imbuing] our people with this view of life. . . . The foundation was the law—that right is what is good for the people. Utilitarianism was raised to the status of law and shown on the posters in the railway stations. Everywhere you looked you could read this fundamental concept—right is what is good for the people. . . . The conscience of the people and the life of nations are destroyed. . . . This concept of ours cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of Germans, as you know full well from the press of the world. 60

The prosecution and defense disagreed as to whether the nurses could choose to stay at Hadamar and as to the degree of risk versus responsibility, or degree of accountability, they faced. The defense argued that the oath of secrecy explicitly implied a threat of imprisonment or death: “Refusal to carry out Springer’s order would have entailed the concentration camp. . . . You must take into account the conditions then prevailing, when nobody could say or do a thing against an order without running the gauntlet of being arrested by the Gestapo.” 61 The defense backed its arguments with the story of Andreas Hung, Kurt Arndt, and Irwin Keiner, three male nurses from a nearby institution who were arrested for openly discussing and disobeying orders. In turn, the prosecution argued that each nurse on trial was legally and morally accountable for his or her own murderous practice. Each could have left Hadamar: there were no known cases of nurses sent to concentration camps for refusing to participate. To counter the defense’s anecdotal argument, the prosecution cited the examples of three female nurses—Pauline Kneisner, Edith Korsch, and Agnes Schrankel— who left the Landesheilanstalt Institution without reprisal: Kneisner to aid her ill mother, and Korsch and Schrankel for pregnancy reasons; none of these three was apprehended or charged. Furthermore, the prosecution argued that these murders fell under the jurisdiction of international law, which supersedes national law. Prosecution attorneys did not rebut testimony about the nurses’ character, but they demonstrated that the nurses showed kindness only to German patients, not

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to Russian and Polish prisoners. They also argued that Hadamar was not a military station, and that individuals were responsible for their own actions and could not simply shift this responsibility to those who gave orders. Those who took leadership roles in aiding and abetting the killing could be held responsible for the killings. The jury concurred with the prosecution’s arguments. On October 15, 1945, a six-man jury took three hours and forty-five minutes to reach its verdicts. All seven defendants were found guilty of violating international law in the matter of these deaths. Ruoff and Willig were sentenced to death by hanging for personally killing the laborers. For her role in aiding and abetting the killings, Huber was sentenced to twentyfive years’ imprisonment. Klein was also sentenced to death by hanging. Wahlmann received a life sentence; Merkle, thirty-five years; and Blum, thirty years’ imprisonment. On December 21, 1945, the American Army Reviewing Authority approved these sentences. On March 7, 1946, the Commanding General of United States 7th Army and Theater Commander Eisenhower approved them. Ruoff, Willig, and Klein were hanged on March 14, 1946. Huber was transferred to the German authorities on December 17, 1946. 62 In 1947, at Frankfurt am Main, there was a second Hadamar trial, in which twenty-five members of the Hadamar staff were charged in a German court with killing German citizens. Huber was charged with and convicted of slaying 15,000 German mental patients and delivered to the War Criminal Prison I in Landsberg on the Lech to serve an eightyear sentence. But in July 1951 the Judge Advocate Division of the War Crimes Branch recommended that her sentence be reduced to time already served, about six years. In September 1951 the War Crimes Modification Board reduced Huber’s sentence in the first Hadamar trial from twenty-five years to twelve. She was released from prison in early 1952. On February 11, 1954, Blum, the last defendant in the first Hadamar trial, was paroled. Merkle had been released in 1950 and Wahlman in 1952. Within the context of early twentieth-century German nursing, the murders at Hadamar were not wholly inconsistent with nursing values that predated Nazism by half a century; in fact, these values were appropriated—with a shift in focus of care and moral responsibility from the individual to the nation—by Nazi ideology, thus providing nurses with justification for murder. Although 1933 marked a major turning point in German nursing, the framework within which these nurses acted remained largely con-

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sistent with nursing values in the Western world of that day. The nursing profession assumed that good character was a central qualification for the profession. Duty was strongly emphasized, but primarily as implicit loyalty to the institution for which nurses worked and obedience to hierarchical authorities. The definitions of caring and locus of moral responsibility, the nurses’ perceived powerlessness to define their practice for themselves, and increased collective susceptibility in the nursing profession all set the stage for participation in Nazi-based murderous practice.

NOTES 1. Susan Benedict and J. Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation in the “Euthanasia” Programs of Nazi Germany,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 21 (1999): 246– 63; Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Claudia Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics: Single-issue Dissent in Religious Contexts,” Journal of Modern History 64 (Supplement, S8–S31); Mary Lagerwey, “Nursing Ethics at Hadamar,” Qualitative Health Research 9 (1999): 6: 59–772; Bronwyn Rebekah McFarlandIckes, Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, “Beyond Kinder, K¨uche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renata Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marian Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Hilde Steppe, “Nursing under Totalitarian Regimes: The Case of National Socialism” (paper presented at the congress, Nursing, Women’s History and the Politics of Welfare, Nottingham England, July 23, 1993). 3. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 151. 4. Ibid., 61, 100–101, 186. 5. Steppe, “Totalitarian Regimes,” 8–9. 6. Joan Ringelheim “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. R. S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 7. Earl Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Philip Blum: (The Hadamar Trial), War Crimes Trial Series, vol. IV (London: William Hodge, 1948). 8. Colonel C. R. Bard, Report to Headquarters Seventh Army, Western Military District (Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, US Army, 1946).

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9. Patricia Heberer, “If I Transgress My Oath: The Story of the 1945 Hadamar Trial” (master’s thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1989). 10. Benedict and Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation.” 11. Bridenthal and Koonz, “Beyond Kinder,” 52–53. 12. Evelyn Benson, “Nursing in Germany: A Historical Study of the Jewish Presence,” Nursing History Review 21 (1995): 189–200; Hilde Steppe, “Nursing in Nazi Germany,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 14:6 (1992): 744–52. 13. Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas,” S17. 14. Steppe, “Totalitarian Regimes,” 2. 15. Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas”; Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland. 16. Bridenthal and Koonz, “Beyond Kinder,” 42. 17. Steppe, “Totalitarian Regimes,” 1–2. 18. Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas,” S17. 19. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism: 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 20. Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas,”; Steppe, “Nazi Germany.” 21. Friedrich Bartels, quoted in Susanne Hahn, “Nursing Issues during the Third Reich,” in Medicine, Ethics and the Third Reich: History and Contemporary Issues, ed. J. J. Michalcqyk (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward), 143. 22. The one exception was psychiatric nursing, for which training was not standardized (Steppe, “Nazi Germany,” 749). 23. Hahn, “Nursing Issues.” 24. Steppe, “Nazi Germany,” 47. 25. Hahn, “Nursing Issues.” 26. Steppe, “Nazi Germany,”; Steppe, “Totalitarian Regimes.” 27. Anne J. Davis, Mila A. Aroskar, Joan Liaschenko, and Theresa S. Drought, eds., Ethical Dilemmas and Nursing Practice, 4th ed. (Stamford, CT: Appleton & Lange, 1987). 28. Heberer, “If I Transgress,” 32. 29. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, 47. 30. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 93. 31. Benedict and Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation”; Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, 226. 32. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein; Heberer, “If I Transgress.” 33. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 63. 34. Ibid., 71. 35. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 119. 36. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, xxiv, 87. 37. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide; Benedict and Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation.” 38. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, xxiv, 88. 39. Bard, Report to Headquarters, 5.

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Mary D. Lagerwey 40. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, xvv. 41. Ibid. 42. Bard, Report to Headquarters, 5–6. 43. Ibid., 6 44. Heberer, “If I Transgress,” 552. 45. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, 216–17. 46. Heberer, “If I Transgress,” 34. 47. Ibid., 127; Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, 178–212. 48. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, xxiii. 49. Ibid., 187. 50. Ibid., 228. 51. Ibid., 241. 52. Ibid., 143. 53. Ibid., 239. 54. Bard, Report to Headquarters, 9. 55. Kintner, Trial of Alfons Klein, 234. 56. Ibid., 241. 57. Ibid., 242. 58. Ibid., 220–21, 227, 235. 59. Ibid., 220, 225, 227. 60. Ibid., 237. 61. Ibid., 229. 62. Heberer, “If I Transgress,” 149–51.

Part III

GENDER AND MEMORY: THE USES OF MEMOIRS

In her essay in the first section of this book, Pasc ale Bos comments upon the past “uses” of Holocaust memoirs by scholars: “In much first-generation research on the Holocaust and gender (as in much research on the Holocaust which does not focus on gender), there is no discussion of how Holocaust narratives (written or spoken) relate to reality. Instead, narratives are simply seen as trustworthy historical sources.” Bos urges the use of poststructuralist modes of interpretation. Her reminder is warranted. Memoirs, diaries, fictionalized autobiographies, autobiographical fictions, oral history, video testimony—all must be recognized as texts which are constructions, and reconstructions, of experiences and memories. Such texts can never offer us unmediated access to the reality, the “truth” of the Holocaust. Recent scholarship has begun to problematize the use of memoirs, engaging in the more nuanced theoretical approaches which Bos calls for. 1 In a related way, Sara Horowitz has also called attention to the critical importance of recognizing the construction of women’s social roles, and the resulting impact on their memoirs: Because the war against the Jews was launched in the home and the community rather than in a distant battlefield, it was first encountered and fought in the domestic realm. Unlike traditional war narratives, survivor reflections often focus on intimate settings made unfamiliar by atrocity: the home, the synagogue, the marketplace. Perhaps because the struggle against genocide often took place in women’s spaces and transformed women’s work into resistance—keeping a family fed, healthy, clean, clothed, and sheltered—Holocaust narratives frequently reverse the traditional dependence of women upon men in war stories. 2

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The studies in the following section take account, variously, of the lives and work of women in the prewar and war years. They demonstrate not only the ways in which women’s work was transformed into resistance, as Horowitz suggests, but also the ways in which resistance was transformed by women’s notions of their roles and their work, whether taking up residence in a camp voluntarily, through “food talk,” through hiding, or through writing. Thus, two of the four essays in this section “use” personal narratives by women to widen and reframe our perceptions of women’s roles and responses during the Holocaust. Judith Greenberg reads testimony—an unpublished memoir and the text of an interview she conducted—to expand the definitions of resistance. Working with Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative, she invites us to think about the courageous acts of two French women—one Jewish and one non-Jewish—in new ways. Greenberg focuses on each woman’s work “on the inside,” her term to indicate both the “domestic” nature of much that they did as well as the covert and subversive actions they carried out under the guise of sexual stereotypes imposed from without. Myrna Goldenberg draws examples from many women’s memoirs and interviews to construct a picture of the similarities and differences among women camp inmates when living with intense hunger. Further, she demonstrates how rituals of food preparation are connected for these women with self-worth, community, religious identity, and memorialization. In so doing, she too reframes perceptions, recognizing recipes as more than “trivial chatter.” A third essay, by Susan Nowak, looks at the ways in which women writers used their own memoirs in reconstructing their identities in a post-Holocaust world. She reads texts by two Jewish women—one a young French girl in hiding in a convent school and the other a Polish teenager in Auschwitz during the war—through the lens of Christian theology. Nowak finds that the rubric of tikkun atzmi (mending of the self) uncovers the subtext of these memoirs: they are less representations of reality than they are representations which create reality, a reality that makes life after the Shoah feasible for these two women, despite the wounds and losses they have sustained. Finally, in the fourth essay, Catherine Bernard tabulates the myriad ways in which Anne Frank’s diary, arguably the most famous female personal narrative of the Holocaust, has been misused, indeed abused—abridged, unethically “edited,” improperly translated, fictionalized in play and film. The result of such textual abuse is an almost unrecognizable figure who is desexualized, infantilized, and transformed into a saccharine and redemptive symbol

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through the seemingly endless misuse of her observation that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Bernard’s essay, then, is a call for a different, more respectful “use” of Frank’s diary, one that restores to the young woman her complexity, her budding sexuality, her struggles with her parents, her ambitions.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Geoffrey H. Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Andrew Leak and George Paizis, The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Karen Remmler, “Gender Identities and the Remembrance of the Holocaust,” Women in German Yearbook 10 (1994): 167–87; Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999); James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narratives and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2. Sara R. Horowitz, “Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Wayne State University Press, 1994), 276.

SEVEN

Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside Judith Greenberg

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cholarship about the French Resistance has paid less attention to the efforts of women than those of men. Why has this been the case? Renée Poznanski attributes some of the neglect to the definition of resistance as a military and political phenomenon. 1 Since women were more often involved in the social infrastructure, recognizing their contributions demands a shift in thinking about the nature of resistance. A broader definition has been offered by Brana Gurewitsch: “any act or course of action taken between 1933 and May 8, 1945 that directly defied Nazi laws, policies, and ideology and that endangered the lives of those who engaged in such actions.” 2 According to this definition, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, engaged in acts of resistance. An understanding of resistance that takes into account these insights allows scholarship to incorporate oral history and stories of women who worked not in the military but from the “inside”—domains of hiding spaces, clandestine routes, and alternate “homes” created to sustain lives. The invisibility of scholarship about women coincides with the larger tendency to recognize actions privileged by the dominant, male culture. Once we begin to explore the question of silence around women, we engage complex issues of gender and representation. The absence of women in the discourse of resistance history reflects what Luce Irigaray refers to as the invisibility of “woman”—her position outside phallocentric discourse. We thus face the challenge of rethinking resistance discourse to recognize the significant contributions of women during this horrific period of history.

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I will discuss the “inside” activities of two women, one Jewish and one Protestant, who worked actively as resistants in France—Denise Siekierski (aka Colibri) and Madeleine Barot—highlighting instances in which gender affected their narratives. Denise Siekierski worked first for the EI (Éclaireurs Israëlites) and the Sixième, Jewish volunteer youth organizations that helped hide and support refugees, and then for the Group for Action against Deportation (Groupe d’Action Contre la Déportation), informally known as the “Service André,” a Jewish resistance organization headed by Joseph Bass (aka Monsieur André). Madeleine Barot was the secretary general of the CIMADE (Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués), the Inter-Movement Committee for Refugees from 1940 through the end of the war which began as a collection of many Christian youth groups involved in social service and eventually turned its focus to the rescue of Jews in France. Both women risked their lives and committed themselves fully to saving others. I will describe some of their activities, using their own accounts as much as possible, and examine the ways in which gender affected their roles as resistants. These are only two of many women involved in resistance work in France. Their stories illuminate aspects of women’s resistance that often go unnoticed: the attention they gave to children and “undesirable” women such as prostitutes, the patriarchal as well as the tyrannical power structures they needed to subvert, and their vulnerabilities to—and abilities to manipulate—conventional thinking. Their narratives help us reconsider how we define resistance, elicit more stories of women’s bravery, and, hopefully, direct our attention to areas where women can and do continue to help others. It may be tempting to point out that gender does not appear as the primary focal point in either woman’s account of her activities. Some scholars argue that the suffering of the Holocaust was “beyond gender.” 3 Indeed, the commitment to saving and helping people joined rather than divided men and women working in resistance movements. And both of these women worked closely with and in similar capacities as men. For two years, Denise Siekierski worked directly for and with “Monsieur André.” Madeleine Barot was in frequent contact with Pastor Marc Beogner, the president of the French Protestant Church, and although their approaches and philosophies differed, they often coordinated plans together. Indeed, focusing on the role of gender in resistance is a slippery project. For one, we want to avoid making totalizing claims about women’s resistance based on these two narratives. Further, gender itself is not a simple concept. Judith Butler makes us aware that:

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If one “is” a woman that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. 4

I will not attempt to untangle the threads of these narratives to isolate the specific ways in which various actions involved issues of gender alone. Rather, gender was one of many forces involved in shaping the identities of these two women and affecting their acts of bravery. I will discuss instances in their narratives in which their acts of resistance seem to engage performances of gender as well as ways in which their bodies both imposed limitations and provided opportunities. Being a woman shaped how each was perceived, not only by both by members of the totalitarian regimes in power but also by the humanitarian group for which she worked. Their acts of defiance were primarily against the Nazi (and Vichy) regime and yet they also had to defy patriarchal demands in their own organizations. I will also examine the role of women’s relationships with other women. The bonds among female friends and coworkers were especially important during this period. Both Denise Siekierski and Madeleine Barot formed significant relationships with other women that sustained them through the traumatic times. For instance, Denise Siekierski explained that being a petite young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes helped her in her clandestine activities. Conducting the kinds of resistance activities in which she engaged was easier for Jewish women in this period, she explained, because women could “pass” as non-Jews while Jewish men bore the mark of their religion on their bodies (circumcision) and non-Jewish French men were obliged to serve in the military. Much as she could “perform” different identities based on her appearance, she also knew how to manipulate traditional French attitudes toward women to her advantage. Specifically, she exploited the prejudices of the French police regarding the innocence of young women. Furthermore, the relational nature of the bonds between Siekierski and family and friends during these years displays a moral code more often associated with women, whereas her male “boss” ultimately demanded a concept of morality that can be described as more typically male. 5 As Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice revealed, gender affects

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notions of morality. Men, Gilligan proposed, define ethics according to rights—everyone should be treated the same—while women often define ethics in terms of care—no one should be harmed. 6 Thanks to Gilligan and others, we have come to understand how the development of identity differs for boys and girls, men and women. Girls are more apt to feel the needs of the other as their own. Since their gender identity does not require complete separation from the mother, they can remain focused on interpersonal connections. Conversely, the gender identity development of boys stresses independence and separation from the mother. 7 In her interviews with women, Gilligan found that their sensitivity to the needs of others led them to see “moral dilemmas in terms of conflicting responsibilities.” 8 As we will see, Denise Siekierski’s story can be viewed in light of Gilligan’s insights about women’s concern with relationships and responsibilities. Rather than work exclusively according to the absolute principles of her male boss, Siekierski attuned her actions to the bonds she formed with people. Madeleine Barot also commented on the central presence of women in the resistance. Years after the war, as part of her lifelong commitment to humanitarian goals, she concentrated on women’s rights and the struggle for equality for women in both the church and society. Discussing the roles played by women in the resistance, she recalled: “During the Second World War . . . [with] the men having been forced to abandon many positions of responsibility, the women demonstrated not only their ability to assume those tasks but their willingness to take on difficulties, to face dangers, without weakness. I myself, with the scouts from CIMADE, lived these situations.” 9 Barot worked with women volunteers, helped women victims and used her role as a woman to her advantage. As a leader of the large organization CIMADE, she organized many women in their brave volunteer work. While she did assist men, much of her work focused on saving and helping women and children. For instance, she helped provide a sense of respect and solidarity among the interned prostitutes at Rieucros. She conveyed many groups of children across the border to Switzerland. And she used the perceptions of others regarding women to her advantage, as exemplified by her strategy to gain entry into the French internment camp of Gurs. While voluntarily living in that camp, she acted in a traditionally defined “female” role of nurturer and creator of a home to uplift the spirits of the prisoners. Barot’s deep belief in the equality and rights of all people, Christians and Jews, men and women, sustained her as she confronted danger and pain throughout the war. All of these acts of resistance, Barot made clear,

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were never done in the hopes of forming a new government. CIMADE was dedicated entirely to helping from the inside, a pure commitment to assisting others. This lack of desire for political gain or recognition can be interpreted as an attention to the other over the needs of the self. It is also reasonable to ask why I consider the role of gender in the experiences of a Jew and a Protestant, when clearly “race” was the most important characteristic that separated people during the Nazi years. I do not want to minimize the unique position of Jews under the Nazi regime or begin to compare the experiences of Jews and non-Jews. The fact that Barot, as a Protestant, was free to travel about without risk to her life and Siekierski, as a Jew, lived in constant danger of deportation and death is an undeniably significant difference in their stories. As Barot has written, “What we risked would have been in all cases less serious than what our Jewish friends would have faced.” 10 At all times, we must remember the unique fate of the Jews during this period, the unprecedented horror of their extermination. The risks that any Jewish resistant faced were far graver than the risks faced by those sheltered by the strength of the church. These facts of history are known. Nor do I want to minimize the bravery and generosity of spirit of non-Jews engaged in acts of resistance. Madeleine Barot, who could have lived in relative freedom, chose to put herself in a camp. She was imprisoned for a short time and took risks that placed her in grave danger. Indeed, there were Christians in Auschwitz and other camps who faced the same horrific torture and death as Jews. Nevertheless, the context of the Nazi (and Vichy) regime forces us to recognize that there was an unfathomable gulf between the lives of Jews and Christians at this time. That said, the paths of these two women share certain contours, and the ties between them can illustrate forms of resistance available to and engaged in by women. I say that both women worked on the “inside” in that both lived behind a barbed wire of sorts and navigated within strictly policed walls. Whether because of a cultural propensity to associate women with the private sphere or a particular gender-linked sensitivity to interiority and the needs of the Other (i.e., a man, a child), the category of woman is often linked with a concept of an “inside.” In the case of these two women, their position on the “inside” was quite literal. Barot chose to move into the internment camp of Gurs. Siekierski hid her Jewish identity and thus managed to travel about inside Vichygoverned France. Of course, any act of resistance, whether performed by men or women, had to remain secret and on the “inside,” but much

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of these women’s acts of resistance transpired in the privacy of their encounters with individual refugees and prisoners. The very nature of their success depended upon their positions inside the camps, inside people’s homes and other places of hiding, and upon understanding their emotional or inside needs as well as their physical ones. These women had to act as double agents on the “inside” not only in terms of their clandestine activities but also by thinking as both men and women. Finally, these “inside” actions translated into consequences on a public stage. Although they came to service work through different religious orientations, both women began as volunteer “scouts” working in youth organizations dedicated to serving others. Both young and single women spent their time nurturing strangers. As the war escalated, so too did the need for their assistance in clandestine activities, and both women took on increasing risks. Both fabricated documents, escorted refugees across the border, and had to assume false names. In much of their daily activities, each worked closely with another woman: Denise Siekierski with her colleagues “Puce” and “Hélène,” and Madeleine Barot with the nurse Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné. Neither woman mentioned any romantic life or interests during these years; as Denise Siekierski put it, there was no time or opportunity for such concerns. The needs of a man might have taken their attention away from their service to others. Instead, each was led by a deep conviction of the need for action and a refusal to accept injustice toward others. Both survived the war and were able to tell their stories. It is important to remember that the various French resistance movements depended on the cooperation of Jews and non-Jews, the participation of religious and secular groups. Both women describe the interactions and interdependence of secular, Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic organizations that allowed their plans to succeed. Although many resistance groups functioned independently—the PCF (French Communist Party), MNCR (National Movement against Racism), OSE (Work of Help), UGIF (General Union of French Israelites), EI (Israelite Scouts), CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France), YMCA, Fédé (French Federation of Students), Le Secours Suisse aux Enfants (Arm of Swiss Red Cross for Children), MIR (International Movement for Reconciliation), and CIMADE, among others—their cooperation permitted the defiance of Nazi and Vichy rule. In the “interfaith” spirit of understanding how cooperation among these groups enabled people to save lives, I turn to the paths of these two women.

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Denise Siekierski Denise Siekierski, aka “Colibri” (nightingale—a name given to her as a child because she was slight and petite and had a good singing voice), was born Denise Julie Caraco into a highly assimilated Jewish family. 11 She lived in Marseille with her mother and uncle (her parents were divorced), who were, in her words, “good French bourgeois.” 12 Being Jewish was not something the family ever denied, yet it played little role in their everyday lives. Until she was eleven years old, Colibri never even heard the words “Yom Kippur” pronounced; she knew that she was “Israëlite” but didn’t know what that meant. Her family was fully identified as French: “In our home it was the love of France.” Her uncle, a veteran of World War I, so believed in the country that it was “his religion.” Thus when the Germans invaded France in 1940, her mother and uncle had no fear for their own safety. Like many people at the time, her uncle considered Pétain “the great man who had saved France” and had absolute confidence in his decisions. It was impossible for them to think that France would not treat them well. In keeping with their respect for the law, her mother and uncle registered as Jews with the local police when so instructed in July of 1941. Colibri, however, had a premonition of danger and didn’t want to declare herself. But since she was only seventeen and a minor, her mother declared her to the authorities anyway. Colibri’s path of increasingly clandestine and risky activity did not follow a predictable course. In 1940 she joined the EI, a Jewish youth scout group composed of youth volunteers that served primarily as a service organization. 13 Their “social work” in the early years was not highly structured. By 1941, however, with the arrival of many foreign Jewish refugees fleeing to the “free zone” of the south, the EI needed to reorganize. Colibri and her best friend “Puce” (Huguette Lévy-Illner, later Schmerb) were asked to found a new section of the EI that would hide and feed refugees. “When anti-Jewish dragnets spread and the pace of deportation increased, social assistance gradually gave way to rescue work.” 14 Together, these young women assumed a new degree of responsibility and danger. When asked if she felt there was something unique in her character that allowed her to take on increasingly perilous roles, Colibri replied that at first she was not aware of the danger of her actions. She, like other members of the EI, first simply acted to help. “I think that for a long time we conducted resistance activities without knowing it, like Mister Jourdain wrote prose without knowing

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it!” 15 When things in Marseille grew increasingly treacherous, Colibri could not stand the idea of being taken and killed for nothing. If she were to be killed, she figured, it should at least be for something. 16 Here we can see how being Jewish did shape her thinking. The possibility of her own imminent death lay in the forefront of her mind. Both Colibri and Puce had to assume a high degree of responsibility and independence, and they created a bond with one another that would help sustain them not only during the war years but also throughout their lives. With their entry into clandestine activity, it became too risky to live with their families. Colibri and Puce rented a flat in Marseille together and worked in a number of capacities: they hid foreign Jews in families, convents, hospitals, and other places in Marseille and its environs, and sustained them by whatever means they could—either paying for their lodging on a regular basis or distributing food tickets to them. Theo Klein, the future president of the CRIF, financed their activities, and they formed a preliminary structure of the “Sixième,” a youth scout organization that concealed Jewish children threatened with deportation. 17 Once the Nazis occupied Marseille, the nature of their work changed. They could no longer hide Jews in Marseille but had to get them out of the city, either to Switzerland or isolated mountain villages. While their work required the utmost secrecy, the two women would confide in each other. To this day, they remain best friends. 18 Colibri described her various jobs at this time. They included fabricating false papers; locating hiding places; conveying people to hiding places or to the Swiss or Spanish border; transporting materials; and social assistance—paying for the food for people in hiding and maintaining some human contact with them. She conducted her first clandestine mission at the end of August 1942, conveying foreign Jewish adolescents to villages for hiding. That September she participated in a training program for scout leaders where they planned a second illegal mission, finding hiding spots in farm towns for Jews who risked deportation. However, after working for the “Sixième” from March to June of 1943, Colibri left that organization, finding its structure too rigid. Upon her return to Marseille that June, she re-encountered “Monsieur André” (Joseph Bass) and he convinced her to work with him for the Service André. Thus at nineteen Colibri became André’s assistant, secretary, and general organizer. 19 She was by far the youngest member of the Service André. The group’s methods were much different from those of the Sixième. Colibri would travel as a liaison with André, who disguised

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himself as a Gestapo chief, often taking first-class trains where there were fewer controls (since usually only collaborators could afford the luxury). Her work for André involved diverse tasks such as producing false identification papers and food ration cards, and conveying messages, papers, and, at times, arms for the group. She also accompanied refugees as they tried to escape Marseille and other German-occupied cities, either to isolated and safer towns in the mountains such as Le Chambon-sur-Lignon or Le Puy or across the border into Switzerland. These missions to move people about depended upon using escape trails from Marseille to Le Chambon that had branches in Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Orange, Nîmes, Lyon and later Nice and Cannes. Through this underground escape route, hundreds of families were saved. Aspects of André’s philosophy, such as his reliance on “interfaith” cooperation and his early anticipation of danger, matched Colibri’s own views. For instance, André worked with many Catholic and Protestant leaders, such as Father Marie-Benoit, Pastor Leenhardt, and Pastor Lemaire, among others, in the effort to create a group to take action against deportation. 20 He tried to convince Jews to go into hiding even when they did not sense the need to do so. During the period following the German takeover of the “free zone,” it was tempting to exploit the more liberal rule of the Italians in control of certain areas and to evacuate Jews in mass to an Italian “refugee zone.” André resisted creating new Jewish colonies in other European locations, however. He preferred to decentralize Jews: to hide them, furnish them with false papers, and cut off all connections with their pasts. Unfortunately, many Jews hesitated, especially French Jews who were accustomed to living by the law and feared entering into secrecy—acts of hesitation that cost many their lives. 21 Colibri shared André’s caution. Much as she initially sensed the danger of declaring oneself to the authorities, she also knew that she had to hide her family even if they didn’t sense the imminent danger. It has been observed that Jewish women often felt a responsibility to remain with and care for their families, and Colibri assumed such a role. She had been telling her family to leave Marseille and by October 1942 they had rented a part of a house in a small village. Although her mother and uncle were reluctant to leave their home, Colibri finally convinced them to go into hiding and managed to keep them safe throughout the war. If Jewish women often cared for their families, then another role they assumed was that of the non-Jew since they were able to “pass” in ways that men could not. During the years she worked in clandestine activities, Denise Julie Caraco took on a number of aliases and identities in

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addition to the most familiar “Colibri.” She used racial stereotypes to her advantage: “Jewish women, particularly those who had the ‘Aryan’ features of blonde hair and blue eyes, were not particularly identifiable as Jews.” 22 Indeed, not only her blonde, blue-eyed appearance but also her immersion in French culture and her ethnically indeterminate name helped her to assimilate. While the people of Marseille may have recognized Caraco as a Jewish name, the Germans did not. And Colibri knew how to “play the game” of assimilation: she had many non-Jewish friends, had been the only Jew in her classes at school, and had even attended Protestant scout camp one summer. As she said, she knew how to put herself in “the skin of the non-Jew.” This ability to assume multiple identities and think beyond the boundaries of religion and gender allowed her the flexibility to remain hidden while in public. Two stories demonstrate her ingenuity and ability to pass. In October of 1942, the EI were informed by the French Resistance that the identity cards of Jews in the “free zone” would eventually be stamped with a special mark. In anticipation, Colibri went to the chief of police in Marseille in a state of tears. Playing the helpless and despairing young woman, she lamented that she had lost her little red purse. The police chief asked if she had lost a large sum of money. “No,” she cried, “but I’ve lost all of my identification papers. What can I do these days without papers?” The police chief paternalistically asked her to list the items in her bag and gave her a receipt for the contents. If the little red bag didn’t surface in forty-eight hours, he assured her, they’d get her new papers. Sure enough, Colibri thus acquired a second set of identification papers and all the necessary ration and lodging cards. She stored her originals safely in a drawer. When the Germans did come to Marseille and demanded that all Jews present themselves to the authorities to have their papers stamped, Colibri presented her new set, leaving her with the original papers unmarked. These unstamped papers allowed her to move about and pass controls without notice. For safe measure, she added a “t” to her name—thus Caracot—on her documents to make her name appear more French. 23 Interestingly, Colibri “performed” gender identity here as a damsel in distress to obtain a new identity card. Her performance as a woman granted her a new identity that erased her Judaism. Judith Butler argues that “gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense gender is always a doing.” 24 Colibri understood how to turn “doing” gender and constituting a purported identity to her advantage.

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This kind of ingenuity and role-playing served her well again when she was helping refugees cross the Swiss border at Annemasse. To cross the border, one had to go through strict SS control. Colibri noticed that certain people were able to move about the town with ease because they had special red stamps on their identification papers. These stamps, she realized, indicated that the bearers lived in the town and needed to cross the border on a regular basis as part of their daily routine. Figuring that her travels sneaking people across the border would be eased with such a stamp on her own papers, Colibri did some “reconnaissance work.” She discovered an empty lot on a main street, rue de Genève, where the apartment numbers on either side jumped in succession, from eighteen to twenty-two. Once again playing the naive and struggling young woman, she headed to the local chief of police with a story. This time she explained that she was looking to rent a place in town for her family, who was tired of the difficult life in Marseille. She told the police chief that she was renting a room at twenty rue de Genève (actually an empty lot) while she looked for an apartment. She was tired of all the police controls, she explained, and needed a stamp to allow her to go back and forth across the town lines until she found an apartment for her family. The chief looked at this wearied “dutiful daughter” and her worn identification papers and ordered her new papers with the local stamp (and her name officially spelled Caracot). Yet again she obtained a new official identity. Colibri “performed” by using her age and gender to confound the suspicions of the officer. Gurewitsch discusses how some women during the Holocaust, “like other women in resistance groups, exploited the stereotypical view of woman held by the Nazis to serve as a courier and in other roles in which Jewish men would have been more easily detected.” 25 The acts of improvisation described show a similar ability on Colibri’s part to manipulate the French psyche regarding women. The pervasive assumptions that women were weak and in need of protection helped her wield power. As Simone de Beauvoir has made us well aware, girls learn how to identify with the larger patriarchal culture and to “think as a man” while they simultaneously act feminine. 26 As she famously wrote, one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman: the traditional feminine behaviors that Colibri enacted were learned. 27 As the dominant sex in patriarchy, men don’t need to think across genders. 28 Thus the police chief in Marseille and the border guard in Switzerland didn’t suspect Colibri’s roleplaying. Her ability to think “doubly”—both as a Jewish woman working

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to save others and as a traditional, bureaucratic male—allowed her to rewrite the plot. Of course, her role as a woman could also be used against her, to paint her as a suspicious and untrustworthy character. Germans often humiliated women and exploited their sexual vulnerability. Once, when Colibri arrived at a scheduled clandestine meeting in Marseille, she was tipped off to leave right away: the Gestapo had just been there looking for “a young woman called Colibri who entertains many people in her room, especially men.” 29 Creating suspicion about a woman’s sexual conduct was a familiar way the Germans made the women they deemed undesirable appear guilty. Prostitutes were sent to internment camps in France, for instance, on account of their subversive and potentially threatening position in society. 30 Even with the potential to be cast in such a “degenerate” light, on the whole, Colibri’s “performative” abilities helped her enormously. In January 1943 life became much worse for the Jewish population of Marseille. From January 22nd to 27th, over 800 Jews were arrested and deported by French and German officers, never to return. Everyone working in the resistance needed to disperse. Colibri got an order to stay in Marseille as long as possible and remained in the city with André and Hélène (Emilie Guth)—a non-Jewish Alsatian nurse from OSE (Oeuvre de Secours or Work of Help, an underground agency for helping children). Using the alias “Mademoiselle Bertrand,” Colibri would receive refugees who managed to find her. Her group of clandestine workers would supply the refugees with false papers, food cards, and money. It was a rule that clients had to present themselves a couple of times to “Mlle. Bertrand” and be interrogated before learning their next destination—Pastor Lemaire’s Sunday services, where they’d receive directions for finding a hiding place. The group’s operations were penetrated by a German Jewish doctor, Dr. Siegfrid Lévy, who had sold himself as a spy to the Gestapo. Dr. Lévy came to “Mlle. Bertrand” saying he needed help. Assuming that as a Jew he was in danger, she led him to Pastor Lemaire and thus unknowingly revealed his and her own involvement in the resistance to the Gestapo. Fortunately, André was alerted immediately by the Resistance that Dr. Lévy had denounced “Mlle. Bertrand” and Pastor Lemaire to the Gestapo. André ordered Colibri to leave Marseille at once, and she escaped, wearing a turban and dark glasses. Since no one knew her real name, she remained undetected despite the posters calling for her arrest. André also alerted Pastor Lemaire to leave Marseille, but he refused

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to go; for him it was a question of honor, and he feared that others would suffer for his actions. Pastor Lemaire was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and taken to Mauthausen and Dachau. He was liberated in 1945, although in a terrible state of health. Colibri never got over her guilt for having sent Dr. Lévy to the pastor: “Up until today, I have a total ‘blank’ regarding this terrible period, his return, our meeting. For forty years, I had a terrible guilt complex regarding Pastor Lemaire: because of me, he was arrested, tortured, deported, while I was able to escape.” 31 This inability to recall is a characteristic response to trauma that is too difficult to assimilate. While she lived with survivor’s guilt, it was her very ability to perform roles and survive that enabled her to continue her work saving others. Colibri’s involvement in the Service André described thus far was similar to that of her male coworkers. However not all of the group’s resistance activities were shared by men and women. In fact, André eventually separated not only male and female resistance workers according to certain tasks, but male and female clients as well. He created a militia of Jewish men and decided that the Service André would feed and hide only the women, children, elderly, and disabled; the men had to join the militia, using old weapons he procured. While Colibri did carry arms at times for the group, as a woman she did not participate in the military wing of the operations. Poznanski observes that “women rarely took part in the fighting,” 32 which at least partly accounts for how women have been overlooked by scholarship on the resistance: “Resistance is understood exclusively as a political and military phenomenon, and women are reduced to the role of shield-bearers in a combat waged by men.” 33 In a move supporting Poznanski’s thesis, Colibri was kept out of the male domain of André’s militia. Interestingly, it was André’s decision to separate the men from the women, not the choice of the women themselves. A male leader decided what tasks the women could and could not perform. Inasmuch as resistance groups were performing heroic deeds, women often still remained under male dominion. Compounding this power structure of male leader and female subordinate was André’s paternalistic attitude toward Colibri herself. Despite her engagement in dangerous activities, André still viewed the nineteen year old clandestine worker as his “little daughter.” Colibri described their relationship in a letter to Puce: “He considered me to be his ‘adoptive daughter’ and often presented me as such, amusing himself by calling me ‘Fifille’ [diminutive for daughter].” 34 For her birthday, André

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gave her a generous sum of money. Colibri objected to the gift and, according to her letter, André replied: “Well, you are my daughter, yes or no?” The letter continued: “And, demurely, I acquiesce ‘Yes Daddy’!!” Despite her acts of bravery, both she and André perpetuated patriarchal roles. He was the Law, the Father. We can consider how this particular relationship may have mirrored power dynamics that transpired in other situations. How could she step outside the Law of the Father? The nature of the relationship between André and Colibri eventually caused friction when the daughter defied the authority of the father. In March of 1944, the Gestapo arrested many of Colibri’s coworkers in Marseille. Both she and André managed to escape to Le Puy, but it was too dangerous for them to return to Marseille to help their clients. For three months Colibri provided social assistance in Le Puy, Le Chambon, and La Ricamarie while André spent most of his time with Jewish underground organizations. As time passed, Colibri grew increasingly worried about her coworkers and the clients who had not received aide for months. She heard stories of arrests, deportations, and shootings and wanted to check on people. André forbade her going. In addition, during the period of their confinement, André had grown furious with the group of young clandestine workers in Nice who had acquired secret information. He instructed Colibri to write a scathing letter accusing this group of disloyalty. She wrote the letter, but since she did not agree with André’s position, she sent her own follow-up letter to distance herself from it. She was recognizing her need to separate from his orders. It must have cased great conflict for her to defy this brave and heroic leader. The need to set her own priorities became more acute. During the weeks following D-day, new dangers began threatening Colibri’s family: her mother and uncle barely escaped arrest because they were visiting a friend when the police arrived at their house. Her seventy-four-year-old grandmother was assaulted and robbed of her valuables in Marseille. When her grandmother begged her to return to Marseille to sell some of the family’s belongings to pay her clinic bills, Colibri could not refuse, despite André’s strict orders. Her loyalty and sense of responsibility to her own family overrode his command. She left for Marseille to help her grandmother and then traveled to Nice to see her coworkers. After her tasks were accomplished, she tried to leave Marseille. At this time, the Allies and Germans were fighting in France, and the French train system had begun to fall apart. It took Colibri a week to return to Le Puy. When she finally arrived, André, irate at her insubordination, screamed

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“I nurtured a viper in my breast!” 35 Disobeying his law, even to help her family and friends, was tantamount to treason. Their relationship was never the same. They each understood a different ethical code: Colibri’s actions showed the importance of relational bonds and commitments to friends and family, whereas André believed in a moral principle of absolute loyalty to his cause. The role of the dutiful daughter had come to an end. Again, the need to follow orders during war, which demands a militaristic and patriarchal code of ethics, conflicted with the need to attend to one’s family and sustain relationships. The split with André was not the end of Colibri’s path, however. During the period of liberation, she and a female friend were asked to set up the first Jewish committee in Marseille. They worked around the clock providing whatever information and aid they could, especially to survivors returning to Marseille. In many ways, this was the hardest year of all. Although the two volunteers had little information to provide, survivors would wait in line for hours to learn the whereabouts of their relatives. Of course, if they did have news to pass on, it was usually devastating. Thus Colibri closed the war years much as she began them, working in alliance with a female friend to help those in need. Interestingly, the two women found a way to work together, after the battles of war were over. The sustenance they provided in the wake of the fighting was as critical for the survivors as the work during the war. Yet this kind of less spectacular aid invites less attention. This woman’s resistance in the social infrastructure, or on the “inside,” sustained and saved the lives of countless others. Her path began with a commitment to social work and a skepticism about the safety of France and its authorities—a skepticism that many women may develop in relation to culture. It progressed to an active defiance of those authorities and a dedication to fight back in the face of danger. She manipulated her knowledge of French society, her role as a young woman, and her “Aryan” looks in carrying out her strategy of resistance. She performed multiple acts of bravery on the most dangerous of stages. And most of all, rather than go into hiding, she risked her life to defy Nazi and Vichy laws, policy, and ideology. Interestingly, it was her will to fight that helped elicit her story. For forty years Colibri did not talk about her experiences during the war years; it was too painful to bring back the memories, as is often the case with survivors. However, when revisionists began denying the actuality of the Holocaust, she felt the urgency to speak out. Her story, like her resistance work during the war, emerged from her need to fight injustice. 36

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Madeleine Barot Madeleine Barot was not quite as young as Denise Siekierski when she became involved in resistance work but she was also a single woman committed to saving others. Unlike Colibri, who believed in God but lived a secular existence, Barot was a woman of deep religious conviction, and this conviction would influence her path of resistance. She had been raised in and influenced by the theology of Karl Barth, a Protestant with strong commitment to social justice as well as spirituality. Barth believed that one should begin the day with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He emphasized the need for witnessing and resistance and was exiled from Germany in 1935. While at school, Barot was also affected by the Fédé (Fédération Française des Étudiants), the French Federation of Students, and thought seriously about questions of responsibility. During the war, she would work with a number of religious leaders in a truly ecumenical spirit: Pastor Niemöller, author of the famous saying, “First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out, then they came for the Jews and I remained silent, then they took the Social Democrats and I remained quiet, then they came for me only there was no one left to speak out;” Pierre Maury, the secretary general of the Fédé, who said “If the day should come when the demands of the French state become unacceptable, remember that it’s better to obey God than men;” and Suzanne de Dietrich, the general secretary of the Universal Federation of Christian Student Associations (Fédération Universelle des Associations Chrétiennes des Étudiants), who preached that student movements had to move beyond the concerns of their own group and help others in need. 37 Barot’s religious convictions guided her commitment to humanitarian causes throughout the war and the rest of her life. Before the war, Barot had studied history at the Sorbonne. Living in the international student dorms, she met students from diverse backgrounds, developed her appreciation of an ecumenical and international spirit, and participated in a Catholic charity that distributed food and clothing. She went to Rome to continue her studies but ended up pursuing other avenues: she taught at a French school and decided that she wanted to pursue her study of Protestant theology. The Protestant faculty whom she contacted, however, did not welcome a woman in its midst. They feared she would either want to attain a position in the church or would distract the men. Thus Barot turned instead to the Dominicans, who accepted her even though she was both Protestant and

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a woman. This confrontation with sexism in her own faith may have affected her later efforts to establish gender equality in the church and society. As the war escalated, Barot became increasingly involved in ecumenical conferences dedicated to issues of responsibility. In 1939 she attended the world conference of Christian youth in Amsterdam that concentrated on the growing problem of refugees. By 1940 she was forced to leave Italy, and within the year she became the secretary general of the year-old CIMADE, directing various youth movements to help refugees. Because most men were mobilized in war, many of the Christian service organizations were composed of women; according to Barot, the leaders of CIMADE were all women. 38 Before the German occupation of France, CIMADE primarily focused on taking care of displaced French Protestant women and children from the Alsace-Lorraine region. Barot explained that CIMADE was not created as an organization dedicated to helping Jews; rather, her job initially involved coordinating the efforts of various youth groups aiding the Alsatians. 39 However, by 1940 most of these people had either returned home or found new living situations, and in June of that year CIMADE turned to the problem of refugees arriving from Germany. A number of internment camps had been set up in the south of France (the so-called free zone) to house incoming refugees. Among them were Agde and Arelèges, which had mostly Spanish refugees; Saint-Cyprien, from which people were transferred to Rivestaltes; Le Vernet, a camp for men that allowed no visitors; Les Milles, whose inmates hoped to get to the United States; Rieucros and Brens, camps for women; and Gurs, the biggest and most crowded camp, in the southwestern corner of France. Gurs had originally been built for Spanish republicans fleeing the Civil War, but soon it became the destination for many opponents of the Nazi regime fleeing Germany. At first, mostly non-Jewish German women came to the camp: artists, students, and shopkeepers, who would be permitted to leave when armistice had been declared. Soon, many musicians, intellectuals, and artists arrived, such as the director of the Berlin Opera. Eventually Gurs became the destination for Jews, communists, anarchists, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis. Several pastors were aware of the horrible living conditions in Gurs; it seemed to be the camp most in need of assistance. Thus Barot made it her mission to gain access there. The YMCA had already been forbidden official entry and so she needed to devise an alternate strategy. In this early plan of action, she used traditional thinking about the role of

Madeleine Barot, head of CIMADE, an underground organization involved in the rescue of children, in the vicinity of Le Chambon, ca. 1940–45. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

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women to her advantage. Learning that there were many births in the camp, Barot used the subterfuge of distributing diapers and layette items for the babies, a service traditionally performed by women. Once she had established her place in the camp, she came on a daily basis to provide material, medical, psychological, and spiritual support to the prisoners. Conditions in Gurs grew worse. In October 1940, 7,000 Jews were arrested and brought to the already overcrowded camp (eighty inhabitants per barrack). 40 Barot found that it was too time consuming to commute to the camp on a daily basis, so by the end of 1940 she voluntarily moved into the horrible environment to live literally on the “inside,” alongside the refugees. Barot was thirty-one years old. There was also great need for a nurse at the camp. Barot found a volunteer, Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné, who came to Gurs with her. Here again, being a woman presented an advantage. According to Barot, the director of the camp was struck by d’Aubigné’s beauty and breeding, and thus accepted her help. In January 1941, d’Aubigné also moved into the camp, and the two women created the CIMADE barrack. One of their primary roles was to serve as witnesses to the degradation in the camp, which was important both for the outside world and as a solace for the prisoners. And while the women enjoyed freedoms the internees did not, such as being able to leave from time to time to enjoy a good meal, make contact with the external world, or even warm themselves around a coffee pot—significant differences, certainly—for the most part they shared their life. The work of CIMADE was based on this kind of solidarity between the interns and the volunteers. 41 Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné described the conditions encountered upon arriving at Gurs: “A shocking sensation upon entry. Severe monotony.” 42 There was a sea of barracks, divided by groups and separated by barbed wire. In May 1940 cattle cars arrived carrying women of diverse nationalities, mostly from Belgium. 43 In October more cattle cars arrived, carrying the sick, occupants of psychiatric hospitals, and mothers. Cries for help could be heard coming from the wagons, and when the doors to the cars were finally opened by members of the Red Cross, the sight of sick and exhausted prisoners piled upon one another greeted the volunteers. The job of CIMADE was to sustain these people materially, psychologically, and spiritually as best as they could. Inspired by Barot and d’Aubigné, over twenty other volunteers moved into internment camps around France to help the prisoners. 44 Life in Gurs was atrocious. Many people died of starvation and illness, yet some managed to find ways to survive. This will to survive was

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aided by the two CIMADE workers, who created ways to uplift the prisoners’ spirits. If creating a home was a job traditionally ascribed to women, then in the camp these women provided a kind of home within the horror. Madeleine Barot and Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné held services and Bible study, open to people of all faiths: they focused on the Hebrew Bible and created a haven for some of the more observant prisoners. They built a library. They set up an infirmary-nursery directly across from their barrack, and one inmate gave birth there to triplets, two of whom survived. Children would enjoy moments when they could play in the sunshine. The CIMADE barrack became a “cultural haven”: the YMCA lent them musical instruments, and prisoners such as the former first violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic and the first tenor of the Berlin Opera would perform. Other prisoners set up the “Theater of Gurs” and staged plays. The CIMADE barrack offered temporary release from the horrors of the camp. Despite the CIMADE efforts, however, many of the inmates of Gurs were eventually deported to Auschwitz. Barot helped women in other camps as well, including Rieucros, where many prostitutes were held. As discussed above in relation to the Nazi-generated rumors about Colibri’s entertaining men, the Germans regularly imprisoned prostitutes out of fear they might be spies. 45 But whereas Barot jumped immediately into the role of nurturer of mothers and children, arriving at Gurs with layette items in hand, initially she had a harder time tending to the prostitutes imprisoned at Rieucros. “A camp of prostitutes,” she thought, “what would we be able to do there?” 46 Her doubt reveals the ways in which religious background and the morality of traditional society divided women against one another. Even this compassionate and generous woman initially questioned her ability to help “undesirables.” However, Barot quickly overcame her hesitation and found that the women at Rieucros were well organized, got along with one another, and were delighted to have the attention and respect of the CIMADE workers. The women at Rieucros knew the danger they faced, and here again, Barot gave respect and hope to women in need. While history may often look beyond the needs of a camp of interned prostitutes, the attention that these women received from Barot and the other women of CIMADE was crucial in sustaining their spirits and resolve to survive. Could or did men perform similar acts of resistance for such women? The work of CIMADE involved the cooperation of many groups against Nazism—the American Joint Committee, the OSE, the YMCA and YWCA, the International Red Cross, the Committee to Save Chil-

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dren in Geneva (Comité de Sauvetage de l’Enfance à Genève), the Catholic Action (l’Action Catholique), the Swiss Committee to Aid Children (le Secours Suisse aux Enfants), and others. Barot organized meetings among these groups to create new solutions for the Jews. Each camp demanded different services. At Gurs and Rivesaltes Barot was responsible for sustaining the prisoners materially and culturally. At Récébédou she worked at healing and consoling them. And at Brens and Rieucros she tried to help them return to “normal” life as soon as possible. All aspects of care, from the material to the emotional, were essential in keeping people going. Unfortunately, it was harder for CIMADE to penetrate other camps. The spring of 1942 was a relatively good period, and CIMADE began a new phase of work. Some camp interns, usually the elderly, the sick, and women with small children, were allowed to leave, provided they would be received by a reception center of a recognized organization. During this period of time, Vichy feared publicity that described their camps as poorly kept. They named an inspector of the camps, prompting Barot to exploit Vichy’s (albeit slight) self-consciousness. She rushed to contact this new inspector, because, as she said, she was the one who knew the depth of the situation best, having entered almost all the camps. 47 Barot used Vichy’s fear to help CIMADE open three reception centers: the Mas du Diable near Tarascon, the Centre de Vabre in le Tarn, and the Marie Durand hall in Marseille. 48 Furthermore, when it was declared that some interns could leave the camp if they could find work, Barot jumped at the opportunity and searched for jobs. Barot spent much of her time working with the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its leaders, Pastor Trocmé and his wife Magda, and Pastor Theis. Using funds provided by Swedish churches and the ecumenical council, CIMADE rented a hotel in the town, Le Coteau Fleuri, which became an important reception center for Jews, who would go from there into hiding or attempt to cross the Swiss border. Barot successfully conveyed the first group of thirty-five interns to Le Coteau Fleuri. She continued to work with Pastors Trocmé and Theis, and with Hubert Meyer, the director of the Coteau Fleuri, to hide Jews in danger. As Pierre Sauvage’s film, Weapons of the Spirit, documents, Pastors Trocmé and Theis and the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding plateau hid and saved 5,000 refugees, approximately 3,500 of whom were Jewish. Both the pastors and their wives as well as the inhabitants of the area were recognized by Yad Vashem, the principal Holocaust museum and memorial located in Jerusalem, as Righteous

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Gentiles for their leadership in the area’s rescue efforts. Barot played a role in encouraging and sustaining these efforts. In the summer of 1942, for example, she learned that the police were headed to Le Chambon to search for Jews. She alerted the pastors, who, with the help of the brave citizens of the village, were able to hide the Jews in time and save their lives. CIMADE’s work progressed from acts of solidarity to acts of resistance. As secretary general, Barot had three principal functions: in order to influence Vichy to help the Jews in any way possible, she acted as a liaison and reported on the camps; she was integral in organizing and coordinating efforts among CIMADE and other groups and keeeping up contact with people conducting clandestine missions to Switzerland; and she helped fabricate false identification papers and other documents, as well as supply food. Many coworkers commented upon Barot’s tireless spirit. She was full of projects and didn’t hesitate to undertake a risky course of action if she could help save lives. Soon after the spring of 1942, things became increasingly dangerous for Jews all over France, even those in the “free zone,” and CIMADE began a third phase of activity. In July and August, interns were rounded up in Gurs and other camps and deported to death camps in Germany. Pierre Laval was handing over thousands of Jews to the Nazis. Laval threatened Pastor Boegner, a major theologian and president of the French Protestant Federation, declaring that if the humanitarian groups working in the camps didn’t provide the quota of foreign Jews demanded by the Gestapo, Vichy would deport French Jews in their place. The humanitarian organizations found themselves in the middle of another terrible dilemma: when the lists of those selected for deportation arrived, they were authorized to provide lists of people to be exempted. This was a dangerous task. In choosing certain people and thereby acknowledging that others would be sent to the camps, they risked becoming complicit with the selection process. In response to this situation, CIMADE became more deeply involved in clandestine activities, especially helping Jews escape to Spain and Switzerland. With this increased danger came an increased need for security. Resistance groups became more aware of the Gestapo’s increasing surveillance of their activities after the arrest and torture of Jean Moulin, president of the National Council of Resistance. CIMADE moved its headquarters to Valence, and Barot had to convey information from one camp or group to another using the greatest secrecy. She changed her identity several times, often going by the name Claudette Monnet among

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others. 49 The fact that her pseudonym adapts the name of a famous French artist (Claude Monet) to the feminine form seems a particularly poignant inversion—or concealment—of French culture. In the persona of Claudette Monnet, Barot fit the portrait of an ideal citoyenne who could still work to create beauty in the world. One of Barot’s most dangerous missions occurred in August 1942. On July 20 the SS had decided to deport 5,000 Jewish children to German death camps. Barot received a phone call from Pastor Boegner telling her that there was to be a secret mission and CIMADE would be needed. This mission was called “The Cardinal’s Children” (Les Enfants du Cardinal) because of the help of the Catholic Cardinal Gerlier in carrying it out. The cardinal was chosen to lead the mission because, it was reasoned, the Germans were more likely to recognize his title and not interfere with children in his custody. The clandestine workers planned to save from deportation as many as possible of the children at Véisseux, an interment camp in Lyon, close to Vichy. On the night of August 20, they went to Vénissieux and cut the entire region’s electricity, effectively derailing cattle cars filled with Jews. Barot described the ensuing events of the night: We jumped over the barbed wires and found ourselves with our little flashlights in cramped barracks: a horrible, unforgettable spectacle. But for the moment we had to act quickly; there was no time for pity. People were seated on the ground or on their sacs, in groups of families, exhausted, unwashed, wondering what new horror awaited them. And there we were, introducing ourselves from family to family, proposing that they sign over the custody of their children to Cardinal Gerlier. A kind of delegation of fatherly power. We argued: it’s so that you will be able to see them when you return. Many replied, inspired by a correct premonition, “but you know well that we’ll never return.” Some of the families signed the paper, which seemed to them the most reasonable solution in the heart of such despair. It had to be done quickly. We were aware of the minutes adding up. The children had to be pulled away from their parents and convinced not to scream. 50

Eighty-four children were saved in this operation. After the war, these children became some of the first members of Israeli kibbutzim. Much as Barot entered Gurs purportedly to help children, she continued to help them throughout the war. The ecumenical council

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managed to procure from the Swiss government permission of asylum for some refugees. To take advantage of the opportunity, however, the refugees still had to get past the Germans in France. Like many other CIMADE workers, Barot escorted groups of children across the border, even though this often posed a terrible risk to her own life; she considered such trips too important not to oversee them herself. 51 She described one passage where a group of children had to cross a French cemetery that lay right on the border between France and Switzerland. To reach safety, it was necessary to climb a high wall, some barbed wire, and a wrought iron gate and then dash to the Swiss frontier. On this particular mission, the children all managed to hurdle the obstacles and arrive in Switzerland. Barot, however, was the slowest and heaviest of the group. As she mounted the gate, she heard a German soldier approaching, and, in hurrying over the post holding up the wall, she began to slip. The soldier arrived to find Barot bleeding and trapped in the barbed wire. Fortunately, he did not shoot, so she too made it to safety. The perils of such missions were at times greater for women, who conducted them while wearing conventional clothing so as not to arouse suspicions. Marie-Louise Brintet, a member of CIMADE, recalled the experience of accompanying people across the border at Annemasse: “We were two, Claude Krebs and myself. The border was made up of two lines of barbed wire of about ten meters around a ditch. It was necessary to remove the barbed wire, fortunately non- electrified, but not easy to jump over in a skirt!” 52 Gilligan observes that traditionally “adventure is a male activity, and that if a woman is to embark on such adventures, she must at least dress like a man.” 53 Both Barot and Brinet could not dress like a man in the activities they conducted. Their stories show how one’s body and costume could impede a dangerous mission and bring about increased risk to one’s life. Despite the challenges large and small—indeed Barot once ended up in a Swiss prison for a short time— this brave and tireless woman continued her dedication to service and conducted many such voyages until the end of the war. Barot’s dedication to humanitarian aid led to new and daunting challenges during the liberation, including repatriating survivors and participating in the church’s period of reflection. A third task confronted her as well: what to do with known and suspected collaborators in France who were now in need of assistance. The camps that had been filled with Jews now housed the prisoners of liberated France. Wasn’t it also her responsibility as a Christian, she considered, to help these new

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sufferers? Just as the end of the war forced Colibri to recognize that she followed a different moral code from André, during this period Barot also was obliged to reexamine her moral principles. She answered to a deeply religious code of morality, and thus her response to this ethical question was that she should help the collaborators as well. Ultimately, however, most of Barot’s post-liberation efforts were devoted to the survivors returning from Nazi camps; she continued to dedicate herself unceasingly to the cause of the Jews. In the years following the war, Barot traveled around the world to address humanitarian concerns. She began to concentrate on the rights of women in Christian theology and society at large. In 1953 she became the director of the department of the Ecumenical Council designated Cooperation between Men and Women in the Church and Society (Coopération entre Hommes et Femmes dans l’Église et la Société), and she declared: “Cooperation, this means that being alone, whether separated or isolated, men and women are incomplete. Neither [sex] will reach its full stature without the help of the other; they are not really themselves except when in dialogue, constantly renewed, reciprocal, based in grace which is the same for each and demands equal responsibilities.” 54 Barot’s devotion to women’s rights, like her commitment to helping Jews during the war, stemmed from her deep religious faith. The same cooperation and dialogue which she called for between men and women was necessary for Jews and non-Jews in French resistance movements during the war. It was Barot’s understanding of a liberal ecumenical theology, which views all human beings of whatever religion or sex as equal and deserving of human rights, that guided her acts of bravery and resistance against the Nazis. Whether her own encounter with sexism in the church affected her dedication to equal human rights is impossible to prove, but it is notable that Barot, who had herself faced gender discrimination, first focused on helping the Jews during the war before turning to the rights of women.

Resistance and Reading Despite their different religions, the two women discussed in this chapter had much in common, saving people through their generosity, bravery, tireless dedication, and ingenuity. Their paths of resistance often involved similar kinds of clandestine work. They did not lead military movements or look to establish themselves as leaders of political organi-

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zations. Rather they understood the necessity of working on the inside— inside the camps, inside reception/escape centers and places of shelter, and inside the cattle cars full of parents and children. Their being women did not exclusively shape their narratives, yet their stories cannot be said to lie “beyond gender.” Given the complexity of the very concept of gender, what can we observe from these women’s stories that will help us reformulate our understanding of resistance? We can first reflect on the ways in which their acts of resistance involved performance. Barot and Siekierski manipulated traditional expectations of women’s roles by assuming multiple identities and performing gender in ways that suited their missions. Their female bodies both marked them to others and gave them a certain invisibility. This invisibility could serve as an advantage, as in the fact that Denise Siekierski’s body could not be identified as Jewish. Both women’s understanding of the dominant psyche and culture enabled them to subvert its expectations to achieve their aims. They wore skirts and crossed barbed wire; they flirted with the authorities and forged documents; they belonged to male organizations and made their own rules. They shifted identities while keeping one thing constant: their dedication to the survival of others. In addition, caregiving has a central role in both narratives. Siekierski and Barot each worked closely with another woman to provide a kind of “home” within the horror for refugees and inmates. The bonds they forged allowed them to support one another during traumatic and often isolating times. Developmental psychologists have observed the emphasis that girls place on friendship, and these patterns generally continue into adulthood. Gilligan, for instance, discusses Janet Lever’s studies of the differences between boys’ and girls’ games: “boys learn both the independence and organizational skills necessary for coordinating the activities of larger and diverse groups of people. . . . In contrast, girls’ play tends to occur in smaller, more intimate groups, often the bestfriend dyad, and in private places. This play replicates the social pattern of primary human relationships in that its organization is more cooperative.” 55 Acts of cooperation sustained these women and emerge in the narratives as central to survival. Denise Siekierski’s friendship with Puce lasted a lifetime. During the war years, the presence of a confidante on the inside with her kept Siekierski from the isolation commonly felt during such traumatic times, and for the remainder of her life she felt closer to no one than this shared witness to the horrors of war. Similarly, Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné witnessed the atrocities of Gurs alongside

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Madeleine Barot. And many other women worked closely with Barot in CIMADE to help the women and children in need. Barot continued her commitment to other women by working for equal rights in the church. Although I do not want to make a totalizing claim about women and friendship here, it is notable that these two figures concentrated on bonds with others rather than individual glory. How can we broaden the discourse of resistance so that women’s stories such as these do not remain unheard? We can explore areas that emerge in these particular narratives. We can look closely at the daily functioning of resistance movements and the roles played by women. For instance, who fed, clothed, hid, and escorted Jews to safety? Who attended to the needs of women and children? What stories of survival have we not yet heard, such as those of prostitutes? Given all we know about the impact of trauma upon the psyche and the need for contact, care, and listening, as well as for food and water, who sustained the spirits of the refugees and camp inmates? We can also examine ourselves. When we think about the French (and other) Resistance, we can consider what constitutes our own discourses of resistance. We can remember to remain “resisting readers” when reading about resistance itself. Judith Fetterly urges us to “become a resisting rather than assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us.” 56 Shoshana Felman turns this idea of resistance in reading on its head by reminding us not to resist reading, that is, not to resist the meanings of a text. Instead we should search for a text’s own resistance to itself. 57 In the context of narratives of resistance, Fetterly’s advice echoes Gurewitsch and Poznanski, urging us not only to honor male-defined acts of resistance but also to uncover and attend to the narratives of women. We can also follow Felman’s insights and examine the tensions in these women’s stories and the places of struggle for the heroines themselves. Certain portions of each narrative, such as Siekierski’s struggle with André and Barot’s passing observations about the weight of her body holding her back, may unveil further areas ripe for exploration. Most of all, we can remember to resist a fixed idea of resistance.

NOTES Special thanks are given to Denise Siekierski and Nelly Trocmé-Hewett for providing me with the information for this chapter. Denise Siekierski allowed

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me to interview her about her experiences during the war. I met with her for three hours in March 1999 in Queens, New York, and tape-recorded our conversation. This interview, along with a yet unpublished memoir/tribute she wrote to André Bass, served as my source of information about her “path” in the Resistance. Nelly Trocmé-Hewett, the daughter of Pastor and Magda Trocmé, important participants in the efforts of the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon to save five thousand refugees, was essential in leading me to both Denise Siekierski and Madeleine Barot. She provided me with contacts, background and bibliography regarding Barot and the CIMADE. Without Nelly Trocmé-Hewett’s assistance, this chapter would not have been possible. 1. Renée Poznanski, “Women in the French-Jewish Underground: ShieldBearers of Resistance?” Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 247. 2. Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 221. 3. It has been argued that for those who suffered the horrors of the German concentration and death camps, gender differences were greatly diminished; that it was a world “beyond gender.” According to this view, the impact of what might be considered gendered atrocities such as those regarding pregnancy and childbirth affected not only mothers but fathers as well and it is dangerous to exaggerate the role of gender or make a hierarchy of suffering. (See Langer, “Gendered Suffering: Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Pre-Empting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. 5. See Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), for an extended discussion. 6. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 174. 7. See Gilligan’s discussion of Nancy Chodorow. 8. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 105. 9. “Durant la dernière guerre, . . . les hommes ayant été forcés d’abandonner bien de postes de responsabilité, les femmes ont fait la démonstration non seulement de leur capacité à asumer les tâches qui leur incombaient, mais encore de leur volonté d’affronter les difficultés, voire les dangers, sans faiblesse. Moi-même, avec les équipières CIMADE, nous avons vécu ces situations.” In André Jacques, Madeleine Barot: Une indomptable energie (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989), 148. 10. “Ceux que nous courions étaient de toute manière moins sérieux que ceux qu’affrontaient nos amis juifs.” In Jeanne Merle D’Aubigné and Violette Mouchon, eds., Les Clandestins de Dieu: CIMADE 1939–1945 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1989), 38. My translation. 11. For the remainder of the chapter, I will refer to Denise Siekierski as

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Colibri, the name used by her colleagues during the war and still used by her friends today. 12. The quotes come from an interview I conducted with Denise Siekierski in March 1999. 13. Renée Poznanski points out that women “frequently . . . directed the social services of the various movements, supplying members with food, lodging, means of communication and false papers; this practice was clearly an extension of women’s traditional role in society.” (Poznanski, “Women in the FrenchJewish Underground,” 235.) Colibri took on such jobs. 14. Ibid., 244. 15. This appears on p. 3 of Siekierski’s yet unpublished memoir/tribute to Joseph Bass entitled “En hommage.” 16. From personal interview, March 1999. 17. Described in the memoir, 6. Poznanski discusses the role of the Sixième, 246. 18. From interview. 19. “André m’avait chargé s’assurer la liasion inter-réseaux à Nice, mais avant tout j’étais son assistante, sa secrétaire, son ‘aide-mémoire.’ ” From her yet unpublished memoir/tribute to Joseph Bass, 17. 20. “Groupe d’Action contre la Déportation.” 21. From memoir, 9. 22. Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, 222. 23. She recounted this story to me in the interview. 24. Butler, Gender Trouble, 25. 25. Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, xv. 26. “Elle veut vivre à la fois comme un homme et comme une femme” (She wants to live simultaneously as a man and as a woman). Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe II (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 602. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Again, Beauvoir reminds us: “Le privilège que l’homme détient et qui se fait sentir dès son enfance, c’est sa vocation d’être humain ne contrarie pas sa destiné de mâle. . . . Il n’est pas divisé” (The privilege a man holds and he feels from childhood is that his place as a human being doesn’t contradict with his destiny as a man. . . . He is not divided). Ibid., 600. 29. Included in the memoir, 30. 30. This practice is discussed in the section on Madeleine Barot as well and her work with the prostitutes at Rieucros. 31. From p. 13 of the memoir. 32. Poznanski, “Women in the French-Jewish Underground,” 235. 33. Ibid., 247. 34. “Il me considerait comme ‘sa fille adoptive’ et me présentait souvent ainsi, en s’amusant à m’appeler ‘Fifille.’ ” Siekierski memoir, 17. 35. From memoir, 40.

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36. Discussed in my interview with her. 37. She said this to the CIM (Inter-movement youth committee). 38. “Des secrétaires des mouvements, des cheftaines, toutes des femmes— puisque leurs collegues masculins étainet mobilisés, avaient passé les mois de la ‘drole de guerre’ dans les villages où les évacués avaient été installés” (Madeleine Barot, “La Cimade: Une présence, une communauté, une action,” Les Clandestins de Dieu, 29). My translation. 39. Ibid., 29. 40. Jacques, Madeleine Barot, 31. 41. Ibid., 32. 42. Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné. “Gurs. La faim. L’attente.” in Les Clandestins de Dieu, 61. 43. Ibid. 44. Jacques, Madeleine Barot, 68–69. 45. Ibid., 58. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 61. 48. Ibid., 60. 49. Ibid., 70. 50. Ibid., 84–85. 51. Ibid., 96. 52. Ibid., 100. 53. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 13. 54. Jacques, Madeleine Barot, 150, my translation. 55. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 10. 56. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), xii. 57. See Felman’s first chapter, “What Does a Woman Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading,” in What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

EIGHT

Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps Myrna Goldenberg “Food wasn’t a subject to be joked about. You could laugh about death, but not about what kept you alive.” Fania Fenelon, Playing for Time

Ea r ly i n h i s m e m o i r , S u r v i v a l i n A u s c h w i t z , P r i m o L e v i recounts a scene of women preparing for the deportation the Nazis had scheduled for the next day: All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him [food] to eat today? 1

In this passage, Levi reflects the pattern of traditional Western culture that identifies women with nurturing, caring, and the preparation of food. He singles out food preparation as the natural work of women as they prepared for the terrible experience that lay ahead. He interprets

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women’s management of their homely duties as an integrity of behavior, consistent with their roles and the expectations of their community. Levi’s sympathetic portrayal is rare but not singular. In his discussion of the routine of everyday living in Terezin, Norbert Troller portrays mothers’ ingenuity with reverence. Referring to the evening meal that brought husbands and teenage children to the women’s barracks, he describes the menu: There is no one so sacrificing or ready to make sacrifices as a mother. She will save her rations; usually the husband would also bring some food he had saved. She has a little pot, or a bowl, and concocts something tasty: “ghetto cake made from dry breadcrumbs, coffee with ground, saved sugar, or saccharin, or penezeln, paper-thin slices of toasted bread, with or without margarine, with garlic, or slices of toasted bread with a dusting of powdered sugar.”

He then explains that the women created salads “from all sorts of weeds.” Later, in descriptions of romance in Terezin, he ironically details the makeshift repast that lovers prepared, divulging parts of the secret recipe of Mrs. Windholz’s incomparable “ghetto torte,” the preparation of which featured bread, coffee, saccharine, a trace of margarine, lots of good wishes, and an electric hot plate. 2 Considering the socialization of women before the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, it is neither surprising nor inappropriate that these writers associate women with food preparation. But the Third Reich perverted the “normal.” Normal life was disrupted, most devastatingly for Jews and other victims. The routine of food preparation took on new meaning and ritual in an environment of state-planned and state-executed starvation. In the ghetto and camps, their different prewar experiences and roles influenced the ways men and women addressed the brutalities the Nazis foisted on them. One specific and important example of difference can be seen in survivor memoirs and their discussions of food. Food—or, more precisely, hunger—dominates Holocaust narratives, along with depictions of violence, vermin, thirst, fear, sickness, and death. Time was measured by hunger: “We have a calendar in Birkenau. It is hunger. . . . Morning is hunger. Afternoon is hunger. Evening is hunger.” 3 Passages about hunger range from recitations of remembered and fantasized meals, to graphic descriptions of food stolen from other prisoners or Nazis, to statements of grotesque hunger and thirst,

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to reflections on preparing meals and menus. We have photographs and drawings that illustrate the physical results of unrelieved starvation. Children’s responses to hunger are recorded in their artwork from Terezin, where the cook is often the only person with facial features, an indication of the singular importance and clearest memory of the person who nourished them. 4 The subject of the economics of food during the Holocaust has been explored, as have the methods of food distribution, but we have relatively few, if any, analyses of the ways in which men and women responded to hunger. Is the response to hunger too vague and subjective to be a serious subject of study? Is the dearth of attention related to the fact that food preparation belongs to the domestic rather than the public arena? Has the subject been ignored because it appears to fall into the category of women’s studies? Has this subject been ignored in the same way that the study of women has been neglected? In this chapter, I consider food preparation—cooking—as a communal activity engaged in by women who were trapped in the “Final Solution,” and I suggest that this activity—“food talk”—often had an ironic effect. Such talk was salutary because it fostered social relationships, reinforced religious values and rituals, and strengthened women’s sense of purpose. In turn, this strengthened their self-esteem and dignity, contributing to their will to survive in a situation which was specifically designed to kill them and which used starvation as one means to that end. Centuries of Western scholarship marginalized women and their “work,” including food preparation and its role in sustaining the family. Women and food have both been largely private or “domestic” issues, relegated more to the realm of the body than to the sphere of the mind. 5 In traditional philosophy, the mind, or soul, which is identified as male, has greater value than the body, which is identified with the female. Expanding this theory further, the body, or the female, is ordinary and the ordinary is less valued than the ideal. 6 Logically, therefore, traditional, in contrast to feminist, philosophy does not address the ordinary and the everyday. Food is ordinary in that it is basic to existence. Food preparation, i.e., cooking, is relegated to the domestic, and the domestic is the sphere of women: “[W]estern philosophers have regarded . . . women’s activities to be philosophically irrelevant; . . . defining them out of existence, rendering them invisible, describing them [ironically] through their silence.” 7 Although Aristotelian logic (and later Dewey’s instrumentalism) challenged Platonic idealism and exerted a strong influence on scientific thought and discovery, the Platonic privileging of theory

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over praxis, mind over body, the ideal over the ordinary, and the male over the female shaped Western intellectual thought until the twentieth century. Cooking, feminist philosophers argue, combines theory and practice and merits investigation as a philosophical inquiry. 8 Only through its economic and religious functions—that is, when food preparation, distribution, and ritual are made public concerns— has the subject of food taken on cultural, scholarly, or political significance, because male as breadwinner has significant implications related to the organization of society. Those aspects of food that are not related to economics or politics may be considered as pleasant diversionary subjects but not topics for serious study. Hence, the study of food was deemed serious when food was objectified or commodified or ritualized. The ritualization of food was particularly relevant because food as ritual has been the prerogative of men; the sacrament of Communion, the blessing of the Sabbath challah, the sacrifice of animals, even the dominance of male chefs in their “regalia” signified the ritualization of food as a male activity. In other words, food was important as an instrument of scientific, economic, or religious study and practice. By comparison, the analysis of the relationship between women and food has been marginalized, rendered relatively unimportant except by feminist scholars and medical professionals who study eating disorders. Here food is transformed into “pathology.” In short, in its ordinariness, food has been overlooked. “Food talk,” including recipe sharing and cookbook writing, is not “high culture.” 9 Unless brought to our attention through news or feature stories, it is background, not foreground, in everyday life. 10 We may safely say that food is inconspicuous except when it is medicalized, politicized, or absent, as in hunger. (Hunger is political and takes on serious dimensions because political status is defined through balances of power and politics is about power.) Thus, while substantial scholarship about women is less than half a century old, scholarship about responses to hunger is nascent. Gendered analyses of hunger have not been addressed. In the context of the Holocaust, food carries symbolic and emotional weight, especially in relation to women. Food traditionally influenced women’s self-definition and status, and, in Jewish culture, their reputations as balabusta (mistresses of the household). A woman’s table/tish was evidence of her creativity, her generosity, and her womanly skills—her worth. In virtually all Western communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women’s importance—beyond their childbearing and child rearing functions—rested on her “domes-

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tic role and her power within the home as angel, minister, nutritionist, manager.” 11 However, when food is discussed by both men and women Holocaust survivors, it usually takes on the dramatic dimensions of extreme hunger—a Nazi weapon whose ultimate purpose is starvation. For the majority of Holocaust survivors, food is conspicuous as the subject of fantasy or memory stimulated by extreme hunger, as the coin of the realm for trade, as a source of violence among prisoners, 12 or as the demonstration of Nazi power or Aryan strength. 13 Yet until very recently the scholarly discussion of food and the Holocaust has centered on state-imposed starvation of the Jews and other victims. The focus has been on the perpetrators, wherever they were in the Nazi hierarchy, and on the use of food as a tool of control over the victims. Documentation of food distribution and allocation to slave laborers and other prisoners comprised the “objective” data on food. 14 In the Holocaust, where starvation was a strategy for annihilation, the object being to starve prisoners to death even as they were being worked to death, food is often treated in statistical terms. That is, we have documents that state the amount and type of food that was supposed to have been delivered to ghettos and camps. What is clear is that German sources on the amount and types of food allocated to and received by Jews during the Holocaust are not reliable. The discrepancy between the documents and the reality is a topic for deeper archival research, outside the scope of this work. In some instances, however, the amount and nature of the food allocated to Jews has been documented carefully and is readily accessible. It is clear, for instance, that even before they were sent to the camps, Jews were subjected to starvation in the ghettos. 15 According to Hilberg, each Jew in Lodz was allocated the equivalent of one egg, 1.5 lbs. of meat, and 12 lbs. of potatoes a month. Each Jew in Lodz was also supposed to receive 1.5 lbs. of bread a week. By 1942, total food expenditure for each Lodzer Jew was $.12 a day. But paper allocations and reality did not match. 16 Food was not distributed equally or fairly—and sometimes not at all. Lodz Ghetto scholar Michal Unger writes about women’s inventiveness with ersatz coffee, which they would transform into ersatz cake, and potato peels, which became ersatz soup dumplings. 17 Holocaust survivor Irene, ten years old at the time, talks about her mother’s response to the Lodz food allocations: “Mother went to the hospital and got a job in the kitchen. That’s the only kind of work she looked for and somehow she got it. That way she knew that I would eat. So I left our attic rooms everyday and went to the hospital kitchen to eat a hot meal. There we

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had some sort of soup everyday. The food that we got from the Council we gave to my grandmother and baby cousin.” 18 In the camps, the food situation varied, but starvation of the Jews was endemic—by design. 19 Again, allocations recorded on paper do not represent the reality of the camps. Hilberg explains: What happened to the food after it got into the camp was the [camp] administration’s own business. The basic diet of Jewish prisoners was watery turnip soup drunk from pots, supplemented by an evening meal of sawdust bread with some margarine, “smelly marmalade,” or “putrid sausage.” Between the two meals inmates attempted to lap a few drops of polluted water from a faucet in a wash barrack. . . . [S]oup was the midday meal . . . , pieces of wood, potato peeling and unrecognizable substances swimming in it. . . . The soup meal was usually issued in cans that weighed about 120 pounds. They had only two handles and no cover. Before it was distributed into the pots, the scalding brew had to be carried under the blows of SS men from the kitchen to the block. 20

Some sources state that women were allocated less soup because it was calculated that the average body weight of women was less than men’s. And since they had many more problems carrying a heavy pot, women wound up spilling a good deal of it, thereby having even less soup to distribute than the men did. To be sure, men and women were equally subjected to starvation. The daily routines of the ghetto and the concentration camp revolved around getting an extra piece of bread, or even any bread. The objective facts lead to no other conclusion than that the Nazis used starvation as a tactic in their larger strategy of annihilation. However, I wish to draw particular attention to the manner in which men and women inmates described their responses to hunger and starvation in their narratives about the concentration camps. Sharing their memories of the wonderful meals eaten in better times was a diversion for women and men. The question of whether such recollections of the fragrances and textures of favorite meals intensified the hunger rather than alleviating it, if only in one’s fantasy, is still contentious. Nevertheless, according to Sybil Milton and Ruth Bondy, women had strategies that apparently helped them forestall the ravages of starvation longer than men could. 21 In men’s memoirs, hunger was rooted in the stomach and in memory, evoking meals once enjoyed in a state of freedom. Men spoke and wrote about their hunger and distress and confessed their willingness

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to do just about anything to alleviate that hunger. Thus, for them, starvation was a manifestation of Nazi power and their hunger, proof of their vulnerability and dependency. 22 In Elie Wiesel’s Night, for example, bread is first valued as a reasonable recompense for Elie’s shoes, but eventually it becomes a vehicle for an exercise of power: even his gold tooth, which is taken rather than traded, cannot serve as compensation for bread. Soup is exchanged for assisting in a hanging, the sight of which does not diminish Elie’s appetite. (However, a subsequent hanging of a particularly likable young boy does affect his appetite.) In This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the non-Jewish narrator satiates himself and his companions on the food brought to camp by Jewish prisoners while he derides Jewish “appetites.” As he devours the food intended for others, he feels neither compassion nor empathy for the victims (he knows that they will die), but rather scorn mingled with contempt. 23 In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl explains that in the concentration camps the “desire for food was the major primitive instinct around which mental life was centered.” The principal subject of discussion was “favorite dishes,” and the prisoners would “exchange recipes and plan the menu for the day they would have a reunion. . . . They would go on and on, picturing it in detail.” 24 Frankl’s reference to recipes is unique. For the most part, men’s memoirs do not include the exchange of recipes, although they certainly were preoccupied with hunger. Actually, most narratives and oral histories by men relate terrible hunger and the memory of wonderful food in the abstract. Like Frankl, they don’t describe the details of food or meals; they describe hunger or temporary respites from hunger by remembering the satisfaction of the meal and the ambiance of family feasts and festivals. Ironically, Frankl protests that such talk was “dangerous . . . [,] affording momentary psychological relief” but unhealthy in that “it is an illusion which physiologically, surely, must not be without danger.” 25 Here Frankl betrays a perspective acutely ignorant of the depths of the impact of “food talk” on women’s identity and community. In women’s memoirs, hunger is just as important a presence as in men’s, but often it evokes a different type of response, one rooted in the imagination, situated in the kitchen, and remembered through socialization. Eleven years old when she was imprisoned in Terezin, Ruth Kluger comments on her first experience of hunger: “Those were my first weeks of protracted hunger; in Vienna [from 1938 to deportation in 1942] I had had enough to eat. There is little to say about chronic hunger: it’s always there and is boring to talk about. Hunger gnaws at

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and weakens you. It takes up mental space which could otherwise be used for thinking.” However, she says a great deal about hunger and what the young girls in her barracks did to stretch the meager amount of food they received: “We acted as if the skim milk we were rationed was whipping cream and beat it into foam, a popular pastime. . . . It could take hours, because it’s difficult to make skim milk foam with a fork.” 26 Women report talking about food, recollecting wonderful meals, and this often led to the next step: exchanging recipes and teaching another woman the art of cooking and baking. A Bergen-Belsen survivor recalls that “many recipes were exchanged and collected” as a diversion or tactic “to fight hunger and the thought of food.” 27 Ruth Bondy, a survivor of three concentration camps, describes “food talk” in Theresienstadt: “[F]ormer housewives would ‘cook’ for hours, telling each other how they used to prepare mushroom sauce with cream or debating the preferred number of eggs for dumplings. Some would even write down recipes, whose ingredients seemed like greetings from another world.” 28 Gertrude Schneider explains that “the main topic of conversation was food, the most beautiful recipes that anybody could think of.” 29 In the forced labor camp Christianstadt, Ruth Kluger recalls, the adult women exchanged recipes the same way I recited poems. At night a favorite game was to surpass each other with the recital of generous amounts of butter, eggs, and sugar in fantasy baking contests. I didn’t even know many of the dishes they cooked and listened with a growling stomach, just as I listened with a hungry imagination to their tales of travel, parties, dates, and university studies—their “estates of memory,” as the novelist Ilona Karmel has called them. 30

These activities did not alleviate hunger; nothing but food could do that. But this kind of talk gave the women certain psychological and spiritual advantages that men didn’t have—unless they had been chefs or cooks imprisoned with other men who were comfortable identifying with cooking and other kitchen work. Hunger was ubiquitous and led Birkenau survivor Giuliana Tedeschi to react negatively to talk that focused on food: “Prompted by starvation, a mania was going around the camp, an obsession with recipes and imaginary meals; it had become pathological.” She recalls these women’s menus and her own screams in response: “ ‘Enough!’ I yelled, getting up from my mattress. ‘Stop it, or I’ll slap your face. Your hunger may be voluptuous, but mine’s raging, okay? It’s worse than exhaustion, worse

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German troops look on as a group of Jews—all but one of whom are women— dig ditches in a fenced-in lot in Krakow, 1939–40. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

than semiconsciousness. My guts are in knots, my stomach is killing me, I can’t feel anything else, I can’t think of anything else. When you talk about food, I turn into a beast.’ ” Yet even as she flees the block and runs toward the toilets, she hears French women discussing a recipe for soup. 31 Women spoke about food so much that some camps had a phrase to define it: “We called it cooking with the mouth,” says Susan CernyakSpatz. And, she goes on, “The funny thing was that many of us were at the

A Jewish woman eating her ration of soup that she received at the public kitchen in the Kielce ghetto, 1942. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

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age where we had never been to cooking school, but we had the wildest imagination about what we would cook. I don’t think I ever became as good a cook as I was with my mouth.” 32 Sara Bernstein gives us many detailed descriptions about foraging for food in Ravensbrück, but she reserves her most vivid imagery for describing recipes. “Tell me again about the polenta,” said an inmate who “like all of us . . . could think of nothing but food. . . . Preparing food was women’s work! . . . But for some reason or other he [Bernstein’s father] decided that he and only he could cook polenta.” Bernstein then describes the precise process, including the special kettle, her father used. Somebody else asks her to talk about Shabbat food and how to prepare chicken soup with kreplach. After providing that recipe, Bernstein continues: “Once I started talking about food, there was no stopping me. I gave the recipes for gefilte fish, for stuffed cabbage, for baked sweet potatoes laced with honey and sprinkled with nutmeg, for rich, moist honey cake dripping with honeyorange sauce, for roast chicken, for goose, for lamb.” After someone comments that she must have been “a great help” to her mother, she hedges; truly, she says, “I could not boil an egg without either burning my fingers or cracking the shell.” Bernstein concludes these recollections by confiding: “I wish I had those recipes I gave out that day; I would love to see what I made up.” 33 Food preparation is ritualized in the act of living: the cooking and serving of food is the participation in the ritual of social and religious events. Thus food has always been a stimulus to community: “Foodmaking processes may define membership in a community, and they may depend on the existence of a community in order to be practiced, or to be passed on to the next generation of [food] practitioners.” 34 Understanding the process of food preparation and its significance to the existence of a community is the essential key to comprehending the different ways in which men and women responded to hunger in the camps. Traditionally, cooking or sharing recipes was a “practice uniting women across social barriers. . . . Although dictated by place, class, or economics, food can become a common language for all through need and hunger.” 35 For many women in the camps, it did. In recalling their domestic roles of pre-Nazi days, women created communities that facilitated sharing recipes and food preparation experiences. As they described the food they once cooked to another prisoner, they shared a familiar experience and connected to another person, briefly breaking the isolation and despair brought on by prolonged hunger. Thus, in many women’s memoirs, hunger created a social relationship just as

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food preparation and food consumption created, reinforced, or defined social relationships for women before the Nazi era. In a sense, these women prisoners created oral cookbooks and, in the process, organized themselves into a temporary, loosely structured but purposeful community shaped from and by their kitchen experiences. These communities, surrogates of those of pre-Nazi days, gave women someone to cling to, another person who knew their name, a way to break the isolation of imprisonment. Their shared reminiscences about food gave them not physical sustenance but emotional nourishment. Food and its connected rituals of cooking, determining menus, and setting a table, reminded these imprisoned women of their former status when they were not trapped and starving victims. Through their discussions of food, women reminded themselves of their earlier connections, when they had been part of a family—a family with a rich heritage and love, and a future as well as a past. These positive reminders of their past status contributed to their emotional strength. One survivor recalls: Another pastime, which was more than a pastime since it was an obsession of practically everybody, was exchanging recipes for food. We had terrible quarrels because if you said this recipe needed three eggs, somebody else said you needed five eggs. We argued whether you need hot water, hot milk, or cold milk—it was an obsession. We couldn’t think of much else other than food. We exchanged these recipes at night. We woke up somebody saying, “Do you remember your mother’s recipe for this or that? Tell me. It’s a very important thing.” That happened in all of the camps. 36

Such discussions had another effect: keeping a dead relative alive through her recipes. It is common practice in cookbooks to identify a recipe by the originator’s name, thereby perpetuating the person’s presence in the sustenance and nurturing routines of everyday life. Recipes carry the past. Indeed, “a recipe is never totally new; it is based on recipes and procedures of the past, reflecting the communal sense of cooking and the long tradition behind it.” 37 A recipe, asserts cookbook writer Joan Nathan, is “about a heritage, a family. [Recipe collections] are oral history.” 38 So it was in the unlikely setting of the concentration camp, when women spoke rather than wrote recipes and cookbooks. Attributing a recipe to a grandmother or aunt or mother, who was absent from the conversation because she had been starved, beaten or gassed to death, figuratively restored her to the circle of women and embedded

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her in the memory, not only of the woman describing the recipe but also in the memories of the audience of women listening to the recipegiver. Through her recipes, a dead woman would be recalled in her lifeaffirming identity, that is, through a validation of her life in the domestic sphere. 39 Inadvertently, recipe attribution became another facet of the long-standing Jewish tradition that formalizes the remembrance of the dead through daily and holiday prayer as well as through commemoration of the anniversary of the day the deceased relative died. People who are remembered, and recalled by name [through a recipe or a prayer], do not truly die. It is then that their souls and names become eternal. That is what keeps some survivors of the war sane. Never to forget does not only mean never to forget the war, the slaughter. . . . [I]t means never to forget the names of those who died, to pass them on to future generations, to keep their candles burning not just once a year, on their communal Yahrzeits, the memorial days of the Jewish calendar, . . . but at home, always. 40

Recipe attribution became the instrument by which a woman could live on despite Nazi attempts to annihilate not only her but also the memory of the existence of her people. Tante Raizel’s blintze recipe, for example, probably had far more significance for her niece’s sense of purpose than it ever had for Tante Raizel herself. In sharing recipes, women in the camps saw themselves as connected humans with meaning and purpose. Since most Jewish cooking is sooner or later connected to a Jewish holiday, the women engaged in such talk and teaching were, in essence, transmitting and perpetuating Jewish custom and observance. For observant Jews, Judaism considers food a visible manifestation of the covenant between man [sic ] and God. There is a special way to prepare the food as well as special dishes on which to eat specific sorts of food; special blessings to be said over the food and over the cooking. In the life of a woman who prepares food in this way and maintains the kosher kitchen with all its ritual complexity, God can become almost as tangible as the stove. 41

Hence, we see that the act of sharing recipes took on cultural significance and ironically reinforced religious identity. In sharing recipes, women also became teachers. The process of sharing a recipe provided them with opportunities to pass on a skill,

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a tradition, and a value system. Their sense of self-worth, their religious identification, and their usefulness were strengthened. Teaching someone how to cook requires a persona of some significance, a sense of being necessary, valuing one’s life and experiences. It is an affirmation of personhood in that we become persons through connecting to other beings. Teaching also carries an assumption of the future: we don’t teach or transmit knowledge and skills if we don’t trust that there will be a future. Belief in the future diminishes the probability of despair, which was surely a prelude to self-neglect and death in the concentration camps. Moreover, belief in the future is grounded in hope; using food metaphorically, one survivor declared, “The will to live is nourished only by hope.” 42 Kluger states unequivocally: “To hope was a duty.” 43 “Our connections with food partially define who we are.” 44 “Food talk” was a good way of reconnecting with other humans as well as clear proof that the Nazis couldn’t really control every aspect of the prisoners’ lives. The act of teaching someone else how to cook is an act of affirmation, a link in the “continuum between the past and the future . . . remind[ing] women of their strengths as nurturers, homemakers, and inventive cooks. Sharing memories reaffirmed their community, and sharing recipes in the context of planned starvation therefore has an ironic therapeutic effect, if only for the length of their discussions.” 45 Through this sharing and teaching, women resisted the dehumanization that was part of Nazi systematic debilitation. They unconsciously and temporarily defied their status by reiterating their previous importance as food givers. Recipe sharing was a social and educational activity, but it was also a spiritual one that assumed there would be a next holiday meal, a next family gathering around a table, a future. As Cara De Silva asserts in the introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes of women at Terezin, “The creation of such a cookbook was an act of psychological resistance, forceful testimony to the power of food to sustain us, not just physically but spiritually.” 46 Sharing the memories of past family life reminded them that they were not the animals or vermin the Nazis claimed they were. Perhaps Frankl, in his strident refusal to talk about food, was indirectly rejecting nostalgia—the “desperate attempt to appropriate the missing past,” as defined by Sara Horowitz in her discussion of postmemory and Holocaust literature. 47 Horowitz distinguishes between temporal and geographic nostalgia, the sentimental longing to revive moments and places of comfort. I am tempted to ask whether “cooking with the mouth” is a gendered form of nostalgia, a recollection of the

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familiar and the safe moments and places of several forms of security. For women in the camps, cooking represented the stability of the wife’s or mother’s place in the family and, more precisely, the kitchen. In some ways, creating recipes is a reaction to the hunger not only for food, but also for the safety of the home and the family. The notion that the ritual of food and eating is an indicator of self-worth, social relationships, and civility is vividly underscored by an episode featuring a Holocaust survivor named Bella. In late April 1945, Bella and her husband Ike escaped their labor camp, rowed across the Elbe, and surrendered to the Americans in Magdeburg. The GIs “liberated” a deserted house, where they installed Bella, Ike, and two friends, Oscar and Bessie, who had escaped with them. The GIs also brought them an abundance of food, which Ike, Bessie, and Oscar eyed hungrily: after six years of imprisonment and hunger, they were ready to eat. Bella stopped them. Her husband, their friends, and the GIs were perplexed. “I want a white tablecloth and I want to set the table,” demanded Bella. The GIs jumped into their jeep and returned within a few minutes, laden with table linens—also “liberated” from a nearby deserted house. Bella’s explanation was firm and simple. “We will not eat like savages,” she said. “After six years of holding onto my dignity in spite of everything they [the Nazis] did, I won’t give them a victory.” Bella took the white cloth, set the table, invited her husband and friends to dine with her, and, in her words, “ate like a free woman.” 48 Bella’s control over the meal epitomizes the connections between food, self-worth, and community. She used the ritual of the meal as a means of reconnecting to culture and its assigned roles and traditions. She used the ritual of the meal to restore herself to a civil society that values both the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of community. She reestablished herself as a participant in a necessary and pleasurable ritual—sharing a meal with others.

NOTES 1. Primo Levi, Survival in Asuchwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1993): 15. 2. Norbet Troller, Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 77, 120. 3. Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 100.

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4. Frances G. Grossman, “The Art of the Children of Terezin: A Psychological Study,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4:2 (1989): 213–29. 5. As far back as the ancients, Plato’s Phaedo privileged mind over body; the Republic depicts the struggle of mind over body: “[I]ntellectuals determined to escape the prison of the body must climb out of the image-world of the cave to gain illumination from the ‘Sun,’ the Form of the Good . . . the universal and unchanging source of all morality and all real knowledge. Theorizing requires him to leave behind the unruly world in which people eat. . . . [W]ork of the hand must be left to those who are not able to govern, philosophize, or fight in battle. . . . That’s the work of women.” Plato posits the familiar dualisms that attach value to the mind/abstract/ideal/reason and devalue the other item in the pair—body/physical/corporeal/emotion: “The first of the pair [is placed] on a higher ontological and normative rank than the second. The first exists and has value only by excluding and marginalizing the second.” (Plato, “Republic,” Book Seven, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], 575–844. 6. Deane W. Curtin, “Food/Body/Person,” in Cooking, Eating, and Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 4–7. 7. Lisa M. Heldke, “Recipes for Theory Making,” in Curtin and Heldke, eds., Cooking, Eating, and Thinking, 255. 8. Heldke, “Recipes for Theory Making,” in Curtin and Heldke, eds., Cooking, Eating, and Thinking, 254–55. 9. Anne Bower, “Cooking up Stories: Narrative Elements in Community Cookbooks,” in Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, ed. Anne Bower (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 47. 10. Exceptions, of course, are imaginative descriptions and depictions of food in literature or art. 11. Bower, “Cooking Up Stories,” 47. 12. See, for example, Gisela Perl’s I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (1948; rpt. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1984), 38–41. Perl describes women prisoners who fought one another for “ten miserable mouthfuls” and sustained bruises and other wounds in the process. 13. It is interesting to note that survivors and scholars alike confirm the fact that food was the preoccupation of the inmates. Brana Gurewitsch points out that “of the 25 interviewees in my book [Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998)], all but 3 mention food in one way or another.” Yet it is not discussed in the literature on the psychological effects of the Holocaust on the survivors. Personal correspondence between Gurewitsch and Goldenberg, December 13, 1998. 14. See, for example, “Document 2233–E-PS, Conference Volume, Cabinet session in Cracow on 8/24/1942 Cabinet session in the Great Conference

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Room of the Government Building in Cracow Monday, 8/24/1942, Part 01” in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. IV: Documents 1409–PS-2372–PS. District of Columbia: Government Printing Office, 1947 [Nuremberg War Crimes Trial Online], where the Governor General states: “Before the German people are to experience starvation, the occupied territories and their people shall be exposed to starvation.” At the same meeting (part 02), party member Naumann, president of the Main Department for Food and Agriculture, explains that “the other Jews [300,000 of whom are still in forced labor], a total of 1.2 million, will no longer be provided with foodstuffs.” Food to other non-German populations was drastically reduced. 15. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 259–64. 16. See isolated quotations related to food in Eugene Aroneanu, compiler, Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler’s Death Camps (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 14–18. 17. Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 134–35. 18. Interview with Irene Berger Glassberg, July 1998, Gaithersburg, MD. 19. Ronald W. Zweig, “Feeding the Camps: Allied Blockade Policy and the Relief of Concentration Camps in Germany, 1944–1945,” Historical Journal 41:3 (1998): 825–51, for insight into the effects of the Allied blockade policy and food relief with particular attention to the plight of the interned Jews. 20. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 910. 21. Sybil Milton, “Women in the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 297–333. Milton’s chapter is seminal in its analysis of the differences in women’s and men’s vulnerability to Nazi abuse and planned annihilation. See also Ruth Bondy, “Women in Theresienstadt and the Family Camp in Birkenau,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 310–26; Pelagia Lewinska, “A Day in Camp,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 93–98; and Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 22. See, for example, Leyb Goldin’s description of his hunger in the Warsaw ghetto, “Chronicle of a Single Day,” in The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. David G. Roskies (Philadelphia: the Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 424–34. 23. Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1959; New York: Penguin, 1976), 29–49. See also Fania Fenelon, Playing for Time (New York: Berkley Books, 1979), 59, 67–74.

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24. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), 46–47. 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001), 75. 27. Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, 24. 28. Bondy, “Women in Theresienstadt and Birkenau,” 316. 29. Quoted in Women Surviving the Holocaust, ed. Esther Katz and Joan Miriam Ringelheim (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983), 153. 30. Kluger, Still Alive, 117. Kluger here is referring to Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1986). 31. Giuliana Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 208–9. 32. Quoted in Katz and Ringelheim, eds., Women Surviving the Holocaust, 153. 33. Sara Tuvel Bernstein, The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997), 229, 237–38. 34. Heldke, “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice,” in Curtin and Heldke, eds., Cooking, Eating, and Thinking, 220. 35. Cecilia Lawless, “Cooking, Community, Culture: A Reading of Like Water for Chocolate,” in Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading, 219. Lawless quotes from Susan Leonardi’s groundbreaking article, “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104 (May 1989). 36. Ruth Reiser, in Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust, ed. Diane Plotkin and Roger A. Ritvo (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 88. 37. Elizabeth J. McDougal, “Voices, Stories, and Recipes in Selected Canadian Community Cookbooks,” in Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading, 107. 38. “Recipes as Oral History,” Washingtonian Magazine, December 2001, 92. 39. Marion Bishop, “Speaking Sisters: Relief Society Cookbooks and Mormon Culture,” in Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading, 95. 40. Esther Hautzig, Remember Who You Are: Stories about Being Jewish (New York: Crown, 1990), 17–18. 41. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 268–69. 42. Vera Hajkova, The World without Human Dimensions—Four Women’s Memories (Prague: State Jewish Museum, 1991), 114. 43. Kluger, Still Alive, 89. 44. Curtin, “Food/Body/Person,” 11. 45. Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 335.

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46. Cara De Silva, ed., In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), xxvi. 47. Quoted by Sara Horowitz in her presentation, “Coming Home to the Holocaust: Second-Generation Americans and Israelis” (Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, December 27, 2000). 48. Interview with Bella Berger Mischkinsky Bermanis, April 1995, Derwood, MD.

NINE

Ruptured Lives and Shattered Beliefs: A Feminist Analysis of Tikkun Atzmi in Holocaust Literature Susan Nowak How long can this go on? For six days I hide from the murderess and she never sees my face. They don’t see me because they are blinded by prejudice. We all look alike to them. We have the identity of shit—scheiss-Judes, mist benes. Rena’s Promise Léa was obviously a stranger in these familiar surroundings where she should have seemed naturally at home after ten years. . . . This child really knew nothing about herself, either about her origins or her identity. She was no more than scorched earth, a landscape of ashes, enclosed in the shifting boundaries of a human form by the magnetic force emanating from Bénédicte. Shadows of a Childhood

Feminist theory has made significant contributions to Holocaust literature since the 1980s. In particular it has fostered a sustained examination of the Shoah’s impact upon Jewish self-understanding. Drawing upon these contributions, e.g., the turn to autobiography, gendered analysis, theological antisemitism, and reading/writing as witness, I explore the issues surrounding the construction of a viable identity both during and after the Holocaust as presented in Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood, which tell the stories of two young girls,

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Rena Kornreich and Léa Levy, whose lives are irrevocably ruptured and indelibly marked by the Shoah. 1 On one level, the realities of Rena’s and Léa’s lives and struggles are radically dissimilar. Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s arresting survivor autobiography takes us to Tylicz, Poland, where she is born to observant Jewish parents whose love creates a world filled with meaning and purpose for each of their children. The security of that world shatters with Rena’s arrival on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz, a fate her younger sister, Danka, soon shares. Merely girls in their teens, for three years they survive the unspeakable terrors of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Neüstadt Glewe, and the sadistic cruelty of forced marches to Stabsgebaüde and Ravensbrück. Day after day, Rena experiences the unrelenting brutality of a system which strips away every ethical certainty and religious belief of her childhood. At the end of her imprisonment, she is sustained only by the promise she made to her mother to care for her younger sister. By the time of her release, the Shoah has worn away even that pledge to the point of collapse. The world of Léa Levy, brought to us in Elisabeth Gille’s haunting fictionalized autobiography, could not be more different from Rena’s. Léa, a character created by Gille who very much lives Gille’s own experiences, was born in the Bordeaux region of France, where her parents fill her life with love and every advantage that their wealth can provide. As Russian nationals, Léa’s parents are very careful to cooperate with the authorities in every way and avoid any involvement in politics. They willingly wear the yellow star, even though they had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1939, and they refuse to go into hiding, even when their names appear on the registry of Bordeaux Jews. In the end, their fate was no different from that of other Jews: deportation and death. Five-yearold Léa is saved at the last minute by a local Jewish/Catholic resistance group, hidden in a convent boarding school, raised as a Roman Catholic, and “adopted” after the war by the parents of Bénédicte Gaillac, her only friend. Sure of neither her heritage nor her memories, she is a perpetual outsider among her classmates, within her “adoptive” family, and in her natal homeland of France. Despite the differences of age, birthplace, and social status and the radical dissimilarities of their circumstances during the Holocaust, Rena and Léa share a common task of incalculable significance: each must forge a sense of identity, beliefs, and ethics which will enable her to withstand the forces that seek her annihilation. Gelissen’s and Gille’s riveting Holocaust narratives focus attention on several important issues concerning the impact of the Shoah upon Jewish self-understandings,

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both during and after this catastrophic event. For example, Rena and Léa struggle to construct a viable sense of identity in the shadow of the Holocaust. The death of their parents destroys the security and cohesion of their natal worlds. But each girl becomes aware that Nazi Germany’s genocidal vision is not limited to the physical destruction of Jews. It seeks to crush the will, rupture the psyche, and destroy the spirit. To remain a human being in the midst of this assault, both girls turn to their personal experience. Their individual lives become the basis upon which they seek to mend the self-contempt destroying their sense of selfrespect. Further, like their ancestors during the Crusades and the Inquisition, Rena and Léa realize that their identities as Jews place them outside the boundary of ordinary human concern and exempt them from the universe of moral obligation. For Rena, acts of ordinary decency can lead to starvation, beatings, and death. Léa must resist the self-willed blindness of a nation unwilling to acknowledge its collaborationist activities or repudiate its antisemitic behaviors. Moreover, each of their testimonies illuminates the ontic wounding of humanity and the futility of maintaining pre-Holocaust notions of identity, morality, and belief. Painstakingly and judiciously they reconstruct ethical judgments and religious beliefs as they grapple with important theological issues, e.g., the collapse of a belief in an interventionist deity, the voluntary nature of covenant during and after the Shoah, the relationship of belief and behavior, and a tikkun (mending) of ethics. Questions about the nature of God, suffering and “chosenness,” and the morality of the bystander haunt each girl as she seeks tikkun atzmi (mending or repair of the self) in the midst of the catastrophe. Rena and Léa discover that a commitment to tikkun atzmi has implications on both the personal and transpersonal levels; self-mending is intrinsically interrelated to the hope of tikkun olam (world-mending). Each recognizes that she can look to no one but herself to mend the ontic wound which encompasses her, all of humanity, and, even quite possibly, the God she knew in her life before the Holocaust.

The Holocaust and the Turn to Autobiography Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood graphically trace the ways each girl is thrown back upon her personal experience to renegotiate questions of meaning, morality, and belief. Both narratives reveal the

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paradigm shift of self-understanding precipitated by the Holocaust’s brutal, triumphalist witness of mass murder, individual dissolution, global indifference, and communal disintegration. Pre-Shoah understandings of Jewish identity, meaning, and faith disintegrate; Judaism’s traditional sources of identity formation, community cohesion, and covenantal responsibility are radically wounded. Rena and Léa’s life experiences become the crucible out of which each must regenerate a coherent worldview and reclaim her identity as a human being or face the fate of the Schmuckstücke. 2 Rena was raised in an observant home filled with love, understanding, and gaiety; her life reflected the rhythms of Jewish culture, liturgy, and history. Soon after arriving at Auschwitz, she witnesses the brutal murder of Russian prisoners. The sound of gunshots “crack open the night,” mingling with the prisoners’ cries as they collapse to the ground. In the midst of this horror, she begins to grasp the magnitude of her situation. Forced to wear the uniform of “these dead soldiers’ comrades,” Rena recognizes that the reason she and her younger sister, Danka, are imprisoned is different. “Our only crime,” she writes, “is that we were born.” 3 The dissonance between the world of her birth and this world of death fractures her sense of meaning, identity, and faith. Desperately she wishes to call upon God, but finds that “my lips are numb and my mouth is frozen open in disbelief.” 4 The rupture intensifies with the realization that Rena is unable to bear witness to what she has seen. Her voice no longer carries the authority of a human being. In this world of death, everything beyond a whisper can be destroyed in an instant. The radical dehumanization of Auschwitz convinces her “that no one is listening” and not even God can intervene. With time, life in Birkenau destroys even the inclination to reach out to God. After the harrowing experience of a daylong selection, she bitterly rejects the thought of praying or thanking God for saving her life: “How can I thank or praise a Creator who allows this to happen? There are five hundred of us, maybe a thousand left in the camp. This is not a miracle, to be alive—it is a tragedy. How can I praise the miracle that Danka and I live while thousands of our fellow girl-women prisoners are gassed and cremated just a few hundred meters from where we have to live?” 5 Human solidarity replaces traditional faith, human dignity eclipses biblical promise, and self-respect supersedes divine intervention in her struggle to remain human. Recognizing the humanity of “fellow girl-women prisoners” becomes counter-testimony to the routinized, anonymous, mass death to which they are subjected.

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Léa Levy’s experience of the Holocaust’s power to destroy “life before” is equally brutal and totalizing. When she arrived at the convent boarding school in 1942, her clothing and demeanor marked her as a wealthy, well-loved, and precocious five-year-old. Her initials decorate a lace-trimmed silk slip; a plaid dress of fine wool displays puffy sleeves and a white piqué collar; her small feet are well protected by black patent leather Mary Janes. Her sharp intelligence reveals itself the very next day when the convent school is subjected to a surprise inspection by a member of the French militia. With an air of complete confidence, Léa voluntarily solves a grammar problem in a class to which she has just been introduced. She so disarms the militiaman that he cuts his search short and leaves charmed by the little girl. The strength of Léa’s intellectual acumen never lessens, but her vivacious and impetuous spirit slowly withers, giving way to a despair broken only by occasional angry outbursts. The power of this despair reaches its height when, in 1945, at the age of eight, Léa is taken to Paris in a desperate attempt to find her missing parents. There she encounters a young survivor from the camps. He appears like a corpse to her, his “nocturnal eyes, which seemed to be all pupil, burned with a dull flame whose black light turned inward, as though a vision of hell had seared and reversed the lens, leaving only the inner surface intact and capable of sight.” 6 In one moment of negative revelation, he destroys her hope of ever finding her parents: “Gassed. Poisoned like rats. Burned in an oven. Turned into black smoke. Poof, your parents. Poof.” 7 After this encounter, Léa is haunted by the phantom presence of six million dead, overwhelmed by guilt for having escaped their fate. She seeks out an “endless parade of tortured shadows,” listening to radio reports of the atrocities, attending local “purification” trials, and searching out magazines with special issues devoted to Nazi crimes. Hidden deep within her bureau drawers are countless newspaper clippings of emaciated figures, half-charred bodies, “acres of human hair [and] mountains of teeth.” 8 Tragically, Léa’s rescuer-guardians remain blind to the Shoah’s impact on her psyche. Not until Bénédicte is forced to reveal Léa’s selfdestructive behavior do they acknowledge its toxic presence. By this time, the Shoah’s legacy of radical absence lies at the heart of Léa’s identity. Every aspect of her life before the Holocaust, from parents and family to religious heritage and national allegiance, is present through its absence, always eluding her while simultaneously asserting its claim upon her. Denied a place with her parents among the six million dead

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and unable to reconcile with a world rushing to forget them, Léa cannot discover a sustaining source of meaning, morality, or purpose. She forfeits her right to happiness, peace, and love in a desperate effort to “let herself be swallowed up by this other world that had engulfed and drowned all those living, breathing people.” 9 Bénédicte testifies to her friend’s shattered identity: “[Léa] said that all those bones dumped like that, into those mass graves—that there wasn’t anything human about them. And that since her body should have been there too, she wasn’t human either.” 10

The Turn to Autobiography and Gendered Analysis Against the fears of scholars such as Cynthia Ozick and Lucy Dawidowicz that feminism threatens to reduce Nazi antisemitism to the “banality” of sexism, thinkers such as Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman demonstrate convincingly that gendered analysis does more than simply “add” gender to Holocaust Studies. They rightly argue that as a category of analysis, it “enhances our understanding of all Jews during the Nazi era” (emphasis added). Accordingly, women’s gendered experiences are not confined to the particularities of women’s lives or treated as applicable only to women. Rather, gender is recognized, according to Ofer and Weitzman, as “only one component of the survivors’ total experience,” thus allowing gendered experiences to be probed from a universalist perspective. This is particularly important concerning analyses of suffering and survival during the Shoah. 11 Gelissen’s and Gille’s attention to gender illuminates in sharp—and horrifying—relief the multifaceted nature of Nazi racial antisemitism. Gendered analysis makes it clear that every Jew—male and female—was poised, knowingly or not, on the edge of a precipice, destined for extermination. Far from idealizing the responses of women or of men as they faced the abyss of humiliation, dehumanization, and murder, gendered analyses reveal the range of ethical concerns and moral standards the victims adopted. 12 Universal lessons are sought from both female and male experiences. Testimony is given to the unalterable disintegration of each victim’s life, while bearing witness to the virulent antisemitism which sought the murder of each individual Jew and the annihilation of the Jewish people as a whole. Within the toxic reality of genocide, each gender, separately and together, but always equally, testifies to the catastrophic behavioral consequences of antisemitic belief.

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In Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood, gender illuminates each girl’s immeasurable loss and fundamental estrangement from the nonwitnessing world. Within Auschwitz, normal physiological developments such as menstruation and the growth of body hair become a source of psychic pain, emotional distress, and physical torment. Rena’s feeling of being insecure and at risk intensifies with the continuation of her menses. She scrounges in the filthy, disease ridden lavatory for discarded squares of newspaper to control her flow of blood. Terrified that the blood will soak through her clothing, she describes herself as “completely self-conscious, afraid of what getting my period means in this place.” 13 The source of her terror is not simply the dread of public embarrassment. She knows that the stain of blood on her clothing will result in a beating and could determine her fate during a selection. Underscoring the motif of dehumanization and depersonalization, she prays that her period “will go away quickly and never return.” 14 The Shoah has successfully reduced the functions of the female body to a burden and a curse. Rena’s Promise also recounts the perverse shrewdness with which the Nazis used Judaism’s ideal of modesty against those who observed its demands. Every three weeks, on Sunday, the women are marched through the camp for a compulsory shaving of all their body hair by male prisoners. Standing outside, naked, they are lined up as Jewish men, “prisoners obeying orders, wait for [them], clippers in hand.” 15 Rena recalls that the German officers “parade back and forth looking at us as if we are interesting specimens in their insect collections. . . . What I wouldn’t give for a tap of hot water and a scrub brush, to wash the Nazis’ eyes from my flesh.” 16 Clinging with raw determination to her instinct for self-preservation, yet quaking with shame, Rena consciously represses all her emotions, until “it is only the flesh moving. I am gone.” Individual dissolution and psychic rupture have become acts of self-preservation; splitting off from herself is part of a desperate gamble not to lose herself, even though she is fully aware that there is no guarantee that spirit and body will reunite: “Sometimes it is the body that wants to survive, more than the spirit. There are days when the spirit has been sucked out and only time will tell if it will come back to feel again, come back to life.” 17 The incalculable cruelty of her existence makes the possibility of total psychic disintegration a less terrible choice. The role of gender plays out differently in Léa’s life. The ordeal of living without a clear sense of identity in the midst of a life-threatening environment leaves her completely detached from her body and its phys-

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ical needs, as well as from a sense of herself as a developing young woman. Léa does not care about her appearance, gives no notice to dragging hems, drooping socks, or snarled and lice-infested hair. After the terrifying encounter in Paris with the young survivor, her eyes “seemed inhabited by a dark, alien presence, perceptible only to [Léa’s] inward gaze.” 18 Despite the Gaillacs’ efforts to revive her sense of childish delight, never again is she the vivacious young girl filled with wonder and possessed by a fascination for the latest fashions. In fact, the situation worsens when Léa and Bénédicte move to Paris to begin their higher level studies. The impact of Léa and Bénédicte’s divergent experiences during the Holocaust grows sharper and more pronounced. Bénédicte Gaillac is the picture of health, with a clear complexion, beaming affectionate eyes, stylish hair cuts, and carefully manicured nails. She delights in Parisian music, art, and theater, dresses to show off her figure, and falls in love with a different man every week. Léa could not be more different. Baggy old clothes hide her breasts and hips, stockings with runs sag at her knees, and a “frizzy mop” of hair makes her “pale little face” seem “almost ghostly.” 19 Most telling is her complete lack of concern over the fact that she has not begun to menstruate by the age of eighteen. There is no space in Léa’s life for dreams like those of other young women her age. Stripped of her identity, deprived of her heritage, and abandoned by the post-Auschwitz world, she cannot envision the future that Bénédicte pursues. The Shoah has destroyed her sense of being “at home” in human society; the world’s postwar, selfwilled amnesia leaves her immune to the regenerative power of human relationships.

The Struggle for Ordinary Decency A careful reading of Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood reveals salient psychosocial, ethical and religious elements at play as Rena and Léa wrestle with the decision whether to engage in heinous acts of selfpreservation or risk the vulnerability of altruistic acts. Both narratives reject the depiction of women as “naturally” compassionate, self-sacrificing caregivers even in situations of radical extremity. 20 Rather, Gelissen and Gille lay bare Rena’s and Léa’s struggle to effect even a partial tikkun of the self and ordinary decency when faced with ethnic hatred and genocide. Each author probes the differing motives and reactions that determined her choices, especially when she found herself in anomic

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and highly dangerous situations that threatened to destroy her tenuous connections to self-respect, hope, and morality. The issues of identity and survival reach excruciating levels for Rena and Léa when their life experiences reinforce their belief that the world has ceased to care about them. Both girls experience themselves as radically Other, excluded from the bonds of human community, expelled from the moral universe of kindness, responsibility, and solace. Neither can believe any longer that the ideals of empathetic compassion, human respect, and benevolent action apply to her. Every person Rena and Léa encounter, every situation in which they find themselves, makes it clear that the world has no will to understand her anguish, protest her plight, or act on her behalf. During the third spring of her imprisonment, Rena is assigned to a laundry detail. With it comes access to better clothing, protection from inclement weather, and a slight increase in food rations. Equally important, it rekindles a sense of hope for a different future. One day, standing outside hanging up clothing, Rena watches a train pass by. She sees a woman, “bedecked in a white hat and white gloves,” looking at her through the window. 21 Clean and refined, “with her chin resting on her pristine wrist,” she appears unencumbered by worry and unburdened by responsibility. The war has not intruded on her life and the sight of concentration camp inmates does not unsettle her equilibrium. In fact, she does not even seem to see Rena; she “is looking at me,” Rena writes, “looking through me as if I were not there.” 22 The shock of her invisibility and the woman’s indifference to her plight crumbles Rena’s new found hope. Tears stream down her face as “the deluge inside” drenches her spirit. 23 This chance encounter brings a devastating truth fully into focus: others continue to have full, rich lives while she is stripped of everything meaningful. If a residue of compassion and concern still exists in the world, it does not extend to her. The innocence of her hope fractures into fragments. In the bowels of Auschwitz, there is no future of which to dream. The death of freedom, confraternity, and solidarity is announced by the smoke “belching” from the crematoria. Rena faces the harsh realization that even escape offers no solution; “we are Jews,” she writes, “and nobody is for us anymore.” 24 Near the end of her imprisonment, Rena is taken from Ravensbrück to Neüstadt Glewe. The terror of the crematorium and the smell of burning flesh are replaced by the horror of bodies, left outside, unburied, to decay in mounds. Daily she is marched past an ever increasing number

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Jewish women are forced to clear snow from the streets of Krakow, 1939–40. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

of corpses through the middle of town to its edge. Each morning the townspeople watch the prisoners’ procession, spitting at them, eyes glowering with hatred. The fact that they are digging a trench to protect the town from the Allied forces does nothing to mitigate the hatred or the behavior. The crowd reassembles each evening to spit upon them as they return to camp. “We are not human beings to them,” Rena writes, “we are lower than dogs.” 25 Public indifference and virulent antisemitism seal her conviction that she has been forgotten by a world which has already abandoned her. Léa’s story presents a different dimension of the Nazi assault upon identity and survival. She is enmeshed in the conflicting forces shaping France’s postwar memories, attitudes, and behaviors. The desire for a new world order which champions intellectual liberty, political freedom, and social equality competes with the wish to obtain justice for the war’s victims. The need to recover a sense of national pride clashes with the seemingly endless “procession of collaborators, profiteers, and informers.” The dissonance is exacerbated by the fact that the nation’s collective war memory excludes French traitors, racist antisemites, and religious collaborators. The power of this self-willed delusion increases exponentially with the silent approval of ecclesiastical leaders, political

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The deportation of women and children to an unidentified concentration camp in Yugoslavia, 1942. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

activists, and judicial officers. Léa’s estrangement deepens with each appeal for clemency and every commuted sentence. The disparity between her parents’ ignominious deaths and the ideological superficiality of communist political solutions, classical theological claims, and French judicial processes compels her to debunk French myths of an anti-collaborationist past. Every action is calculated to bear witness to her parents and the six million dead by exposing the world’s depraved complicity. In ninth grade she “publicly demolished, with exceptional spitefulness,” a classmate’s impassioned poem extolling “the nobility of the French people who had risen as one to drive the cruel Occupation forces from their native soil.” 26 Emphasizing the antisemitic and collaborationist bonds which united religion to culture and government, she remarks: “It’s funny, but when Monsignor Feltin celebrated his Te Deum in the cathedral in September of ‘44—you remember, Bénédicte, the nuns dragged us there, and everyone gave him an ovation—well, I saw the same faces there as the year before, at the ceremony in honor of Joan of Arc with Maréchal Pétain. So they’re the ones,

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the people who rose up en masse to boot the occupiers out of France, as our classmate says?” 27

The Rupture of Ethics and Faith Sanctification of life (kedushat hayim) is an all-embracing idea that lies at the heart of Gelissen’s and Gille’s narratives. For Rena and Léa, during the Shoah and after, this sanctification expresses itself in the struggle to achieve tikkun atzmi in the midst of a social order that denies their humanity. Each young woman is challenged to press this idea beyond mere physical survival and concentrate on the quality of her survival. She must assert her humanity—and that of every Jew—even if society turns its back and God remains silent. Sanctifying life becomes Rena’s and Léa’s vocation, as each strives to uphold her dignity even in the most inhumane circumstances. This resolve pits both girls against the Nazi doctrine which defines every Jew as the dread Other who threatens the future “racial well being” of the Third Reich. In Nazi Germany, social unity was conceived according to the dictates of a brutal and unforgiving ethic of “racial health” and “social worth.” Bolstered by eugenic racism and spurious teachings about hereditary characteristics, the Reich envisioned a future of culturally strong and racially perfected “German-blooded” human beings. These frugal, hardworking, and self-sacrificing individuals would embody (in a very literal sense) the Reich’s racial future, while Jews and other lebensunwertes leben (lives unworthy of life) incarnated the threat of racial suicide. 28 (I have discussed elsewhere the implications of this racist ideology for Jewish women.) Caught within the larger effort to ensure societal “racial health” throughout Germany as a whole, Rena’s and Léa’s identities as female and Jewish pose a specific and deadly threat to Nazi Germany’s “racial health.” As girls who will mature, they present the greatest danger because they may give birth, according to Nazi doctrine, to physically substandard, intellectually inferior, and morally degenerate individuals. Anti-natal legislation, compulsory sterilization, forced abortion, and infanticide were Nazi Germany’s answer to this dilemma. In the camps, Rena learns firsthand that nothing superseded the drive for racial redemption. Standing at attention during roll call, she is forced to watch as an entire orphanage marches past, five toddlers in each line and an armed SS guard and watchdog at every fifth line.

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Transfixed, she stares in disbelief, rage, and helplessness at “little faces buried in their toys, eyes . . . as big as saucers, lost as lambs.” 29 Feeling their “angelic” faces reflected within her heart, she tries to pray one last time, beseeching God for one sign that the children have not been forsaken. There is no answer, no sign, no intervention. Instead Rena is confronted by a female SS guard who recognizes the agony etched in Rena’s stricken face. Staring at her with cool and cruel eyes, she asks: “Where is your God now?” 30 At that moment, Rena knows that nothing will ever again be the same. The biblical promise of redemption disintegrates as smoke begins to rise from the chimneys. The inviolate sanctity of innocence and purity ruptures with “the smell of little children being incinerated.” 31 Léa’s arena is much more subtle in its denigration of the sanctity of human life. In France, the ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity are still publicly acclaimed, even though they have fallen victim to political rhetoric which praises justice but refuses responsibility, extolls freedom while rejecting obligation, and glorifies confraternity as it repudiates solidarity. The torrent of shallow, biased rhetoric directing the thoughts and actions of so many French citizens, including the elder Gaillacs and Bénédicte, overwhelms Léa. At home, around the dinner table, neither her skeptical reserve nor the Gaillacs’ memory of Nazi atrocities touches their unshakeable belief that justice will ultimately triumph for those who struggle on its behalf. Out in society, some of Bordeaux’s finest citizens trace the source of France’s postwar problems to the “central European ghetto” refugees or “strays,” as individuals such as Léa are referred to in private conversation. 32 Léa knows that their dreams for France’s future encompass neither the Holocaust’s six million dead nor an orphaned survivor of its victims. With a growing anger fueled by her unspeakable despair, Léa witnesses firsthand the steady erosion of France’s commitment to the war trials—amnesty laws are enacted and appeals for mercy are almost automatically granted. The strength of Léa’s inner resources finally shatters during one of the last trials scheduled at the military tribunal. Three former SS officers are accused of brutality, torture, the execution of hostages, and the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux, among whom were Léa’s parents. She is convinced that the trial will end with a death sentence, something “she was already anticipating with pleasure.” 33 As the days wear on, however, it becomes clear that this will not be the case. The lawyers effectively argue that the three had, at worst, “behaved like soldiers, only regretfully carrying out their painful duty.” 34 In the end, a

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guilty verdict is delivered, but the sentences are reduced to time already served in detention. Confronting the prisoners in the courtroom before the entire assembly, Léa yells with all her might: “Hey! You! What did you do with my mother and father?” 35 After a deathly silence, pandemonium fills the courthouse, but there is no change in the court’s ruling or the nation’s conscience. With this trial, Léa’s hope of recovering the memory of her life before hiding, before the Holocaust, dies forever, and with it vanishes every hope of rebuilding her shattered identity. The scope of the Gaillacs’ just social order does not and, she is convinced, never will, include her, her parents, or any of the six million dead.

Mending the Self in the Midst of the Holocaust Rena Kornreich Gelissen and Elisabeth Gille’s testimonies underscore the catastrophic power of Nazism’s genocidal assault. Virulent antisemitism fueled by racial hatred and a lethal sexism destroys each woman’s world, ineluctably reshaping her life, identity, and future. Yet neither young woman abandons all hope. Rather, each clings to her desire for tikkun atzmi, or self-mending. Fiercely faithful to her experience, each struggles to infuse it with meaning so that she may recover the remnants of her identity as a human being. In the midst of calculated cruelty and mind-numbing brutality, Rena seeks to restore a sense of dignity, self-worth, and decency. It becomes her only defense against the relentless humiliation and depravity which seeks to annihilate her fragile connection to anything human. Léa, for her part, refuses to abandon her personal relationship to the Shoah. The recovery of memory becomes her only means of preventing the total dissolution of self; fidelity to the six million dead is her continuing source of identity. For both, the act of self-mending signifies the possibility, however remote and fragile, of individual restoration and personal redemption. Rena draws upon every remaining fragment of strength to reclaim her right to dignity and respect. In the world of death and dehumanization, simple acts of self-care become acts of self-healing and reconstitution. No one act alone can effect the needed healing; even together they are no match for the Shoah’s murderous power. Yet Rena experiences each act as an act of healing that touches body, mind, and emotions. For example, she is haunted by the clean skin, polished boots, and crisp uniforms of the SS guards. By contrast, her body is a mass of red welts

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from bug bites and the rough wool of her uniform. Her hands are covered with “huge callouses,” while her feet “are too miserable to look at for long.” 36 The bleakness of Rena’s situation gives rise to a response. She resolves to do whatever she can to look neat and cared for. Braving the night cold, she places her pants underneath the filthy mattress in order to crease them; denied water, she uses her own saliva to clean her rotting shoes. These acts do not undo the devastation wrought by the Shoah, but that is not Rena’s intention. It is enough that they strengthen her resolve to remain human. Aware that her ability to stave off the forces of dehumanization is always tenuous, Rena actively searches out other sources of self-mending. The recovery of particular memories from her pre-Shoah life begins to play a role in her efforts to achieve a tikkun. For example, terrified by the moral disintegration of her fellow inmates, she recalls the important role which charity played in her parents’ lives. Food, clothing, and shelter were always given to those who knocked at their door on Friday, before the Sabbath. This memory challenges Rena profoundly. It prompts her to articulate a twofold conviction. First, her sole duty is to live as a human being. If she is to remain a human being, she must act as a human being, even in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Second, living as a human being means that caring for others is an obligation. Her identity as a human being commits her to compassionate action. The strength of Rena’s convictions is tested many times in Auschwitz. One of the most difficult challenges is precipitated by an encounter with a distant relative. Rena sacrifices her daily portion of bread to obtain medicine for this family member. She risks starvation even though she believes that this relative “will do anything to save herself but cares nothing for me.” 37 The encounter leaves her feeling used, hungry, and frightened, but she is also certain that her actions save her from becoming less than human. Claiming the freedom to choose how she responds to other human beings, she infuses her choice with ultimate meaning: “There is little we can avoid in Birkenau, but trying to act with a little dignity helps me, reminds me of home. . . . This is my legacy, to treat everyone with compassion.” 38 Léa’s route is once again very different from Rena’s, yet it has the same objective. Unable to reconcile herself with the image of Jews as helpless victims of the Nazis, she refuses to turn to traditional Judaism as a source of mending. She is equally estranged from the political ideologies of her day because their vision of a “new world order” does

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not include seeking justice on behalf of the Holocaust’s victims. The church offers no consolation because she remembers all too well the hypocrisy of its leaders and their willing collaboration with the Nazis. Tragically, the Gaillacs remain blind to the debilitating impact of the nation’s postwar amnesia and the moral bankruptcy exhibited during the war trials. At best, Jacqueline Gaillac, Bénédicte’s mother, senses the ever present absence eroding the core of Léa’s being: “That child with the ashen complexion . . . suddenly seemed to her no more than Bénédicte’s shadow. As though Léa needed the light shining from her friend to leave her own faint imprint on this earth. Or even as though she were already dead, and had been for a long, long time, ever since 1945, perhaps, and had only been kept artificially alive by the older girl’s energy and life force.” 39 Jacqueline’s short-sighted ideological convictions prevent her from responding effectively: Blind to the magnitude of her failure to embrace the plight of the Jews during the Shoah, she remains incapable of identifying with Léa’s plight afterward. Her misdirected concern only deepens Léa’s estrangement, and her shallow convictions about justice, power, and freedom intensify the rupture wounding Léa’s self-understanding. Desperate to identify an adequate alternative, Léa turns to the existential philosophers of her time with their twofold ideological focus: first, modernity’s moral bankruptcy, and second, the need for a practical commitment to the universal struggle against all forms of prejudice and racism, whether theological antisemitism, extreme nationalism, or ideological chauvinism. For the first time in her life, Léa feels connected to others who share her desire to bear witness and confront the experience of evil and innocent suffering. However there is yet another dimension to this inchoate experience of tikkun atzmi. An accidental but fortuitous encounter with a Jewish philosopher by the name of Vladimir Jankelevitch at the Sorbonne begins a tentative but real reexamination of her identity as a Jew. Jankelevitch renounces the legacy of Vichy France, condemns the collaboration trials, and rails against the growing culture of moral indifference, but more importantly he also refuses to “write off six million people and acquit their murderers.” 40 His passionate commitment attests to the possibility of a voluntary post-Auschwitz Jewish identity without, Léa believes, falling victim to the ideological blindness of the “true believers or the Zionists.” Jankelevitch’s witness spurs her to engage the issues of a postAuschwitz tikkun atzmi and tikkun olam. Fusing morality to an elusive

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but ever-present sense of memory, she seeks a path that will “eventually awaken in her echoes of some sense of belonging” while teaching her how to love others “without forgiving or forgetting.” 41 The complexity of the act of mending plays out on both the personal and transpersonal levels. Interweaving self-mending and world-mending, she embraces the demands of bearing witness to the memory of the six million dead and testifying to the world’s moral decay even as she strives to heal the rupture eroding her sense of meaning and purpose. The relationship between tikkun atzmi and tikkun olam assumes an ethical dimension: viewing Jewish identity through the prism of Auschwitz while illuminating the Shoah’s universal significance.

Conclusion: Self-Mending and Holocaust Legacy Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood are deeply moving testimonies of profound commitment to the act of mending in the midst of diabolical evil and moral bankruptcy. Clinging to a necessary hope while assaulted by absolute despair, Rena and Léa each bear witness to the painful and traumatizing experiences which stripped them of family, culture, and faith. The Holocaust ineluctably shapes the life of each young woman, making systematic dehumanization her constant companion, routinized evil her cultural ethos, and genocide her moral inheritance. This catastrophic event forms the self-identities of both Rena and Léa in two profoundly important ways: it becomes an irreducible part of their relationship to both religious and secular communities, and their efforts to repair the self and the world become their defining legacy. Thrust into the Shoah’s universe of racial antisemitism, ethnic hatred, and mass murder, Rena and Léa learn important lessons about inheriting the legacy of tikkun atzmi and tikkun olam and about the role played by the Holocaust in shaping Jewish identity. First, their experience illuminates the struggle to identify new sources of identity, morality, and belief during the Shoah and after. The Nazi genocidal campaign launched a massive assault on the traditional sources of Jewish identity, leaving Judaism and the Jewish people radically wounded. Rena and Léa represent those for whom the Shoah threatened to overthrow the tradition and its classical sources. In the midst of ruptured lives and shattered beliefs, the classical sources could no longer function as their primary foundation for identity formation, ethical decision making, or religious belief.

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Next, each account confirms the observation that the Holocaust has caused many Jews to view questions of identity through personal experience rather than archetypal norms. Personal experience replaced traditional sources as the “text” which illuminates one’s identity. Gelissen’s and Gille’s testimonies make it clear that while the Shoah provided the context for reconstructing traditional notions of identity, community, and unity, it did not offer any coherent content for the reconstruction process. The content had to be generated from personal experiences. Individual decisions about moral behavior and ethical commitment assumed the place held by theology in a pre-Shoah world. Traditional understandings of memory, community, and obligation were reinterpreted in light of the genocidal assault that took antisemitism, racism, and sexism to their extreme end. Finally, Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood reflect the centrality of autobiography in reconstructing Jewish identity after the Shoah. Throughout their respective ordeals, each woman’s story is the crucible through which questions of meaning, integrity, and purpose are pursued. Gelissen and Gille each presents her own life’s story as the “text” which determines what it means to be a Jew, a Jewish woman, and a Jewish female survivor after the Holocaust. Joined to the power of memory—a traditional source of Jewish identity—each author’s story shapes her understanding of what it means to remain a Jew in a world where antisemitic violence is not a thing of the past. Together, personal experience and memory transform the meaning and significance of tikkun atzmi, a concept deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, and shape Gelissen and Gille’s understanding of their respective experiences during the Shoah. Within the hell of the Holocaust and its aftermath, each author maintains that her fate was directly linked to her reinterpretation of tikkun atzmi. It alone offered a defense against the cataclysmic violence, racial antisemitism, and shallow morality that threatened to destroy her. In both narratives, Rena’s and Léa’s ability to reassert a fragile hold on their identity as human beings is directly affected by the ways in which they reinterpret the relationship between personal experience and memory. For Rena, the transformative power of tikkun atzmi is experienced in the recognition given by one human being to another; recognizing the humanity of another is simultaneously an act of self-mending. Within the context of the Holocaust, the glory of humanity is no longer reflected in its creation as the imago dei, but in the choice to live as the imago humanis. Léa experiences no such reprieve. Neither her relationship with her beloved friend, Bénédicte, nor the wit-

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ness of her rescuers can mend the ontic wound that pierces the core of her being. Trapped within a society that chooses not to remember, Léa cannot join her most significant human relationships to her vocation to bear witness to the Holocaust’s victims. Despite a desperate struggle to mend the anomie, loss, and grief that give her no rest, regaining a viable sense of self-worth or self-respect is beyond her reach. Gelissen’s and Gille’s autobiographies are each an act of tikkun which intertwines self-mending and world-mending in a dynamic and transformative relationship. As acts of mending, both accounts seek at least a partial repair of the cultural, psychic, and theological rupture which is the Shoah’s legacy. Notions of identity and morality are clearly bound to the Holocaust and reveal its continuing impact upon survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. Universal questions regarding innocent suffering, the nature of human responsibility, and the authentic meaning of solidarity reflect the tragedy experienced by the Shoah’s survivors as well as its continuing reverberations in the post-Auschwitz world. However, each testimony makes it clear that pursuing these questions for their own sake is not enough. They must lead to moral behavior, to ethical acts undertaken for the sake of one’s own humanity, the welfare of the victimized, and the memory of the murdered. Careful reading reveals that Rena’s Promise and Shadows of a Childhood never offer the hope that such acts will bring a resolution to the Holocaust and its continuing legacy. But each account inspires hope, by illuminating the possibility of at least a partial tikkun of both the self and the world, even in the midst of the Holocaust itself. The testimonies of Rena Kornreich Gelissen and Elisabeth Gille reject self-contempt, apathy, and nihilism as humanity’s final post-Auschwitz legacy. Each seeks instead tikkun that honors self-respect, chooses solidarity with the Shoah’s victims, and embraces the sanctity of human life, even in a world that has yet to acknowledge this legacy and promise to transmit it to future generations. 42

NOTES 1. Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), and Elisabeth Gille, Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and Friendship (New York: New Press, 1996).

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2. A gender-specific term referring to those female victims who were beyond recovery due to acute starvation and psychic exhaustion. Male victims were referred to as Muselmänner. 3. Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 73. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 191. 6. Gille, Shadows of a Childhood, 70. 7. Ibid., 72 8. Ibid., 96. 9. Ibid., 94. 10. Ibid., 109. 11. See Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Ofer and Weitzman are not alone in their use of gender as a category of analysis. Yael Danieli, Eva Fleischner, Marion A. Kaplan, and Sybil Milton have also made significant contributions to feminist studies. Efforts to develop this hermeneutic continue; see Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), and Esther Fuchs, ed., Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (New York: University Press of America, 1999). 12. Joan Ringelheim argues that gendered analysis is particularly important when examining issues such as suffering and survival during the Holocaust. Prompted by her own questions about the adequacy of her early research, Ringelheim initiated a critical analysis of cultural feminism, examining the ways in which this framework “change[s] respect for the stories of Jewish women into glorification.” I agree with her that interpreting women’s accounts as “inspiring stories” which reveal “female superiority” valorizes oppression and supersedes the reality of this catastrophic event, distorting its painful and traumatizing memory. For Ringelheim’s self-critique, see Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993). 13. Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 81. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Ibid., 139. 16. Ibid., 140. 17. Ibid., 141. 18. Elisabeth Gille, Shadows of a Childhood, 76. 19. Ibid., 125. 20. Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (ed. Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin [College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998]) examines the experiences of women health care providers during the Holocaust. Ritvo and Plotkin probe the full range of women’s behaviors and choices as they

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confront the nightmarish reality of Nazi “health care,” often with no expertise and little training. 21. Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 219. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 220. 24. Ibid., 221. 25. Ibid., 257. 26. Gille, Shadows of a Childhood, 89. 27. Ibid. 28. See Susan E. Nowak, “Dark Illuminations: Race, Gender, and Class during the Shoah,” Race, Gender, and Class 6:4 (1999): 24–40. 29. Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 135. 30. Ibid., 136 31. Ibid., 137. 32. Gille, Shadows of a Childhood, 112. 33. Ibid., 105. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 89. 37. Ibid., 149. 38. Ibid., 149–50. 39. Gille, Shadows of a Childhood, 125–26. 40. Ibid., 135. 41. Ibid., 136. 42. Alan L. Berger offers an insightful and detailed analysis of the intergenerational issues at play in the transmission of the Holocaust and its legacy. See Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (New York: State University Press of New York, 1997).

TEN

Anne Frank: The Cultivation of the Inspirational Victim Catherine A. Bernard

On May 5, 1985, a few hours before his infamous visit

with Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the German cemetery at Bitburg, 1 US President Ronald Reagan addressed a crowd at the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. As he commemorated the thirty thousand victims of Bergen-Belsen, Reagan sought to ameliorate the atmosphere of death and despair by invoking the name of Anne Frank: And too many of them knew that this was their fate. But that was not the end. Through it all was their faith and a spirit that moved their faith. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of a young girl who died here at Bergen-Belsen. For more than two years, Anne Frank and her family had hidden from the Nazis in a confined annex in Holland, where she kept a remarkably profound diary. Betrayed by an informant, Anne and her family were sent by freight car to Auschwitz and finally here to Bergen-Belsen. 2

Just three weeks before her capture, young Anne wrote these words: It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I

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Eight months later, this sparkling young life ended at Bergen-Belsen. Somewhere here lies Anne Frank. Everywhere here are memories— pulling us, touching us, making us understand that they can never be erased. Such memories take us where God intended his children to go—toward learning, toward healing, and, above all, toward redemption. They beckon us through the endless stretch of our heart to the knowing commitment that the life of each individual can change the world and make it better. 3

On the face of it, Reagan’s conclusion—that the story of Anne Frank reinforces faith, healing, and redemption—is unremarkable. Anne Frank’s extraordinary and universally celebrated diary has been invoked in this manner since its publication in 1947. We are accustomed to thinking of her in such celebratory terms; even her name, the author of a recent biography claims, “is the epitome of optimism and the will to live.” 4 But is it really appropriate to read a diary kept by a young woman in hiding from a brutal and murderous occupation regime, who died of starvation and disease, exclusively as “A Portrait in Courage” (the subtitle of a popular 1958 biography by Ernst Schnabel)? 5 It is possible to trace the route through which Anne Frank and her diary came to be so adopted and, this essay claims, manipulated by the popular imagination. Anne Frank is simultaneously the best and the least known of the female documentors of Nazi terror. Her diary has been translated into numerous languages and is included in school curricula around the world. Yet she has been, for the most part, gently but unambiguously dismissed as a figure not meriting serious academic examination. Therefore, although her name earns a level of recognition matched by few if any survivors of the Holocaust, little effort has been expended in analyzing her voice. Hers remains a life largely unexamined, except by Anne herself. For such a celebrated figure, the list of works to date on Anne Frank is relatively short. Works that examine Anne Frank and the diary critically (as compared to biographies of her) are surprisingly few. 6 Nowhere does the paucity of scholarly work on Anne Frank seem more surprising than in the relatively young and increasingly popular subcategory “women and the Holocaust.”

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In one of the first monographs devoted to the subject, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust, 7 author Marlene Heinemann devotes only a sentence to the most recognizable of Holocaust memoirs, writing that “Almost everyone knows Anne Frank, but the life of hiding which her diary describes has very little to do with the concentration camp and deaths which awaited Anne and her family, like millions of others.” 8 However, the themes which Heinemann identifies as female-centered—anatomy and destiny—resonate throughout the diary as Anne meditates on her relationship with her mother, on her emerging sexuality, and on the status of women in her culture; these themes are not so far removed from the experience of women in the camps, especially since many of the women there had very recently been adolescents just like Anne. Carol Rittner and John Roth are more blunt than Heinemann about the reason for excluding Anne Frank’s writings from their book, explaining that as far as their project is concerned, she simply is not a woman: “No part of the diary [of Anne Frank] appears here. We reasoned, first, that the diary is readily available, and second, that Different Voices ought to concentrate on writings by and about adult women. Full of feeling and wisdom though it is, Anne Frank’s youthful voice speaks differently enough from those resounding in these pages that it seemed best not to expand the category “women and the Holocaust” so broadly as to include it.” 9 Rittner and Roth do not do themselves a service by this exclusion. By refusing to acknowledge that Anne, fifteen and thus on the cusp of adulthood (for a child in normal circumstances—and one can imagine that a young person in Anne’s situation might have been forced to mature a good deal more rapidly), might be anything but “A Young Girl,” they participate in a reading of Anne Frank which has been instrumental in the erasure of the issue of gender from Holocaust Studies. It has been essential to isolate Anne from the impurity of adulthood in order to facilitate her function as a redemptive figure who provides a point of uplift in what would be otherwise, after all, an unremittingly depressing historical event. The speech by Reagan excerpted above is an example of the means by which Frank, whose force putatively comes from her identity as a historical figure, 10 has been emptied of her particularity and nudged into a metonymical role as both a palatable and a forgiving representative of the victims of fascism. 11 Until very recently any desire to examine the diary of Anne Frank as the complex expression of an actual young woman was eclipsed by

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the importance of maintaining Frank’s symbolic role as the ultimate innocent victim. And foremost, apparently, that maintenance has taken the form of eliminating reference to Anne’s femaleness and emerging sexuality, by suppressing the fact that Anne edited her own writings for future publication, and especially by reworking the document of a murdered girl into an inspirational text. Most of those familiar with Anne Frank would, like Reagan, be able to parrot the oft-quoted phrase “I still believe that people are really good at heart.” But few would recognize the following as a conviction she argued with equal fortitude: A question that has been raised more than once and that gives me no inner peace is why did so many nations in the past, and often still now, treat women as inferior to men? Everyone can agree how unjust this is, but that is not enough for me, I would also like to know the cause of the great injustice! Presumably man, thanks to his greater physical strength, achieved dominance over woman from the very start; man, who earns the money, who begets children, who may do what he wants. . . . It is stupid enough of women to have borne it all in silence for such a long time, since the more centuries this arrangement lasts, the more deeply rooted it becomes. Luckily schooling, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. In many countries, women have been granted equal rights; many people, particularly women, but also men, now realize for how long this state of affairs has been wrong, and modern women demand the right of complete independence! But that’s not all, respect for woman, that’s going to have to come as well! Generally, man is held in high esteem all over the world; why shouldn’t women have a share in this? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and celebrated, explorers acquire immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many will look upon woman as they would upon a soldier? . . . [W]omen suffer more pain, more illness and more misery than any war hero just from giving birth to children. And what reward does woman reap for coming successfully through all this pain? She is pushed to one side should she lose her figure through giving birth, her children soon leave her, her beauty passes. Women are much braver, much more courageous soldiers, struggling and enduring pain for the continuance of mankind, than all the freedom-fighting heroes with their big mouths!

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In no way do I mean by this that women should turn against childbearing, on the contrary, nature has made them like that and that is all to the good. I merely condemn all the men, and the whole system, that refuse ever to acknowledge what an important, arduous, and in the long run beautiful part women play in society. . . . [M]en must learn that birth has ceased to mean something natural and ordinary in those parts of the world we consider civilized. It’s very easy for men to talk, they don’t and will never have to bear the miseries of women! I believe that the idea that a woman’s duty is simply to bear children will change over the centuries to come and will make way for respect and admiration for one who without complaint and a lot of talk shoulders all these burdens! yours, Anne M. Frank. 12

At least until 1986, this passage was completely unfamiliar to anyone who read any edition of Diary of a Young Girl, and for good reason: although written by Anne on June 15, 1944, only two weeks before her final entry, it was deleted from the original Dutch edition and consequently from its translations. The rest of the entry of which it was part was retained. The reasons for this deletion are unclear, unless one accepts that for some reason these very adult and feminist statements were somehow seen as either incompatible with the purpose of the book or unacceptable to the reading public. Not until 1986, when the critical edition of the diary was published in the Netherlands (the English translation appeared in 1989), was this passage available. Even then, it was not really accessible to the general reading public until the much more readable (and much less expensive) definitive edition was published in 1995. The new editions revealed that Anne Frank, while in hiding, actually edited her own diary for postwar publication. They also made plain that the diary published in 1947 was redacted from the originals and from Anne’s partially completed manuscript, with sometimes extensive editing not only by Otto Frank, her father, but also by his colleagues and, in some cases, by translators. In many cases, deletions in the published version followed deletions Anne herself had indicated, but in some cases, often significantly, they did not. Upon reviewing the nature of Anne’s own deletions, which were mostly items that she felt were overly personal or petty (such as negative remarks about her classmates written when she was thirteen), it seems unlikely that she would not have retained the above passage, especially since she wrote it concurrently with

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her editing. Perhaps more startling, virtually all the references both to Anne’s plans to publish her diary as well as to a series of short stories she was writing based on her wartime experiences were also deleted. Anne Frank began to edit her diary in response to a March 28, 1944, address by exiled Minister of Education, Art, and Science Gerrit Bolkstein, delivered to the Dutch nation on Radio Oranje: History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory. 13

The next day, Anne wrote, “Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. . . . Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annexe.’ The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.” 14 By May 11, her consideration of the idea had taken on a much more serious tone, and she wrote that: “You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer. Whether these leanings towards greatness (or insanity?) will ever materialize remains to be seen, but I certainly have the subjects in my mind. In any case, I want to publish a book entitled Het Achterhuis [the Attic/Secret Annexe] after the war. Whether I shall succeed or not I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help.” 15 And finally, in a remark also deleted from previously published versions of the diary, she wrote on May 20 that “after a good deal of reflection I have started my ‘Achterhuis,’ in my head it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.” 16 It is reasonable to assume that subsequent entries were made with the idea of publication in mind, and that therefore the entry of June 15, with all its passion and vitality, would be one Anne would have wanted included. Why it was not included—and, moreover, why the evidence that Anne Frank was aware and desirous of the possibility of her diary’s publication has been suppressed—is unresolved. 17 At this point, some information about the diary’s publication history and its initial critical reception may serve to begin to answer these

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questions. The diary was left behind when the Franks’ Secret Annexe was raided on August 4, 1944, and it was rescued and hidden by family friend Miep Gies. Gies actually recovered three separate exercise books and some loose sheets, together containing Anne’s entries from her thirteenth birthday in June of 1942 up through her last entry on August 1, 1944. Approximately a year later, after Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only surviving member of the family, had returned to Amsterdam, Gies handed Anne’s papers over to him. He immediately began to edit the diaries into a single manuscript and seek out a publisher. As mentioned, Otto Frank did not merely copy out the diaries; he deleted items he felt were offensive to his dead wife or to other third parties, as well as items which he “felt would be of little interest,” a point which begs clarification. 18 Otto Frank was unsuccessful in finding a publisher for his daughter’s diary until 1946, when the eminent Dutch historian Jan Romein read the manuscript and wrote an article about it in the newspaper Het Parool, entitled “A Child’s Voice”: By chance a diary written during the war years has come into my possession. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation already holds some two hundred similar diaries, but I should be very much surprised if there were another one as lucid, as intelligent, and at the same time as natural. . . . The way [Anne Frank] died is in any case not important. What matters far more is that her young life was willfully cut short by a system whose witless barbarity we swore never to forget or forgive while it still raged, but which, now that it belongs to the past, we are already busily, if not forgiving, then forgetting, which ultimately comes to the same thing. To me, however, this apparently unconsequential [sic ] diary, this “de profundis” stammered out in a child’s voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together. To me the fate of this Jewish girl epitomizes the worst crime perpetrated by everlastingly abominable minds. For the worst crime is not the destruction of life and culture as such—these could also fall victim to a culture-creating revolution—but the throttling of the sources of culture, the destruction of life and talent for the mere sake of mindless destructiveness. . . . That this girl could have been abducted and murdered proves to me that we have lost the fight against human bestiality. 19

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Shortly after Romein’s article appeared, Frank was besieged by publishers. The first edition of the diary, entitled, as Anne had wished, Het Achterhuis, was published by the Dutch house Contact a year later. But what is notable, especially in comparison to the unanimously celebratory tone of the reviews that would appear and set the standard for subsequent characterizations of the diary, is the anger and despair Romein expresses. In his article “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” Alvin H. Rosenfeld elaborates: What is remarkable about [Romein’s] statement is its date: April 1946. The war had ended less than a year before, and yet, as is obvious from Jan Romein’s downcast words, the question of memory was already a worried one; indeed, in terms of its outcome, it may already have been a lost one. . . . Given this sense of things, he read Anne Frank’s diary in the only way he could, as an admonitory text. The book’s youthful author, after all, had been murdered by the Nazis, and her death appeared to him as a warning of further devastations to come unless the spirit of nihilism unleashed by Nazism could be permanently overcome. Romein recognized Anne Frank’s precocious talent, to be sure, but for all of that he found nothing in her diary that transcended his sharp sense of her horrible end and the monstrous system that destroyed her. 20

Very rapidly, however, it would be established that the message of the diary was one far different than that with which Romein had identified. That transformation is epitomized by early reviews of the book, which rhapsodized that Het Achterhuis was “a miracle,” “uniquely tragic,” and “transcends the misery so recently [in 1947] behind us”; it was a “moral testament” and “a human document of great clarity and honesty,” and, it was stressed, “by no means a war document as such . . . [but] purely and simply the diary of an adolescent girl.” 21 Whereas Romein felt compelled to reflect upon Anne Frank’s brutal murder, his colleague Henri van Praag felt that Anne’s writings, and Anne herself, inspired contemplation of the ideals of a moral life: How does it happen that the diary of a child has had such an extraordinary effect on mankind? The answer is, simply that a child is the symbol of human perfection and purity. As Christ says in the gospel, unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. And the Chinese sage Lao-tse also exhorts us to become like children again.

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He who does not lose his child’s heart can hope for a better world where peace and justice will prevail. . . . Anne Frank inspires us to keep our child’s heart. 22

What happened, in short, is that the tortured reading Romein gleaned from the diary was soon replaced entirely by the popular conception of the Diary of Anne Frank as an inspirational text. Despite the periodic appearance of some important challenges, this interpretation has held to this day. Anne herself was transformed into an empty vessel, her voice glorified as pure, innocent, completely unblemished. To read the forewords which accompanied the first translated editions—The Diary of a Young Girl in English, Das Tagebüch der Anne Frank in German, Journal de Anne Frank in French—is to begin to understand the function of this consecrated and inviolate Anne; in each foreword she is made to serve for each nation as a flattering mirror image of itself. To Eleanor Roosevelt, this young girl, “not afraid of telling the truth,” is a symbol of American pluck; 23 for the triumphant, always unconventional French, her unusual and spirited observations defy all that is “dusty and discolored”; 24 for the wary and weary Germans, Anne’s “cool, keen observation of human beings, and her resolve to be alert to the comic element in even the worst situations, these are familiar to us: they belong to the armor worn by our generation.” 25 Thus stripped and reassembled, Anne was to serve as a redemptive figure for the suffering masses, an assurance that despite the evidence of the Holocaust, humanity was fundamentally good, that the devastation wreaked by the Nazis was but a momentary lapse in the ultimate civilizing trajectory of Western culture. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, was nearly alone among commentators in his public distaste for the Anne Frank phenomenon. In 1960 he wrote that “The universal success of The Diary of Anne Frank suggests how much the tendency to deny the reality of the camps is still with us, while her story itself demonstrates how such denial can hasten our own destruction.” 26 Bettelheim claimed that the Franks’ decision to hide together, as a family, amounted to an attempt to go on with “life as usual”; by refusing to accept the extent to which evil had infested their world, they perpetrated an act of willful blindness that contributed as much to their fate as did Nazi persecution. Bettleheim singled out for particular attack Anne’s famous words about the goodness of all men: If all men are basically good—if going on with intimate family living, no matter what else, is what is to be most admired—then indeed we can all

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Women in the barracks of the newly liberated Auschwitz concentration camp, January 27, 1945. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

go on with life as usual and forget about Auschwitz. Except that Anne Frank died because her parents could not get themselves to believe in Auschwitz. And her story found wide acclaim because for us too, it denies implicitly that Auschwitz never existed. If all men are good, there was never an Auschwitz. 27

As scholar Naomi Seidman notes, Bettelheim’s furor is misplaced and amounts, at the very least, to what is known as “blaming the victim.” 28 The Franks’ choice to hide as a family indeed may have been illogical, but in Holland, where fewer than twenty percent of Jews ultimately survived under one of the most brutal of the occupation regimes, the question of logic had become untenable. Hannah Arendt supplied a profound and succinct answer to Bettelheim’s accusations in a letter to the Jewish quarterly Midstream in 1962: Mr. Bettelheim’s position in this respect bears a striking resemblance to the Prosecutor’s attitude in the Eichmann trial. You will remember that Mr. Hausner asked witness after witness, survivors of extermination camps: Why did you not resist? Why did you not rebel? This question

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Corpses of women piled upon the floor of Block 11, Birkenau, February 1945. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

has been taken very seriously by reporters and has caused endless discussions in Israel and elsewhere. In point of fact, it was a silly question. Why were there no rebellions in Russian concentration camps prior to Stalin’s death? Why did the Russian peasants, deported by the million, not resist? It is as though people have forgotten what terror means, and that there exist things which are considerably worse than death. 29

Still, Bettelheim’s aversion as a survivor to this saccharine version of Anne is understandable; moreover, it points to the degree to which the adaptations of the diary by the American entertainment industry came to be as authoritative as their source. The 1955 stage play by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett and the film version of the play released in 1959 were instrumental in interpreting Anne’s writings according to a universalist ethic. Public perception of the writings of Anne Frank have been shaped as much by the enormously successful play and movie versions of the diary as by the diary itself—perhaps more so. Even Bettelheim noted that his objections were based not on “what actually happened to the Frank family—only on the account given in Anne’s diary

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and in the play and movie based on it, ” 30 an explanation that fails to distinguish between the degrees of accuracy manifested by a historical document and by its fictionalizations. Indeed, the adaptations of the diary differ significantly from their source in terms of focus and characterization. Meyer Levin, who sued after his own stage adaptation was rejected by Otto Frank, devotes many bitter words of his aptly-titled memoir, The Obsession, to descriptions of how Anne’s musings were deprived of their Jewishness in order to guarantee their appeal to a general (read: gentile) audience. Judith E. Doneson contends that this step was taken in accordance with the assimilationist ideals of the 1950s, ironically resulting in simplified characters that contributed, if unintentionally, to conventional antisemitic stereotypes of the inhabitants of the Secret Annexe as nervous, weak Jews at the mercy of their courageous Christian friends. 31 The exception, of course, is Anne herself, whose strong awareness of herself as a Jew and a woman is replaced by an irrepressibly optimistic and entirely lovable childlike figure whose triumphant final declaration— that, of course, she still believes people good at heart—banishes the feelings of horror and fright that might have overcome the audience upon learning of her cruel end. That this line “does not appear in the diary in anything like the climactic role it is made to assume in the play,” 32 and that “As Lawrence Langer has written, this line, ‘floating over the audience like a benediction assuring grace after momentary gloom, is the least appropriate epitaph conceivable for the millions of victims and thousands of survivors of Nazi genocide,’ ” 33 has not altered the tendencies of enormously influential speechifiers such as Ronald Reagan. It is useless to point out that Anne wrote these words long before she experienced Auschwitz; at any rate, Auschwitz is not an evident part of the universe to which the adaptations refer. In 1993, a full forty-six years after the diary was first published, Berteke Waaldijk’s “Reading Anne Frank as a Woman” broke new ground by questioning the degree to which Anne’s specific identity as a woman has been underrepresented. Waaldiji’s article focuses in part on the differences between the three versions of the diary: the unabridged, the one containing Anne’s own revisions, and the one finally published. She concludes that “Although the differences may be negligible from the point of view of the political and judicial claims of authenticity,” in the face of which the critical edition in fact was compiled, “they are extremely significant for readers interested in Anne Frank as a woman writer.” 34 Waaldijk finds that in most cases, the passages removed dealt directly with aspects of Anne’s experiences as a woman: “They have to do

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with her body, menstruation and sexuality, her conversations with Peter about sex, and her relationship with her mother.” 35 The remarks Anne had made about her mother were deleted by Otto Frank exclusively. Waaldijk claims that within the diary these observations were generally a manifestation of Anne’s normal adolescent rebellion against her mother; the separation Anne desired could not be physically achieved while her family was in hiding, and she compensated by articulating, sometimes harshly, a mental distance from her mother. That Otto Frank could not tolerate the publication of these passages so shortly after the murder of his wife is understandable. Yet by censoring Anne’s complex relationship with her mother, he also undoubtedly shielded an important part of her from the reader. Both Anne and her father deleted various passages concerning Anne’s sexuality. For example, Anne chose to leave out of her rewritten version a one-page description of her genitals. “Because Anne Frank never finished her editing,” Waaldijk explains, “we cannot be sure that would not have resurfaced in some other form, but it would clearly be wrong to picture her only as the object of silencing.” 36 The difference, however, between the elimination of Anne’s sexuality from the popular portrayals of her diary and her own self-censorship is this: Whereas overt references to Anne’s sexuality were eliminated by, for example, P. de Neve, the managing director of Contact, because they were felt to be offensive, and by Goodrich and Hackett because they interfered with the stylization of Anne as the ultimate childlike innocent, Anne removed passages because she felt they made her appear immature. A passage composed on October 22, 1942, in which thirteen-year-old Anne expresses her impatience for the onset of menarche, was deleted in both Anne’s and the published version; in a note to the page penned on January 22, 1944, Anne writes, in a tone of embarrassed dismay, “I shall never be able to write such things again!” 37 She takes advantage, that same day, of a page she had left blank in her first diary to elaborate: It was stupid of me to have left all these lovely pages blank, but perhaps it’ll be all to the good if I am now able to put down my thoughts in general about what I have written. When I look over my diary today, 1½ years on, I cannot believe that I was ever such an innocent young thing. I cannot help but realize that no matter how much I should like to, I can never be like that again. I still understand those moods, those remarks about Margot, Mummy and Daddy so well that I might have written them yesterday,

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Catherine A. Bernard but I no longer understand how I could write so freely about other things. I really blush with shame when I read the pages dealing with subjects that I’d much better have left to the imagination. I put it all down so bluntly! But enough of that. 38

Anne ultimately deleted these two notes to herself as well, as did her father. What controversy there has been about the diary has been centered, in fact, upon Anne’s descriptions of her emerging sexuality. As recently as 1982, the book was challenged in a Virginia school by parents who complained that the book was offensive due to its sexual content. 39 To Ditlieb Felderer, whose tract Anne Frank’s Diary—A Hoax was one of the challenges to the diary’s authenticity (and by extension to the historicity of the Holocaust itself) that the critical edition was published to answer, both the mature nature of Anne’s writing and the mere existence of her sexuality were cause for doubt: At the end [of the official Anne Frank Foundation Amsterdam brochure], we are finally shown an excerpt purporting to belong to Anne Frank, then fifteen years old. Somehow this excerpt, the only one given in the brochure, does not fit our conception of a girl at that age. [The passage to which Felderer refers is identical to that quoted by Reagan at Bergen-Belsen.] Another matter which strikes the reader is that the diary is not the type of story one would want one’s own child to write. It is not a KIND story. It is not the sign of a healthy child. Indeed it leaves the air of being a product of someone who tries to invent a child’s mind but is unable to do so, sprinkling it with “sexy” portions to sell the story. . . . We cannot make out why a girl living under these circumstances would be preoccupied with all these “love affairs” at such tender age. In today’s promiscuous society it may be an ordinary thing but not during the war. . . . Apparently the “sexy” portions were too much even for some Jews to stomach, and one of the first, if not the only group, to voice their objections against the diary, were some Orthodox Jews who felt it gave the Jews a bad image. A proper girl would not act in such a way. Whether their objections were based on true moral grounds or for fear that the story was letting the cat out of the bag may be debatable. Talmudic sources are certainly not foreign to perverse sex. 40

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At first glance, the blatant antisemitism of revisionists such as Felderer (whose publishing house, Bible Researcher, was also responsible for such titles as Zionism the Hidden Tyranny) may seem to have no connection with the adoration most express for Anne Frank. Yet the hateful intolerance of one finds a friend, unfortunately, in the self-protective blindness of the other. Felderer also writes that “We find it exceedingly difficult to believe that a healthy girl at her age can be so possessed with hate [for the Germans].” 41 Apparently, so did those who accompanied the transformation of Anne’s diary into its published and adapted forms. In the critical edition, editor Gerrold van der Stroom remarks at length on the degree to which the German translator, Anneliese Schutz, took it upon herself to edit out some of Anne’s more anti-German sentiments: The explanation that to those listening to the radio in the Annexe “there were no forbidden stations with the proviso that it was understood that only exceptionally could one listen to German stations, for instance to hear classical music and the like,” was omitted from the German version. . . . The Dutch: “And indeed, there is no greater hostility than exists between Germans and Jews,” became in German: “And there is no greater hostility in the world than between these Germans and Jews!” . . . The rule that people in the Annexe were required “to speak softly at all times, in any civilized language, therefore not in German,” became in translation: “Alle Kultursprachen . . . aber leise!!! [All civilized languages . . . but softly!!!].” 42

Alvin H. Rosenfeld informs us that Goodrich and Hackett also took pains to minimize Anne’s very understandable animosity toward the Germans: Peering out of her hideaway windows, for instance, Anne Frank saw and recorded the brutality of the German occupation (entry of November 19, 1942): “Evening after evening the green and gray army lorries trundle past. The Germans ring at every front door to inquire if there are any Jews living in the house. If there are, then the whole family has to go at once. If they don’t find any, they go on to the next house. No one has a chance of evading them unless one goes into hiding. . . . It seems like the slave hunts of olden times. But it’s certainly no joke; it’s much too tragic for that. In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see rows of

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Catherine A. Bernard good innocent people accompanied by crying children, walking on and on . . . bullied and knocked about until they almost drop. No one is spared—old people, babies, expectant mothers, the sick—each and all join in the march of death.” . . . [N]o such passage as the one just quoted appears in the stage play. 43

Indeed, no such passage appears in either the play or the film; it would be fundamentally at odds with the “indestructibly affirmative” 44 Anne the adaptations labored to create. If this inability to cope with Anne’s complexity marks a reluctance to face both the questions she posed and the answers suggested by her fate, then perhaps it is not, after all, so far removed from Felderer’s desire to whitewash the Holocaust and turn it into a benign and vastly exaggerated moment in history. In short, the suppression of different aspects of the real Anne Frank facilitated, and in fact may have been necessary in, her transformation into a idealized figure who served to sweeten the bitter cup of the Shoah. With the deletion of the details pertaining to Anne’s complex relationship with her mother, the passages regarding her sexual awakening, and especially her observations of the misogyny of her society, many of the references to Anne’s womanhood were lost; this made it all the easier to relegate Anne Frank to the easily manipulated role of a child. Both Anne’s painful awareness of the fate the Nazis had designed for her as well as her drive to become a writer, expressed with force and fluency, point to a mind that had become disillusioned and longed to describe the world in its own terms. Many of these observations, too, were altered or deleted, permitting “the reduction of Anne Frank to a symbol of moral and intellectual convenience,” 45 a mechanism for easy forgiveness. It is highly ironic that the public has been prevented from knowing Anne as a woman or as a mature writer, because she saw these two aspects of herself as intricately related. The rejection of her mother and of her mother’s role as a bourgeois housewife was closely linked to Anne’s literary ambitions. As Waaldijk explains, and as is evident in the entry of April 4, 1944, quoted below, “Anne’s wish to lead the life of a writer coincides with her desire to lead a better life than that of her mother”: 46 And now it’s all over. I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the “Secret Annexe”

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are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen. I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work, I know myself what is and is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is. . . . And if I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself. But I want to get on; I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. v.P. 47 and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten, I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to! I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me! 48

Recently it seems that new perspectives are, at long last, seeping into popular opinion. In “Who Owns Anne Frank?” published in the October 6, 1997, issue of the New Yorker, novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick encapsulated many of the points I have made or alluded to others making, albeit in a more strident and angry tone. 49 Posing the title question, Ozick condemns the appropriation of Anne Frank, whether by Goodrich and Hackett in the name of a universalist ideal or by Meyer Levin to represent specifically Jewish martyrdom. What Ozick does not note is that appropriation often also goes under the name of identification or empathy, another new manifestation of morality. Given the impossibility of going back in time to intercede in past events and the difficulty of making the connections necessary to take action in the present, activist tendencies are turned inward, taking the form of identification with victimization. As Ian Buruma astutely observed in a New York Review of Books article published shortly after Ozick’s New Yorker article, “the tendency, not only of Jews but of many others as well, to identify with suffering itself, to, as it were, gain virtue from vicarious victimhood, is our modern form of sentimentalism.” 50 In her article, Ozick examines Love, Otto, a recently published correspondence between Otto Frank and his young admirer Cara Wilson. Ozick sharply condemns Wilson for daring to identify with Anne Frank (and Otto Frank for succumbing to and even encouraging Wilson’s epistolary assaults). But what Ozick sees as Wilson’s shameless audacity— presuming to identify with a “hunted child in hiding” 51—is in part the lesson of an identity politics that glorifies suffering and defines authen-

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ticity within these parameters. If one is not a victim or the direct recipient of a legacy of victimhood, one can align with such a legacy through identification, as Buruma describes: “Some Chinese-American groups talk about the Nanking Massacre of 1937 as though this Japanese atrocity were the key element of their patrimony. African-Americans, with more justification, talk about slavery, Armenians about the Turks. And Serbs go on about Kosovo. ”52 Buruma’s point is not that these atrocities do not deserve study and remembrance but rather that this sort of idealization of collective victimhood is not exactly a healthy basis for cultural identity. As Joan Miriam Ringelheim concluded in her searing essay, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research”: “Oppression does not make people better. Oppression makes people oppressed.” 53 Those who fail to recognize this salient fact run the risk of glorifying suffering. Unfortunately, this point is overlooked in the agenda behind identity politics: identification presumes the ability to identify, and points to something that can be labeled “authenticity,” which is immune from criticism by the “inauthentic” (which, in turn, describes anyone making such criticism). In a 1995 New York Times review of the newly issued definitive edition, Patricia Hampl mentions Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer as a manifestation of our natural desire to invent escape fantasies for Anne Frank. “It is unthinkable and disorienting,” she writes, “to know that this life was crushed.” 54 Her comment completely misstates the point of Roth’s novel. The Ghost Writer covers a weekend in 1956 spent by up-and-coming young writer Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s famous alter ego, at the home of his idol, the reclusive novelist E. I. Lonoff. Also staying at the house is a dark, lovely young woman, Amy Bellette, who seems to be a livein protégée and would-be lover of Lonoff’s. Forced by a snowstorm to spend the night, Nathan lies awake in Lonoff’s study and imagines that Amy, on the strength of her mysterious background and her “fetching accent,” 55 is in fact Anne Frank. The fantasy that she still lives is, on the part of Roth’s protagonist, an entirely self-serving fantasy: married to Anne Frank, Nathan imagines, he could write his sarcastic and pointed portrayals of his American Jewish cultural milieu with impunity. He envisions the reaction of his father, who recently accused Nathan of playing to antisemitic stereotypes with a particularly acerbic story about an embarrassing familial financial dispute: “Anne, says my father—the Anne? Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken we have been!” 56 Indeed, who else could, by her very presence, legitimate whatever Nathan chooses to write? Chosen and

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loved by none other than Anne Frank, Nathan would be transformed instantly from troublesome black sheep to archetypal good son. Roth’s story is an example of how effortless it has been for all sorts of people to imagine themselves as Anne. The Ghost Writer features a self-conscious triple appropriation, whereby Roth invents Nathan, who invents Amy believing that she is Anne. Ian Buruma believes that Levin’s troubles arise when he begins to sense a privileged knowledge of what Anne would have wanted: “More and more, he began to see himself as Anne’s alter ego, or even as Anne herself. . . . [Writing to Otto Frank, she says,] ‘Oh how your daughter would weep for the evil use to which you have allowed her work to be put.’ ” 57 Ozick’s distaste for Cara Wilson arises because Wilson seems to imagine that she has a perfect right to identify with Anne and to correspond intimately with Anne’s father. In turn, Ozick’s uncritical self-righteousness implies that Ozick herself feels some ability to speak for Anne, her “hunted child in hiding.” Ultimately, there is no room in the world for a living Anne Frank: the uses to which her diary and her persona have been put require her to be dead. Even Nathan Zuckerman’s indulgent late-night reverie acknowledges this fact in an impassioned (imaginary) speech by Amy/Anne: “ ‘They weep for me,’ ” said Amy, ‘they pity me / they pray for me; they beg my forgiveness. I am the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It is too late to be alive now. I am a saint.’“ 58 It will continue to be difficult to acknowledge the use and misuse to which Anne Frank has been put and to attempt to look critically at the idolization of her. The unthinking tendency toward veneration continues, as Benjamin R. Barber observed in response to a review of Melissa Müller’s biography: “In an otherwise reasonable review . . . Jonathan Rosen makes the remarkable claim that Müller’s portrait ‘of Anne dying—emaciated, covered with sores, naked except for a filthy blanket—makes it impossible to mistake her for the eternal image of defiant survival she has become.’ How did he think we imagined she died? Covered in linens? Skin of pure alabaster? Pleasantly plump?” 59 Nonetheless, the scholarly community must step back and look carefully at what we continue to do with Anne Frank. Are we attempting to restore her or are we merely using her conveniently malleable persona once again to represent another set of ideals, replacing one invocation with another? Moreover, the question remains to what extent the popularization and valorization of Anne Frank has had an impact on other women writers of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was and continues to be blatantly denied status as a woman; this coincides disquietingly with the

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pressure to omit or minimize the importance of the question of gender in critical works about the Holocaust and suggests that Anne Frank may have left behind a legacy with which she would not be content. Finally, we should wonder whether the enormous critical and commercial success of Anne Frank’s diary has had anything to do with the fact that the majority of women’s literary contributions to studies of the Holocaust are in the form of diaries or memoirs. The diary, after all, seems to be a perfect expression of the role to which women have been relegated time and time again: it is personal, emotional, unobtrusive, spontaneous, and without “serious” literary pretensions. The idealizations of Anne Frank as a symbol of gentle forgiveness or as a touchstone for identification with the oppressed of the world do not challenge this role. Anne Frank herself ventured far outside these guidelines, but she was posthumously forced back into them.

NOTES 1. Where, as was noted by many US and German Jewish organizations and by the US Congress, but apparently not by Reagan, several dozen SS are buried. The visit to Bergen-Belsen was arranged hastily by Reagan and Kohl as a conciliatory gesture to those who protested Reagan’s visit to a Nazi graveyard. See Ilya Levkov, ed., Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German and Jewish History (New York: Shapolsky, 1987); Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 2. In fact, only Anne and her sister Margot went to Bergen-Belsen, in March of 1945 (some time after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army). Both died there, of starvation and typhus. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz on January 6, 1945; Otto Frank, who remained in Auschwitz until the end of the war, survived. Peter van Pels (van Dann in the published version of the diary) died at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945; his father, at Auschwitz on September 6, 1944; his mother, at Terezin (Theresienstadt) in the spring of 1945. Dr. Pfeffer, aka Dr. Dussel, died at Neuengamme on December 12, 1944. 3. Levkov, Bitburg and Beyond, 134; Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 255. 4. Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Biography, trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1998), 8. 5. See Ernst Schnabel, Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958). 6. A 2001 Library of Congress search turns up four works containing critical evaluations of the diary and its impact, all published within the last few years. See

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Hyman Aaron Enzer and Sandra Slotaroff-Enzer, eds., Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Denise de Costa, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum: Inscribing Spirituality and Sexuality, trans. Mischa F. C. Hoynick and Robert E. Chesal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Carol Rittner, ed., Anne Frank in the World: Essays and Reflections (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 7. The subcategory “Women and the Holocaust” did not merit a mention in the exhaustive Bibliography on Holocaust Literature edited by Abraham J. and Hershel Edelheit until the publication of volume two of its 1990 supplement. Until very recently, this was an unpopular subject, and one severely criticized by such prominent Jewish women writers as Hannah Arendt, Cynthia Ozick, and Helen Fagin. See Catherine A. Bernard, “ ‘tell him that I’: Women Writing the Holocaust,” Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism 2.1 (2000), September 30, 2001 . Beginning in the early 1990s, however, there has been a relative explosion of books on the subject. See, for example, Esther Fuchs, ed., Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999); S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Dalia Ofer and Leonore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998); Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); R. Ruth Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993); and essays by Myrna Goldenberg, Abigail Rosenthal, and Joan Ringelheim in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottleib (New York: Paulist Press, 1990). Despite this spate of titles, it should be noted that the subject remains relatively unexplored terrain. A search in the Library of Congress yields the following results: “Catholic[s] and Holocaust”— 45 titles; “children and Holocaust”—471 titles; “women and Holocaust”— 122 titles. (The total number of works indexed by the subject “Holocaust” is 3,493.) 8. Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986) 1. 9. Rittner and Roth, eds., Different Voices, xii.

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10. As exemplified by this speech by the mayor of Amsterdam, Ed van Thijn, presenting the Anne Frank literature prize in 1985: “[Anne Frank is] not a symbol in an abstract sense, far away from reality: no, she is a symbol because she reflects reality, because she was just a girl of fourteen, fifteen years old. . . . She made the incomprehensible story of the Second World War comprehensible.” 11. Examining the controversy around Bitburg, Alvin H. Rosenfeld observes a similar rhetorical tendency on the part of President Reagan to collapse Nazism and its many adherents into what Reagan insisted on referring to as “one man,” namely Adolf Hitler: “Nazism . . . was a mass phenomenon, and in both large and small ways involved vast numbers of Germans over the course of the war. In attributing the evil of Nazism to Hitler alone, and, inexplicably, by never referring to him by name, Mr. Reagan was reducing history to cartoon shapes, to a celluloid image of pervasive, if ineffable, malevolent force.” Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Another Revisionism: Popular Culture and the Changing Image of the Holocaust,” in Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 94. 12. Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold Van Der Stroom, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 678. All citations are from this edition, hereinafter referenced as “Diary.” 13. Gerrold van der Stroom, “The Diaries, Het Achterhuis and the Translations,” in Diary, 59. 14. Ibid., 578. 15. Ibid., 647. 16. Ibid., 653. 17. In March 1995, Doubleday published a “Definitive Edition” of the diary, which restores most of these entries. However, the Doubleday edition makes no attempt to analyze the effects of either the elimination or restoration of this material. On the contrary, Doubleday is quoted as claiming that “the restored entries, constituting . . . 30 percent more material do not alter our basic sense of Anne Frank” (emphasis added). Patricia Hampl, “The Whole Anne Frank,” rev. of Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Melissa Müller, New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1995, 3. Given the diary’s history, it is not unwarranted to view this assertion with some skepticism. 18. In September 1998, for example, five pages from the diary were discovered which contained sharply critical observations of the Franks’ marriage. Otto Frank retained the pages until shortly before his death in 1980, when he offered them to Cornelis Suijk, the international director of the Anne Frank Center USA, in order to assist the Dutch government’s authentication efforts. Suijk did not transfer these pages to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, to which Otto Frank entrusted custody of the diary, or to the Anne Frank Foundation Amsterdam, which holds the copyright, but their ex-

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istence became known when he permitted Austrian journalist Melissa Müller to quote from them in her biography of Anne Frank. Subsequently, the Anne Frank Foundation (chaired by Bernd Elias, Anne Frank’s seventy-five-year-old cousin) attempted to block Müller’s quotation of these entries and repudiated her book. See Ralph Blumenthal, “Five Precious Pages Renew Wrangling over Anne Frank,” New York Times, September 10, 1988, A1. 19. Van der Stroom, “Diaries,” 67–68. 20. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Lessons and Legacies, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 246–48. 21. Van der Stroom, “Diaries,” 71. 22. Henri van Praag, “Ideas are Dynamite,” A Tribute to Anne Frank, ed. Anna G. Steenmeijer, in collaboration with Otto Frank and Henri van Praag (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), 25 (emphasis in original). 23. Eleanor Roosevelt, introduction, The Diary of a Young Girl, in Steenmeijer, ed., Tribute, 34. 24. Daniel Rops, preface, Journal de Anne Frank, in Steenmeijer, ed., Tribute, 35. 25. Albrecht Goes, preface, Das Tagebüch der Anne Frank, in Steenmeijer, ed., Tribute, 35. 26. Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” Harper’s 221 (1960): 45. 27. Ibid., 46. 28. Naomi Seidman, “Toward a Feminist Holocaust Studies” (unpublished essay) 13. 29. Hannah Arendt, letter, Midstream 8 (1962): 86. 30. Bettelheim, “Ignored Lesson,” 45 (emphasis added). 31. See Judith E. Doneson, “Feminine Stereotypes of Jews in Holocaust Films: Focus on the Diary of Anne Frank,” The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide, eds. G. Jan Colijn and Marcia S. Littell (Lewiston, UK: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); and Doneson, “The American History of Anne Frank’s Diary,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2 (1987): 149–60. 32. Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory,” 252. 33. Ibid. See also Lawrence L. Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” in Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies, 214–15. 34. Berteke Waaldijk, “Reading Anne Frank as a Woman,” Women’s Studies International Forum 16 (1993): 328. 35. Ibid., 330. 36. Ibid., 330 (emphasis in original). 37. Diary, 287. 38. Ibid., 304. 39. See Robert P. Doyle, Banned Books 1994 Resource Guide (Chicago: American Library Association, 1994), 31. In addition, in 1983 members of the Al-

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abama State Textbook Committee called for the withdrawal of this title because it was “a real downer.” 40. Ditlieb Felderer, Anne Frank’s Diary—A Hoax (Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Studies, 1979) 5,10. 41. Felderer, Anne Frank’s Diary, 16. 42. Van der Stroom, “Diaries,” 72–73. 43. Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory,” 256. 44. Ibid., 255. 45. Ibid., 271. 46. Waaldijk, “Reading Anne Frank,” 331. 47. During her editing, Anne invented “van Dann” as a pseudonym for van Pels, the actual surname of the family who hid with the Franks. 48. Diary, 586–87. 49. That the tone of her article was itself the focus of some comment is interesting, given that such criticism is a traditional tactic used to undermine women’s arguments. For example, these comments by regular participants (male and female) in the on-line discussion group H-Holocaust: “I find virtually everything Ozick writes and says to be gratuitously ‘shrill’ and off-putting.” “I was fascinated by the chronicle Ozick presents but was repelled by her arrogant and superior tone in her attacks on Frank and Wilson.” “ . . . the hectoring and profoundly ungenerous Ms. Ozick.” One (female) participant, who objected to the unusual emphasis on Ozick’s tone and questioned whether sexism was coming into play, received this condescending and dismissive response: ’s screed condemning the critics of Ozick of sexism is the height “Ms R seems to wish to envelop Ozick and all females in of sexism itself. Ms. R an impenetrable mantle of rectitude endowed by virtue of their sex. No viable discourse can continue if half the participants are exempted from comment by cannot stand the heat of discourse, it is suggested virtue of their sex. If Ms. R that she keep OUT of the kitchen.” (These quotations are all available via search in the archives of H-Holocaust. See H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, Michigan State University, September 30, 2001 .) 50. Ian Buruma, “Anne Frank’s Afterlife,” New York Review of Books XLV:3 (February 19, 1998): 4–8. 51. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” New Yorker (October 6, 1997): 79. Also printed in Ozick, Quarrel and Quandary (New York: Knopf, 2000). 52. Buruma, “Anne Frank’s Afterlife,” 7. 53. Joan Miriam Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” in Rittner and Roth, eds., Different Voices, 387. 54. Hampl, “Whole Anne Frank,” 3.

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55. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 125. 56. Ibid., 159. 57. Buruma, “Anne Frank’s Afterlife,” 6. 58. Roth, Ghost Writer, 150. 59. Benjamin R. Barber, letter, New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1998, 3.

Part IV

WOMEN’S EXPRESSIONS: POSTWAR REFLECTIONS IN ART, FICTION, AND FILM

It is virtually a cliché to assert that there is no art possible after Auschwitz. Yet paradoxically, it has also been posited that only art can convey the emotional and psychic impact of Auschwitz. When rooted in history and informed by cultural and personal memory, the imagination can shape a response no less authentic than a literal memoir. In this section, three scholars explore imaginative interpretations of the unimaginable catastrophe we know as the Holocaust. In doing so, they avoid, as the critic Lawrence Langer has demanded, the taint of sentimentality, the imposition of meaning where none exists, and the attempt to find consolation when such consolation is neither appropriate nor reasonable. 1 Stephen Feinstein examines the influence of feminism on contemporary installation art inspired by the Holocaust. He argues that gender influenced artists both in their choice of subjects and in the expression of their responses. Lillian Kremer demonstrates the influence of gender in her analysis of women novelists, selecting two Holocaust survivors and three American born and bred writers. She describes the effects of women writing about female protagonists whose suffering is different from—not more or less—that of male victims. Rebecca Scherr explores eroticism in selected Holocaust fiction and film, where an “overabundance” of sexual imagery and a saturation of sexual scenes distort both the reality and the memory of the Holocaust.

NOTES 1. Lawrence L. Langer, ed., Art From the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–9.

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ELEVEN

Jewish Women in Time: The Challenge of Feminist Artistic Installations about the Holocaust Stephen C. Feinstein

Not much research has been done regarding feminism and artistic narratives of the Shoah. Certainly, there are many women artists whose work documents the destruction of the Jews and the workings of the Third Reich. Charlotte’s Salomon’s Life or Theatre?, for example, stands not only as a visual memoir of a German-Jewish victim but also of a young woman dealing with her Jewish identity, her identity as a woman, the burdens of multiple family suicides, and dependency on males as protectors. While Salomon’s collective work is not feminist in intent, it is singularly a woman’s story, and the narratives within her more than nine hundred paintings tell a story of a woman struggling with values and restrictions on boundaries imposed by National Socialism. Similarly, the examination of art within the threatening world of the concentration camp can provide a sense of how this medium became a means of establishing some normalcy in the lives of the victims. In Theresienstadt, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist whose earlier associations were with the Bauhaus School of Design, opened an art school for children. The works produced are not high art but they deal with the essentials of learning about painting: simple landscapes, geometric designs, testing of color fields, and experiments in line, light, and color. Although neither Dicker-Brandeis nor many of her students survived and most were deported to Auschwitz, the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis may be viewed as that of a committed woman artist rather than that of a feminist. Yet the attempt to maintain a degree of normalcy in the lives

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of imprisoned children suggests perhaps a particular role best achieved by a woman artist. Many other examples can be provided of women artists. However, there is very little to distinguish gender in their representation. Given separation by gender in the camps, choice of scenes certainly distinguishes the subject when it came to portraiture. As has been pointed out by Sybil Milton and Janet Blatter as well as by other critics and art historians dealing with art from the camps and ghettos, such works are concerned with representation, witnessing, and providing a visual legacy, which is often subtle and not seen by the photographer. These works are also less concerned with the perpetrator than with the victim. It may be argued that the question of feminist narrative in art is essentially a postmodern concept that materialized during the 1980s and 1990s. As such, its main manifestation leading to some successes is not in two-dimensional forms but rather in “installation art” or conceptual spaces. The conceptual spaces of Ellen Rothenberg and Nancy Spero are excellent examples of such deconstructed environments. To be sure, the question of feminism is not intrinsic to what happened to Jewish men and women during the Shoah: it is clear they died not because of gender but because they were Jews. Yet the fact that most of the early memoir voices that remained in print were by men (Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Tadeuz Borowski, Elie Wiesel) suggests the absence of a strong female narrative. The Diary of Anne Frank became iconic because of complex factors relating to the postwar publication of diaries and because, as it was being written, its author intended it to be private, never to see the light of day. A fateful turn in Anne’s own perception of her diary was the London-based broadcast of March 29, 1944, from the Dutch government in exile, encouraging the writing and collection of diaries for postwar publication. Anne’s entry from that date seems to catch the romanticism of notoriety: Bolkesteyn, an M.P., was speaking from the Dutch News from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters after the war. Of course they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the “Secret Annexe,” the title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if people were told how we Jews lived and what we ate and talked about. 1

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Anne Frank was never able to fulfill her vision of the future but became the best known female victim of the Holocaust. Installation spaces, the focus of this chapter, are complex pieces of art. Since the 1970s, the installation as a form has prospered. Among the recently recognized leading installation artists are Joseph Beuys, Nancy Graves, Nancy Spero, Christian Boltanski, Jonathan Borofsky, Ellen Rothenberg, Rebecca Horn, and Jenny Holtzer. The twentieth century has provided sufficient contradictions and suffering for the fertile mind of the installation artist and has become the springboard for creating interesting and charged environments. Allan Kaprow has written that scale is an important feature of the environment, where the viewer must walk into the artwork and, in a certain sense, become part of it. This perspective is different from merely observing what may be the debris of civilization arranged into an artistic environment. From the point of view of Holocaust-related art, the issue of debris itself is significant, and combining such debris into an environment/installation represents, in essence, an attempt to recreate in paradoxical ways the vision of terrible places like Auschwitz and the absence of victims. As a mixed form of sculpture, painting, film, and graphic elements, installations are a means of setting the Holocaust in both a metaphorical and a semi-historical context. Installation spaces relating to the Shoah are not so far removed from being Holocaust memorials, and some artists describe their work as such. Unlike public memorials, however, their work does not go through public competitions for outdoor spaces. Yet the best installation work seems not too far removed from what James Young has described in his analysis as setting the stage for this work on questions of how the Holocaust will be remembered through “anti-redemptive memorials” as well as provocative, rather than elegiac and often sentimental artistic representations. Young poses the question correctly: “[H]ow is a postHolocaust generation of artists supposed to ‘remember’ events they never experienced directly?” He admits there can be no single formula, “no final solutions” for contemporary artists. In At Memory’s Edge he even focuses on a grouping of monument and museum designs that may be labeled “counter monuments” or “negative monuments,” neither redemptive nor edifying. 2 Keeping Young’s ideas in mind about monuments can be helpful in identifying art that helps amplify the understanding of the Shoah. Installation art can provide a sense of setting for the drama of the Holo-

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caust by creating an environment which evokes certain elements of the event or its memory and contemporary effects. Therefore an installation can also be more than an artwork. Artists trying to develop a sensitivity toward the Holocaust as subject for art inevitably are drawn to the power of photography and the debris of human suffering displayed in the Auschwitz and other camp museums: mounds of women’s hair, artificial limbs, children’s clothing and toys, eyeglasses, shoes, and other remains of what were human beings. Installations also tend to be historical in their methods and in their use of artifacts. Photographs, vitrines, and images of a horrible past can all be arranged in a way that is both artistic and pedagogical. The result may be a disquieting revelation for the viewer. If there is a danger for the artist, it is the danger of the cliché, the use of repetitive and well-known images, so much so that individualism in creativity can become merely a rearrangement of familiar images. The contemporary artist cannot reenact the event because he or she was not there. A few exceptions to this sense of art exist. In 1994 the installation format became the basis for Witnesses of Existence, an exhibition in the Obala Gallery of artworks from Sarajevo which, when exhibited in the New York Kunsthalle, became an installation within an installation of sorts because of the dilapidated condition of the exhibition space. During the original exhibition in Sarajevo in 1993, viewers risked their lives trying to get to the museum as the city was being torn apart by armed conflict. 3 The impermanence of the installation also raises certain questions about how we remember actual sites of destruction and how well art itself or even photography can serve as a conveyance for memory. Just as there is an ethical debate about how to conserve the sites of destruction, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, there is a question of the durability of mediums of artistic memory. Despite their architectural and installation effectiveness, historical museums designed to tell the story of the Holocaust— such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—fail, in some respects, to tell the whole story. This, without doubt, is related to the greater problem of the “impossibility” of the Holocaust as an event, and the fact that it happened. Within this challenge is the question at hand: whether or not a specific “women’s” or “feminist” memory or narrative can be created and, if so, effectively communicated. But as deconstructed spaces, installations can tell a well-known story in a new way, create new interest in an old subject, and inspire the viewer to play detective while using the artistic creation as a springboard for further reading, research, and insight. Among the issues addressed by artists are feminist themes relating to the Holocaust.

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Ellen Rothenberg: Deconstructing Anne Frank Ellen Rothenberg emerged during the 1980s and 1990s as one of the more important artists involved with conceptual work about the Holocaust. Educated at Cornell University and the Massachusetts College of Art, she has been best known for her performance art and installations. Both performance and conceptual pieces raise important questions about moving beyond the museum and traditional audiences to raise artistic, political, and ethical issues. Some of Rothenberg’s works from the 1980s were focused on politically charged questions. Materials, tools, and objects also play important parts in the meaning of her art. Rothenberg was concerned with the question of the impact of the artist, minority groups within society, and extending boundaries set by power elites. During the 1970s and 1980s, and strongly influenced by the feminist movement, Rothenberg probed questions of feminism, sexuality, and boundaries imposed by gender fashions. The Great Circle (1987), a performance piece staged in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was reminiscent of some of the agitprop works of the Russian Constructivists. The artist appeared clad in a papier-mâché suit made up of front pages from the New York Post and other tabloid newspapers; on her head was a coxswain’s horn, with a question mark emerging from it; she propelled a “time/money furrower,” with a clock face on one side and the image of an American quarter-coin on the other. In this artistic performance, the artist herself became a living piece of propaganda for and against capitalism. In Common Sense (1988), she appeared in Boston’s public places dressed in an apron with the word “power” repeated in an orderly fashion and a black slate in the center of the apron. Copies of the same type of apron, imprinted with the seven deadly sins, were exhibited in a 1989 installation, Vices and Virtues, with the black framed area in the center of the apron inscribed with opposing virtues: Envy/Hope, Gluttony/Prudence, Lust/Temperance, Wrath/Justice, and so on. At the base of each apron depicting the sins were shoes made of bread and placed on sisal mats. The theme of this work seems to imply women’s submissiveness to premodern household tasks circumscribed by a Victorian morality, what the Nazis referred to as Kinder, Kirche, und Küche, (children, church, kitchen). These conceptual works suggest there is no single meaning to art. Rothenberg herself has noted this, describing her work as a place where “the intellectual or conceptual center is outside the individual pieces which make up a larger work,” 4 where symbols and meaning can be constantly reinterpreted. The bottom line, however, is the absence of

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a “prescribed meaning.” 5 On occasion, Rothenberg often subverted traditional gallery space by placing objects in untypical viewing areas, such as in a position where viewers had to climb ladders, undercutting the traditional museum dictum to look but not touch. Like the work of many other installation artists, Rothenberg’s spaces have a strong focus on language. She has noted that “spoken or printed language is a way of being able to talk about things outside of the language of images, which is an area where artists have been relegated.” 6 In Rothenberg’s most ambitious work with references to the Holocaust, The Anne Frank Project, begun in 1990, she attempts to challenge both the ongoing surface understanding of the Anne Frank story and its misuse. Rothenberg noted that “whole countries and cultures have used Anne Frank as an escape valve. She’s become a symbol for people without their having any kind of self-exploration or real understanding of her experience.” 7 Indeed, the recent successful international tour of the documentary exhibition sponsored by the Anne Frank Foundation of Amsterdam, Anne Frank in the World, elicited long lines of viewers, especially school children. However, commentary about the limitations of the exhibition, especially by some Holocaust survivors, alleged that somehow Anne Frank’s Jewishness was not integral to the story. In light of the publication of the complete Diary—including the previously censored sections from March 24, 1944, dealing with Anne’s sexual self— others judged that aspects of the show were sanitized for young audiences. Part of Rothenberg’s impulse to focus on Anne Frank was her husband Dan’s European roots from the period of the Holocaust. Inquiry into the authenticity of the Diary as well as Holocaust deniers’ exploitation of the varying versions of the text as a demonstration of its inauthenticity provided Rothenberg with many elements of artistic and documentary integration. The beginnings of The Anne Frank Project can be found in Rothenberg’s 1989 series, made of linoleum block prints on handmade paper, Those Which Are Most Common. The twelve panels in the series represent a series of anecdotes, vignettes, commands using language, and other symbols of both the mundane and the unique in contemporary civilization. Hanging clothes are juxtaposed against people who have been hanged, and a third reference to a presumed victim with feet tied and suspended off the ground. Lists of names from Dachau and the handwriting of Anne Frank appear, interspersed with images of television sets, primitive-like drawings of humans in varying forms of despair, flight or torture, prices (“13c,” the price of an execution bullet in contemporary

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China), quotation marks, commands such as “Yes/No” and “Grasp,” all of which appear to establish a specific visual vocabulary. Dan Eisenberg has commented that “the twelve panels do not function as independent entities but as fragments of a whole. . . . The true form of the work is only revealed when all panels are seen together.” 8 Eisenberg has suggested that the hanging suits might come, for example, from the Dachau Museum, Joseph Beuy’s Felt Suit, or nonspecific imagery. 9 One double list of names appears as a cube capped by a triangular roof, evoking the image of the SS barracks’ entry portal at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eisenberg correctly points out the inherent paradox of Rothenberg’s images: [I]mages are produced for consumption that have been in some measure pre-read, the conditions for their reception put in place well before their appearance. How then can any new event provide a new image or truly unique information, when what we seek is what we already know? We have only these images in our collective repertoire to instruct both composition and content. The question arises, do the images we see and learn instruct or contain our vision of the world, or do they constantly reassert themselves because we see deeper patterns repeating from generation to generation, from event to event, ad infinitum? 10

In a public performance piece Hello Traitor (1992), Rothenberg walked through Berlin wearing shoes made of bread and a man’s jacket with price tags on the front, a “sold” (verkauft) sign on the back. Another performance, The German Question, presented the artist wearing a plaid hat with two artificial blonde braids and raising a plastic sausage, with a question mark attached, in the form of a salute. In another performance, Rothenberg also wore gardening shoes marked “forwards” and “backwards,” suggesting what Cindi Katz has termed “a maniacal bid for meaningful presence, making literal the metaphor of ‘municipal housekeeping,’ through which women, marginalized from production in the nineteenth century, reinserted themselves into public life.” 11 The “forwards” and “backwards” notations on the shoes suggest the dialectical conception of progress endemic to German philosophical thought since Kant, which became an ingredient in what Richard Rubenstein has called “technically competent barbarism” during the Holocaust. The Anne Frank Project represents for Rothenberg a major installation and intellectual/artistic discourse on the meaning of Anne Frank as both woman and Jew. As it is conceived and executed by an artist rooted in feminist ideology, it may be called a “feminist” work, although

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some aspects of representation may appear gender-free. The project evolved through three stages and represents a dramatic example of how artists can be effective in their approach to history through metaphor, perhaps more so than through documentation. Like many American girls, Rothenberg read The Diary in anticipation of seeing Anne as a role model. However, the result was something quite different, even disturbing. Rothenberg has said that “the first time I read The Diary there was no information regarding her experience after the arrest. There was an unarticulated horror. Here was an intelligent, talented young Jewish girl who never got the chance to grow up. In that way she is a confusing role model.” 12 This lack of full understanding of Anne Frank impelled Rothenberg to create the installation project. The first section of the project is a large architectural space entitled The Partial Index (1990–1991), which metaphorically recreates aspects of the Frank’s family hiding place in Amsterdam as described in diary entries from July 9, 1942, through August 1, 1944. The second is A Probability Bordering on Certainty (1993), an object- and language-oriented space based on the concluding statement of the Dutch State Forensic Science Laboratory, which, after analyzing the original manuscripts of the Anne Frank Diary, concluded they were “with a probability bordering on certainty by the hand of the author of the standards of comparison, Anne Frank.” 13 The third part, added during the exhibition at Tufts University Gallery, is The Conditions for Growth (1994), which focuses on aspects of Anne Frank’s physical, sexual, and intellectual growth as reflected in her diary. Woven through all three parts of the Project is the idea of female perceptions of a closed environment, measurement and growth, scientific analysis of handwriting in the Diary, and a recognition of the absence of a formal ending of that work. Nonetheless, the project acknowledges that Anne Frank has a commanding presence in the contemporary world. 14 Partial Index is the fundamental environment for entering Rothenberg’s artistic discourse on Anne Frank. A rectangular box 40 feet long by 12 feet wide and 11 feet high, with twelve dissimilar doors, creates a memory of the Frank’s hiding place as a wooden sculpture. The space emits a sense of both power and confinement, despite its large size as an artwork. The wide end is covered with wallpaper and book shelves, simulating the swinging door that provided access to the hiding place. The wallpaper is composed of photographs of Anne Frank and her sister Margot from prewar school photos. These are neatly arranged in a repeated block design and are both familiar and disturbing, for the

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viewer undoubtedly knows the story does not end well. In addition, the touching photos of Anne and Margot can be juxtaposed against group photos from the Holocaust, best represented by those taken at KL Auschwitz of the original inmates in their prison dress. (The Polish artist, Jozef Szajna, a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and major theater producer in Warsaw, also used this Auschwitz wallpaper concept in his play without words, Replika.) Rothenberg’s shelves hold enigmatic books—cut-up telephone directories covered in lead—lying flat. As a volume of indexing, the telephone directory provides an analogy to “instances of alphabetically indexed objects of daily life that refer to the German proclivity for quantifying and organizing people, which was taken to terrible extremes during W.W.II.” 15 Each of the installation’s twelve doors enters into the same open interior space, which has a raised wooden floor. The interior space of Partial Index contains reproduced pages from The Diary of Anne Frank as well as twenty-nine other historical documents and artifacts that were photographed, enlarged, printed on translucent paper, and installed on panels saturated with paraffin and wax; the effect was of both age and, because of the panels’ huge, six-foot size, contemporaneity. The interior space also contains “false artifacts,” which Elizabeth Brown described as fabricated images of a radio, a rag, a monogrammed handkerchief, and a girl’s undershirt, objects Anne Frank might have owned. The “documents,” true and false, engage several senses—kinesthetic, tactile, temporal, and sensory—and contribute to our understanding of the Anne Frank story in several ways. These shards of information elicit different responses and examine disparate parts of a life, ranging from the deeply solemn to the ludicrous, thus recalling the varied elements of the quotidian existence. 16

The documents displayed in the installation are arranged at random, unlike the attempt at precision displayed by the Nazis when they identified and exterminated their victims. Photos similar to those Anne pasted to her bedroom wall are juxtaposed to an aerial photograph of Birkenau, where the Franks were “resettled” after Amsterdam and Westerbork. A “paisley-like” design of wallpaper turns out to be “graphic images of lice,” evoking the typhus epidemic which claimed both Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen in early April 1945 and dubbed “the Jewish army lice” by the Nazis. 17 This type of imagery suggests the limits of documentation

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and narrative history, allowing the artist to create an impression of terror and despair which the historian cannot mimic without sliding into some invention. However, within the parameters Rothenberg has suggested and subscribed to, she leads the viewer to emotionally charged questions. She includes documents which show the impact of loss of freedom and humanity on Anne Frank and her family, with particular emphasis on the meaning of such deprivation for an adolescent girl. In her analysis of Anne Frank, Rothenberg is dealing with an iconographic figure whom she imagines to some degree because her own knowledge is based on history rather than experience. At the end of this phase of the Project, there is a writing desk where viewers are asked to respond to the installation, in a gesture that mimics Anne’s own writing. A Probability Bordering on Certainty was conceived by Rothenberg during the nine months she lived in Germany during 1991. This section of The Anne Frank Project is a mixture of historical artifacts, recreations of objects from Anne’s Diary, and some mythical objects suggesting what might have been had Otto Frank’s plan proved successful. For example, a series of Anne Frank Business Cards in three languages reinforces the sense conveyed in the Diary that Anne saw herself after the war as a writer. (In a film unrelated to Rothenberg’s installation, John Blair’s Academy Award-winning documentary, Anne Frank Remembered, suggests this positive postwar vision of Anne Frank by replicating the testimony of those who had contact with her in Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.) Samples of Postwar Embroidery, with a long thread typical of packaged Band-Aids and thus evocative of a type of bandage, suggests Anne Frank as a trauma victim: Having mastered only the basic running stitch of introductory embroidery, the subject more often than not loses track of her work. All the fragments in Samples of Postwar Embroidery are peculiar or somehow defective, starting with the wrong choice of material—a functional, adhesive bandage instead of a pillow case or handkerchief. One strip has an embroidery pattern that digresses into a kind of swastika. From another a threaded needle dangles. In a third, the thread is layered until, as the artist describes it, “ . . . it’s like a deep scab, very dense, with part cut away and little scabs of threads like hairs.” 18

A conceptual Family Portrait is found in this section, with the Frank family represented as wooden flour scoops identified with name tags that read “Sara,” “Sara,” “Sara,” and “Israel”—the four imposed names

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of the Frank family in compliance with Nazi internal identity card law. (Anne first spoke of the imposition of restrictions in her diary entry of June 20, 1942. 19) The presentation of the Franks as traditional objects in a modernist form suggests objectification of the Jews and the whole question that underlies the Holocaust as interpreted by Zygmunt Baumann—that part of the understanding of the Holocaust involves the presence of a traditional group, the Jews, expanding their boundaries because of the possibilities opened by modernity and emancipation and their consequent rejection by the dominant group. Other objects found in this section of the show include a set of footprints with the text of Anne Frank’s handwriting, a large glass tank filled with pencil erasers imprinted with the word “guilt” in a Fraktur-Gothic script, a wall filled with enlarged handwriting of Anne Frank and analysis scales (an allusion to the debate over authenticity of the Diary), and a work entitled Das Wesentliche (The Essence) made up of forty-four leather belts, implying a female’s corset or a Jewish ritual binding (tefillin) reserved, in the Orthodox tradition, for men. However, the ironic twist Rothenberg applies to this piece is that the belts are blind-stamped with sections of the unexpurgated Diary of Anne Frank from March 24, 1944, that deal with her sense of sexuality. The viewer must walk around the work in order to read the full text. All of these works collectively suggest not a naive and innocent Anne Frank, but what Elizabeth Brown has called “a complex, subtle and sexual being . . . [that] restores her as a vivid and startling presence.” 20 The most beautiful and possibly the most engaging piece in A Probability is The Combing Shawl, a wall and floor sculpture which both hints at women’s hair and specifically refers to Anne Frank’s combing shawl, or dressing jacket. The image of falling hair is created by 9-foot-long strips of vellum coated with graphite, on which is printed text from the first version of the Diary. At the base is a mass of 350 cast metal combs, some with bits of hair in them. The size is monumental: ten feet high by four feet wide by eight feet in length. The poignancy of this piece has been noted by Elizabeth Brown: [It] was recuperated, along with the pages of the diary after the SD . . . had cleared the families’ hiding place. Of the many possessions Anne Frank once had, described in early sections of her diary, only a fraction were brought to the “secret annex.” At the end, what was left of her physical body was this one garment, and all that was left of her ineffable self—her mind, her intelligence, her personality—were the writings.

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Monica Bohm-Duchen, a London curator, included The Combing Shawl by itself in the 1995 exhibition After Auschwitz. The piece was well-received. Moreover, as content, it is extremely powerful by itself, and thus raises the question of whether an entire project dedicated to Anne Frank was necessary. Obviously, the compelling nature of the Anne Frank story may be a stimulant for the artist to be both comprehensive and persistent, as Rothenberg has been, in telling the story in another way and by different means. Yet The Combing Shawl may be sufficient alone as an artwork, for it includes all of the essential elements of both aesthetics and narration: the text of the diary, the illusion of hair, the memory of artifacts in places where they had been after deportation from Amsterdam, particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the conversion of that last vestige of a woman’s dignity, her hair, into a commodity for filling mattresses for the German navy. Das Wesentliche (The Essence) and The Combing Shawl are also the most “feminist” interpretative works in the installation, and it may be argued that the artist has focused on a narrative which would be apparent only to a woman or a feminist. The third and final part of The Anne Frank Project is The Conditions for Growth, based on both a reexamination of scientific research about Anne Frank’s writings and the artist’s “own assumptions about the documentary nature of her project, exploring the difference between imagining and experiencing history.” 22 An essential question asked by the artist is “[H]ow do we reconstruct history from the fragment? What role does the museum play in how we understand the past?” 23 Physical entry into The Conditions for Growth leads the viewer to an arbitrarily conceived alphabet-wall of commercial letters hung on translucent glassine and sealed in wax. The block letters are unlike the analysis of the cursive writing of Anne Frank in A Probability and impel “the viewer to confront the enigma of linguistic building blocks that are at once concrete (printed letters) and ephemeral (without meaningful linkages).” 24 The main body of the exhibition is made up of vitrines and freestanding piles of objects. The objects include a steel spring mattress, architectural plans, sheets and towels, and boxes stacked on conventional steel shelving. In every room of the exhibition single light bulbs hang on wires, evocative of Christian Boltanski’s famous installation, Lessons of Darkness. 25 In one room, cases displaying artifacts are mounted on rolling dollies, suggesting “the provisional nature of the ‘history’ pre-

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sented here.” 26 The cases contain loaves of bread, tickets from ration books, cards printed with words like “Eat” and “Drink,” photographs of consumer goods that appear dated, five tanned hides, dates created from library return ink stamps, and women’s long white gloves imprinted with multiple repeats of the word “villain” and identified with metal tags. The word “why,” similar to Rothenberg’s previous use of such printed questions, appears on some of the gloves as well as on randomly dropped pieces of paper. The largest room in The Conditions for Growth deals directly with the title, as every object in this space relates to concepts of measurement. It is a large room, where the viewer is confronted with 2,500 hanging yardsticks and rulers, each of which is attached to a mercury thermometer, suggesting a metaphorical reference to the victims as human beings, with the measuring sticks alluding to progressive height measurements of the Frank children made on the walls of the apartment/annex in Amsterdam. Also hanging is a series of pocket watches, suggestive of the slow passage of time while in hiding and possibly also a visual pun on Dali’s iconic painting, The Persistence of Memory. Various types of counter and industrial scales are found on the floor, perhaps implying that the viewer must play detective to pull everything together as memory and evidence of a crime. A large hanging wood case with glass front displays twentyfour rolls of varying colored movie tickets from rolls, recalling Rothenberg’s own The Combing Shawl in A Probability and with obvious historical reference to ration coupons and the counting of calories which was important for the Nazi’s calculation of life and death in both ghettos and death camps. Alternately, one may recall Anne Frank’s youthful enthusiasm for showing Rin Tin Tin movies at her home in Mauveplein, where she made her own theater admission tickets for her friends. 27 On the floor are representations of shoes, or soles of shoes, cut from steel: an immovable memory of those who once walked through this place. A pillow cover is embroidered with the phrase, “Where have they gone?” One scale on the floor balances a loaf of bread on one side against the framed, block-printed word, “YOU.” Visitors in this section are encouraged to interact with the exhibition by writing their own height on a white wall. Taken as a whole, Ellen Rothenberg’s project about Anne Frank is impressive for its depth of development. The fact that the artist creates a means of comprehending through art both Anne Frank and the conditions under which all Jewish victims lived during the Nazi era is significant. In a certain sense, the Project is indicative of the successes that both

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art and history can have in engaging this subject and its limitations: it is hard for us to imagine Anne Frank as a muselmann in Bergen-Belsen, and neither the historian nor the artist makes this leap of imagination in this particular story. If historical writing is seen as a rational collection of documents and factual materials presented in an orderly pattern, art in this case suggests that while there is a well-defined connection between document and authenticity, the presentation may take the form of abstraction or deconstruction, resulting in similar, perhaps even more effective, means of understanding conceptual aspects of this period and specific emotions connected with it. At the same time, however, there is always a tendency to willingly or unwillingly rely upon artistic references which may be defined as overdone or clichéd. The symbols of the Holocaust found in many artworks are usually limited representations of victimizations as created by the perpetrator: barbed wire, personal objects, suitcases, human hair, and elements of counting, reflective of the bureaucratic nature of destruction used so effectively by the SS. Thus the sheer abundance of materials in all the collective aspects of The Anne Frank Project may, in the long run, overstate the case. Nonetheless, the effect is tantalizing. The bottom line, of course, is that history and art use different methodologies. There is always a danger in fabricating “mythological” items associated with the life of Anne Frank, for naive museum goers can return—and often have returned—from a museum experience based on art thinking that all the objects are “real.” 28 The artists must always watch out for the slippery slope of accidental revisionism of facts. This need not preclude creativity, but dangers abound.

Nancy Spero: Feminist Motifs within the Holocaust The well-known New York artist, Nancy Spero, has focused many of her installations on political and feminist oriented subjects. She and her husband, Leon Golub, have been in the forefront of American and international political issues since the 1940s. During the period 1966–1970, Spero painted in gouache and ink a War Series: Bombs and Helicopters, which served as both a personal and public statement against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Unlike many artists, however, Spero was not working as an illustrator, but was concerned with symbol, some of which left little to the imagination, while others were more complex and allegorical. She described these works as “a personal attempt at exor-

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cism”: “The bombs are phallic and nasty, exaggerated sexual representations of the penis: heads with tongues sticking, violent depictions of the human (mostly male) body. The clouds of the Bomb are filled with screaming heads vomiting poison into the victims below.” 29 For Spero, the helicopter became anthropomorphic, “a primeval (prime-evil) bird or big wreaking destruction,” 30 and the ultimate symbol of the Vietnam War. Many of Spero’s other works have included symbols like the crematoria, the swastika, and the star of David. However, Spero insists she is not a “Jewish artist,” nor is she particularly interested in Jewish themes or the Holocaust as a narrow artistic vision. However, a 1987 article in the New York Times by Bill Keller about the resolution of an investigation of a wartime execution in Minsk became the basis for Spero conjoining a feminist issue with the Holocaust. The article in question was about the 1941 execution of a group of Soviet partisans by the Nazis. Only one, a seventeen-year-old woman, was not identified at the time of the hanging. Keller’s investigative story revealed the victim to be Masha Bruskina, a woman and a Jew. Spero seized on the story as the basis for an installation, first shown at the Whitney Biennial of 1993. The installation featured large white walls on which Keller’s story was reproduced in a hand-printed text. The photo images from the New York Times story were included, which showed Bruskina with a sign tied to her indicating that she had engaged in illegal activities against German forces. In essence, the installation recounts the detective story begun by the Soviet reporter, Lev Arkadyev, who saw the photo after the war and finally determined who Masha Bruskina was. For Spero, she was “the ultimate rejected Jew.” 31 However, in the room installation, Spero does not simply recapitulate Keller’s story on a wall. Running through the text is the question of whether she was unidentified because she was a woman or a Jew. The answer is probably the latter, because of antisemitism within the partisan movement and the pattern of Soviet war reportage which neglected to identify Jewish victims by nationality. Bruskina’s femaleness, however, cannot be ignored, as the artist, using installation space, raises the question of women controlling their own bodies and their own history. The feminist theme becomes clearer as Spero adds symbolic devices: an ancient Egyptian “Vulture Goddess,” a Greek Gorgon, and what the artist describes as a “Somnambulist,” a fantastic six-legged female figure, all of which hover throughout the installation as part of the printed wall design. They are colored, juxtaposed against the black and white of the

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story line. These mythical creatures seem to sanctify Bruskina’s death in a ritualistic way. The gorgon is a representation of Athena as a death goddess, who presides over the story. The somnambulist is described by the artist as a dancing priestess trapped in her own body. The vulture goddess is a mother image as well as the angel of death. As a raptor bird, its function is to carry away the dead flesh, as the flesh of Roman crucifixion victims was carried away by birds of prey, but the vulture goddess also bears fragments of broken bones to heaven, implying some redemption. Parallel to Masha Bruskina, Spero produced a second installation for the reopening of the Jewish Museum in New York in 1993. The Ballad of Marie Sanders: The Jew’s Whore was an installation derived from a poem of the same name by Bertolt Brecht. Spero’s works often follow a series pattern, and the emerging linkage between the two installations was the title of Brecht’s poem, “Jewish Women in Time.” The installation incorporates the text of the Brecht poem, as well as one by Nelly Sachs, “That the Persecuted May Not Become Persecutors.” The core of the installation is the message from Brecht and the growth of Nazi laws that separated Jews from the rest of the population. These laws addressed a biological issue, but their practical intent was to prevent sexual contact between Aryans and “Jewish vermin,” thus preserving the sanctity of the “Aryan womb.” 32 The Nuremberg Law of September 15, 1935, defined Jews according to grandparentage. While Jews were the obvious victims within the biological vision of the Third Reich, Spero suggests that German women were also victimized, in particular those women who chose to have Jews as lovers and thus had the power of the state imposed upon them. Brecht’s poem begins with the sentence, “Marie Sanders, your lover’s hair is too black.” Marie Sanders was punished for her violation of the racial laws by having her head shaved and being driven around Berlin as a public display. Spero’s illustration depicts this event almost as a ritual sacrifice. In discussing her work, Spero has noted that she chose Brecht’s poem because “of his straightforward, unflinching look at the human condition. . . . [The poem] . . . voices in unrelenting terms the Nazi sexual sadism directed against having a Jew as a lover.” 33 Spero also explained that while the photo of the bound woman she used in the installation was from the Gestapo archive, it had “a pornographic titillation. She looks ashamed, violated, bound, her head averted, a heavy rope around her neck. Fantasy alludes to reality. It could be porn but it isn’t. It’s for real.” 34 By 1936, when Brecht had finished his poem, the walls of sexual separation had been established.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, Partial Index. 1991. Mixed Media 38 x 12 x 13 feet. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, Partial Index. 1991. Mixed Media 38 x 12 x 13 feet. Detail of end of installation showing empty bookshelves and photos of Anne and Margot Frank. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, Partial Index. 1991. Open doors. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, The Conditions for Growth. 1994. Interior of installation. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, A Probability Bordering on Certainty. The Combing Shawl. 1993. Contains the text of The Diary of Anne Frank printed on vellum, with 300 steel combs. Approximately 10’ high x 4’ wide x 8’ ground length. With permission of the artist.

Detail of The Combing Shawl. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, A Probability Bordering on Certainty. 1994. Anne Frank Business Cards. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, The Conditions for Growth. 1994. Belts with printing displayed in the form of womens’ corset. Background: Measuring scales for writing analysis of Anne Frank’s diary by Dutch Historical Commission, enlarged for artistic purposes. With permission of the artist.

Detail of The Conditions for Growth. With permission of the artist.

Ellen Rothenberg, The Anne Frank Project, The Conditions for Growth. 1994. Interior of installation. Scales, watches, and metric rulers as indicators of time and measurement of growth in the Annex. With permission of the artist.

Nancy Spero, Masha Bruskina. Installation at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Size varies. Printed text and photos on wall with art motifs. 1993. With permission of the artist.

Nancy Spero, detail showing Masha Bruskina from a Soviet photograph and New York Times text of story by Bill Keller. With permission of the artist.

Nancy Spero, image of persecuted woman and backdrop of Masha Bruskina before execution. Original photograph from 1942. With permission of the artist.

Nancy Spero, Jewish Women in Time: The Ballad of Marie Sanders. 1993. Installation at The Jewish Museum, New York. Printing and art work on walls, size varies. Text from Bertolt Brecht and Nelly Sachs. With permission of the artist.

Detail showing text from Brecht, Jewish Women in Time: The Ballad of Marie Sanders. 1993. With permission of the artist.

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Spero’s inclusion of Nelly Sachs’s poem intensifies the discourse about victim and perpetrator. In the visual aspects of Spero’s installation, the answer to the question is ambiguous. The overwhelming interpretation of the artwork is the violation of women. However, the viewer must also reflect on some reversals of interpretations of victimization in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, when Austrians and Germans began to depict themselves, in their own strange way, as victims of Nazism. Thus the question of perpetrator and victim can be inverted. Can one develop sympathies for German women as victims? German women, in fact, staged one of the only successful demonstrations against National Socialist German Workers’ Party policies in the famous demonstration on the Rosenstrasse in February 1943. The protesters were largely gentile women who demanded the release of their Jewish husbands, and their protest was successful. 35 Another issue implicit in the installation is derived from Spero’s political activism. Spero was undoubtedly sensitive to images of Israelis versus Palestinians, which represent a different struggle but nonetheless conjure up questions of victim and perpetrator. Sachs’s poem describes the brutality of the hangman: steps of hangmen over the steps of victims what black moon pulled with such terror the sweep hand in earth’s orbit? 36

Spero’s works are effective as they merge together images of common memory, activated by reportage, poetry, and photography, and afford a special direction to this Holocaust narrative: the victimization of women. The work is also impressive for what it does not do: translate the message with the heavy imprint of ideology. Ellen Rothenberg’s The Anne Frank Project and Nancy Spero’s two installations about the fate of women during the Third Reich demonstrate unequivocally that art has a substantial role to play in providing insights and analysis that may not be captured by historical narration. These women are both feminist artists who have produced feminist works of art. For many viewers, however, the postmodern form, with its emphasis on a deconstructed rather than continuous narrative may pose many problems. After all, it isn’t necessary to enroll in an academic course at a university before reading the Diary of Anne Frank or an article about Masha Bruskina. However, an inexperienced viewer in a museum setting

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may have trouble decoding a room full of yardsticks and other modes of measurement, or comprehending the link between Nelly Sachs and Marie Sanders. However, the point of postmodern art is not to make the museum experience easy but to provide an artistic and intellectual challenge for the artist as well as the viewer. For a subject as difficult in its essence to comprehend as the Holocaust, artistic installations such as those discussed here have the power to create such strong visual images that a return to text is mandatory to establish full understanding. Dealing with Hitler’s best known victim, Rothenberg succeeds in establishing and reminding viewers of Anne Frank’s humanity and feminine qualities. Spero’s art, which treats lesser known women victims, is an effort to rescue them from time and place them in a context for understanding the fate of women as well as all victims. Taken together, the two artists, through their artistic installations, act as guardians of memory and remind the viewer that the less familiar heroines need to be remembered—that the most well-known figures cannot be taken for granted and made into a cliché. In this respect, both Spero and Rothenberg have rescued their subjects and embedded them in our memories in new ways which only an artist can achieve.

NOTES 1.Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (New York, Doubleday, 1989), 578. 2. See James E. Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994); Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven. Yale University Press, 2000). 3. Jamey Gambrell, “Sarajevo: Art in Extremis,” Art in America, May 1994, 100–105. 4. Ellen Rothenberg, quoted in Johanna Branson, “Interview with Ellen Rothenberg,” in Johanna Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg (Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery, 1994), 13. 5. In the context of the Holocaust, the issue of “no prescribed meaning” has also been interpreted as “no final solutions.” It is important to validate this concept, because art with a specific meaning—such as a visual narrative series of two-dimensional paintings—has the capacity to become old, if not stale, very

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quickly. Deconstructed conceptual spaces, on the other hand, have the capacity, in the best cases, to remain timeless. 6. Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 19. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Dan Eisenberg, “Department of Correction: Notes on Ellen Rothenberg’s Those Which are Most Common,” in Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 30. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 35. 11. Cindi Katz, “Spaces of Possibility/Spaces of Change: The Personal Geography of Ellen Rothenberg,” in Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 40–41, 12. Ellen Rothenberg interview with Johanna Branson, in Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 21. 13. Elizabeth A. Brown, “Reading the Anne Frank Project,” in The Anne Frank Project: Installations by Ellen Rothenberg (Santa Barbara, CA: University Art Museum, 1993), 5. 14. Rothenberg’s interview with Johanna Branson refers to Alvin Rosenfeld’s scholarship about Anne Frank and representations of her in the United States, Germany, Israel and Japan. Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 20. 15. Ibid., 3 16. Ibid. Since the author did not have an occasion to see the exhibit in person, there is strong reliance on the descriptions by Elizabeth Brown as well as the installation photographs found in this text and in Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg. 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Elizabeth Brown, “Reading the Anne Frank Project,” 6. 19. The diary entry of June 20, 1942, reads: “Jews must wear a yellow star; Jews must hand in their bicycles; Jews are banned from trains and are forbidden to use any car, even a private one; Jews are only allowed to do their shopping between three and five o’clock, and then only in shops which bear the placard Jewish Shop; Jews may only use Jewish barbers; Jews must be indoors from eight o’clock in the evening until 6 o’clock in the morning; Jews are forbidden to visit theatres, cinemas and other places of entertainment; Jews may not go to swimming baths, nor to tennis, hockey and other sports grounds; Jews may not go rowing; Jews may not take part in public sports. Jews must not sit in their own or their friends’ gardens after 8 o’clock in the evening; Jews may not visit Christians; Jews must go to Jewish schools, and many more restrictions of a similar kind, so we could not do this and we were forbidden to do that. But life went on in spite of it all. Jacque used to say to me: ‘You’re scared to do anything because it may be forbidden.’ ” Anne Frank, Diary of Anne Frank, 183. 20. Brown, “Reading the Anne Frank Project,” 6. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Whitney Chadwick, “The Conditions for Growth,” in Branson, ed., Ellen Rothenberg, 70.

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23. Ibid. 24. Ibid, 71. 25. For information on Boltanski’s space, see Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 77–150. 26. Ibid., 71. 27. For documentation of this event, see the film by John Blair, Anne Frank Remembered (1995). 28. For an interesting case study of this issue, see Andrea Liss, Trespassing Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), ch. 2 and 3. Liss develops a provocative discourse on the question of identification/false identification between the viewer and individuals pictured in the Tower of Faces/Tower of Life at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Christian Boltanski’s challenge to the documentary photograph through his manipulation of photos which may or may not have a relationship to the Holocaust. The issue of authenticity was also a minor issue in an installation by Julia Terwilliger, Women of Ravensbrück, first exhibited in 1997 at the University of Central Florida. The first installation ¨ included documentary photos not related to Ravensbruck; although they were germane to the experience of women, their inclusion was misleading. The same exhibition included replication of toys made by women inmates at Ravensbrück. Unfortunately, the artist died before the project could be revised. However, in 2001 the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, displayed a new version of Women of Ravensbrück, curated by Rochelle Saidel, that solved this problem of authenticity and was true to both aesthetic and narrative issues. 29. Nancy Spero, “Artist’s Statement” for Installation War Series: Bombs and Helicopters, Peace Museum Archive, Chicago, Illinois, 1993. 30. Ibid. 31. Nancy Spero, Wall Didactic at Installation of Masha Bruskina, the Whitney Museum of Art, May 1993. 32.This language pervades National Socialist propaganda. The image of “Jewish Vermin” is found in many of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s speeches and is an important visual image in Fritz Hippler’s 1940 propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). The Nuremberg Law of September 15, 1935, forbade sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews, and Hitler had been obsessed with the alleged relationship between Jews and venereal disease since at least 1924 and 1925, if not earlier. Mein Kampf (1925) has many sections dedicated to this theme. See also W. Meyers, Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1998), 134; Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart (New York: Norton. 1996), xxviii, 6, 11. 33. Nancy Spero, interview with Erika Hoffman, quoted in Monica BohmDuchen, ed., After Auschwitz (Sunderland, UK: Northern Center for Contemporary Art, 1994), 156.

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34. Ibid. 35. See Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart. 36. Nelly Sachs, “That the Persecuted May Not Become Persecutors,” as depicted in Spero, The Ballad of Marie Sanders, Installation at the Jewish Museum, 1993.

TWELVE

Women in the Holocaust: Representation of Gendered Suffering and Coping Strategies in American Fiction S. Lillian Kremer Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing. . . . Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. “The Laugh of Medusa,” Hélène Cixous

Not until we read texts written by women do we encounter the depth and breadth of the double curse Jewish women endured as racial pariahs and sexual victims of the Holocaust. Until recently Shoah scholarship and literary analysis of Holocaust narrative have been either gender-neutral or presented in terms of the male master narrative. Scholars and literary critics are now more sensitive to distinctions as well as commonalities in historic male and female Holocaust experience and literary representation of that experience. 1 Although densely patterned novels by women situate the struggle of women for survival within the larger configuration of European Jewry’s ordeal, a striking departure of women’s Holocaust writing is its foregrounding of women’s suffering and response in gendered ways that accord with findings by feminist historians and social scientists. 2 This study is an analysis of recurrent themes in women’s Holocaust writing: attention to gender issues; to biological and socially gendered suffering and coping patterns of women; and women’s physical and spiritual/psychological resistance to Nazi oppression and dehumanization. Two subjects dominate this study: first, comparative observations of male

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and female authored fiction, and second, recognition of shared themes and approaches in fiction by survivor authors working from memory and literary construction and those working from extensive research and literary imagination. The subjects of this study—Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory (1969), Elzbieta Ettinger’s Kindergarten (1970), Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Anya (1974), Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” (1980, 1983), and Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers (1987)—have female protagonists and in gendering female war experience, they are differentiated from dominant male discourse. Novels by survivor-émigrés Karmel and Ettinger and those by native-born Americans Schaeffer, Piercy, and Ozick reflect women’s Holocaust experiences. The texts selected for study map the lives of diverse characters: the political and apolitical, the religious and secular, eastern and western Europeans. These novels present women in “open” and concealed hiding, in free and incarcerated resistance groups, in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps. The characters’ wartime responses are influenced by their prewar gender and national/ethnic socialization, and their postwar survival is marked by the nature of their Holocaust era suffering. 3 Departing from the paradigm established in male-authored texts which generally obscures or absorbs lives of women in dramas of male experience, in which women play only ancillary roles and then most often as helpless victims, in women-centered novels female characters are fully defined protagonists, experiencing the Shoah in all its evil manifestations. This writing portrays individuals forging communal bonds and struggling to survive as they encounter not only the hardships men endured, but also those peculiar to their sex. Eschewing essentialist positions, the authors whose works are the subject of this essay refrain from suggesting that Jewish women were persecuted because they were female in a male dominated universe, refrain from presenting women as a homogeneous group identical in beliefs and behaviors, and refrain from arguing that gender comprises the totality of women’s Holocaust experience, even though they underscore the gendered dimensions of women’s suffering and of their coping strategies. In accord with the Holocaust scholarship of feminist historians, these novelists clearly attribute women’s suffering to their Jewish status yet address gender by featuring gender-specific themes including sexual assault, maternity, fertility, amenorrhea, fear of sterilization, the “crimes” of pregnancy and childbirth, and selection for annihilation based on maternal status. The critical differences between the fiction of male and female writers are centered in the presentation of gendered ghetto and concentra-

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tion camp experience and coping mechanisms, resistance themes, and the Shoah plight of children. Departing from the conventions of male novelists, like Leslie Epstein in King of the Jews, who follow the lead of the ghetto chroniclers, such as Emmanuel Ringelblum and Chaim Kaplan, in their focus on the communal life of the ghetto and the organizational structure and dynamics of its administration, women feature family dynamics and efforts to sustain familial structures in the hostile ghetto environment. They depict female slave laborers producing civilian and military goods for transport to Germany while grappling with domestic and maternal responsibilities, forming cooperative networks to feed the starving and nurse the sick. Women often write from the vantage point of the individual woman to chronicle overcrowding, abysmal housing, starvation rations, lack of sanitation, slave labor policies, early mass killings, and Jewish resistance efforts. Prewar socialization influenced both the physical and psychological resilience of prisoners under the stress of malnutrition and starvation. Female writers show how women’s tribulations were complicated by biology and gender as socially constructed in the prewar era and assaulted in wartime. Most passages focusing on female anatomy and defeminized appearance are references to the deterioration of, and attack on, women’s bodies, loss of menstruation, fear of sterilization, forced abortions, and arid breasts. Male writers do not perceive starvation as an assault on their characters’ masculinity, reflecting the dominant socialization of contemporary Jewish males to value prayer, scholarship, and professional achievement more than physical prowess. Similarly, women writers’ female character constructs reflect socialization encouraging women to value physical attractiveness and to prize good health for procreation and are therefore distraught by their diminishing feminine appearance and capacity to bear and nurture children. Although male writers convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists’ strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreative anxieties so clearly evident in women’s writing. Émigré writers working from memory and native-born American writers working from research create fiction echoing the impressions of female survivors and the findings of social scientists in explaining lower mortality rates from short-term starvation among women than among men. Scholars cite and novelists show the ingenuity of women in applying key domestic skills, in stretching limited food supplies, in mending tattered clothing, and in nursing the sick. 4 Scholarly confirmation of the

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social interaction of women in Plaszow confirms Karmel’s introduction of prewar religious instruction and gender socialization to foreshadow the degree and manner of mutual assistance women exercised in the ghettos and camps. 5 Women in An Estate of Memory and those in Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers dwell on hunger-induced food fantasies, fondly recollect meal preparation, and share recipes. Their conversations and social relationships are centered on food. The strength to endure, to keep self and group alive is affirmation of each person’s sense of individuality and worth in a universe designed to obliterate dignity. Whereas collective Jewish victimization under Nazi racist policies is clearly the primary subject of women’s Holocaust writing, because women’s vulnerability was violently and relentlessly complicated by the combined forces of racism and sexism, texts treating women’s experience focus intensely on sexual intimidation and trauma. While rape by the SS was rare because racial laws forbade sexual contact between Germans and Jews, and because the SS had an ample supply of their own women and healthier non-Jewish inmates in brothels, other manifestations of sexual abuse were rampant. More prevalent than sexual exploitation by SS men was that by lower level functionaries, kapos or other prisoner-supervisors, who demanded sexual favors from female inmates in exchange for an extra piece of bread, medicine, a pair of boots, a better job, or escape from a selection. Delousings, selections, and punishment sessions were often venues for sexual abuse. The differing degree to which women’s memoir and testimony and women’s fiction deal with sexual matters merits notice. Oral and written testimony acknowledge but generally refrain from graphic development of sexual abuse, probably because it is either too painful to recall publicly or because women have been socialized to remain silent about such issues and interviewers rarely press for such detail. Novelists have more license to develop this topic under the guise of fiction and thereby represent a portion of women’s Holocaust experience that is often muted in testimony. The concentration camp induction, among the most dehumanizing Holocaust experiences for men and women, has become a dominant motif of Holocaust literature. We see prisoners ordered to undress, subjected to rapid and brutal removal of all body hair, and covered with harsh delousing chemicals. Men typically write of the induction ritual in terms of loss of autonomy and personal dignity. With clothing confiscated and bodily hair shorn, each man is far less distinguishable from the others. The outward symbols of male religious, professional, and social status have been obliterated. Perhaps because women had

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traditionally been excluded from the professions and male institutional religious life, but were socialized by religious teaching and communal values to be modest, female characters are represented as responding to the induction ordeal as a sexual assault rather than a civic or social abomination. Highlighted in women’s fiction are the shame and terror of facing SS men who make lewd remarks and obscene suggestions; who poke, pinch, and maul as they delouse women and search their oral, rectal, and vaginal cavities for hidden valuables. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Kaiserwald induction scene boldly and graphically juxtaposes the women’s pain with the soldiers’ pornographic sadism. Schaeffer’s selection and arrangement of detail and her focus on assaulted female anatomy impart an effective understanding of the humiliation and degradation imposed on the women. Her prose specifically genders the humiliation with emphasis on women’s vulnerability implicit in shorn hair, mauled breasts, probed rectums, and chemically burned vaginas— offenses transparently mischaracterized as medical procedures “for their own good” that simultaneously sexually assault the victims and strip them of feminine attributes. Paralleling the fictional representation of sexual assault women suffered in the Nazi universe is representation of the systematic violation of their traditional maternal roles. Because the birth and life of Jewish children were perceived as threatening Aryan purity, Jewish women discovered that bearing children was a crime against the Reich, that their progeny were condemned by German decree to starvation, disease, and lethal injections in the ghettos, and to being gassed or tossed alive into the crematory ovens and lime pits of the death camps. And since the initial round of selections at the arrival ramp of the camps was contingent on the deportee’s age, health, profession, and maternal status, survival was less likely for women arriving with young children. Thus, as one critic observes, “Being a mother directly affected the chances for survival; being a father did not.” 6 The intimately bound fates of women and children have led to women writers privileging pregnancy/motherhood tropes for “vulnerability of women, or the predominance of the life force” 7 and emphasizing the Shoah plight of children. Fictional delineations of clandestine births, public murders of children, and smuggling the young into hiding testify to the writers’ tendency to combine the Holocaust fate of their female characters with those of endangered young children. Experiences of the women in this fiction parallel the historic record as parents striving to protect their children confront the dilemma of

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whether to relinquish a child to strangers or risk keeping the family together. The torment of enforced separation of mother and child is explored with noteworthy sensitivity and thoroughness in Anya. Schaeffer charts the macabre drama from the early period of occupation when Anya’s husband fails to convince her to leave their daughter in the care of gentile farmers for the duration of the war. Despite his warning that the infant will be killed if they keep her, Anya rejects her husband’s plea to flee with the visas he can secure for two. She struggles to keep her daughter as long as possible and parts with her only when ghetto children are being taken in lethal “actions.” Among the most emotionally disturbing scenes of the novel is that of grandmother and mother preparing to smuggle the child out of the ghetto. They wash, dress, and preen the child, carefully instructing her to go with a Jewish ghetto policeman who will deposit her at a church outside the ghetto gate, whence she is to depart with a stranger who has offered her something to eat. Only after her daughter is safely beyond the ghetto walls does the mother vent her despair, scream, and collapse. Juxtaposed to the rescue of a single child is the routine murder of Jewish children. It is among the novel’s Vilna Ghetto inhabitants that the tragedy is played out in its most common and brutal forms: children snatched from their ghetto rooms and hiding places and given lethal injections; infants ripped from their mothers’ arms and smashed against walls, their brains splattering. Resisting mothers are attacked by guard dogs and then must witness the murder of their children. Choral parts, ranging from mothers who struggle fiercely, albeit in vain, to those who try to save themselves by relinquishing children convey the full scope of “choiceless choices” Jewish mothers experience. Central to the fictional resistance theme and celebration of women’s bonding and mutual support is women’s rebellion against the Nazi ban on Jewish pregnancies. Women in the fiction, like their historic counterparts, willingly risk their lives to secure extra food for their pregnant sisters, assist in clandestine births, kill infants to save mothers, and, on very rare occasions, subvert the Nazi genocidal endeavor and support Jewish continuity by smuggling a newborn out of the camp. 8 Marge Piercy explores the complexity and contrariness of this theme through secondary characters who collaborate in hiding a pregnancy and birth from camp guards, yet must kill the newborn to save the mother and her co-conspirators. The pregnancy, we learn, escaped the physician’s detection during the arrival selection, thereby sparing the prisoner immediate gassing or admission to the medical experimentation block. Piercy

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underscores the danger to the women in attendance at the delivery: “If they were caught, they would all be sent to the gas chamber.” 9 The scene reflects testimony on conspiratorial camp deliveries and pays tribute to the selfless heroism of endangered women providing medical assistance and psychological succor to the birth-mother, thereby becoming defiant rebels themselves. Piercy’s episode closes with the commonplace death of the child, drawing attention to the victim’s impotence and to Nazi subversion of the life principle. Unlike most women who conclude such scenes in elegiac tones, Piercy issues a stirring rebuke, shifting the focus from victims to perpetrators and explicitly condemning one of the architects of the tragedy, a healing physician transformed into a murdering minister. She cites Dr. Mengele’s sadistic experimentation on pregnant women and fetuses to remind us of the racial and biological dimensions of the catastrophe. Shared determination to bring a pregnancy to successful term and smuggle the newborn to safety is a central theme of Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory, a work testifying to women’s bonding and mutual support in the Holocaust terrain. The women conspire to feed the pregnant inmate and help her hide her pregnancy. They take some of her workload upon themselves despite their own dire circumstances so that she may have the luxury of rest. 10 In this place where pregnancy is a crime punishable by death, the women rally to the cause of birth and sustenance of new life as an act of faith in the future, fully understanding that they are heightening the risk of losing their own lives. The assertive stance of Karmel’s foursome in bringing the child to life and managing its escape from the camp is a validation of life against death, of women’s “protective agency” and triumph over their oppressors. 11 Word of the child’s survival spreads, and speculation about its escape sustains the spiritual resistance of many women in the camp. If they can believe, as some do, that an underground organization rescued the child or that a partisan fighter actually entered the camp to smuggle the child to freedom, then perhaps they can trust that they too will be rescued. Childbirth temporarily rebuts the overwhelming contextual dominance of death and loss. The birth of a live Jewish child in a ghetto or camp is an act of bonding and resistance representing female and Jewish affirmation and triumph over Nazi degradation. 12 Cynthia Ozick explores the ordeal of clandestine camp motherhood in “The Shawl.” A young mother, Rosa Lublin, confronts the terrible choice encountered by many Jewish mothers: whether to seek a stranger’s good will to care for her infant Magda or conspire to preserve

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its life in her own, often fatal, setting. “A walking cradle,” 13 Rosa is so frail and thin that she successfully conceals Magda between her breasts under a shawl. Later, when Magda misses the wrap, she toddles into the square crying. A German guard swoops her up and flings her onto the electrified fence. Rosa inhibits the maternal instinct to run to her child. Instead, she honors the survival instinct, for to scream or retrieve her baby’s charred corpse would assure the guard’s bullet for herself. The shawl, now her life preserver, muffles her scream. Underscoring the female nature of Rosa’s suffering, Ozick privileges breast imagery at every crucial juncture in the short story. The mother’s anxiety over the threat to her child’s survival, whether from starvation or electrocution, is conveyed through references to teat and nipple: “Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, . . . both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole.” 14 Similarly, as Magda takes her fatal walk in the appelplatz, “A tide of commands hammered in Rosa’s nipples.” 15 Departing from much late twentieth-century feminist writing, which displaces the maternal voice by privileging women as sisters and friends, Holocaust fiction restores the authority of the maternal voice, linking this body of work to traditional Jewish writing, which routinely affirmed maternal figures and influence. Complementing their maternal roles in pregnancy and as guardians of young children, mothers are cast as Shoah tutors to adolescent and adult offspring, whether coaching adolescent daughters of “Aryan” appearance to pass as Christians, or acting as guides in ghetto and camp survival strategies, or serving as proponents of Holocaust witness and memory. Schaeffer meticulously reveals the intergenerational support mother and daughter offer each other. During the early stages of ghetto imprisonment, Mrs. Savikin is strong, wary, and judicious in dealing with the enemy. She exhibits unerring judgment in assessing ghetto decrees, opportunities, and German ploys designed to lure Jews to their destruction. Mrs. Savikin saves the lives of her sons-in-law by encouraging them to forego a German call for labor volunteers that is in fact a ruse which results in the murder of 5,000 men of the Vilna Ghetto. She insists that despite fatigue and despair, Anya must maintain her good physical appearance because the Germans must believe her fit to work and therefore fit to live. In treating the ghetto relationship of mother and adult daughter, Schaeffer also presents the Holocaust phenomenon of role reversal. As starvation and stress take their toll, Anya progressively accepts the role of her mother’s protector. In addition to working in several ghetto jobs

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to secure the family food, Anya helps her mother avoid capture in repeated “actions” targeting elderly ghettoites. During the Vilna Ghetto liquidation, she daubs rouge on her mother’s lips and cheeks and, in an attempt to spare Mrs. Savikin’s life, bribes a guard to allow her to join the Kaiserwald transport. Successfully passing one checkpoint, the women are then forcibly separated: Mrs. Savikin sent to the extermination line and Anya pushed into the labor camp transport. Mrs. Savikin’s last service to her daughter, a prophecy that Anya will survive because she has a child to live for, arms Anya with hope. As Mrs. Savikin asserted, Anya’s will to live, to find her daughter, and to reconstruct a Jewish family gird her for the survival struggle. Fictional women, like their historic counterparts, often replace men—who have been killed, taken into forced labor, or deported—as family providers and protectors, serving as survival guides and mentors to their daughters. Ilona Karmel explores the resourcefulness daughters learn from their mothers through the relationship between a nineteenyear-old child of a prominent mercantile family and her mother. During their fugitive period, while riding a train in the company of Polish antisemites, Tola’s mother bolsters their affinity to other passengers by persistently strengthening their Christian personae. She crosses herself as the train passes a church, invents tales of her Catholic family and devotional interests, and speaks audibly of Aunt Krystyna’s book on Saint Theresa and the colonel who went to mass each day. Finally, she authenticates her Polish Catholic mask by larding her speech with antisemitic rhetoric. The survival skills Tola learns from her mother during this fugitive period and later in the ghetto prepare her to think innovatively, to barter successfully for food and medicine, and to organize other women for survival in Plaszow and Skarzysko. Women’s fiction celebrates the formation and success of female sustaining groups that often function as surrogate families. Whether political, religious, or merely circumstantial, whether large or small, these female camp networks strive to mitigate the physical and emotional subjugation imposed by the Germans. Unlike men, who were typically socialized to compete against one another and learned nurturing traits primarily under duress, most women were already experienced in their use. 16 These female characters, like many of their historic models, attribute their survival to the generosity of friends who shared their bread, helped them withstand a roll call, or nursed them through acute illnesses. Representative of mutual support cited in testimony and incorporated in fiction is Schaeffer’s Anya taking a naive, terrified girl un-

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der her protective wing, helping her conform to orders or including her in a bunk assignment; or Karmel’s fiercely independent mercantile heiress withstanding primitive dental surgery to supply a despised pregnant inmate with food; or Marge Piercy’s Auschwitz “old-timer” providing boots and sound advice for her newcomer niece. Karmel’s second mother-daughter relationship exemplifies the surrogate families women created in the ghettos and camps to enhance survival chances. Having met as they crawled from a mass grave at the Radom Ghetto liquidation, this pair bond as mother and daughter and continue that relationship in Skarzysko until separated by death. As in the novel’s biological family, the surrogate daughter adopts the maternal role in support of her debilitated camp “mother.” Attesting to the social solidarity of female bonding—whether biological or surrogate—as essential to women’s survival, Karmel’s and Schaeffer’s women evidence the crucial bonds that are judged by many survivors to have been integral to their emotional sustenance and even to their physical survival. Karmel’s and Schaeffer’s heroines nurse each other through typhus and dysentery. They tend to each other’s wounds in ways that are physically and psychologically therapeutic. Schaeffer’s Anya applies her medical skills to care for the sick and performs lifesaving primitive surgery on a friend, thereby helping her escape a selection. Karmel’s Barbara applies her estate managerial proficiency and Tola her mercantile acumen to organize their camp family’s mutual assistance strategy. These female protagonists evidence values and behavior similar to those of their historic counterparts, documented in the research of Joan Ringelheim, Sybil Milton, and Myrna Goldenberg. The fiction, like survivor testimony, attests to the importance of “small groups of women in the same barracks or work crews . . . bond[ing] together . . . in networks to ‘organize’ food, clothing, and beds, and to help cope with the privations and primitive camp conditions.” 17 The novels of Piercy, Schaeffer, and Karmel, like women’s testimonies, recount how despite every Nazi effort to dehumanize the inmates and set them against each other, women who suffer from gnawing hunger share food; women weary from the day’s excruciating labor pick each other’s lice and sustain each other through long, painful roll calls; ailing women nurse each other through debilitating diseases and tend the wounds and welts of a flogged inmate. Characters share memories, recipes, remembered literary passages, and religious observances to bolster morale and determination in the battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In the labor and concentration camp settings, fic-

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tional women, like their historic models and male counterparts, engage in illicit “organization,” bartering for goods among prisoners or stealing at the expense of the Germans to obtain food, clothing, medicine, anything needed to prolong life. In addition to women’s resourcefulness and cooperative strategies, spiritual and psychological resistance in the face of relentless atrocity is of major interest to the novelists. Like males in fiction composed by men and the testimony of both sexes, starving women fast on Yom Kippur and refuse to eat leavened bread during Passover. At significant risk, they honor the womanly commandments and smuggle materials from Nazi warehouses to fashion makeshift Sabbath candles. On a psychological level, exchange of prewar memories and visions of a postHolocaust future serve “as promissory notes to redeem the suffering of the present.” 18 These religious observances and psychologically supportive conversations provide vital, albeit fleeting, distraction from camp brutality, a moment of transcendence from the present, and hope for postwar restoration. These herculean efforts to retain human dignity persist in a universe designed to systematically eradicate civility and feelings of individual worth. Paralleling the popular misconceptions of the absence of Jewish active resistance and the belief that Jews went to slaughter like sheep is the fallacy that resistance movements were exclusively male. Jewish women and men served both in national resistance units as well as in exclusively Jewish resistance and partisan groups. The fiction charts women’s active resistance in Aryan sectors, ghettos, and concentration camps. Opportunities for resistance work beyond the ghettos and camps, and for certain jobs within the Nazi net, depended on many factors, including an Aryan appearance. The novelists clearly show that because women were not perceived as traditional agents of political or militant opposition they often successfully undertook resistance operations men could not. Elzbieta Ettinger, writing from experience and witness, and Marge Piercy, writing from comprehensive research, each devote considerable attention to women in the resistance. 19 Ettinger’s fictional mother and daughter are representative of Jewish women who exploited their Aryan looks, either to remain alive in Aryan sectors or contribute to the communal resistance effort. Since their Jewish identity could not be discerned physiologically, “Aryan”-appearing women could more easily pass as Christian than could Jewish men of “Aryan” features. This factor allowed some to remain in “open hiding” in Aryan districts and others to play a significant role in resistance movements as couriers, moving about “freely.”

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Representative of women’s treatment of this theme is Ettinger’s meticulous representation of the tension and peril of girls in “open” hiding, residing and working in Aryan sectors under false identities and living outside the law that confined Jews to ghettos. In Kindergarten, the ghetto adolescent being prepared for escape to the Aryan sector must remove all traces of Jewishness from her appearance and language, trust no one, and appear confident. She must even stay clear of partisans, for “There is one point about which some partisans agree with the Germans—that is the Jews.” 20 Ettinger dramatizes the tension generated by the constant danger of neighbors suspecting that a Jewish child was being sheltered and the fear of inadvertent self-betrayal. She admirably and painstakingly details the psychological strain of undeviating vigilance, the stress associated with adapting to the customs of people who were often very different culturally and religiously while burdened by the need to persuasively project new identities for oneself and invented relatives. The girls live in terror of blurting out their real names, of uttering a Jewish word, of mispronouncing a word of a Christian prayer or forgetting an anticipated religious gesture. Incessant fear of discovery and the need to be faithful to the assumed character cause severe psychological stress for Ettinger’s young women. Their life on the Aryan side is a harrowing experience, marked by the urgency of eluding blackmailers and informers, and coupled with the constant need to alter identities and relocate. Ettinger and Piercy develop resistance as major themes of their novels and incorporate gendered aspects of resistance. The fictional Maria travels from ghetto to ghetto, resistance job to resistance job, delivering information, maintaining links between dispersed Jewish populations, and smuggling arms. Ettinger celebrates the mastery of Maria’s Polish appearance and manners, “the way she talked and laughed and drank vodka and held her glass, fitted her new identity perfectly. Her voice became more harsh, her language less refined, her gestures brisk and sure. She could drink heavily with the millers, laugh and joke with them. . . . She was perfectly balanced. There was neither exaggeration nor slackness in her manner. She clearly did not underestimate the foe, real or potential.” 21 Marie’s daughter Elli—whose ghetto escape and “Aryan” incarnations are engineered by her mother—works within the Nazi bureaucracy, enabling her to bring news of forthcoming actions to the ghettos. Elli participates in the group slaughter of a Polish informer who repeatedly threatens to denounce several ghetto escapees, and she even

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manages to kill a lust- and wine-besotted Nazi on her own, after the men are rendered defenseless by liquor and sex. Piercy’s chief female resister, who overcomes male sexism within the Resistance, operates within French and Jewish networks and takes great risks to smuggle children out of France, secure safe escape routes for downed flyers, and serve the Resistance as a courier. Benefiting from postwar resistance research, Piercy writes of French Jewish women who join male colleagues to collect military and economic information; prepare information for the Allies; print and disseminate information from the BBC and American radio broadcasts; write, print, and distribute underground news releases; and falsify papers for fugitives. These women fight in the mountains, conspire with local partisans, attack a Milice prison, and retrieve Allied materials from drop zones, all fictional recreations of women’s historic resistance work. Beyond the militant resistance of women operating “in freedom,” women’s Holocaust literature dramatically represents incarcerated women resisting, not only in every act they perform to remain alive, but as saboteurs of the slave labor economy and the industrial killing machine. The concentration camp inmates of Gone To Soldiers and An Estate of Memory learn from old-timers how to debilitate war materials they produce and how to slow production. Karmel’s Plaszow and Skarzysko women intentionally manufacture defective materials, and Piercy’s prisoners take part in the destruction of crematory ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whether gathering information, helping fellow prisoners, or somehow confounding the camp bureaucracy, women’s active resistance to the Nazi universe is a cogent theme of women’s writing. Like their male colleagues, female writers also devote considerable attention to the postwar plight of Holocaust survivors, often highlighting gendered aspects of their pain and the religious and political aspects of their purpose. Women’s accounts are generally dominated by the psychology of loss and the plight of voicelessness. In the fiction of Ozick and Schaeffer, we encounter female survivors suffering the emotional and physical consequences of the Shoah and applying wartime survival lessons to their post-Shoah situations. The fictional maternal survivors evidence characteristics similar to those identified in the psychiatric literature: paranoia, suspicion, and emotional isolation and distance. These are illustrated by unwillingness to resume prewar professions; reluctance to forge new emotional connections; prolonged, unalleviated mourning for loved ones; overprotection of survivor children; and refusal to bear additional children. When they are not obsessively involved

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in their children’s lives, they are often withdrawn into the worlds of memory and nightmare. The Holocaust dictates everything about the postwar life of Schaeffer’s protagonist. Anya decides to marry because of her pride in her husband-to-be’s ability to avenge his father’s death and bring a Nazi criminal to trial. The couple agree not to have children because they still suffer from Holocaust trauma. Obsessed not only with the health and welfare of her survivor-daughter, Anya also foils Ninka’s budding romance with a gentile boy, insisting that she marry a Jew to assure continuity of the people. The family live and work in a run-down neighborhood in order to live among fellow survivors, the only people whom they think they can trust, the only people who “can understand what it was like.” 22 Cynthia Ozick’s novella “Rosa” portrays the title character at fiftyeight, decades after the events recounted in “The Shawl,” and explores the wounded psyche of the bereaved mother and rape victim. Again and again the grieving mother recalls her murdered child in a series of fused shawl, fence, and electricity images that evoke the concentration camp, dramatize the connection between Rosa’s postwar trauma and its Holocaust inception, and effectively link the narratives. On the narrative level, Ozick articulates Rosa’s gendered suffering. That Magda is the product of Rosa’s rape by a Nazi is encoded in Stella’s remarks and Rosa’s sexually-based paranoia about postwar theft of her underwear. Rosa’s survival is bitter because the hell of failed communication with those who evade her Holocaust testimony and those who would exploit her history, and the hell of lost family, lost aspirations, lost language, lost life. Just as the shawl was the objective correlative of her daughter’s life and death in the short story, it operates in the novella as an objective correlative of the survivor’s psychic torment. For Rosa, the shawl is a holy emblem of her child; for her antagonist and fellow survivor, it is Rosa’s “trauma,” “fetish,” “idol,” “relic.” Rosa’s denial of Magda’s death and invention of her daughter’s prosperous adult life epitomize her emotional anguish. Contrasting with the fictional treatment of survivor syndrome, such as Ozick’s in “The Shawl,” is the theme of survivor mission, expressed either in terms of continuity of Jewish life in America or in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel. One form of restorative healing is seen in emigration of survivors to Palestine to build a Jewish homeland. While Schaeffer introduces the subject on a plot level dramatizing the obstruction Anya encounters in her efforts to emigrate, Piercy takes a stronger thematic approach. Her politically astute novel culminates in

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the Holocaust transformation of the heroine from alienated Jew and French nationalist to confirmed Jew and Zionist. This heroine, who formerly disdained her family’s Orthodox religion, observes selected rituals at war’s end and rejects repatriation to collaborationist France to cast her lot with Jewish survivors embarked on nation building in the land that will become Israel. Articulating women’s voices and women’s Holocaust history, these writers construct individual and collective memory in ways that reveal the Shoah’s enduring relevance and attest to the moral imperative to remember that is a cornerstone of Jewish thinking and liturgy. The European-born women bear witness to horrors they endured, and the American-born authors join them in solidarity as “the generation that bears the scar without the wound, sustaining memory without direct experience.” 23 Whether they reconstitute the past from direct knowledge and memory as eyewitnesses or through documentary research and artistic imagination, these writers create memorable literature opening and broadening the American literary canon and the Holocaust canon by giving full voice and visibility to women’s Holocaust history. They thereby help overturn the paradigm of reading human experience through the lens of male norms while implying that they adequately represent women’s history and perspective. These women persuasively demonstrate that although the Holocaust is first and foremost a Jewish experience, both history and its artistic representation have a gendered dimension deserving of memory and imaginative contemplation.

NOTES 1. See the following texts for examination of women’s Holocaust literary expression: Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Ellen S. Fine, “Women and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival,” in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder: Csengeri Institute for Holocaust Studies, Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, 1990), 79–95. Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). Sara R. Horowitz, “Ilona Karmel,” in Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, ed. Ann R. Shapiro (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 146–57, and “The ‘Pin with Which to Stick Yourself’: The Holocaust in Jewish American Women’s Writing,” in Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, ed. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997),

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141–59. S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); “Holocaust-Wrought Women: Portraits by Four American Writers,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11:2 (Fall 1992): 150–61; “An Estate of Memory: Women in the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Studies Annual, ed. Sanford Pinsker and Jack Fischel (New York: Garland, 1992), 99–11; “Holocaust Writing,” in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 395–97; “The Holocaust and the Witnessing Imagination,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing As Transgression, ed. Deirdre Lashgari (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 231–46; “Norma Rosen: An American Literary Response to the Holocaust,” in Halio and Siegel, eds., Daughters of Valor, 160–74; “Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust Fiction,” in Witness through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 218–78. 2. See Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 297–333; Joan Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 69–87; Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs 10:4 (1985): 741–61; Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 150–166; and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 3. For a more complete analysis of women’s gendered Holocaust writing of the texts listed here and others, see Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing. 4. Ghetto historian Leonard Tushnet reported that “Clinical research by Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto confirmed the impressionistic accounts of contemporaries and brought proof to the assertion that women were less vulnerable to the effects of short-term starvation and famine. . . . [and that] women also shared and pooled their limited resources . . . better than did men.” Leonard Tushnet, The Uses of Adversity: Studies of Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto (London, 1966) quoted in Milton, “Women and the Holocaust,” 311–12. 5. Judith Tydor Baumel concludes from her study of Plaszow women’s mutual assistance that the behavior was both gender and religiously motivated, citing women who invoked Torahic and Talmudic teaching to the effect that Jews were responsible for one another and that “[s]he who saves one life, it is as if [s]he saves an entire world.” Judith Tydor Baumel, “Social Interaction among Jewish Women in Crisis during the Holocaust: A Case Study,” Gender and History 7 (April 1995): 65 cited by Myrna Goldenberg, “ ‘From a World Beyond’: Women in the Holocaust,” Feminist Studies 22:3 (Fall 1996): 670.

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6. Ellen Fine, “Women Writers and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival,” Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: City University of New York, 1990), 82. 7. Sara R. Horowitz, “Engendering Trauma Memory,” in Ofer and Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, 371. 8. See Konnilyn Feig on the Nazi supervised births in Birkenau, and the prescribed manner of drowning the newborn in small barrels. Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 184. 9. Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers (New York: Summit Books, 1987), 576. 10. Aurelia’s pregnancy is modeled on that of a woman Karmel met in Leipzig who also bandaged herself to conceal pregnancy. Karmel recalls that this woman would fall asleep at work and that the others would nudge her to wake her. The portion of Aurelia’s story that relates to smuggling the child from the camp has its source in an incident that occurred in the Cracow camp, which involved smuggling a drug-silenced child out in a sack. Karmel interview with Lillian Kremer, May 24, 1988. 11. Sara R. Horowitz, “Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 269. 12. See also Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” 163. 13. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 4. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. No doubt there were instances of men sacrificing themselves for one another, but testimony and creative writing suggest that such activity was far less prevalent. In male Holocaust writing interdependence is exceptional rather than commonplace, as in Primo Levi’s association with a young man whom he helps feel human by reciting Dante, or the non-prisoner chemical worker who shared his food, or Elie Wiesel’s mutually devoted father and son. More often, male writing depicts the dependence of one victim upon another as a threat to the survival of the physically stronger character, for example, the sons fleeing from their debilitated fathers in Wiesel’s Night and in Richard Elman’s 28th Day of Elul. Testimonial evidence and fictional representation of cooperative association among male inmates in male writing is modest when compared to the emphasis women survivors and writers place on bonding and reciprocal support. Primo Levi’s account of the solitary nature of the male camp inmate is instructive. He writes: “[H]ere the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some[one] . . . vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there will be one more ‘muselmann’ dragging himself to work every day; and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and

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cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, personal benefit; he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival” (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier Books, 1958, 80). See also Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (November, 1996): 87. 17. Milton, “Women and the Holocaust,” 313. 18. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 67. 19. Although Ettinger refused to detail the specifics of her missions or identify her group during our interview of May 23, 1988, she confirmed her association with a resistance unit. Representative of the many histories and memoirs she read in preparation for writing Gone to Soldiers, Piercy acknowledges—in the “After Words” section of her novel—that she read Vera Laska’s Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, Amy Latour’s The Jewish Resistance in France, and Karen Anderson’s Wartime Women. 20. Elzbieta Ettinger, Kindergarten (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 19. 21. Ibid., 47–48. 22. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Anya (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 475. 23. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 2.

THIRTEEN

The Uses of Memory and Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Film, Fiction, and Memoir Rebecca Scherr

In narrative accounts of Holocaust testimony, explicit discussions of sexuality and eroticism are almost nonexistent. If the theme does occur in eyewitness accounts, often it is the enforced lack of sexuality that is the object of commentary: “ ‘Spread your legs,’ yelled the blokowa. And the body hair was shorn too. . . . We ceased to exist as thinking, feeling entities. We were not allowed any modesty in front of these strange men. We were nothing more than objects on which they performed their duties, nonsentient things that they could examine from all angles. . . . It did not bother them that we were women and without our hair we felt totally humiliated.” 1 As Sara Nomberg-Przytyk remembers, the prisoners became, in the eyes of the Nazis, “nonsentient things” the moment they entered the concentration camp. Trauma, displacement and incarceration, starvation and its consequent exhaustion, overwork, the segregation of men and women, the destruction of family units, the shaving of body hair, the cessation of menstruation, the constant presence and threat of death—all these factors conspired to strip the individual of any means of imagining oneself a being, human and sexual. This is not meant to imply that sexual relationships, sexuality, and eroticism are never alluded to in survivor accounts, however. Charlotte Delbo, for example, recalls witnessing a kapo and her girlfriend “play ‘wedding’ all night,” 2 but Delbo’s memory constitutes one small segment of her long narrative recounting her experiences in Auschwitz and After, and it is by no means the focus of her writing.

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However, a survey of fictional narratives that take the Holocaust as subject matter reveals numerous works that treat sexual relationships and eroticism as dominant features of the main characters’ experience of the Holocaust. In Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter and D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, eroticism emerges as the central trope for examining the difficult subject of Holocaust experience and memory. These fictional works of art replace the absence of sexuality characteristic of memoirs of camp experience with an overabundance of erotic imagery, a sign of a general discomfort with the historical facts or with the methods one can employ to represent the Holocaust. Moreover, it is the female body that becomes the site for displaying this erotic impulse. The authors project a kind of sexual paranoia, and as readers/viewers watch these sexualized bodies they share the experience of navigating between sex and violence, and sex and death, in a fictional Holocaust universe both Cavani and Thomas attempt to render “real.” Thomas’s and Cavani’s use of erotic imagination in relation to the Holocaust involves such transgressive sexualities as perversion, sadomasochism, rape, and nymphomania. Cavani’s 1975 film The Night Porter centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a Nazi camp “doctor” and his favorite female prisoner, while simultaneously depicting such “sideshow perversions” as the rape of a male camp inmate, an exNazi’s struggle with his repressed homosexuality, and an aging female collaborator’s taste for young gigolos. 3 Thomas’s protagonist Lisa Erdman in The White Hotel writes erotic poetry in which she figures as an exhibitionist nymphomaniac and hallucinates “falling from a great height and . . . being buried by a landslide” 4 whenever she engages in intercourse; her eventual murder in the ravine of Babi Yar is described in sexualized, yet horrific, prose. What is the point of using eroticism as the central medium for giving meaning to Holocaust memory in a work of fiction? How does this reflect on the historical reality of the Holocaust? How does the trope of the sexualized female body contextualize the memory and the fact of the Holocaust in these works of fiction? I will explore these questions as they apply to The Night Porter and The White Hotel, and then I will examine a few passages from survivor memoirs which address the issue of female sexuality and position the access of sexuality as a deliberate act of resistance. The Night Porter is a perplexing film that tells the story of ex-Nazi officer Max and his “little girl” Lucia, who was once a prisoner and his mistress in a camp where he played doctor. The film opens in 1957 Vienna, where Max is working as a night porter in a large hotel that

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serves as a sanctuary for the ex-Nazis who comprise its staff as well as its residents. As the film unfolds, we learn that these ex-Nazis are involved in an attempt to bury all traces of their wartime pasts. They hold mock trials among themselves, exonerating one another of their wartime deeds by destroying existing documentation of their criminal actions as Nazi officers. This destruction of documentation includes actual survivors, of whom there are few. These men murder persons who can recognize their faces and could point an accusing finger at them. One night, while Max is working at the hotel’s front desk, a group of opera-goers enter; among them is Lucia, who is now married to an American, a visiting conductor of the opera’s orchestra. The recognition between Max and Lucia is immediate, and the movie cuts quickly to a flashback. We see a line of people, mainly Jews—identified by the yellow stars sewed onto their clothing—and among them young Lucia. 5 We see Max holding a film camera, walking to and fro filming the prisoners when the bright light falls upon Lucia, in whom he takes an immediate interest. Max’s camera penetrates Lucia’s space, moving from her head to her feet. She blinks in confusion, then looks away. The movie cuts back to 1957, to Lucia in her hotel room, contemplating her face in a mirror, visibly disturbed. As the movie continues, Cavani employs the flashback as a means of establishing the nature of the relationship between Max and Lucia. Significantly, in the first flashback, Max looks at Lucia through his own movie camera, suggesting that in the flashback sequences we are seeing Lucia through Max’s lens. These flashbacks, used as a device to denote memory, contain no dialogue, and as a consequence the memories are ambiguous insofar as the spectator relies on purely visual clues to “read” these moments. Cavani manipulates the spectator’s habit of reading by projecting onto the body of Lucia a kind of paranoid eroticism as seen through Max’s lens. The camera achieves this through extreme closeup, interrogating Lucia’s face and body. In one flashback, a very thin and naked Lucia stands alone, cowering against a wall of showers. Max is firing bullets at her, purposely missing but marking his absolute power over her fate. Her body is extremely gaunt, an obvious signifier of the “real” starvation actual prisoners suffered. Yet Lucia’s emaciated body becomes an erotic site because we are already aware of Max’s interest in Lucia and because “shooting one’s gun” is clearly a sexual metaphor. We closely examine her nakedness and vulnerability as the camera, like Max’s camera, lingers on her skeletal body and conventionally beautiful face. In short, through Max’s vision Lucia becomes a site of (erotic)

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investment and speculation for the spectator. This purposeful manipulation of the gaze—transforming the starved prisoner’s body into an erotic spectacle—evokes the first twinges of discomfort Cavani leads the spectator to experience. The beginning of Max’s and Lucia’s sexual relationship occurs when a group of impassive prisoners looks on as a Nazi officer rapes a male prisoner in his bed. Max walks into the room wearing his doctor’s coat, takes Lucia by the hand, and leads her to a room where they are alone. Though Max forces Lucia to perform oral sex, her facial expression is indeterminate. It is as if Cavani demands that the spectator read this ambiguity: her use of the extreme close-up forces us to examine Lucia’s expression, the look in her eyes, and what we gain is only discomfort— Lucia doesn’t seem unwilling, nor does this other “rape” seem to cause her any feelings of displeasure. This scene is disturbing because it is unclear whether Lucia abhors this act of violence, passively consents, or perhaps even feels a certain amount of pleasure. The tension between violence (rape) and pleasure (Max’s and possibly Lucia’s) is, in this moment, left suspended. Cavani opens up the possibility that sexual pleasure is one dimension of the relationship between the Nazi and his prisoner. The confusion as to Lucia’s feelings toward Max is compounded by the fact that they resume their sexual relationship in the filmic present, willingly relinquishing any signs of conventionality they have reestablished in their post-camp lives. The two hole up in Max’s apartment. He breaks with his Nazi cohorts and quits his job; she leaves her husband to devote herself entirely to Max. Max’s Nazi associates are aware of Lucia’s presence and her identity as a former prisoner. Since Max is unwilling to eliminate her and he claims they are in love, the Nazis wait outside Max’s apartment for a chance to assassinate them both. Driven by starvation to flee the apartment and obtain some food (the Nazis prevent the delivery of food to the apartment), Lucia and Max are, eventually and predictably, shot to death. One overall effect of the story of Max and Lucia seems to be the deliberate blurring of clear demarcations between the experience of memory for the victimizer in relation to the victimized. As Marga CottinoJones writes, [Cavani’s] main motivation was that the basic difference between victims and victimizers consisted in the fact that victims remembered, while victimizers searched to find excuses in the logic of war in order to

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“Our basic beliefs about Nazism and the Holocaust” refers to the assumption of a clear division between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the concomitant associations generally ascribed to each. For example, that Max is a prisoner in his own apartment, where he and Lucia suffer fear of death and starvation—much as we know, historically, real prisoners suffered in the camps—gives him a new status as one of the hunted. At one time a hunter, he is now marked out for execution by the very group to which he once belonged. The Nazi, as a symbol of our “basic beliefs” of Holocaust history, represents evil; he is unquestionably guilty, without conscience, a born revisionist and denier. Yet Cavani complicates Max’s identity as Nazi by transforming him into a figure who becomes prey to the cannibalistic trajectory of Nazism, whose experiences toward the end of his life uncannily resemble the experiences of the prisoners he tortured and murdered. Cottino-Jones continues her analysis of The Night Porter by arguing that the disturbing effect of the movie is further emphasized by the film’s “voyeuristic effect and its subtle manipulation of the spectators’ gaze and reactions . . . what [Scott] Montgomery calls ‘the power and erotics of the image itself—the ability of images, for example, to overwhelm and ravish, to enlist a voyeuristic pleasure of almost any subject, no matter how monstrous.’ ” 7 The Night Porter turns the concentration camp memory into a memory of sexual play, a place where prisoners and film spectators watch Max and Lucia enact their psychosexual drama. In effect, Cavani transforms the memory of the camp into a “sexy memory,” which, through the depiction of eroticism and the sexualized female body, elicits a reaction of pleasure in the spectator, completely warping the historical facts of the Holocaust: in particular, the fact that the Holocaust was by no means, in any way, sexy. The flashback sequences always foreground Lucia’s body as an erotic spectacle, a beautiful woman of distinct interest to the viewer in the midst of “equally naked but older prisoners totally devoid of any physical attractiveness.” 8 Furthermore, every flashback, every “memory,” contains a sexual encounter between Max and Lucia, whether explicit or suggested. The images of the bizarre

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power-sex games Max plays with Lucia are always juxtaposed with the faces of the other prisoners as they hover in the background, watching. The prisoners, like the spectators of the film, become voyeurs of the erotic games enacted between Max and Lucia. The camera’s concentration on the beautiful woman as erotic spectacle, and the flashback “memory” as one that contains only moments of sexual ambiguity and voyeurism, are more intent on representing perversion and sensationalism than in recreating Nazi atrocity, and the effect is to decontextualize the concentration camp from its historical circumstance. Although the erotic scenes in The Night Porter are ostensibly perverse, they nevertheless communicate a sensation of both discomfort and pleasure. In itself, the act of watching sexual intercourse unfold onscreen holds the power to sexually excite the viewer; this watching taps into a kind of scopophiliac desire, which Laura Mulvey defines via Freud as the “desire to see and make sure of the private and forbidden.” 9 We as viewers experience voyeuristic pleasure in having privileged access to Max’s Viennese apartment, 10 where Lucia is willingly chained inside and which Max has barricaded from the exterior world. We can further see into the space where he and Lucia play out their psychotic-sexual drama, whereas the other film personalities are barred from entering. This potentially triggers the desire to watch Max and Lucia, for they become objects who will stimulate in us a feeling of sexual excitement when we watch them make love. Perversely, our feelings of desire will be further heightened, perversely, because of the “forbidden” nature of sex acts between a Nazi and his prisoner, especially when, toward the end of the film, it is the prisoner who initiates intercourse. Furthermore, these sex acts take place within the confines of an apartment sealed off from the rest of the world of the filmic plot, but laid bare for our privileged access and subsequent enjoyment. In short, the viewer is manipulated to experience the pleasure of a “peeping tom.” As to the discomfort we feel in opposition to this pleasure, we as viewers/readers fall into a trap Lawrence Langer articulates: namely, that the atrocity of the Holocaust is so heavy and unimaginable that we search for moments of redemption or acts of resistance in concentration camp narratives in order to render “more manageable . . . impossible circumstances” like the Holocaust. 11 In The Night Porter our discomfort stems from the absence of any acts of redemption and resistance by the victim, Lucia, or even a redeeming characterization of her personality. She has almost no personality in the film; the only aspects of her character developed there are her disturbing passion for Max and her reaction to

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his presence. We watch her repeat her victimization, and then she dies. “Our basic beliefs” of the Holocaust incite in the spectator a desire to see her flee, to resume a “normal” life, to repudiate Max and all the history he represents. In other words, we want to see a narrative of redemption through Lucia’s resistance to Max’s seductive power, a power she could not resist while she was his prisoner, when resistance meant a sure death. But now that she is “free” she can reject him, point a finger, and enact her/our revenge. She does not enact this revenge we so desire; rather, she causes us discomfort because of the enslaving passion she carries for her oppressor. Cavani deliberately infuses Lucia’s identity as victim with ambiguity, as she does with Max’s character, further blurring the line between victim and oppressor. Discussing the factors that inspired her to create The Night Porter, Cavani referred to two interviews she conducted with Italian women of the Resistance for her 1965 television documentary, La donna nella Resistenza. One survivor returned to Dachau each year during her vacation for reasons she could not clearly articulate; all she could say was that her incarceration was the most important experience of her life. The other, a woman who had survived Auschwitz, remarked to Cavani, “Don’t believe that every victim is innocent.” 12 Cavani fuses these two stories to create the character of Lucia: Lucia’s return to Max’s embrace signifies “the psychological grip of the past [that] locks characters into repetition compulsion,” 13 like that of the woman who returns to Dachau; and Lucia’s willingness to be Max’s mistress, a choice initially made to increase her chances of survival, taints the “innocence” associated with survivorship, in that she slept with, and in a sense collaborated with, the enemy/oppressor. For Cavani, the women’s stories best illustrate the point she wanted to capture in her film: “In reality, I was searching for an explanation for the ambiguity of human nature,” which she claims to have discovered “in fetishism, in the power of masochism . . . in the violence that arises within us, from all that is hidden in the unconscious.” 14 How these issues relate to the Holocaust in particular Cavani does not reveal in her discussion of the film, nor does she state how or why eroticism is the chosen vehicle for representing this interrogation of ambiguity in human nature. It is as if the Holocaust is secondary and dispensable, merely a stage set for the author’s meditation on “the ambiguity of human nature” through the presentation of perverse and sensationalist eroticism. Lucia’s erotic body is the focal point for the spectators as we navigate the thrill of a perverse passion; it is both the site of eroticism and

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the site of memory. Her presence as Holocaust survivor recalls the traumatic experience, yet that physicality can only express itself through the language of eroticism controlled by her oppressor. This is reminiscent of Mulvey’s formulation that “Woman . . . stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” 15 Since the memories presented in Cavani’s film are particularly Max’s memories, as seen through his lens, Lucia stands as the silent bearer of (his) meaning. In fact, she rarely utters a word throughout the entire film. The victim here does not make meaning; the woman’s body stands for the atrocity and memory of Cavani’s fictional Holocaust but remains prisoner to it, contained within the boundaries of Max’s perverse, erotic rhetoric. The meaning assigned to Lucia is that of the center focus of the gaze, the captive body that is looked at and desired, a position that succeeds in illuminating the interconnections between pleasure and perversity, yet a position that fails to communicate the horror that was the Holocaust. Perhaps the horror of the Holocaust will begin to be represented when it is the victim who becomes the maker, or producer, of meaning. The ambiguity Cavani sought to investigate in her film is certainly a fascinating dimension of the plot, but what is not as apparent is how the theme of the Holocaust is (ab)used in her film. In choosing to center on the notion of ambiguity, vague by its very nature, Cavani admits that it is not the Holocaust nor the concentration camp that she is interested in exploring but rather the ambiguity associated with the fascination and pull of Nazism. 16 This allows her to depart from any allegiance to reality in the depiction of the camp, using it instead as a backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim. By not exploring in depth the reality of camp life, the film’s use of the Holocaust comes across, to follow Cottino-Jones’s assessment, as “shallow.” 17 Instead of an insightful examination of the past’s grip on the psyche, a psyche that has experienced the full atrocity of concentration camp life, the more central erotic and arguably romantic components of this film transform the story of Max and Lucia into a “ ‘sentimental idyll’ . . . exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence.” 18 Furthermore, by relying on the use of the erotic female body as the central trope of the film, The Night Porter borders on soft-porn in its play on voyeurism. The film’s use of an erotic language to talk about the Holocaust succeeds only in probing Cavani’s

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central question, that of “the ambiguity of human nature.” It fails to add itself to the growing number of Holocaust-related works of art that deal rigorously with the question of how to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. 19 D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, more nuanced and complicated than Cavani’s film, recounts the story of Lisa Erdman, a woman of mixed Catholic and Jewish heritage whose “Cassandra-like” ability, her clairvoyance, gives her foresight glimpses of her murder at the Babi Yar massacre. While a patient of Thomas’s fictionalized version of Freud, and in the grip of what Freud called hysteria, Lisa writes an erotic poem in which she fantasizes a sexual adventure at the White Hotel, where she and Freud’s son incessantly make love: So pulling me upon him without warning, your son impaled me, it was so sweet I screamed but no one heard me for the other screams as body after body fell or leapt from upper stories of the white hotel. I jerked and jerked until his prick released its soft cool flood. Charred bodies hung from trees, he grew erect again, again I lunged. 20

At this moment in Lisa’s poem, the upper levels of their hotel are ablaze, but the couple cannot be bothered to leave their lovemaking, even though they watch as other guests at the White Hotel fall and leap to their deaths. The image of people falling to their deaths foreshadows Lisa’s own fate, much later in the text, when she is shot by German soldiers and drops into the corpse-packed ravine of Babi Yar. Only when Lisa fantasizes about sex, or when she actually engages in intercourse, do these catastrophic visions rise in her mind. The fictional Freud, who narrates a large part of this novel, draws the conclusion, through Lisa’s case analysis, that sex and death are intertwined phenomena. When Lisa actually falls into the ravine, shot and yet barely alive, Thomas repeats this perverse sexual/erotic rhetoric as he describes her death. The kind of death Lisa will experience is veiled in the language of the poem excerpted above, but it is revealed in the sexualized language Thomas employs to describe the moment of her death: With Semashko’s assistance he found the opening, and they joked together as he inserted the bayonet, carefully, almost delicately. [Lisa]

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was not making any sound, though they could see she was still breathing. Still very gently, Demidenko imitated the thrusts of intercourse; and Semashko let out a guffaw, which echoed from the ravine walls, as the woman’s body jerked back and relaxed, jerked and relaxed. But after those spasms there was no sign of a reaction, and she seemed to have stopped breathing. Semashko grumbled at their wasting time. Demidenko twisted the blade and thrust it in deep. 21

In Lisa’s poem, she uses the phrase “I jerked and jerked” to describe having sex with Freud’s son, and she also writes that “[he] impaled me.” In Lisa’s death scene, Thomas as narrator repeats these two actions. The soldier moves his bayonet inside Lisa’s vagina to give Lisa’s body the appearance of engaging in sexual intercourse (“[her] body jerked back and relaxed, jerked and relaxed”), and eventually he “thrust [the bayonet] in deep”—he impaled her. According to Laura Tanner, this death scene “finally reveals the true cause of Lisa’s excruciating pain, but it is the stark description of that violence that displaces once and for all Freud’s abstract symbolism and the metaphorical forms in which that symbolism cloaks the facts of violence.” 22 In the death scenario above, Thomas strips the prose of the heavily symbolic vocabulary based on psychoanalytic terms that functions as the dominant mode of expression for all previous chapters of the novel, and in its stead he reveals brute violence. Tanner argues that this strategy of revelation is effective because the reader is able to experience horror at the “sight” of Lisa’s death/rape. The brutal and horror-inducing description of Lisa’s death works to oppose the passage from Lisa’s poem, for the verse bars access to the sensation of horror even when the reader “witnesses” the violent image of “charred bodies.” In Lisa’s poem the violent images are subsumed by the erotic rhetoric of the poem, “cloaking” violence in metaphorical language— particularly erotic language, so that the “facts of violence” disappear into the erotic dimension of the poem. 23 In other words, the erotic component of Lisa’s verse writes violence in terms of eroticism so that the violent images become part of Lisa’s sexual landscape, increasing the power of her orgasm while simultaneously removing these images from the realm of atrocity and horror. We also see this phenomenon of (erotic) metaphorical language cloaking the facts of violence in The Night Porter, since the spectator never confronts atrocity itself, only metaphorical violence as depicted in the sadomasochistic relationship between Nazi and victim.

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Thomas’s prose explores this profound point, though at the expense of sexualizing and trivializing one survivor’s testimony of Babi Yar. The section of the novel entitled “The Sleeping Carriage” is the most imagistic and powerful part of the novel; it is also the chapter where Babi Yar is described in horrifying detail, and the only part of the book that actually takes place during the Holocaust. For this chapter, Thomas relied on the testimony of one of Babi Yar’s few survivors, Dina Pronicheva. As Holocaust literary critic James Young explains, “Seemingly torn between presenting Babi Yar as a fictional construct and simultaneously asserting that Babi Yar was not a fiction, Thomas has thus labored to create the authority of an authentic witness within the realm of his [fictional] text.” 24 What Thomas does is layer in this testimony with his own prose style, “appropriating Dina’s voice as a style, a rhetorical move by which he would impute to his fiction the authority of testimony without the authenticity of actual testimony.” 25 At moments in this chapter, Thomas actually plagiarizes Dina’s testimony as recorded in Anatoli Kuznetsov’s docunovel Babi Yar, inserting her testimony into the flow of his own prose. 26 As the author appropriates this eyewitness account, the testimony becomes subsumed within the fictional world of D. M. Thomas, thereby undoing its authority as testimony, as actuality. In other words, Thomas cloaks the power of Dina’s testimony in the voice of a fictional narrator. The testimony does not stand on its own; it becomes threaded into the fiction, “novelized” and severed from the reality of the Holocaust. Thomas as narrator seems to realize this when he writes, “After a while Dina Pronicheva stopped admitting she had escaped from Babi Yar.” 27 Reverting to silence, Dina, as the referent, the memory of Babi Yar—like Lucia’s identity as reminder of the concentration camp—ceases to speak the victim’s story. After this reversion to silence, the words Dina leaves behind are open to appropriation and recreation by others—namely, by Kuznestov and by Thomas himself. Thomas’s novelistic twist on this testimony brings Dina’s experiences into the realm of fiction—a dangerous move in our era of Holocaust deniers who claim the Holocaust itself is a conspiracy perpetuated through narrative and photographic fiction. Although Young’s analysis of the relationship between Thomas’s fiction and Pronicheva’s testimony is an interesting discussion of the relationship of fiction to documentary evidence, he chooses to read only this aspect of Thomas’s text. He does not consider the other chapters of the novel, nor does he delve into a discussion of the effect that Thomas’s layering of Pronicheva’s testimony into Lisa Erdman’s death-scene has on the reading of the whole text. Already uprooted from its own context

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and connection to the historical reality of the Holocaust, the testimony is eroticized in this novel through Thomas’s rhetorical style. This is not the same kind of erotic impulse that Cavani creates, but it is similar. Whereas Thomas incites the reader to experience a moment of horror by employing erotic language to depict a scene of violence and exposing the dissonance between the two, Cavani’s characters fail to move beyond the struggle of pleasure and perversity, and hence she fails to represent Holocaust violence as horrific. Nevertheless, both Thomas and Cavani use erotic language to explore the notion of death in the Holocaust. By positing Lisa’s death as the horrific conclusion of her earlier fantasies of sex and death, Thomas, through juxtaposition, lends this kind of explication and closure to Dina’s real experiences. In The Night Porter Cavani deliberately juxtaposes the watchful prisoners’ faces with Max’s and Lucia’s erotic entanglements, transforming the prisoners into an anonymous group of voyeurs. Likewise, Thomas’s juxtaposition of Lisa’s fictional life and death with Dina’s testimony ends up subsuming Dina’s story into a novel that centers on a woman’s sexual fantasy life and the way these fantasies foreshadow the massacre. In short, through the use of the erotic as their central trope, both Thomas and Cavani eroticize the shreds of the documentary “real” they attempt to layer into their works of fiction. All Holocaust fiction is in danger of taking the facts of the Holocaust and, by writing them into the work of fiction—placing the historically real into the category of fiction—turning the lived experience of the survivor into a narrative conceived in the mind of the writer. This formulation holds true for Holocaust memoir as well. As Young points out: “For even though ghetto-diarists, survivor-memoirists, and docu-novelists all seem to fear that the essential rhetoricity of their medium inadvertently fictionalizes the events themselves, the diarists and memoirists also fear that the empirical link between their experiences and their narrative is lost in literary construction.” 28 For the memoirist, this fear of losing the connection between the word and the event is, of course, driven by the necessity of communicating the lived experience of the Holocaust so that its fact and impact do not disappear or fade from collective memory. Furthermore, it is evident that many Holocaust memoirists are also driven by the need to memorialize and remember the many dead who were not properly buried or mourned. 29 There exists no Holocaust memoir that centralizes sexuality and eroticism as the focal point of the narrative, since the survivors’ words seek to recall a historical and lived experience, an experience that was anything but erotic. Because the memoirists are

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intent on infusing the fact of the Holocaust with narrative authority and authenticity, it is unfathomable that a memoir would be written that foregrounds eroticism as its overriding trope. As stated at the beginning, this does not mean that sexuality and eroticism are absent from testimonial works. There are moments in survivor memoirs that describe and remember instances when sexuality and eroticism became one fragment of the Holocaust experience. 30 These moments, though, are never central, but are only one small shred of the conglomeration of pieces that constitute the memory of the camps. Both Charlotte Delbo’s and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s works refuse the unifying tendency of the novel or the narrative film. Writing about NombergPrzytyk’s Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Young mentions “the sense of broken time and lives” that her vignettes preserve. 31 Each of the forty stories in the collection can stand on its own; each of them is a fragment of memory and experience containing the seed of its “own discrete truth, its own possibilities of meaning.” 32 Nomberg-Przytyk does not try to subsume her experience into a unifying narrative, or try to express her camp experience through the use of a single vehicle or trope, as Cavani and Thomas do with the erotic components of their fictions. Instead, Nomberg-Przytyk’s memoir maintains a sense of broken time, and from these shards grow multiplicities of meaning. The survivor Charlotte Delbo, in her trilogy Auschwitz and After, similarly utilizes a kind of “vignette” style, although her prose is more poetic and her lines more compact than Nomberg-Przytyk’s. A single sentence in Delbo’s work can, if studied carefully, produce numerous images and meanings that relate to the time she was in Auschwitz and reach beyond it to explore the moral and metaphysical aspects the facts of the Holocaust demand. She creates a sense of fragmented memory by swinging, sing-song like, between the different and disparate images she remembers from the camp. 33 Sometimes she places one piece of her memory, expressed in a mere four sentences, on an otherwise blank page. The visual effect of a minimal amount of print set in the larger space of the blank page communicates a sense of fragmentation, of ruptured time and lives and space, barring the reader from attempting to relate this piece of evidence to a larger, unifying narrative. 34 As examples of another stance representing the female body in Holocaust literature that differs considerably from Thomas’s and Cavani’s, I will isolate some instances in Delbo’s and Nomberg-Przytyk’s works where the sexualized female body becomes, in their world of Auschwitz, a site that speaks of resistance. Their portrayals of a kind of

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“Auschwitz” sexuality also point to the reality of the incomprehensible and surreal value systems that informed the camps. Yet it is important to note that these moments depicting sex and eroticism are by no means the defining characteristics, the central focus, of their memories. Toward the end of Delbo’s first chapter, “Arrivals and Departures” in None of Us Will Return, she evokes the following image: “A kapo will masquerade by donning the bridegroom’s morning coat and top hat, with her girlfriend wrapped in the bride’s veil. They’ll play ‘wedding’ all night while the prisoners, dead tired, lie in their bunks. Kapos can have fun since they’re not exhausted at the end of the day.” 35 These packed sentences are somewhat shocking not because of their lesbian content but because of their reference to sexuality, erotic games, and the nature of relationships among the inmates at Auschwitz. The difficulty of expressing the inexpressible—Holocaust experience—is here made clear by Delbo’s reliance on the rhetoric of normalcy to describe a union of individuals that is by no means “normal.” On one level, Delbo transposes the objects of heterosexuality (the costumes of the bride and groom) to the sexual relationship between two women. She further complicates the scenario by portraying two people “having fun” in the context of the death camp, where starvation, despair, and death are the realities of everyday life. Because we view this through the eyes of the survivor, the kapo and her girlfriend are framed as mocking the other “prisoners, dead tired,” who witness their game-playing. In Cavani’s scenario of the prisoners who watch Max and Lucia, we see the prisoners from Max’s point of view, since the moment is contained in the flashback memory (Max’s lens); this turns the nameless prisoners into voyeurs, whose watching heightens the intensity of Max’s pleasure. Delbo does not eroticize her own point of view, nor does she encourage the reader to do this; she witnesses the performance and opens it to far different interpretations than Cavani’s narrative allows. For one, the kapo—whose role as supervisor and disciplinarian allows her more privilege within the camp system than other prisoners can access and whose girlfriend enjoys these privileges through the kapo’s favor—is nevertheless a prisoner herself. The kapo perpetrates violence upon the bodies of other prisoners, but she suffers the violence of incarceration and probable death just as surely as the others. Therefore this brief “wedding night” sketch could be read as an act of resistance. 36 The kapo and her girlfriend are not the “nonsentient things” the Nazis view all prisoners as, for they discover means of sexual expression. In the midst of the death camp, this may be perverse, but it allows them to

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maintain their humanity through moments of acting out pleasure and desire. This memory portrays a dizzying value system premised on a sense of inevitability; beneath each memory and image of Auschwitz lies utter horror, regardless of how “normal” something appears through its representation in language and narrative. The camp is a place where the signs of normal life are only mockery and illusion; there is no space of refuge, within or without these signs. The horror of Delbo’s image lies in the representation of the actual costumes of the bride and groom the kapo and her girlfriend wear. A few pages before introducing this image, Delbo lists the arrival of various kinds of people at Auschwitz, including on this list the arrival by train of a bride and groom, “the bride all in white wrapped in her veil wrinkled from having slept on the floor of the cattle car / the bridegroom in black wearing a top hat[,] his gloves soiled.” 37 All those who have “arrived” in the place that Delbo describes become the fuel that feeds the gas chambers. It is as if the kapo and her girlfriend can only transpose the illusion of “normalcy” onto their bodies and their relationship by wearing the clothing of those who have already met their deaths in the gas chamber, by appropriating the possessions of other victims. These “masks” become a sign of the blood others have shed. What seems so “normal” and innocent—the wedding costume—has no place in the camp save as a mocking reminder of violence and murder. Delbo exposes the rhetorical impossibility of talking about Auschwitz in familiar language, but she also demonstrates that behind the use of “normal” language and signs there exists the reality of murder, violence, and horror. The reality of murder and violence is the price these women pay for creating the illusion of the normal. Behind every image Delbo evokes, this horror is manifest, impossible to convey fully but nevertheless present in everything in and about Auschwitz. Delbo emphasizes this point once again when she recalls, “[a] blockhova will cut homey curtains from the holy vestments worn by the rabbi to celebrate the sabbath no matter what, in whatever place.” 38 The use of the word “homey” refers to this illusion of the normal abode, but Delbo ruptures this sense of familiarity by tracing the material of the curtain to its origin—its function as a sacred cloth worn by a rabbi who is most likely dead. The object belies any indication of the normal, the familiar, the explicable, none of which has a place in Auschwitz. All objects that seem normal are plundered signs from the life of the Holocaust victim, and thus they can never actually be normal, no matter how they are used in the camp. There is no place in Auschwitz that can contain

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the normal; there is no way to use language to convey the horror of Auschwitz. Similarly, language, a normalized tool used to describe culture and experience, can never contain the Holocaust. Though Delbo’s point of departure is the sexual games played out between a kapo and her girlfriend, she communicates that this scenario does not represent the familiar site of eroticism; rather it speaks of the impossibility of speaking, of normalcy, of language and signs to represent the memory of the Holocaust. In recognizing the failure of language to represent the Holocaust, Delbo acknowledges the experience of the victims who struggle to find words to communicate their stories. One of the most famous memories of resistance through the enactment of erotics and sexuality is recorded in a number of memoirs by Auschwitz survivors. This is the story of “the dancer” who, upon her arrival at Auschwitz, immediately recognizes the horror occurring there and chooses to resist. I quote the story at length as it is told by Filip Müller and as it appears in Young’s book: The woman, as soon as she noticed that the two men were ogling her, launched into what appeared to be a titillating strip-tease act. She lifted her skirt to allow a glimpse of thigh and suspender. Slowly she undid her stocking and peeled it from her foot. From out of the corner of her eye she carefully observed what was going on around her. The two SS men were fascinated by her performance and paid no attention to anything else. . . . She had taken off her blouse and was standing in front of her lecherous audience in her brassiere. Then she steadied herself against a concrete pillar with her left arm and bent down, slightly lifting her foot, in order to take off her shoe. What happened next took place with lightning speed: quick as a flash she grabbed her shoe and slammed its heel violently against Quackernack’s forehead. . . . At this moment the young woman flung herself at him and made a quick grab for his pistol. There was a shot. Schillinger cried out and fell to the ground. Seconds later there was a second shot aimed at Quackernack which narrowly missed him. 39

Young comments that although this story appears in various forms in a number of memoirs—where the details of the woman’s clothing, nationality, and religious affiliation vary considerably—for the prisoners the story “represented courage, desperation, resistance, justice, or hope; and as it represented these categories for the prisoners, it also inspired the prisoners to act on them.” 40 In Nomberg-Przytyk’s account of the

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incident, entitled “Revenge of a Dancer,” the dancer is a young French woman of unusual beauty who wears a two-piece bathing suit. 41 What is significant about Nomberg-Przytyk’s version, though, is that the dancer, after shooting at the SS guards, “saved the last bullet for herself.” 42 Not only does she resist the Nazis by turning violence back on them, she resists, too, by committing suicide, denying the SS the chance to murder her. The dancer uses her beauty and powers of seduction to hypnotize the guards, drawing them away from their immediate concerns and enacting her revenge by simulating an erotic performance and committing suicide. The relationship between eroticism and resistance is clear here. By no means does this story become a tale of erotic intrigue at the concentration camp, as do Lucia’s various performances in the fictional camp of The Night Porter. Instead, the story of the dancer becomes one of the most paradigmatic examples of resistance and heroism that the survivors of Auschwitz remember. Both Delbo and Nomberg-Przytyk emphasize appearances when they recall camp memories that deal with issues of the (female) body as a sexual site. The appearance of sexuality and eroticism denotes meanings that go far beyond Cavani’s and Thomas’s use of eroticism as exploitation and sensationalism. In the works of the two survivors, sexuality is never an end in itself; rather it is a framework for discussing resistance. It is about accessing the very human desires of the body that the SS tried to kill in their prisoners. Sexuality also is a sign of its own lack, its absence as a central aspect of camp life, as illustrated in the excerpt from NombergPrzytyk’s Auschwitz quoted at the beginning of this essay. Through her brief description of the sexual relationship between a kapo and her girlfriend, Delbo points to the impossibility of language to adequately render the true horror of camp life, taunting the reader/spectator to “Try to look. Just try to see.” 43 The narrative works of the survivor memoirists own a kind of authenticity that Holocaust fiction writers can never match, even when they base their fiction on testimony and documentary evidence. The writers of the memoirs I cite in this paper intuitively maintained the sense of rupture, of broken times and lives, that the Holocaust wrought on its victims. Mirroring this impression in their narrative works, they come closer to communicating the historically real event of the Holocaust than do the authors of unifying, fictional narratives. The survivors maintain the link between the event and the word because of their actual link to the Shoah. They are bodily reminders of the atrocity, and their attempts to maintain that link through language infuse their works

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with authenticity and honesty. The more “fictionalized” aspects of their narratives—in the sense that placing experience into narrative form necessarily changes the actual event that happened—are subsumed into the writer’s authority as witness, and their works maintain their connection to history through the writer’s body of experience (as conduit). Cavani and, to a lesser extent, Thomas misread the Holocaust by abstracting the event into works that center on the erotic female body; their works sensationalize the Holocaust because of their reliance on representing perverse and paranoid sex as symbolic of Holocaust memory. Thomas and Cavani misuse the memory of the physical experience of the Holocaust when they attempt to write about bodily memory solely through the rhetoric of erotics, and hence their works fail as meaningful memorializations of the Holocaust. Their narratives grossly misrepresent historical facts, even the fact of the Holocaust itself, by transforming the memory of the Holocaust into “sexy memories.”

NOTES 1. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, trans. Roslyn Hirsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 14. 2. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 8. 3. The Night Porter, directed by Liliana Cavini, featuring Dick Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling (Lotar Film Productions, 1975). 4. D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 123. 5. We learn later in the film that Lucia is not a Jew. Rather, she is “the daughter of the socialist.” She is not wearing a yellow star in this scene. 6. Marga Cottino-Jones, “ ‘What Kind of Memory?’: Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter,” Contention 5:1 (1995): 107. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 59. 10. When I mention “Max’s Viennese apartment” that he has barricaded from the outside, this refers to Max’s apartment in the filmic present, 1957. 11. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 2. 12. Ciriaco Tiso, Cavani: Liliana Cavani (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1975), 97. All translations are mine. 13. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 137.

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14. Tiso, Cavani, 96. 15. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasures,” 58; emphasis mine. 16. Tiso, Cavini, 96. 17. Cottino-Jones, “What Kind of Memory?” 110. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., concluding remarks, 110. 20. Thomas, White Hotel, 20. 21. Ibid., 249–50. 22. Laura Tanner, “Sweet Pain and Charred Bodies: Figuring Violence in The White Hotel,” Boundary 2 18:2 (1991): 145. 23. Ibid., 146–49. 24. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 56. 25. Ibid. 26. Young also points out that Kuznetsov actually wrote Pronicheva’s testimony as he remembered it years after she told him her story. Furthermore, Thomas used an English translation of the testimony, which was originally written in Russian by Kuznetsov. If Thomas is “invoking a second-hand rendering of a third party’s memory,” how valid is Young’s claim that Thomas is not trying to “violate the factual integrity of real events,”? (Writing and Rewriting, 56). 27. Thomas, White Hotel, 252. 28. Young, Writing and Rewriting, 23. 29. For a discussion on how the memoirs of some female survivors memorialize the dead in literature, see Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 122–29. This theme is especially pertinent to Delbo’s work. 30. In her article “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 548 (November 1996): 83, Myrna Goldenberg quotes Elie A. Cohen, who documented that women in the barracks discussed sex often: “Others confide that there was ‘everlasting talk about sex and smut [which] may be considered as compensatory satisfaction.’ ” Goldenberg’s article can also be found on the Web at http://www.interlog.com/ ~mighty/essays/lessons.htm. 31. Young, Writing and Rewriting, 43. 32. Ibid., 44. 33. The sing-song tone that swings from image to image is most apparent in the first part of Delbo’s trilogy, None of Us Will Return. 34. See, for an example, p. 84 of Auschwitz and After. 35. Ibid., 8. 36. I stress the term could because I acknowledge that my reading of this scenario in Delbo’s work is contentious. I choose to read this passage as potentially representative of resistance in the camp. In many survivor memoirs kapos are seen as occupying perpetrator roles and are hated like the Nazis. I choose to

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consider the kapo’s more ambiguous status as both perpetrator and victim; others could read this passage as just another instance of a perpetrator exploiting a victim. 37. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 6. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Young, Writing and Rewriting, 48. 40. Ibid., 49. 41. Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 108. 42. Ibid., 109. 43. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 86.

CONTRIBUTORS

The Editors Elizabeth R. Baer serves as Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, where she holds the Florence and Raymond Sponberg Chair of Ethics. She is the co-editor, with Hester Baer, of the first English edition of The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women, a memoir by Nanda Herbermann published in 2000 by Wayne State University Press. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches a course entitled “Women and the Holocaust: Gender, Memory and Representation.” She also recently taught courses on the Holocaust for the Jewish Community Relations Council in Minneapolis as well as a three week course in Germany and the Czech Republic for twenty-four American undergraduates. Dr. Baer was the recipient of a Fulbright Award in the summer of 2000 to study the history of Jews in Germany. She was recently honored with the Virginia Hamilton Award for the Outstanding Essay on Multicultural Children’s Literature in 2000 for an essay on children’s literature about the Holocaust. She is also the editor of Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Buck, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1997. Myrna Goldenberg is one of the early contributors to the field of women and the Holocaust. Her seminal article, “Different Horrors, Same Hell” has sparked controversy as well as serious scholarship, and she has continued to examine memoirs and oral histories to discover the common experiences of women in ghettos and concentration camps. Her other research projects focus on American Jewish women (Annie Nathan Meyer) and Holocaust Studies in higher education. She contributed chapters to a variety of books on Jewish women, women in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust, in general, as well as numerous encyclopedia articles on Holocaust memoirs and novels, and many reviews of feminist literature and Holocaust works. Dr. Goldenberg is a professor of English and

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the Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-supported Paul Peck Humanities Institute at Montgomery College, Maryland, and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland and The Johns Hopkins University graduate program. The recipient of several prestigious fellowships, she was recognized in 1996 as the Outstanding Faculty Member in the nation’s community colleges by the Association of Community College Trustees.

The Contributors Susan Benedict is Professor of Nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina where she teaches the doctoral course in ethics, and Associate Chief Nurse/Research at the Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Administration Medical Center in Charleston. She is the only nurse to have received the Fellowship in Medical Ethics and the Holocaust from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., where she undertook research for the chapter included in this book. Portions of the chapter were published as part of the article, coauthored with Jochen Kuhla, “Nurses’ Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany” in the Western Journal of Nursing Research. Catherine A. Bernard received her J.D. in 2002 from New York University School of Law, where she was a Dean’s Scholar. From 1997–1998, she was a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a Graduate Theological Union Presidential Scholar at the U.C. Berkeley/Graduate Theological Union Joint Graduate Program in Jewish Studies. She received her B.A. in 1995 from Stanford University, where senior honors thesis, tell him that I: Women Writing the Holocaust, won three university awards. Her essay “Anne Frank and Women Writers of the Holocaust,” was published in Readings on the Diary of a Young Girl, edited by Myra H. Immell, Currently, she is writing about the Nazi-era restitution litigation and its effect on and significance to Holocaust survivors. Pascale Rachel Bos is Assistant Professor of Netherlandic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota where she taught Women’s Studies and Holocaust Studies, and served as Assistant Director at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Born and raised in Amster-

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dam, The Netherlands, she is herself a daughter and granddaughter of Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivors. Stephen Feinstein is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls where he taught history and art history from l969 to 1998 and is now Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He was an invited guest scholar and participant in the Stockholm International Conference on the Holocaust held in Sweden, January, 2000 at the instigation of Prime Minister Goran Persson. Feinstein was the guest curator for “Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust” at the Minnesota Museum of American Art and curated “Absence/Presence: The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide” at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, the University of Minnesota. Feinstein is the author of numerous articles and was co-editor of the book with Schierman and Littell of Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate For the 21st Century (1998, University Press of America). He is currently working on two manuscripts: Indelible Images: Artistic Responses to the Holocaust and Spaces with Ghosts: Installation Art about the Holocaust. Judith Greenberg has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University. She has just completed editing 9 11: Trauma at Home, a volume of essays about the attacks of September 11 (Nebraska UP). She has published on trauma and the figure of Echo in American Imago and on trauma and Virginia Woolf in Woolf Studies Annual and Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries (Pace UP). She has also written on Charlotte Delbo in Teaching Representations of the Holocaust (MLA). S. Lillian Kremer, University Distinguished Professor, teaches courses in American literature, Ethnic and Women’s writing and Holocaust literature and film in the Department of English at Kansas State University. She is the author of Witness Through the Imagination: The Holocaust in Jewish American Literature (Wayne State University Press) and Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (University of Nebraska Press). Forthcoming from Routledge in 2003, and with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, is a two volume reference text, Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Writing. Kremer’s articles have appeared in Modern Language Studies, Contemporary Literature, Modern Jewish Studies, Saul Bellow Journal, and Studies in American Jewish Literature, and numerous essay collections. She serves on

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Contributors

the editorial boards of Studies in American Jewish Literature, Yiddish, and Modern Jewish Studies. Mary D. Lagerwey is an Associate Professor of Nursing at Western Michigan University, where she teaches community health, qualitative research, and nursing ethics, and chairs the University’s Human Subjects Institutional Review Board. Her publications focus on gender studies, women and the Holocaust, health care of vulnerable populations, and the history of nursing ethics. Her book, Reading Auschwitz, a gendered analysis of Auschwitz survivor memoirs, was published in 1998 by AltaMira Press. Portions of her chapter were previously published as “Nursing Ethics at Hadamar” in Qualitative Health Research in 1999. Sybil Milton received her B.A. at Barnard College (1962), her M.A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1971) in modern German history at Stanford University. After teaching at Stanford University, she was affiliated with the Commission for the History of Parliamentary Parties in Bonn and HIKO (Historical Commission) in Berlin. Dr. Milton was Director of Archives (1974–1984) at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. She was affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1986–1997, and served as Senior Historian there. She worked as an independent historian and consultant until her death in 2000. For the past twelve years, Dr. Milton’s research focused on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. She co-edited and contributed to The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide (1980) and Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust (1983); she was co-author of Art of the Holocaust (1981) which received the National Jewish Book Award in Visual Arts, 1982. She also published a number of important articles on various aspects of the Holocaust, including “Women and the Holocaust,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984). Dr. Milton served as co-editor of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vols. 1–7 (1984–90). She was series co-editor of the twenty-six volume documentation series Archives of the Holocaust. Her recent articles concerned the fate of Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany, 1933–45 and occupied Europe, 1940–45; the role of Hollerith technology in locating victim groups in Nazi Germany; and the problem of memorials and memory in Germany and Austria. Her most recent book, In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics of Holocaust Memorials, was published by Wayne State University Press, 1991. At the time of her death, she was preparing a volume for University of

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North Carolina Press on photography of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as historical evidence. She also served as the president of the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association. Susan Nowak is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Nazareth College of Rochester. Her other work includes: “The Auschwitz Convent Controversy: The Challenge of Repentance and Reconstruction,” in Confronting the Holocaust, edited by S. Feinstein, K. Schierman, M. Sachs Little (University Press of America, 1998); “To Stand Before the World as the Church Repentant,” in United States Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican, edited by Harry James Cargas (Greenwood Press, 1998), “In a World Stripped of Innocence: Rescue and Belief in Elisabeth Gille’s Shadows of a Childhood” Literature and Belief (December 1998); “Dark Illuminations: Race, Gender, and Class During the Holocaust” The Journal of Race, Gender and Class; “In a World Shorn of Color: Toward a Feminist Theology of Holocaust Testimonies,” Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation edited by Esther Fuchs (University Press of America, 1999). Anna E. Rosmus, from Passau, Germany, is the real life heroine of the film The Nasty Girl, who, as a teenager, uncovered her hometown’s hidden Nazi past. Since then, she has dedicated her life to uncovering antisemitism and the Nazi history of her Bavarian hometown, and combating the neo-Nazis and German extreme right in Germany. Her book, Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, documents the atrocities in Passau at the end of the war. Some of her other books include Exodus: In the Shadow of Mercy, Resistance and Persecution—Passau 1933–39, Robert Klein: A German Jew Looks Back, Out of Passau, and Against the Stream: Growing up Where Hitler Used to Live. She also contributed to numerous publications as a ` et les Hommes, Holocaust and Genocide freelance writer, such as La PensEe Studies, The New York Times, The European, and Aufbau. A biography of Anna Rosmus was published in 1994 by Hans Dieter Schutt, Anna Rosmus: The Witch of Passau. She was awarded the highest honor by the German Jewish Community, the Gralinski Prize (1996), the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Conscience in Media award, the Sarnat Prize from the Anti-Defamation League for those who fight anti-Jewish bigotry, the Myrtle Wreath Award from the Washington, DC, chapter of Hadassah, the coveted Tucholsky Death Mask, and the Holocaust Survivors and Friends’ Holocaust Memorial Award.

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Contributors

John K. Roth is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Recognized as one of the preeminent Christian scholars on the Holocaust, he has published hundreds of articles and more than thirty books, many of them focused on the Holocaust, including Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy, with Richard L. Rubenstein; Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, co-edited with Michael Berenbaum; Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, coedited with Carol Rittner; and Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses. Among his most recent books are Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, co-edited with Carol Rittner, and Holocaust Politics. The latter analyzes the controversy around his aborted appointment to head the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM and the difficulty of public confrontation of the Holocaust. In 1988 he was named US Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Rebecca Scherr is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Minnesota. She has presented papers on eroticism in Holocaust fiction and memoir, and on the wartime paintings of Charlotte Salomon. Her research interests also include literary modernism and modernist photography, the visual cultures of modernism, and theories of the body.

INDEX

Abortion, 48n. 54, 78–84, 262. See also Children; Mother Adelsburg, Sidonie, 56 Afro-Germans, 65 Aktion T4, 116. See also Euthanasia Allen, Anne Taylor, xxiii Americans, 87, 88, 96, 117 Améry, Jean, 9 Anatomy. See Body Anti-Semitism: and Frank, 212, 215; and Gelissen, 188, 196, 197; and gender, xx, 26; and gendered analysis, 185; and German women, xxi–xxii; and Gille, 190, 196, 197; and Karmel, 268; and race, 11; and Spero, 243; and women, xxii. See also Jews Appearance: and D’Aubigné, 149; and Delbo, 294; and Gelissen, 186; and Gille, 187; and NombergPrzytyk, 294; and resistance, 133, 270; and Schaeffer, 267; and Siekierski, 140, 145; and women’s fiction, 262. See also Body Arendt, Hannah, 210–11 Arkadyev, Lev, 243 Art, 150, 227, 229–44, 256n. 5; installation, 230, 231–32, 256. See also specific artists Artifact, 238, 240 Assimilation, 42n. 20, 137, 140, 212. See also Passing Auschwitz-Birkenau, 67; and art, 227; and body, 186; and children’s

strollers, 15–18; and death, 68; and Delbo, 290–91, 292–93; and experimentation, 8; and Frank, 212; and Gelissen, 183, 186, 188, 193–94; and Gypsy camp, 53, 62, 67; and Nomberg-Przytyk, 290–91; and resistance, 74n. 56; revolt in, xxiv; and Rothenberg, 237; and Sinti and Roma, 53, 57, 62, 67; and work, 8, 16–17, 21n.19; and Zyklon-B, 5, 6. See also Camps Austria, 60, 255 Autobiography, 23, 35, 39, 41n. 8, 197. See also Memoir; Testimony Babi Yar massacre, 286, 288 Baer, Elizabeth, 1, 3n. 3; The Blessed Abyss, xxxn. 4, xxxiin. 25; xxxiiin. 37, 39 Baer, Hester, The Blessed Abyss, xxxn. 4, xxxiin. 25 Baranowski, Shelley, xxv Barber, Benjamin R., 219 Barhof farm, 87–88, 89–90 Bar-On, Dan, 31 Barot, Madeleine, 132, 133, 134–35, 136, 146–57 Bartels, Friederich, 113 Barth, Karl, 146 Bass, Joseph, 132, 138, 139, 142, 143–45 Bauer, Yehuda, 12, 21n. 13; Rethinking the Holocaust, xxvii

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Index

Baumann, Zygmunt, 239 Baumel, Judith: Double Jeopardy; Gender and the Holocaust, xxvi Beauvoir, Simone de, 141, 159n. 28 Belorussians, 85 Beogner, Marc, 132 Bergen-Belsen, 67–68, 168, 201–2, 237. See also Camps Berlin-Marzahn, 60–61 Bernstein, Sara, 171 Bettelheim, Bruno, 209–12 Beuy, Joseph: Felt Suit, 235 Biology, xx, xxx, 48n. 57. See also Body Birkenau. See Auschwitz-Birkenau Blatter, Janet, 230 Blum, Phillip, 117, 118, 123 Bock, Gisela, xxvii–xxviii, 32 Body: and Auschwitz, 186; and Barot, 154; and camp induction, 264; and Cavani, 279, 282, 284–85, 295; and D’Aubigné, 149; and Delbo, 290–91, 294; and Frank, 213, 239, 240; and Gelissen, 186, 193–94; and Gille, 186–87; and menstruation, 186, 187, 213, 262; and Nomberg-Przytyk, 290–91, 294; and resistance, 133; and Schaeffer, 267; and Siekierski, 140, 145; and Spero, 243; and Thomas, 279, 295; and Western philosophy, 163–64, 176n. 5; and women’s fiction, 262. See also Appearance Boegner, Pastor, 152 Bohm-Duchen, Monica, 240 Boltanski, Christian, 258n. 28; Lessons of Darkness, 240 Bond. See Relationships, women’s Bondy, Ruth, 166 Borowski, Tadeusz: This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 167 Bos, Pascale, xv, 2 Breast, 262, 267. See also Body

Brecht, Bertolt: “Jewish Women in Time,” 244 Bridenthal, Renate: When Biology Became Destiny, xx Brintet, Marie-Louise, 154 Brown, Elizabeth, 237, 239–40 Bruskina, Masha, 243 Buchenwald, 61, 62. See also Camps Burial: and forced abortions, 81, 84; and Hadamar victims, 116; and infants’ homes, 86–87, 88, 89. See also Death Buruma, Ian, 218, 219 Butler, Judith, 128, 132–33, 140 Bystander, 8–9 Camps: and art, 227, 229–30; and Barot, 134, 135, 147, 149–51, 152, 154–55; and Bettelheim, 209; and body, 186, 264; and Cavani, 285; and children, 15, 16–18, 48n. 54, 62, 151; and collaborators, 154–55; conservation of, 232; and death, 6, 48n. 54, 64, 67, 68; and Delbo, 290–91, 292–93; and experimentation, 8, 65; and fiction, 261–62; and food, 161–63, 165, 166–75; and Frank, 201–2, 212; and Gelissen, 181, 183, 186, 188–89, 191–92, 193–94; and gender, 158n. 3; and Gille, 181; Gypsy, 53, 60, 62, 67; and hunger, 162, 163; and induction, 263–64; and mothers, 15, 16–18, 48n. 54, 63; municipal, 57, 58, 59, 60; and Nomberg-Przytyk, 290–91; and prostitutes, 134, 142, 150; and refugees, 147; and resistance, 74n. 56; revolt in, xxiv; and Rothenberg, 234, 237, 241; and Sinti and Roma, 53, 56–58, 60–68; and Vichy, 147, 149–51, 152; and women, 20n. 5, 60, 151, 263–64; and work, 8,

Index 16–17, 21n. 19, 60, 61, 62; and Zyklon-B, 5, 6. See also Infants’ homes; Killing centers Canning, Kathleen, 30, 41n. 11 Caplan, Arthur, 106 Cardinal’s Children, The, 153 Catholic Church: and Barot, 146; and forced abortions, 79, 83, 90; and infants’ homes, 90; and nursing, 100, 102; and resistance, 136. See also Religion Cavani, Liliana, 290; La donna nella Resistenza, 284; The Night Porter, 279–86, 287, 289, 290, 291, 294, 295 Cernyak-Spatz, Susan, 169, 171 Chambon-sur-Lignon, Le, 151–52 Character, 114, 119–20, 122–23, 124 Childhood, and Frank, 203, 208–9, 212, 213, 216, 222n. 10 Children: and art, 163, 229–30; and Auschwitz, 15, 16–18; and Barot, 134, 150, 153–54; and camps, 15, 16–18, 48n. 54, 62, 63, 151, 229–30; and Cohen, 7; and Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués, 147; and Dicker-Brandeis, 229–30; and Ettinger, 270, 271, 272; and euthanasia, 84–88, 97– 98, 106, 111, 116; and Frank, 205; and Gelissen, 191–92; and hunger, 163; and infants’ homes, 78, 84–91; and Karmel, 268, 269; and law, 264; and Levi, 161; and Nazis/Nazism, 7–8; and Ozick, 266, 267, 273; and Piercy, 265–66; and Ravensbrück, 62; and rescue, xxiv; and resistance, 132; and Schaeffer, 265, 267–68; and Siekierski, 138; Sinti and Roma, 58–60, 62, 63; and strollers, 15–18; and survival, 264, 272–73; and Theresienstadt, 229–30; vulnerability of, 63; and

307

women’s fiction, 262; and work, 59. See also Abortion; Mother; Pregnancy Christians: and anti-Semitism, xxii, 135; and Barot, 147; and Frank, 212; and Karmel, 268; and passing, 270. See also Catholic Church; Protestants/Protestantism Church, and euthanasia, 98. See also Catholic Church; Christians; Protestants/Protestantism CIMADE. See Comité InterMouvements auprès des Évacués Clarenz, Franz Maria, 79, 80–82, 83–84 Clauberg, Carl, 65 Cliché, 232, 242 Clothing, 154, 234, 267, 273 Cohen, Elie A., 296n. 30 Cohen, Judy, 7, 9, 20n. 5 Colibri. See Siekierski, Denise Collaborator, 154–55, 189, 190 Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués, 132, 134, 135, 147, 149, 150–51, 152, 153, 154 Community: and food, 163, 171– 75, 174; and Gelissen, 182, 196; and Gille, 183, 196; and women’s fiction, 261, 262. See also Relationships, women’s Concentration camps. See Camps Conference of Bishops, 80 Conti, Leonardi, 66, 79, 83 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 281–82, 285 Czech, Danuta, 21n. 19; Auschwitz Chronicle, 15, 16, 18 Dachau, 61, 234. See also Camps Dachau Museum, 235 Dancer, story of, 293–94 D’Aubigné, Jeanne Merle, 136, 149, 150, 156–57 Daughter: and Ettinger, 270, 271,

308

Index

Daughter (continued) 272; and Karmel, 269; and Ozick, 266, 267, 273; and Schaeffer, 267–68. See also Children Dawidowicz, Lucy, 185 Death: and abortion, 48n. 54, 78–84, 262; and camps, 6, 15, 48n. 54, 64, 67, 68; and Cavani, 289; and Delbo, 291, 292; and Fein, xxvi–xxvii; and food, 172–73; and Hadamar, 115–24; and Hitler, 96, 98, 121; and infants’ homes, 84–91; and killing centers, 67, 98–99, 111, 115, 116; and law, 79, 80, 101, 105, 107, 120, 121, 122; and men, 8; and mothers, 48n. 54, 264; and Nazis, 122; and Nomberg-Przytyk, 294; and nurses, 80–81, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100–107, 111, 118–24; and Ozick, 273; and Passau, 77; and pregnancy, 48n. 54; and race, xx, 11; and Sinti and Roma, 62, 63, 67, 68; social, xxiii; and Spero, 244; and Thomas, 286–87, 289. See also Burial; Survival; Survivor Debris, 231, 232 Delbo, Charlotte, 20n. 7, 37–38, 39; Auschwitz et après, 41n. 4, 278, 290, 296n. 36; “The Men,” 37–38; None of Us Will Return, xiii, 291 Deportation: and Auschwitz, 62; and Barot, 153; and forced work, 77; and Kolmar, 15; and Marseille Jews, 142; and Ravensbrück, 62; and Siekierski, 137, 138; and Sinti and Roma, 56, 62, 66; and social death, xxiii; and Vichy Jews, 152, 153 De Silva, Carla, 174 Dicker-Brandeis, Friedl, 229 Dietrich, Suzanne de, 146 Difference, xvi; construction of, 28; relevance of, 24–25. See also Gender; Women vs. men

Documentation, 258n. 28; and Rothenberg, 236, 237–38, 242. See also Records Domesticity, 164–65, 173. See also Home Doneson, Judith E., 212 Eckhardt, Alice, xvii Éclaireurs Israëlites, 132, 137, 140 Ecumenism, 146, 147, 155. See also Religion Education: and nursing, 102, 113–14; and Roma, 72n. 27; and Sinti and Roma, 57, 58–60, 71n. 24 Eglfing-Haar, 106 EI. See Éclaireurs Israëlites Eisenberg, Dan, 235 Elman, Richard: 28th Day of Elul, 276n. 16 Emigration, xxii, 47n. 52 Enfants du Cardinal, Les, 153 Environment, 231, 232 Epstein, Leslie: King of the Jews, 262 Equality, 9–10, 147 Erdmann, Luise, 100–103 Escape/rescue: and Barot, 152, 154; and children, xxiv; and Siekierski, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144 Essentialism, xvi, xviii, 2, 261 Ethics/morality: and abortion, 79; and Allen, xxiii; and art, 232; and Barot, 155; and Bass, 145; and euthanasia, 106, 122; and Frank, 208–10, 212, 217; and Gelissen, 182, 187, 188–89, 194, 196, 197; and gender, 133–34; and gendered analysis, 185; and Germany, xxii; and Gille, 182, 187, 188, 195–96, 197; and Hadamar, 122; and memory, 274; and nursing, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 124; and physicians, 111; and Rothenberg, 233; and Siekierski, 145, 155; and women, 150

Index Ethnicity, and Sinti and Roma, 54–55, 56–57. See also Race Ettinger, Elzbieta, 270, 277n. 19; Kindergarten, 271–72 Eugenics, 96, 111 Euthanasia: and Hadamar, 115–24; and Hitler, 96, 98, 121; and law, 101, 105, 107, 120, 121, 122; and Nazis, 122; and nurses, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100–107, 111, 118–24; and Sinti and Roma, 67; wild, 98. See also Death Exile, xix–xx. See also Emigration Experience: and assimilation, 42n. 20; and Delbo, 291; and Gelissen, 182, 188, 197; and gender, xiv, 33, 39, 260, 261; and Gille, 182, 188, 197; and memoir, 289; and narrative, 127; and NombergPrzytyk, 290; and Rothenberg, 238; and selection, 31, 32; uniqueness of, 30 Experimentation, 8, 65, 266. See also Camps Family: artificial, 27; and euthanasia, 98; and food, 172, 174, 175; and Frank, 210, 220n. 2, 238–39; and Gelissen, 183; and Salomon, 229; separation of, 265; and Siekierski, 139, 144, 145; Sinti and Roma, 55, 60, 63; surrogate, 268–69; and women, 172, 268; and women’s fiction, 262 Fascism, xx, xxi, xxii Fédération Française des Étudiants (Fédé), 146 Fein, Helen, xxvi–xxvii Felderer, Ditlieb: Anne Frank’s Diary—A Hoax, 214, 215, 216 Felman, Shoshana, 157 Feminism: and art, 229–44, 255; and autobiography, 35; criticism of, xxv–xxvi, xxviii, 185; cultural,

309

28; and essentialism, 2; and fiction, 260; and Frank, 205, 216; and history, 23, 41n. 11; and Holocaust, 230; and Holocaust Studies, xvii, xxv, 23, 24, 25– 29, 185; and Kaplan, xxiii; and memory, 232; and Nazis, xx; and Ozick, xxviii; and postmodernism, 230; and Rothenberg, 233, 235–36, 240; and Schoenfeld, 42n. 13; and Spero, 243; and survivors, 27–28, 45n. 34. See also Women Fetterly, Judith, 157 Fiction, xxiii–xxiv, 20n. 6, 260–74, 278–89, 295. See also Narrative; specific authors Fine, Ellen S., 43n. 22 Fleischmann, Gisi, xxvii Food: and community, 174; and death, 172–73; and family, 172, 174, 175; and fiction, 269; and Gelissen, 194; and gender, 161–75; and Gurewitsch, 176n. 13; and identity, 173, 174; and infants’ homes, 85, 86; and Jews, 173; and memory, 165, 172– 73, 174; and narratives, 166; and Ravensbrück, 63, 65; and recipe sharing, 164, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172–74, 174, 262; and religion, 270; and ritual, 162, 164, 171, 173, 175, 270; and Rothenberg, 241; and sex, 33; and Siekierski, 138; and Sinti and Roma, 63, 65; talk about, 162–63, 167, 168–70, 171–75, 262; and women, 164, 166, 167–69; and women’s fiction, 262, 263; and work, 165. See also Hunger/starvation Fortune teller, 55, 56–57, 57 France, 68, 133, 151, 189, 190, 192, 195, 209

310

Index

Frank, Anne, 41n. 4, 128–29, 201–20; and her diary, 202, 203, 205–6, 219, 220, 222nn. 17, 18, 230–31, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240; and Rothenberg, 234, 235, 236–37, 238, 239, 240, 241, 256 Frank, Margot, 236, 237 Frank, Otto, 207, 213, 217, 222n. 18, 238 Frank family, 210, 220n. 2, 238–39 Frankl, Viktor, 174; Man’s Search for Meaning, 167 Franz, Hugo, 70n. 13 French Federation of Students, 146 Fuschs, Esther: Women and the Holocaust, xxvi Fuss, Diana, 2 Galen, Clemens August Graf von, 102 Gaze, 281, 285. See also Voyeur Gebhardt, Karl, 65 Gelissen, Rena Kornreich: Rena’s Promise, 180–83, 186, 187, 188–89, 191–92, 193–94, 196 Gender: and analysis, 185–87, 199n. 12; and anti-Semitism, xx, 26, 185; and art, 230; and Barot, 156; and Bauer, xxvii; and Butler, 132–33; and camps, 158n. 3; as category, 47n. 48; conceptualization of, 41n. 11; construction of, 2, 28, 41n. 11, 47n. 48; and essentialism, xvi, xviii, 2; and ethics, 133–34; and experience, 33, 39, 260, 261; and Fein, xxvi–xxvii; and food, 161–75; and Gelissen, 186; and Gille, 186–88; and hair shaving, 33–34; and history, 42n. 20; and Holocaust, xvii–xxviii, 132, 158n. 3; and Holocaust Studies, xxvii– xxviii, 6–14, 23–39, 49n. 65; and hunger, 164; and identity, 133; and language, 30; and memoir, 230;

and memory, xiv, xxiii, xxx, 2, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 49n. 58, 59, 174–75; and narrative, 2, 31–39; and Nazis, xix–xxiii, 9, 11, 26–27, 32–33; and nostalgia, 174–75; and Ozick, xxviii; performance of, 128, 133, 140, 141–42, 156; and race, xx, xxviii, 32; and relationships, 35–36; and resistance, 132; and Roma, 55; and Rothenberg, 233, 236; and self-image, 36; and Siekierski, 143– 44, 156; and Sinti and Roma, 55, 61, 67; and socialization, 32; and starvation, 34; study of, xvii–xxviii; and survival, 48n. 57, 276n. 16; and survivors, 25–26, 38; as term, 13; and testimony, 33, 39, 49n. 64; and work, 64. See also Women vs. men Genocide: and Fein, xxvi–xxvii; and men, 8; and race, 11. See also Death Gerlier, Cardinal, 153 German Girls League, 58 Germany: and anti-Semitism, xxi– xxii; and contemporary attitudes, 88–91; and Frank, 209, 215–16; and gender, xix–xxiii; and morality, xxii; and mothers, 7–8; and Roma, 54–55; and Rothenberg, 237; and Sinti, 54–55; and victims, 255; Weimar, 55; and women, xxi. See also Nazis/Nazism Gestapo: and Bass, 139; and euthanasia, 105; and Hutthurm abortions, 81; and Lemaire, 143; and nurses, 122; and Siekierski, 142, 144; and Vichy deportations, 152 Ghetto, 60, 165, 241, 261, 262, 265, 267–68, 269 Gies, Miep, 207 Gille, Elisabeth: Shadows of Childhood, 180–83, 184–85, 186–88, 189–91, 192–93, 194–95, 196

Index Gilligan, Carol, 156; In a Different Voice, 133–34 Gobel, Ernst, 120 Goebbels, Joseph, xxii, xxiv Goldenberg, Myrna, xvi, 43n. 22, 44n. 27, 45n. 39, 269, 296n. 30 Golub, Leon, 242 Goodrich, Francis, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217 Grossmann, Atina, 43n. 26; When Biology Became Destiny, xx Group for Action against Deportation. See Service André Grunberger, Richard, xxi Gumbmann, Kate, 120 Gurewitsch, Brana (Bonnie), 131, 157, 176n. 13; Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, xxvi Gurs internment camp, 134, 147, 149–50, 151, 152. See also Camps; Internment camps Guth, Emilie, 142 Guttenberger, Elisabeth, 56, 58–59, 71n. 24 Gypsies, 51, 54. See also Roma; Sinti Gypsy camp, 53, 57, 60–61, 62, 67 Gypsy law, 66 Hackett, Albert, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217 Hadamar. See Landesheilanstalt Institution at Hadamar Hair, 33–34, 48nn. 55, 186, 263. See also Body Hampl, Patricia, 218 Handicapped persons, 96, 98, 111, 116 Healing, 273 Heberer, Patricia, 112 Heinemann, Marlene, 34, 43n. 22, 49n. 59; Gender and Destiny, xxiii, 203 Heinkel factories, 65

311

Heroism, xxiv Heydrich, Reinhard, 56 Hiding: and Lemaire, 142; open, 270, 271; and Siekierski, 137, 138, 139, 145. See also Passing Hilberg, Raul, 12, 165, 166 Himmler, Heinrich, 11, 56, 85 History: and Cavani, 282, 295; and feminism, 23, 41n. 11; and fiction, 289; and Frank, 212; and gender, 42n. 20; and Holocaust Studies, xiv–xv, xxiii, xxvi; and language, 41n. 11; and male researchers, 24; and memoir, 294; and narrative, 29, 45n. 39; objective, 30; oral, xxv, 172; and Rothenberg, 238, 240–41, 242; and testimony, 46n. 44; and Thomas, 295. See also Reality Hitler, Adolf, xx, xxi; and euthanasia, 96, 98, 121; and Nazism, 222n. 11; and nursing, 114, 119; and sex, 258n. 32 Holocaust: and Cavani, 282, 284, 295; definition of, xv; and Delbo, 291, 293; deniers of, 288; and gender, xvii–xxviii, 132, 158n. 3; life before, 184–85; particularity of, 2, 6, 14, 19; politics of, 10; sacral nature of, xv, xviii; and Thomas, 295 Holocaust Studies: and feminism, xxv; and gender, xxvii–xxviii, 6–14, 23–39, 49n. 64; and history, xiv–xv, xxiii, xxvi; questions concerning, xxix–xxx, 1, 24–25; and readers, 41n. 9 Home, 134, 150, 162, 235, 236. See also Domesticity Homosexuality, xviii, xix, 291 Horowitz, Sara, 49n. 64, 127, 128, 174 Hospital, 102, 104 Housing: and Jews, 58; and Ravensbrück, 62, 63; and Sinti and Roma, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63

312

Index

Huber, Erwin Hall, 90–91 Huber, Irmgard, 112, 115, 116, 117, 120–21, 123 Hunger/starvation: and camps, 68, 162, 163; and community, 171–72; and fiction, 262, 270; and Gelissen, 194; and gender, 34, 164; and infants’ homes, 85; and Jews, 166; and Judaism, 263; and Schaeffer, 267; as weapon, 165; and women vs. men, 34, 44n. 30, 163, 166, 167–69, 171–73, 275n. 4. See also Food Hutthurm Hospital, 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 90 Hyman, Paula, 23 Identity: and Barot, 152–53, 156; and food, 173, 174; and Frank, 203, 204, 208–9, 212–13, 216– 17; and Gelissen, 182, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198; and gender, 133; and Gille, 182, 185, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198; and Gilligan, 134; and men, 263; and nursing, 113; reconstruction of, 128; and Salomon, 229; and Siekierski, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141–42, 156; and women, 134 Identity politics, 217–18 Illness, 96, 101, 105, 116–17, 119, 262, 269 Image, 232, 235, 237–38, 255, 290 Infants’ homes, 78, 84–91. See also Children Inside, 135–36, 149, 156 Inter-Movement Committee for Refugees. See Comité InterMouvements auprès des Évacués Internment camps: and Barot, 134, 135; and collaborators, 154–55; and prostitutes, 142; and refugees, 147; and Sinti and Roma, 57–58;

and Vichy, 147, 149–51, 152. See also Camps Jewishness, xx; and Frank, 212, 234, 235 Jews: and Barot, 151, 153; and camp population, 62; and food, 164, 173; and Gurs internment camp, 147, 149; and housing, 58; and hunger/starvation, 166; and resistance, 135, 136, 270; and Rothenberg, 239; and sexism, 44n. 27; and Siekierski, 140; and Sinti and Roma, 58; as victims, 260; vs. non-Jews, 135, 139 Judaism: and Gelissen, 182, 186, 196, 197; and Gille, 183, 194, 195, 196, 197; and hunger/starvation, 263; and Rothenberg, 239; and Spero, 243. See also Religion Kaplan, Marion, 47n. 52; Between Dignity and Despair, xxiii; When Biology Became Destiny, xx Kapo, 263, 264, 291–92, 296n. 36 Kaprow, Allan, 231 Karmel, Ilona, 269, 276n. 10; An Estate of Memory, 263, 266, 268, 272 Katz, Cindi, 235 Katz, Esther, xvii Keller, Bill, 243 Kerscher, Elsa, 85–86 Killing centers, 67, 98–99, 111, 115, 116. See also Camps Klein, Alfons, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123 Klein, Theo, 138 Kluger, Ruth, 167–68 Kohlberger, Maria, 56 Kokoszenko, Stanislaus, 85 Kolmar, Gertrud, 14–15, 19 Koonz, Claudia, 112, 113; Mothers in the Fatherland, xxii

Index Kremer, Lillian: Women’s Holocaust Writing, xxvi Kuhl, Eduard, 119, 120 Kuznetsov, Anatoli: Babi Yar, 288 Labor. See Work Landesheilanstalt Institution at Hadamar, 97, 112, 114–15, 116–23 Langer, Lawrence, xxviii, 12–13, 227, 283 Language: and Cavani, 287, 289; and Delbo, 293, 294; and history, 41n. 11; and poststructuralism, 30; and testimony, 46n. 44; and Thomas, 286–87, 289. See also Narrative Laska, Vera, xviii–xix; Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, xix Laval, Pierre, 152 Law: and abortion, 79, 80, 82–83, 84; and childbearing, 264; and education, 57; and euthanasia, 96–97, 101, 105, 107, 120, 121, 122; and fraternization, 78; and Hadamar trial, 115; and housing, 57, 58; international, 121, 122, 123; and marriage, 57, 66; and Passau records, 90; and race, 66; and rape, 33, 78, 263; and segregation, 244; and sex, 78, 244, 258n. 32; and sexuality, 57; and Sinti and Roma, 55–56, 57; and sterilization, 65, 79, 96 Law on the Regulation of Nursing, 113 Lehmann, Elisabeth, 60 Leitner, Isabella, xiii, 48n. 55 Lemaire, Pastor, 142 Lesbians, xviii, xix, 291 Lever, Janet, 156 Levi, Primo, 9, 276n. 16; Survival in Auschwitz, 161–62 Levin, Meyer, 217; The Obsession, 212 Lévy, Siegfrid, 142, 143

313

Levy-Haas, Hanna, 68 Lévy-Illner, Huguette, 137, 138, 156 Liberation, 68, 87, 88 Life expectancy. See Survival Liss, Andrea: Trespassing Shadows, 258n. 28 Literature, xxiii. See also Fiction; Narrative Lixl-Purcell, Andreas: Women of Exile, xix Lodz, 165 Lorde, Audre, xvi Magdeburg, 57, 60 Magyar-Isaacson, Judith, 48n. 55 Marriage: and Frank, 222n. 18; and Ravensbrück, 63; and Sinti and Roma, 57, 63, 66. See also Sex Martin, Elaine: Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich, xxii Marzahn, 60 Maury, Pierre, 146 Mauthausen, 63 Meaning, 256n. 5; and Cavani, 285; and Rothenberg, 233–34, 240 Medicine: and Karmel, 269; and race, 113; and Ravensbrück, 65; and Schaeffer, 269. See also Nurse/nursing; Physician Memoir: collections of, xxv; and dancer, 293–94; and experience, 289; and fiction, xxiii–xxiv; and food, 166; and gender, 230; and history, 294; and memory, xv; and narrative, 294, 295; and sexuality, 289–90; Sinti and Roma, 53–54; and truth, xv; use of, 127; and women, 220. See also Autobiography; Frank, Anne; Testimony; specific works Memorial, 231, 289 Memory: and art, 232; and Cavani, 280, 281, 282–83, 285, 295;

314

Index

Memory (continued) construction of, xv, xvi; and Delbo, 290; and ethics/morality, 274; and feminism, 232; and food, 165, 171, 172–73, 174; and Gelissen, 194, 197; and gender, xiv, xxiii, xxx, 2, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 49nn. 58, 59, 174–75; and Gille, 193, 196, 197, 198; and memoir, xv; and narrative, 36, 127; and NombergPrzytyk, 290; and relationships, xxiii, 35–36; and Rothenberg, 240, 256; and selection, 31; and Spero, 255, 256; and Thomas, 288, 295; and trauma, 30 Men: and Bass, 143; and competition, 268; and Delbo, 37–38; and Frank, 204, 205; and genocide, 8; and Holocaust literature, 9; and identity, 263; and independence, 35–36; and memoirs, 166–67; and Nazism, 32–34, 112; and nursing, 112; and passing, 133, 139; and Ravensbrück, 63; and relationships, xxiii, 35–36, 43n. 22, 45n. 33, 49n. 59; replacement of, 268; and resistance, 131, 132, 133, 143, 270; roles of, 47n. 52; and Salomon, 229; and self-sacrifice, 276n. 16; Sinti and Roma, 54, 61, 63, 70n. 10; and Spero, 243; and work, 262, 263. See also Patriarchy Men vs. women: and anti-Semitism, 26; and art, 230; and assimilation, 42n. 20; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, 21n. 19; and Barot, 155; and camp induction, 263–64; and disease, 44n. 30; and emigration, 47n. 52; and essentialism, xvi, xviii; and ethics, 133–34; and experience, xiv, 33, 260, 261; and fiction, 260–62; and food, 164, 166, 167, 174; and Frank, 204–5; and hair shaving,

33–34, 48n. 55, 56; and Holocaust Studies, 10–14, 23–25, 38, 49n. 65; and hunger/starvation, 34, 44n. 30, 163, 166, 167–69, 171–73, 275n. 4; and memory, xiv, 33, 34, 35, 49nn. 58, 59; and narrative, 32, 33; and Nazis, 9, 11, 43nn. 22, 26; and Nazi treatment, 32–34; and nurture, 268; and race, xxvii–xxviii; and relationships, xxiii, 35–36, 45n. 33, 49n. 59; and resistance, 143, 270; and Ringelheim, 26; and Schoenfeld, 7; and selfishness vs. cooperation, 43n. 22; and Sinti and Roma, 61, 70n. 10; and stroller incident, 18; and survival, 48n. 57, 262; and survival rates, 26–27, 44n. 27; and testimony, 49n. 64; and work, 112–13. See also Gender Mending, 182. See also Tikkun Menstruation, 186, 187, 213, 262. See also Body Mental hospital, 98, 103, 106 Mental illness, 96, 97, 101, 105, 115, 116, 121 Merkle, Adolf, 117–18, 123 Meseritz-Obrawalde, 95, 98–99, 100–107 Meth, Rosa, xxiv Meyer, Hubert, 151 Michaelis, Wanda, 55–56 Midwife, 80, 81, 86. See also Nurse/nursing Military, 114, 119, 123, 143, 145 Miller, Joy Erlichman: Love Carried Me Home, xxvi Milton, Sybil, 27, 44n. 30, 51, 166, 230, 269 Modernism, 239 Moi, Toril, 30 Morality. See Ethics/morality Moreau, Rudol von, 88–89 Mortality. See Survival Mother: and abortion, 48n. 54,

Index 78–84, 262; and Auschwitz, 15, 16–18; and Cohen, 7; and coping, 43n. 22; and death, 48n. 54, 264; and Ettinger, 270, 271; and euthanasia, 97; and fiction, 262, 264–68; and Frank, 203, 213, 216, 217, 222n. 18; and Germany, 7–8; and Karmel, 268, 269; and Langer, 12; and Levi, 161; and Nazis, 7–8, 11; and nurses, 114; and Ozick, 266–67; and Piercy, 265–66; and Ravensbrück, 63; and relationships, 265–66, 276n. 10; and resistance, 265–66; and Schaeffer, 265, 267–68; Sinti and Roma, 63; and survival, 48n. 54, 264, 272–73; and Tedeschi, 16; traditional roles of, 161; and Troller, 162. See also Parents Moulin, Jean, 152 Müller, Filip, 293 Müller, Melissa, 219 Mulvey, Laura, 283, 285 Municipal camps, 57, 58, 59, 60 Museum, 232, 233, 234, 240, 242, 255–56 Musician, 56 Narrative: conceptualization of, 30; construction of, 30, 31, 32, 127; deconstruction of, 29–33; and Delbo, 290; and emplotment, 31, 35; and food, 166; and gender, 2, 31–39; and history, 29, 45n. 39; and meaning, 31; and memoir, 294, 295; and memory, 36; and reality, 29; and (re)construction, 30; and rhetoric, 46n. 44; Roma, 53–54; and Rothenberg, 238, 240; and selection, 31; Sinti, 53–54; and survivor, 47n. 48; transformation of, 47n. 48; and trauma, 30. See also Fiction Nathan, Jon, 172

315

Nathana, Sister, 79, 80–81 Nazi Sisterhood, 100 Nazis/Nazism: and anti-Semitism, 11; and Cavani, 279–80, 281, 282, 283, 285; and children, 7–8; contemporary attitudes toward, 88–91; and Delbo, 291; and equality, 9–10; and euthanasia, 96–100, 122; and feminism, xx; and Frank, 209, 239; and Gelissen, 191; and gender, xix–xxiii, xxviii, 9, 11, 26–27, 32–33; and Gille, 191; and Hitler, 222n. 11; and hunger/starvation, 165, 166, 167, 174, 176n. 14; and mothers, 7–8, 11; and nurses, 111–14, 122, 123; and race, xxviii, 11, 26–27, 32, 96, 135, 244; and resistance, 133; and Roma, 55, 56, 58; and Rothenberg, 237, 239; and Salomon, 229; and Sinti, 55, 56, 58; and sterilization, 96; and women, 141; and women vs. men, 43nn. 22, 26, 112–13; and work, xx, xxii, 112. See also Germany Nebe, Arthur, 66, 71n. 17 Negroes, 66 Neüstadt Glewe, 188 Neve, P. de, 213 Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara, 278; Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, 290; “Revenge of the Dancer,” 293–94 Normalcy, 35, 36, 61, 162, 229–30, 292 Nuremberg Law, 244, 258n. 32 Nuremberg Trials, 83, 115 Nurse/nursing: and class, 113; and ethics, 113, 114, 124; and ethics/morality, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 124; and eugenics, 111; and euthanasia, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100–107, 111, 118–24;

316

Index

Nurse/nursing (continued) and forced abortions, 80–81; and Hadamar, 112, 115, 116, 118–20; and military, 114, 119; and Nazis, 100, 111–14, 122, 123; and public health, 111; and sisters, 80–81; and women, 112–13, 114 Nurture, 136, 150, 268 Obedience, 104, 106, 119–20, 122, 124 Obrawalde, 107 Ofer, Dalia, 9, 185; Women in the Holocaust, xxv–xxvi Ontic wound, 182, 198 Opfermann, Charlotte Guthmann, xix–xx Oppression/persecution, xvi, 29, 55–56, 218 Other, 134–35, 188, 191 Owing, Alison, xxi–xxii Ozick, Cynthia: and feminism, xxviii, 185; and Frank, 217, 219, 224n. 49; and Ringelheim, 42n. 13; “Rosa,” 273–74; “The Shawl,” 266–67, 273; and survivor, 272; “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” 217 Parents: and Gelissen, 182; and Gille, 181, 182, 190. See also Mother Partisan, 271 Passau, 77, 78, 79, 84, 90 Passing, xxiv, 133, 139, 140, 268, 270–71. See also Assimilation; Resistance Passivity, xxiv Past, 184–85 Patriarchy, xxi; and Bass, 143, 144–45; and Beauvoir, 141; and Mulvey, 285; and resistance, 132; and Siekierski, 143, 144–45. See also Men Pawelczynska, Anna, 27, 44n. 28 Perpetrator, xxi, 8–9

Philosophy, 163–64, 176n. 5, 195 Photography, 232, 236, 237, 255, 258n. 28 Physician: and ethics, 111; and euthanasia, 97, 98, 100–101, 103, 104, 106; and forced abortion, 79; and Piercy, 266; and sterilization, 114 Piercy, Marge, 270, 271; Gone to Soldiers, 263, 265–66, 269, 272 Poland, 61, 95 Poles, 77–78, 85, 116, 117, 119, 123 Police: and Barot, 152; and Siekierski, 140, 141. See also Gestapo Population: and camps, 61–62; and Sinti and Roma, 55, 70nn. 9, 9 Portschy, Tobias, 66, 72n. 27 Positionality, 30 Postmodernism, 230, 256 Poststructuralism, 29, 30 Poznanski, Renée, 131, 143, 157, 159n. 13 Praag, Henri van, 208 Pregnancy, 48n. 54, 78, 265–66. See also Abortion; Mother Prisoners, 116–17, 123 Private sphere, 135 Pronicheva, Dina, 288 Prostitution, 132, 134, 142, 150 Protestant Nursing Orders, 100 Protestants/Protestantism, 100, 101, 136, 146. See also Religion Public health, 58, 66, 97, 111. See also Eugenics; Euthanasia Puce. See Lévy-Illner, Huguette Punishment, and Sinti and Roma, 63, 64, 65 Race: and euthanasia, 97; and gender, xx, xxviii, 32; and genocide, 11; inventory of, 65–66; and law, 66; and medicine,

Index 113; and Nazis, xxviii, 11, 26–27, 32, 96, 135, 244; and Siekierski, 140; and Sinti and Roma, 54–55, 56–57, 58; and victim, 260. See also Ethnicity Racism: and Gelissen, 191; and Gille, 191; and women’s fiction, 263 Raizel, Tante, 173 Rape: and Cavani, 281; and law, 33, 78, 263; and Ozick, 273; and Polish workers, 78; and Thomas, 287. See also Sexuality Ratajczak, Nurse, 107 Ravensbrück, 20n. 5, 57, 61–62, 63, 188 Reagan, Ronald, 201–2, 203, 212, 220n. 1, 222n. 11 Reality: and Cavani, 285; and fiction, 289; and modern Germany, 91; and narrative, 29; and positionality, 30; (re)construction of, 30. See also History; Truth Récébédou, 151 Recipe. See Food Records: and food, 165; and forced abortions, 82, 83, 90; and Hadamar victims, 117; and infants’ homes, 87, 88; and Passau, 90; and slave labor, 76–77. See also Documentation Redemption, 283, 284 Reflectionism, 30 Refugees, 137, 138, 139, 142, 147, 151 Reich Committee for Research of Inherited and Other Severe Illnesses, 96, 97, 115, 124 Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments, 115–16 Reich’s Association of Nurses, 114 Reich’s Union of German Nurses and Nursing Assistants, 114 Reis, Georg, 81–82, 83

317

Reitberger, Judge, 82 Relationships, women’s: and assistance, 263; and Barot, 133, 136, 156–57; and cooperation, 43n. 22; and fiction, 267, 268–70; and food, 163, 171–75, 263, 269; and Gille, 187; and Karmel, 266; and memory, xxiii, 35–36, 45n. 33, 49n. 59; and mothers, 265–66, 276n. 10; and religion, 275n. 5; and Siekierski, 133, 136, 137, 138, 145, 156; and Sinti, 63; sisterly, 21n. 21; and survival, xiii, 16, 27, 276n. 16. See also Community Religion: and Barot, 146, 150, 155; and Delbo, 292; and ecumenism, 146, 147, 155; and euthanasia, 101, 102, 103; and fiction, 270; and food, 164, 173; and Gelissen, 182, 183, 192, 196, 197; and Gille, 182, 190, 194, 195, 196; and nursing, 100, 101, 113; and Piercy, 274; and relationships, 275n. 5; and Siekierski, 146. See also Ritual; specific religious sects Resistance: and abortion, 81; and appearance, 270; and Auschwitz, 74n. 56; and Cavani, 283, 284; and Cohen, 7; and dancer, 293–94; definition of, xxiv; and Delbo, 37, 291, 296n. 36; and Ettinger, 270, 271, 277n. 19; and euthanasia, 105, 122; and fiction, 270–72; and Jews, 135, 270; and Langer, 283; and men, 131; and mothers, 265–66; and passing, xxiv; and Piercy, 271; and pregnancy, 265–66; and reading, 157; and Rosenstrasse Frauen, xxiv, 255; and sexuality, 293–94; and Sinti and Roma, 68; and women, xviii, 131–57; and women vs. men, 143, 270; and work, 128

318

Index

Riemer, Franz Seraph, 80 Rieucros camp, 150, 151 Ringelheim, Joan, 269; and gendered analysis, 199n. 12; and Holocaust Studies, xvii, 25–27, 28–29, 38; and narrative transformation, 47n. 48; and oppression, xvi; and Ozick, 42n. 13; and survival rates, 44n. 27, 45n. 32; and truth, 31; and victims, 9; “Women and the Holocaust,” 218 Rittner, Carol, 203; Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, xxv, 6–7 Ritual: and fiction, 270; and food, 162, 164, 171, 173, 175, 270; and Rothenberg, 239; and Spero, 244. See also Religion Rivesaltes, 151 Roma, 51, 53–68, 70n. 9; as term, 54 Romance, 162. See also Sexuality Romein, Jan, 207, 208, 209 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 209 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 208, 215–16, 222n. 11 Rosenstrasse Frauen, xxiv, 255 Rosmus, Anna, 51 Roth, John K., 1–2, 203; Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, xxv, 6–7 Roth, Philip: The Ghost Writer, 218–19 Rothenberg, Ellen, 230, 233–42, 256; Anne Frank Business Cards, 238, 248; The Anne Frank Project, 234, 235–42; The Combing Shawl, 239–40, 241, 247, 248; Common Sense, 233; The Conditions for Growth, 236, 240–41, 246, 249, 250; Das Wesentliche (The Essence), 239, 240; Family Portrait, 238–39; The German Question, 235; The Great Circle, 233; Hello Traitor, 235; The Partial Index, 236–37, 245, 246; A Probability Bordering on Certainty, 236, 238–40, 241,

247, 248, 249; Samples of Postwar Embroidery, 238; Those Which Are Most Common, 234–35; Vices and Virtues, 233 Rubenstein, Richard, 235 Ruoff, Heinrich, 115, 116, 117, 123 Russians, 78, 107, 116, 117, 119, 123 Sachs, Nelly, 255; “That the Persecuted May Not Become Persecutors,” 244 Sachsenhausen, 61. See also Camps Sallach, 84–85, 91 Salomon, Charlotte: Life or Theater?, 229 Sanctification, of life, 191, 192 Sanders, Marie, 244 Sarajevo, 232 Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg, 264, 267–69, 272, 273; Anya, 265 Schlink, Bernhard: The Reader, 20n. 6 Schneider, Gertrude, 168 Schoenfeld, Gabriel, xxv, 6, 7, 9, 42n. 13 Scholz-Klink, Gertrud, xxi Schutz, Anneliese, 215 Scott, Joan Wallach, 41n. 11 Scouts, 137 Segregation, 59–60, 62, 244 Seible, Theresia, 54 Seidman, Naomi, 210 Self, gendered, 38 Self-definition, 164 Self-image, 36 Self-understanding, 182, 183 Service, 136, 137, 138 Service André, 132, 138 Sex: barter for, 33; and law, 78, 244, 258n. 32. See also Marriage Sexism: and Barot, 155; and Frank, 216; and Jews, 44n. 27; and Piercy, 272; and race, 26–27; and women’s fiction, 263

Index Sexuality: as advantage/disadvantage, 33; and camp induction, 264; and Cavani, 279, 280–81, 282–83, 284–86, 287, 289, 294, 295; and Delbo, 278, 290–91, 294, 296n. 36; and Frank, 203, 204, 213, 216, 234, 239; and law, 57; and memoir, 289–90; and memoirs, 290; and Nomberg-Przytyk, 290– 91, 294; and resistance, 293–94; and Rothenberg, 233, 239; and Siekierski, 142; and Sinti and Roma, 57; and testimony, 278, 290; and Thomas, 279, 286–87, 289, 294, 295; and victims, 33, 78, 260, 263, 264; and women, 33, 296n. 30; and women’s fiction, 263, 264. See also Romance Sichardt, Anna, 88 Siekierski, Denise, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137–46, 155–56, 157 Simonovic, Max, 89 Sinti, 51, 53–68, 70n. 9; as term, 54 Sisterhood, 16, 21n. 21. See also Relationships, women’s Sisters of Mercy, 80–81, 90. See also Catholic Church; Nurse/nursing Sixième, 132, 138 Smith, Roger, xxi Socialization, 32, 37, 38, 49n. 58, 112, 162, 262, 268 Space, conceptual, 230, 256n. 5 Spero, Nancy, 230, 242–44, 255–56; The Ballad of Marie Sanders, 244, 253, 254; Masha Bruskina, 243–44, 251, 252, 253; War Series: Bombs and Helicopters, 242 Steinbach, Hulda, 57 Sterilization, 8; and camps, 60; and eugenics movement, 96; and law, 65, 79; and Nazis, 96; and physicians, 114; and Ravensbrück, 65; and Sinti, 53; and Sinti and

319

Roma, 58, 65, 66, 67; and women’s fiction, 262 Stroom, Gerrold van der, 215 Students, 146. See also Education Subjectivity, 35, 36 Survival: and abortion, 48n. 54; and children, 264, 272–73; and dependence, 276n. 16; factors in, 44nn. 28, 29; and gender, 48n. 57, 276n. 16; and mothers, 48n. 54, 264, 272–73; rates of, 26–27, 44n. 27, 45n. 32, 262; and relationships, xiii, 16, 17, 276n. 16. See also Death Survivor: and autobiography, 23; and Cavani, 285; and feminism, 27–28, 45n. 34; and gender, 25–26, 38; and Gille, 184; and narrative, 47n. 48; and postwar situation, 272–74; Roma and Sinti, 53 Switzerland, 154 Symbol, 242, 243 Szajna, Josef: Replika, 236, 237 Tedeschi, Giuliana, xiii–xiv, 168; There Is a Place on Earth, 16–19 Terezin. See Theresienstadt Terwilliger, Julia: Women of Ravensbrück, 258n. 28 Testimony: and Babi Yar massacre, 288; construction of, 31, 32; and gender, 33, 39, 49n. 64; and history, 46n. 44; Roma, 54; and sexuality, 263, 278, 290; Sinti, 54; and theory, 46n. 44. See also Autobiography; Memoir Textuality, 30, 31, 35 Theis, Pastor, 151 Theory, xv, xxiii, xxvi, 29, 46n. 44 Theresienstadt, 67, 163, 168, 174, 229. See also Camps Thomas, D. M.: The White Hotel, 279, 286–87, 288–89, 290, 295 Thomas, Judith, 115, 117

320

Index

Tikkun, 182, 187, 198 Tikkun atzmi, 182, 191, 193, 197 Tikkun olam, 182, 195–96 Trial: defense arguments at, 121; and forced abortions, 79, 82, 84; and Gille, 192–93; and Hadamar, 112, 114–15, 117–23; and MeseritzObrawalde nurses, 100–107 Trocmé, Magda, 151 Trocmé, Pastor, 151 Troller, Norbert, 162 Truth, 33, 46n. 44, 290. See also History; Reality Tuberculosis, 116–17, 119 Tushnet, Leonard, 275n. 4 Ukranians, 78, 79, 85 Unger, Michal, 47n. 52, 48n. 57, 165 United Nations War Crimes Trial, 115 United States, 96, 117 United States v. Alfons Klein et al., 115 Universalism, 185, 195, 198, 217 Vichy France, 68, 133, 151, 195. See also France Victim: and art, 229, 230; and Cavani, 281–82, 284, 285; and Delbo, 296n. 36; and dependence, 276n. 16; and Frank, 203, 204, 217, 218, 238; idealization of, 218; identification with, 217, 218, 258n. 28; nonJewish, xv–xvi, 8; and race, 260; and Rothenberg, 234, 238; and sexuality, 33, 78, 260, 263, 264; and Spero, 244, 255, 256; women as, xviii, 8, 43n. 26, 255; and women’s fiction, 263 Voyeur, 283, 285, 289, 291 Waaldijk, Berteke, 212–13, 216 Wahlmann, Adolph, 117, 123 Weissman, Gary, 41n. 9

Weitzman, Lenore, xxiv, 185; Women in the Holocaust, xxv–xxvi White, Hayden, 46n. 44 Wieczorek, Helene, 105 Wiegand, Rosa, 64 Wiesel, Elie, 9, 48n. 55; Night, 167, 276n. 16 Willig, Karl, 115, 116, 117, 119, 123 Wilson, Cara, 217, 219 Winkler, Johann, 79–80, 82 Witnesses of Existence, 232 Womanhood, and Frank, 203, 204, 212–13, 216, 219–20, 235 Women: and abortion, 78–84; and anti-Semitism, xxii; and Bass, 143; as bystanders, 8–9; and camps, 20n. 5, 60, 151, 263–64; and Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués, 147; culture of, 27, 28, 29; and Delbo, 38; and equality, 204–5; and ethics/morality, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 124, 133–34, 150; and exile, xix–xx; and family, 172, 268; and food, 164, 166, 167–69, 171; and Frank, 204–5, 217; and Germany, xxi; and identity, 134; and inside, 135–36; and Judaism, 23–24; and memoirs, 167–69, 220; and memory, xiv, xvi, 33, 34, 35, 49nn. 58, 59; and Nazis, 9, 11, 32–34, 43nn. 22, 26, 141; and networks, 27; and nursing, 112–13, 114; and other, 134–35; as partners, 9; and passing, 133, 139; as perpetrators, xxi, 8–9; and pregnancy, 48n. 54; questions about, 13–14; and Ravensbrück, 20n. 5; and replacement of men, 268; and resistance, xviii, 131–57; and resourcefulness, 26, 27, 28–29, 37, 43n. 22; rights of, 155; roles of, xx–xxii, xxviii, 8–9, 20n. 7, 47n. 52, 128, 134, 140, 141, 143–44, 149,

Index 156, 159n. 13, 204–5; Roma, 51, 53–68, 70n. 10; and Rothenberg, 236; and sexuality, 33, 296n. 30; silence concerning, 131; Sinti, 51, 53–68, 70n. 9; social construction of, xvi; and Spero, 255; studies of, xvii–xxviii, 6–14; and survival, 26–27, 44n. 27, 48n.57, 262; as victims, xviii, 8, 43n. 26, 255; and vulnerability, 26, 29, 37, 154; and work, xx, xxii, 77–78, 112–13, 163. See also Feminism; Gender; Nurse/nursing; Relationships, women’s Women vs. men: and anti-Semitism, 26; and art, 230; and assimilation, 42n. 20; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, 21n. 19; and Barot, 155; and camp induction, 263–64; and disease, 44n. 30; and emigration, 47n. 52; and essentialism, xvi, xviii; and ethics/morality, 133–34; and experience, xiv, 33, 260, 261; and fiction, 260–62; and food, 164, 166, 167; and Frank, 204–5; and hair shaving, 33–34, 48n. 55, 56; and Holocaust Studies, 10–14, 23–25, 38, 49n. 65; and hunger/starvation, 34, 44n. 30, 163, 166, 167–69, 171–73, 275n. 4; and Koonz, xxii; and memory, xiv, 33, 34, 35, 49nn. 58, 59; and narrative, 32, 33; and Nazis, 9, 11, 32–34, 43nn. 22, 26; and nurture, 268; and race, xxvii–xxviii; and relationships, xxiii, 35–36, 43n. 22, 45n. 33, 49n. 59; and resistance, 143, 270; and resourcefulness, 29; and Ringelheim, 26; and Schoenfeld, 7; and selfishness vs. cooperation, 43n. 22; and

321

Sinti and Roma, 61, 70n. 10; and stroller incident, 18; and survival, 26–27, 44n. 27, 48n. 57, 262; and testimony, 49n. 64; and work, 112–13 “Women Surviving the Holocaust,” 26, 27–28 Work: and Auschwitz-Birkenau, 8, 16–17, 21n. 19; and Barot, 136, 149, 150, 151, 152–55; and Bass, 143; and camps, 8, 16–17, 21n. 19, 60, 61, 62; and children, 59; and Ettinger, 271; and euthanasia, 97, 105, 106; and fiction, 262; and food, 165; forced, 56, 77, 116–17, 119; and Frank, 216–17, 238; and gender, 64; and men, 112–13, 262, 263; and Nazism, xx, xxii, 112; and Piercy, 272; and Poles, 77–78; and Ravensbrück, 63, 64, 65; and resistance, 128; and Rothenberg, 238; service, 136, 137, 138, 159n. 13; and Siekierski, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145; and Sinti and Roma, 55–57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71n. 24; and war, 77; and women, xx, xxii, 77–78, 163; and women vs. men, 112–13 World War I, 114 Worlitscheck, Dr., 82 Wronska, Kazimiera, 77–78, 86, 87 Young, James, 37, 288, 289, 290, 293; At Memory’s Edge, 231 Zigeunerlager. See Gypsy camp Zigeuner/Zigeunerin, 54 Zimetbaum, Mala, xxiv Zionism, 274 Zyklon-B, 5–6