If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust 9781644697115

Citation preview

If This Is a Woman Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust

If This Is a Woman Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust

Edited by Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik

BOSTON 2021

Cover photograph: The Hoenig sisters, Prešov, Czechoslovakia, 1941. From right to left: Yolana was in Auschwitz for three years and survived; Regina was deported in 1944 and perished; Magda was among the first deportees to Auschwitz in 1942; Anna hid near Prešov, was deported, and perished; Ilona hid with Anna and perished; Irena was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Photo Credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archives, archival signature 7753 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nešťáková, Denisa, 1987- editor. | Grosse-Sommer, Katja, 1994-editor. | Klacsmann, Borbála, 1983- editor. Title: If this is a woman : studies on women and gender in the holocaust / edited by Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik. Description: Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Summary: “The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against antigender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021034951 (print) | LCCN 2021034952 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697108 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697115 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697122 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish women in the Holocaust. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Classification: LCC D804.47 .I47 2021 (print) | LCC D804.47 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18082–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021034951 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021034952 ISBN 9781644697108 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697115 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697122 (epub) Copyright © 2021 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Foreword: Unholy Alliances Andrea Pető

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Introductionxi Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik Part One Theoretical Reflections on a Gender Focus in Holocaust Studies 1. “Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis Dalia Ofer 2. A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship? Natalia Aleksiun Part Two Gender in Times of Occupation and Authoritarianism: Expectation and Reality 3. Masculinities under Occupation: Considerations of a Gender Perspective on Everyday Life under German Occupation  Agnes Laba 4. New Slovak Woman: The Feminine Ideal in the Authoritarian Regime of the Slovak State, 1939–1945 Eva Škorvanková

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Part Three Women’s Lives in Camps 5. “Our mother organized it all”: The Role of Mothers of Sereď Camp in the Memories of Their Children Denisa Nešťáková 6. Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 1939 Marína Zavacká Part Four Women in Positions of Community Leadership 7. Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust? Anna Nedlin-Lehrer 8. Female Involvement in the “Jewish Councils” of the Netherlands and France: Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern Laurien Vastenhout Part Five Women in the Resistance 9. “Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?” The Betrayal of Polish Women and the Jewish Children They Hid during the Holocaust—the Case of Cracow Joanna Sliwa 10. “And with these boots, I’m gonna run away from here”: The Significance of Female Narratives in the Sobibor Uprising and Its Aftermath Hannah Wilson 11. “After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot.” Jewish Women among Partisans in Lithuania, 1941–1944 Modiane Zerdoun-Daniel Part Six Sexuality and Sexual Violence 12. Listening to Women’s Voices: Jewish Rape Survivors’ Testimonies in Soviet War Crimes Trials Marta Havryshko 13. Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany Florian Zabransky

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Contributors264 Index268

Acknowledgements

As we believe the saying should go, “no woman is an island.” This is particularly true for this volume, which could not have been created without the work and support of many individuals and institutions. The editors want to warmly thank the institutions under whose auspices the conference was organized—Comenius University in Bratislava (the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, in particular), the Institute of History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Thank you to the staff at Comenius University who enabled us make our conference a success. Thanks to Professor Eduard Nižňanský for early support and the motivation to organize the conference. We are grateful to the partners that cooperated with in organizing the conference: the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University, Olomouc, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Department of History at the University of Szeged, as well as the Sereď Holocaust Museum. We are more than thankful to the institutions offering us financial support, without whom we could not have brought together such amazing scholars. They are the Visegrad Fund, Comenius University in Bratislava, the Goethe Institute Bratislava, the Polish Institute in Bratislava, the French Embassy, and the Israeli Embassy in Slovakia. Furthermore, we would like to express our gratitude to the institutions providing the additional financial support that made possible the publication of the book you are holding in your hands. Our thanks go to the Institute of History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Project APVV-15-0349—The Individual and Society: Their Mutual Reflection in the Historical Process), the Slovak Research and Development Agency

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(APVV-18-0333), the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava, the Polish Institute in Bratislava, and Paideia—The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. The vital bureaucratic work was taken on by the Vincent Múcska (the head of the Department of General History), the department’s treasurer, Dr. Eva Škorvánková (a contributor to this volume), and the department’s administrators Mária Bajbarová, Viera Feriancová, and Oľga Petreková. We want to warmly thank all the conference’s participants, including those whose work is not featured in this volume. In particular, we want to thank our co-organizer Dr. Anna Ullrich for her dedication to the project. Thank you to Academic Studies Press for providing the opportunity to publish our work and to Alessandra Anzani for her involvement in pushing it forward. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments on the manuscript.1 Thank you to Wolfgang Schellenbacher from the EHRI Document Blog for giving us the opportunity to share our research in a more popular setting. The blog contributions of conference participants are collected at https://blog.ehri-project.eu. Thank you to all those who have encouraged this project from its conception to its realization. We are honored to collaborate with such intelligent, dedicated, and concerned individuals, and have enjoyed their support for this project. If these are the women and allies we could work together with in every project, we believe that academia would certainly be richer and more supportive.

1 Authors were responsible for the implementation of reviewers’ comments.

Foreword: Unholy Alliances Andrea Pető

We all know the value of the discussions during conference breaks. These are the moments when experts on gender and women’s history usually talk to each other about their marginalization in the profession. Unless they find the separately flagged “gender” panels and special issues of peer-reviewed journals comforting, not much has changed in the power dynamics of the historical profession in the past decades. In the institutional inertia, the concept of “gender” as an analytical category has gone through a major transformation. Joan Scott, in her very influential and widely quoted Siegriest lecture of 2001, pointed this out in her article entitled “Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis,” published in the American Historical Journal in 1986, did not bring the expected intellectual and political breakthrough. Instead of a major epistemological transformation by applying gender as a category of analysis, it led to “genderism,” meaning that researchers used gender as a category of analysis ignoring intersectional approaches that take into consideration other differences.1 Those who are working in the field of Holocaust and Jewish studies are of course familiar with these complexities of institutionalization and application of gender as a category of analysis too well. They do not even need a conference break to recall that the famous debate about “asking the wrong question” has a long shadow, especially when jobs are scarce 1 Joan W. Scott, “Millennial Fantasies. The Future of ‘Gender’ in the 21st Century,” in Gender: Die Tücken einer Kategorie. Joan W. Scott, Geschichte und Politik. Beiträge zum Symposion anlässlich der Verleihung des Hans-Sigrist-Preises 1999 der Universität Bern an Joan W. Scott, ed., Claudia Honegger and Caroline Arni (Zürich: Kronos-Verlag, 2001, 19–37.

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anyway.2 Historians working on gendering the Holocaust are also struggling not only of the remasculinization of their profession but also the resistance of history writing against these epistemological challenges. Sara Horowitz sets out two aims for those undertaking gender analyses of the Holocaust: “recovering the experiences of women and reshaping or nuancing Holocaust memory.”3 The first approach—“recovering the experiences of women”—seeks to gather the lost and neglected stories of the Holocaust; the second focuses on the framework, or rather settings, in which these stories are situated. Recently, however, unexpected allies showed up on the thus far quite gloomy horizon of gender historians of the Holocaust. A number of books and journal articles covering this “recovery of the experiences of women” during the Holocaust has, surprisingly, increased. But these new allies are only interested in the first task set by Horowitz: to recover women’s voices as they were. Representatives are returning to the main objective of women’s history writing of the 1970s, but with a very different political agenda. This “her-story turn” is a result of the failed epistemological change in history writing together with the illiberal memory turn. Their aim is to recover female figures, mainstreaming them into the very center of national history where they failed to find a “proper home” in the past decades.4 The ongoing illiberal shift demonstrates that feminists do not have a monopoly to write women’s history, just as they cannot count on their monopoly to politically represent women. They have to prove that they are better, more relevant and first of all more interesting. If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust is an attempt to do exactly that: because if we fail, there will not be too many conferences in the future to complain about marginalization over coffee.

2 Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karoline Krasuska, eds., Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (Warszawa: IBL, 2015). 3 Sara R. Horowitz, “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory,” Prooftexts 20, nos. 1–2 (2000): 176. 4 Andrea Pető, “Roots of Illiberal Memory Politics: Remembering Women in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” Baltic Worlds 10, no. 4 (2017): 42–58.

Introduction Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik

When we decided to organize a conference on the history of World War II and the Holocaust with an emphasis on gender, we believed the subject was well-established. Despite this, we were faced with predictable stereotypes when a senior (male) scholar encouraged us to “invite some of your women, and have a female meeting” during the initial stages of the conference planning in 2017. We decided to interpret the comment as a challenge and set out to conceptualize a conference that would go far beyond his suggestion. As organizers, we were interested in providing a space to discuss gender and gendered experiences within the context of World War II and the Holocaust, research by scholars from East-Central Europe or those working on topics focused on this geopolitical space. Spreading the word through and beyond “[our] women,” we received almost ninety applications from academics all around the world wanting to take part in the second “XX. Century Conference: If This Is a Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava. Under the subheading “If This Is A Woman,” the conference took place on January 21–23, 2019, in cooperation with the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich. Ultimately, we were able to accept only eighteen speakers: our “female meeting” seemed to have sparked quite an interest among academics, doctoral students, and early career researchers, no matter the gender. Anyone arranging a conference on gender will struggle not only to make selections from a large pool of quality work, but also with regard to the gender of speakers. Part of the reason for setting up a gender-focused

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conference is precisely to offer female researchers a space for discussion that is not dominated (or less dominated) by gender-based power structures. We found ourselves in the privileged position of additionally being able to refine our selection in the light of two factors important to us as young researchers ourselves. One was bringing together established and non-established scholars in an environment in which each person’s work could be reviewed critically, yet not destructively. We wanted to create structures of support which would link the academic and the private, could be built for the long term, and serve not only to mitigate the competitive atmosphere prevalent in much of academia, but also contribute to a positive mutual encounter that would reach far beyond our conference. The other was to highlight research on East-Central Europe as a geopolitical space decisively shaped by processes of occupation, collaboration, and perpetration during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Relevant writing in English-language publications is often produced by scholars from Northern America or Western Europe. Next to the factors of gender and the level of academic advancement, it was therefore a political imperative of this conference to encourage and support a stronger international inclusion of scholars from East-Central Europe. A further issue faced by those organizing a conference on “gender” is how to handle the oftentimes prevalent equation of “gender” with “women” or “female” experiences. We did not help ourselves by giving it the title “If This Is A Woman.” Luckily, Gender Studies in itself has always been interdisciplinary and, ideally, intersectional, and we believe that the present volume, as a presentation of some of the significant research discussed during the conference, is not required to restrict itself to a narrow conception of gendered experiences during World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing female experience in the title, we hope we will encourage others to fill the lacunae that still—four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies by way of attention to gender—exist when it comes to female experiences. At the same time, any study of women must also keep in mind the gendered experiences of others. In this way, it increases its usefulness by being both a form of analysis and a comparative method.

The Necessity of a Gender Focus and Its Connection to Democratic Values in East-Central Europe Our having to work hard to push through the conference’s proposed topic against initial reservations, mentioned previously, is certainly not unheard

Introduction

of. Throughout the history of feminist scholarship, many scholars have had to face not only dismissive comments, but also verbal accusations and attacks on their work, including from their peers. One of the notorious cases in our field is that of Joan Ringelheim, one of the earliest feminist historians, working in the 1980s, to devote herself to working on the lives of women during the Holocaust. She was accused of appropriating the Holocaust to forward her feminist program, presenting it as another example of female oppression rather than a uniquely Jewish tragedy.1 In the same way, when Zoë Waxman presented a paper addressing the subject of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust, her research was dismissed and deemed unworthy of discussion.2 Though much has changed since, particularly due to the pioneering work of these scholars,3 similar attacks continued well into the 2010s. To mention one example, Anna Hájková, who writes on queer Holocaust experiences, was accused of using the history of the Holocaust to support her “queer agenda” in an attempt to discredit her work.4 We believe that the discussion of gender as a fundamental component of human experience belongs in every conference, public debate, and academic institution. Understanding both majority society and persecuted groups is essential to writing the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Fascism, especially in its most radical form in National Socialist Germany, is generally seen as a quintessentially male ideology that is virulently opposed to feminism and advocates a kind of “kitchen-slavery.”5 1 See Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 741–761. For more on the initial criticism of a feminist approach to Holocaust research, see Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), xvii–xxvii; Marion Kaplan, “Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust?,” Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 37–56. 2 See Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3 For another work of exceptional significance, see Sonja M. Hedepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2010). 4 For example, see Anna Hájková, “How We’ve Suppressed the Queer History of the Holocaust,” Haaretz, May 2, 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premiumwhy-we-ve-suppressed-the-queer-history-of-the-holocaust-1.5823923. Her extensive work on the topic includes Anna Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” Jahrbuch Sexualitäten (2018): 86–110. 5 Fascism was called “kitchen slavery” as early as 1934. See Palme R. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (London: International Publishers, 1935), 241.

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Most fascists around the world in the thirties and forties indeed argued that a woman’s place was in the home—an approach epitomized by the Nazis’ infamous “three Ks” (Kinder, Küche, Kirche), and Hitler’s comment in 1934 that the German woman’s world was “her husband, her family, her children, and her home.”6 The picture is more complex, however. Some fascist movements promised to respect women’s rights and the progress made in emancipation, but in fact advocated policies that would remove most of these. For example, soon after coming into power most fascist regimes stopped professing any interest in bringing about female suffrage and emancipation. Women’s sections in various organizations were quickly subordinated to all-male branches and the authorities began to insist that women’s responsibilities lay in the home. Gender also played a key role in the lives of individuals in population groups deemed “racially inferior”—and who, as a consequence (even, of course, before the war), were socially excluded, persecuted, and in the case of Jews and Roma faced with mass murder. It determined how much danger someone was in as well as which social structures they could access and inhabit, whether in the camps, ghettos, or in hiding. Jewish men, for example, could be physically identified through circumcision, reducing their chances of “passing” in Gentile spaces. However, they also had a  greater chance of avoiding immediate extermination in concentration camps by being selected for forced labor. Jewish women, on the other hand, were for the most part responsible for children. Labeled “unproductive,” their chance of survival in the camps was greatly diminished. Furthermore, they were more exposed to sexual assaults and were less likely to be accepted in underground or partisan movements.7 In writing the history of Nazi persecution and murder in the German Reich and occupied countries from 1933 to 1945, then, it is crucial to examine and include experiences shaped by gender. Despite the quality of the scholarship that introduced feminist theory into Holocaust studies, (political) counter-narratives against a gender focus have strengthened in the last years. This development is particularly 6 Max Doramus, The Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945 (Mundelein: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), 532. 7 For the gender-based persecution of Jewish women, see e.g. Marion A. Kaplan, “Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles, 1933–1939,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 3 (1990): 579–606. For the gender-based persecution of Jewish men, see e.g. the article by Florian Zabransky in this volume.

Introduction

frustrating in light of the #metoo movement and its impact on the academic landscape and within academic power structures. Gender Studies has been taught for about fifty years and there is an increasing acceptance of the historical and contemporary presence of women—both as subjects in history and as subjects writing history. Yet many academics, as well as broader society, are still unsympathetic and indifferent. Moreover, there is a small number of people who have the clout not only to hold back Gender Studies as discipline, but also put barriers in the way of scholars working in the field. This can affect feminist historians’ academic standing and potentially prevent them carrying out their work. In the geopolitical space of East-Central Europe, attacks on Gender Studies have recently become particularly common. These include attempts to delegitimize its academic credibility by disparaging discussions of specifically female historical questions. Approaches that look beyond heteronormative male experience challenge the dominant—that is, patriarchal—historical narrative, which gets its status from its claim to represent the whole of society. When women’s history and experiences, as well as those of minorities, are taken into account, the dominant historical narrative is interrupted. Historians who benefit from a homogenous narrative, upon which their claim to objectivity rests, do not want to acknowledge the subtleties of societal and national self-understanding. Today, many countries in East-Central Europe with rightwing populist governments have introduced policies aimed at boosting fertility and reviving so-called “traditional family values.”8 Inevitably, this political turn has had an impact on the field of Gender Studies too. In the three years between our conference’s initial planning in 2017 and the finalization of the present publication in April 2020, we witnessed and endured an unexpectedly powerful backlash against Gender Studies and women’s rights in East-Central Europe. There was an offensive against the ideas of “progress,” gender equality, and individual freedom. In recent years, and in certain European countries, the devaluation of the humanities 8 See, for example, “Hungarian action plan seeks to dramatically increase birth rate by 2030,” Hungarian Free Press, 25 May 2017, http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/05/25/ hungarian-action-plan-seeks-to-dramatically-increase-birth-rate-by-2030/; “Hungary’s new constitution: Family friendly, hostile to gays,” Euractiv, 28 March, 2011, https://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/news/hungary-s-new-constitutionfamily-friendly-hostile-to-gays/; “Novák: Hungary’s Family Policy Both Conservative and Modern,” Hungary Today, accessed September 4, 2020, https://hungarytoday.hu/ novak-hungary-family-policy-conservative-modern/.

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in its entirety is now taking place, with Gender Studies singled out as a special target. To mention a recent example: the Hungarian government banned Gender Studies at universities in 2018, arguing that it represented “ideology” rather than science, that it was not a profitable discipline, and that scholars in Gender Studies were of no value to the labor market.9 Meanwhile, Slovakia has been continuously refusing ratification of the Istanbul Convention. The reasoning behind the rejection of the convention, meant to prevent and combat violence against women, is based on populist politics. The government claims that the document promotes a “gender ideology” that blurs the boundaries between the sexes, undermines traditional family values, and invites “moral decay” into the country.10 Attacks on Gender Studies, such as the ones coming from the governments of Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland at the time of writing this introduction cannot ever be read simply as hostility towards scholarship, its methodologies, sources, or analytic approaches. They are always followed by attacks on women’s (and minorities’) rights and need to be fought. As we have said, Gender Studies aims for the intersectional inclusion of women’s experiences into otherwise homogenous historical narratives. The suppression of Gender Studies currently taking place in regions of East-Central Europe, we believe, part of a gradual move towards a rejection of democratic values. The “XX. Century Conference: If This Is a Woman” was organized with the explicit aim of standing against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights described above.

The Articles The volume begins by discussing theoretical approaches to Holocaust studies through a gender lens. Dalia Ofer’s contribution, based on the conference’s keynote speech, looks back on almost forty years of research that has integrated female voices and experiences into Holocaust historiography. Natalia Aleksiun’s article traces the “familial turn” in Holocaust scholarship, 9

Becky Prager, “The Hungarian Ban on Gender Studies and Its Implications for Democratic Freedom,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, accessed April 28, 2020, https:// harvardjlg.com/2019/01/the-hungarian-ban-on-gender-studies-and-its-implicationsfor-democratic-freedom/. 10 “Slovakia’s parliament rejects women’s rights treaty,” ABC News, February 25, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/slovakias-parliament-rejectswomens-rights-treaty-69207493.

Introduction

work that has taken the family as a fundamentally gendered social institution and thereby opened up a new area of research—studies that puts women’s and men’s experiences front and center. The next section concentrates on gender expectations, as well as lived reality under occupation and authoritarian regimes. Agnes Laba examines shifts in conceptions of masculinity under German occupation in various European countries during World War II. Her work also examines how changes in the perception of masculinity and its expression in everyday life influenced women’s conceptions of themselves and their roles in society. Eva Škorvánková’s article on the feminine ideal propagated by the authoritarian Slovak state from 1930 to 1945 also adopts this comparative stance. She draws out the consistencies and changes to prewar gender expectations by examining print media aimed at young girls. The following group of articles emphasizes the gendered experience of life in two internment camps run by the authoritarian Slovak state, underlining the conference’s focus on East-Central Europe. Reading the testimony of their children, Denisa Nešťáková discusses the role of mothers in the labor camp of Sereď. She builds on the “familial turn” and argues that children’s testimony is a vital historical source. Finally, Marína Zavacká analyzes the experiences of women in the detainment camp of Ilava, concluding that the experiences of women, aside from their labor allocation, was not significantly different from those of men. The next section of this volume shows that persecution sometimes enhanced the influence and power of women. Anna Nedlin-Lehrer discusses Zivia Lubetkin and Havka Folman Raban, both part of the Zionist youth movement Dror and its resistance activities in the Warsaw ghetto. Through case studies, she investigates the different positions women could hold in egalitarian organizations before and during the Holocaust, and develops a nuanced understanding of both breaks and continuations of prewar gender roles. Laurien Vastenhout, who examines Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern, female members of the Jewish Councils in Netherlands and France, traces these two women’s spaces of actions in a maledominated atmosphere. Neither article argues that women were necessarily offered more spaces of action during wartime; rather, the authors examine the extraordinary situations of women who were, in fact, both on their own initiative and through the positions allotted to them, able to offer significant contributions to counteracting German persecution in both official and underground structures.

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Networks of rescue and resistance from the perspective of women, particularly the challenges and dangers they entailed, is the focus of the next section. Joanna Sliwa, focusing on female non-Jewish aid givers who sheltered Jewish children in occupied Cracow, examines the betrayal of these Polish women by their neighbors and family members. She shows how these women, who were faced with threats in the private, domestic sphere, struggled with both fulfilling and transgressing traditional gender norms under extreme circumstances. The female role in resistance activities is further underlined by Hannah Wilson. In her article, she studies female accounts of the uprising in the death camp Sobibor. In the larger narrative surrounding this major act of Jewish resistance, testimony given by female survivors has in general not been noticed adequately. Wilson convincingly demonstrates that the female perspectives which can be found in oral testimony or memoirs can enrich our knowledge of the uprising. Women’s work in the resistance is further elaborated on in the article by Modiane Zerdoun-Daniel, which offers a closer view of Jewish female partisans in Lithuania, and the challenges posed by the intersection of Jewish identity and female gender. One of the greatest problems Jewish women faced was their increased vulnerability to sexualized violence. This topic is explored by Marta Havryshko, who analyzes the handling of rape survivors’ testimonies in the Soviet prosecution of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. The topic of male sexuality and its expression is taken up by Florian Zabransky, who explores how three male Jewish teenagers reflect on their sexuality in Nazi Germany in their postwar testimony. Focusing on the transmission of male sexual performativity, Zabransky argues that sexuality, in the boys’ and young men’s recollections, is linked with youth, questions of belonging, and identity, as well as the concept of courage. Together, the articles in this volume, diverse in their methodology and thematic foci, offer a multifaceted contribution to the field of gendered experiences in the Holocaust and World War II.

Concluding Remarks: COVID-19, Attacks on Gender Studies, and Democratic Values The final stages of editing and compiling this book took place in April 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. The measures implemented by governments to contain the disease’s spread have made us

Introduction

reflect on different historical issues as well as on historical writing itself. The pandemic has, we see, invoked historical consciousness: historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers alike have invited the general public to participate in the collective and individual documentation of their everyday experiences. The pandemic has directly affected this volume’s publication, the contributors, and we the editors. Aside from the distress of potential infection, many have been forced to complete their work while in government-imposed lockdowns of varying severity; but everyone involved has had their individual movement strictly restricted. The pandemic has posed a risk to authors’ health, as well as necessitating an adjustment to new conditions of daily life, including the disruption caused by the closure of workplaces, homeschooling, or childcare. Almost all of us have been confronted with the inevitable insecurity and fragility of academic life and exchange, highly dependent as it is on the freedom of movement as well as access to libraries and archives both home and abroad. Fellowships have been postponed, and conferences, seminars and trainings canceled or delayed. The academic community has also had to reckon with governmental stimulus packages. While measures have been taken to help the natural sciences, which, politicians have argued, can contribute tangibly to the fight against the virus, the humanities and social sciences, unsurprisingly, have been neglected. This, for us, sheds light on an already-known larger issue, namely the secondary value of humanities in our society. In a profit-oriented capitalist economy, the scientific results produced by academics in the humanities and social sciences are not seen as bringing about immediate “profit”—a view reflected in the lack of state support they receive, pandemic or not. This certainly affects faculties of history, such as those to which the scholars contributing to this volume are affiliated. Historians, social scientists and other representatives of the “soft sciences” are often faced with the criticism and cynical remarks of laypeople who question their research since the humanities do not operate with replicable experiments nor hard facts. Far more detrimental to the humanities, however, are the actions the state may take as a funding body of both public and private research institutions and projects. As mentioned previously, governments in Hungary and Slovakia are just two of the countries in East-Central Europe that have gone after Gender Studies and a woman’s right to self-determination on ideological grounds. One imagines that such attacks and attempts to restrict the field of Gender Studies will grow more extreme as the expected economic recession caused

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by the pandemic settles in. Scholarship in the humanities may be marginalized as economically irrelevant. To counteract the politics of the new illiberalism,11 particularly in EastCentral Europe, and its aggressive advocacy of “traditional” family values and assault on critical discourse, we believe it is more important than ever to stress the significance of gender. We are convinced there is an intrinsic link between the study of gender and political support of democratic values, which, turning back to the situation of pandemic and government-imposed lockdowns, calls our attention back to the historical context dealt with in the present volume. The historians and social scientists editing this volume are skeptical of simplified historical parallels. However, historical study does not occur in a social vacuum, nor do the historical events resist interpretation or transposition. The events of World War II and the Holocaust, then, are a valuable guide for our actions in today’s society. They serve as extreme examples of what happens when governments suppress democratic values by dictating what is allowed and forbidden, and restricting access to public space. It also shows that a government can use a crisis to conceal political activity that at other times would provoke vigorous civil opposition. In Poland, for example, the national parliament debated two bills seeking to radically curtail access to abortion and criminalize sexual education, while equating homosexuality with pedophilia, rushing these items through under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic.12 While respecting the validity of public health measures, as citizens of a democratic Europe we must remain critical and politically active when our values are at stake. We must be wary of any limits imposed on democratic rights and forms of expression. The latter, we believe, include the practice (and financial support) of the academic study of gender. We end our introduction to this volume on gendered experiences of the Holocaust and World War II with a call to energetically defend democratic structures in order to encourage debate about government rulings. We must vigorously shape democratic space so that it includes all classes, ethnicities, ages, and, as this volume emphasizes, genders. We hope that this work contributes to this task. 11 See also Andrea Pető’s foreword in this volume. 12 Rachel Savage, “Poland Mulls Law Denouncing Sex Educators as Paedophiles and Gay Activists,” reuters.com, April 15, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/ us-poland-lgbt-education-trfn/poland-mulls-law-denouncing-sex-educators-aspaedophiles-and-gay-activists-idUSKCN21X2ZA?fbclid=IwAR0MWJ7TT89DWpPWxAr-L7zKtD8jHXlLRRpTmQjesQlDP1c0bPxzOcWO6A.

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“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis Dalia Ofer

Women Join the Historical Narrative It took until the mid-1980s for Holocaust researchers to introduce gender as a social category into the Holocaust historical narrative. The idea was pioneered by female scholars who were drawn to revisiting the historian’s craft from a feminist perspective and presenting this missing voice in Holocaust research.1 In their introduction to Women in the Holocaust: Different Voices (1993), one of the first publications in this vein, the editors describe their anthology as “our joint response to the questions ‘Where were the women during the Holocaust’ and ‘How do the particularities of women’s experiences in the event compare and contrast with those of men?’”2 This vanguard publication addressed those activities and problems that were unique to women at the time; and by presenting the voices of women survivors and writers, and reflecting on women’s 1 Joan S. Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs 10 (1985): 741–761; “J. S. Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 69–87. 2 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993), 3.

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experiences, it opened new avenues for Holocaust research. The challenge was well received, and publications on women and their experiences in the Holocaust have proliferated and crossed the borders of many disciplines ever since. At the time of writing—2019—the answer to the question asked in the title of this chapter is “Yes.” Thus, the analysis of the historical narrative has broadened and the inclusion of the individual’s perspective and subjectivity at the core of Holocaust historical analysis has gained legitimacy. There is also greater awareness of methodological issues, namely, the problem of integrating personal documentation into the historical narrative and then integrating the results into the general historical narrative. By bringing new, and nuanced, information about women to the conversation, feminist historians have demonstrated that the old, mostly male, narratives left the reconstruction of events incomplete and thwarted comprehensive interpretation. Predictably, these first steps in introducing women as major protagonists in the historical narrative encountered resentment and even venomous attacks. The major objections alleged a feminist political agenda that distorted the historical narrative; other opponents feared that dealing with daily matters such as gender relationships would banalize and trivialize research on Holocaust and the event itself.3 Research on women’s lives during the Holocaust has taken several main avenues. One, motivated by cultural-feminism, demonstrates the perspective of women’s studies as reflected in the various scholars’ works. Other historians engage with social history and sociological perspectives in order to write feminist studies of the period.4 Both of these efforts to integrate gender into discussions of the Holocaust have produced work on Jewish victims and women couriers in the Jewish resistance.5 The most common approach for understanding women’s experiences during the Holocaust centers on gender continuity. There is now a large 3 Gabriel Schoenfeld, “The Cutting Edge of Holocaust Studies,” The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 1998 page; Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary 105, no. 6, June 1998: 42–46. For a response, see Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 12–13, and Sara R. Horowitz, “Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory,” Prooftexts 20, nos. 1/2 (Winter/ Spring 2000): 158–190. 4 Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Judy T. Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Cass, 1998); Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust. 5 Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

corpus of scholarship that links women’s responses to the Holocaust to their prewar roles, and shows how homemaking, nurturing, and mothering skills were translated into coping strategies.6 A related body of scholarship employs a “disruptive framework” that challenges the continuity model by pointing to the dramatic ways Jewish women abandoned prewar roles, defied prewar conventions, and engaged in previously unthinkable activities. This research not only emphasizes the radical departure from prewar roles, but also, to an extent, contests the assumption that women reacted in gender-specific ways. More fundamentally, it undermines the “essentializing of gender” implicit in continuity model. Examples of this approach appear in descriptions of women working in the underground, mothers who deserted their children, and women who used their femininity as a bargaining mechanism.7 A third model, the “sequential framework,”8 posits the two aforementioned types of women’s responses as sequential—it proposes that women switched between prewar and wartime behaviors according to necessity. This approach allows us to track sequential changes in women’s behavior and coping strategies as the Holocaust proceeded. The key interest of this kind of work is the “tipping point” that changed an individual’s perspective and led her to new actions which reflected a new personal identity, as in the case of women resistance fighters and commanders. In the following I will demonstrate this conceptual framework by describing the voices of several women from different sectors of Jewish society. 6 Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany,” in Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 42–43. Note: elsewhere her work, Kaplan illustrates the second framework discussed below; Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in ibid., 327–339. See also Myrna Goldenberg, “Food Talk,” in Experience and Expression, ed. Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 161–89. 7 Lenore J. Weitzman, “Women of Courage: the ‘Kashariyot’ (couriers) in the Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies IV, ed. Jeff Diefendorf (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 112–152; Lenore J. Weitzman, “The Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed July 7, 2021, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kashariyot-couriersin-jewish-resistance-during-holocaust; Dalia Ofer, “Motherhood under Siege,” in Life, Death, and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust, ed. Esther Hertzog (Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 2008), 41–67. 8 Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, “A Conceptual Framework for Explaining the Presence and the Disappearance of Traditional Gendered Behavior during the Holocaust,” in Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, ed. Andrea Pető, Andrea Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska (Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015), 27–63.

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The Voices Cecylia Slepak, Journalist and Translator (1900?–1942) The first woman I will present is Cecylia Slepak, who inspired me to study the world of Jewish women in the ghetto.9 Slepak, a journalist and translator who lived in Warsaw, was part of the intellectual Jewish elite, a social group immersed in secular Jewish culture and embedded in Polish culture. Slepak’s home was a meeting for Jewish intellectuals and had the reputation of being a pleasant venue for cultural and social discussions. Rokhl Auerbakh reported in her wartime diary that even in the spring of 1940, Slepak still hosted friends for four o’clock tea—a typical middle-class afternoon of leisure in a home that the Germans had already looted. Slepak’s husband survived the Holocaust; she and her two children did not: they were sent to Treblinka in 1942.10 We know very little about the Slepaks’ life in the ghetto. Auerbakh reports having met her at the ghetto self-help organization and inferred correctly that she was part of the Oyneg Shabes archival team. In late 1941, the Oyneg Shabes leadership initiated a wide-ranging research project titled “Two and a Half Years of Nazi Occupation: One Year of Ghetto Life.” Commissioned to write about women, Slepak interviewed sixteen women, a cross-section of the ghetto population. As far as we know, she had not written about women before and had not been active on behalf of women’s rights. In her interviews, conducted during the spring and winter of 1942, Slepak followed the guidelines of the general research plan. She asked her respondents about their prewar lives, their experiences during the siege of Warsaw, the impact of the first stages of occupation, their reaction to German regulations that stripped them of rights and possessions, and their efforts to cope with the pauperization of their families, starvation, disease, and unemployment in the ghetto. The interviews are a unique account of women’s strategies for navigating the mounting dangers that they and their 9 Dalia Ofer, “Why Women—and What That Means to Me as a Historian,” in Her Story, My Story? Writing About Women and the Holocaust, ed. Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and Dalia Ofer (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2020), 163–174. 10 Dalia Ofer, “Her View through My Lens: Cecylia Slepak Studies Women in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves, ed. Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 29–50; Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 241–243.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

men faced, and their shifting patterns of accommodation, defiance, and resistance. Slepak provides a sketch of the ghetto at the beginning of her narrative: The Jewish streets are bustling with an apprehensive rhythm of uprooted life. People [like] trees, walk, almost with no movement, they stand bound to the wall. Faces, voices, smiles mingled. . . . “Fresh roll, good, white, cheap!” “Warsawer Zeitung [Warsaw newspaper]. . . . “The best cigarettes, cheap cigarettes.” “For potatoes . . . carrots” “Good people, have mercy on a mother of three orphans!” “Sweets—Oy gevalt! A thief! Catch her!” “I’m rushing to the hairdresser. . . . I have an appointment in the afternoon.” “Thank God, I made some money this week.” “At the office, the payments are late.” “I have nothing more to sell; how can I provide for the family?” “Yes, the appeal for the children had good results.” “How expensive! I don’t know how and on what to save.” “Spring, what a beautiful sun. We want so much to live. We must endure.” . . . At 10:00 a.m., the Jewish streets are already vibrating and full of the voices of the destitute and the light of hope of the day. Slepak’s dominant themes—living, perseverance, and resistance—touch almost all the other themes and aspects of being she discusses. Instead of writing about heroic feats, she follows the rhythm of life and death with an open mind and great respect for her interviewees, particularly when the topic is their femininity. The phrase “the rhythm of uprooted life” follows her description of people as almost paralyzed as they face the ghetto wall. Yet voices, rather than silence, populate the air—voices of desperation,

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hope, and the search for opportunities. Slepak makes us listen and imagine the scene. Slepak describes the lives of sixteen women, among them housewives, a domestic, a house committee member, and one who worked at food storage centers, public kitchens, and orphanages. Several were in the performing arts, others were small vendors or smugglers; some were professionals—an agronomist, a translator, and a librarian. Slepak juxtaposes her women, who during the Holocaust worked in formerly unacceptable occupations (there is a thief, for example, a respondent reduced to prostitution, and a beggar), with those who continued with traditional work or that of the “New Woman.” These multiple voices reveal multiple realities. We hear how the women manipulated the situations forced upon them. The research literature on women’s narratives defines this as resistance or steadfastness. Women and mothers smuggled; an educated woman taught agriculture to the young and helped them to provision their families with vegetables; a librarian offered children story time at the library, and a nutritionist established public kitchens and strived to help people nourishing food. In each narrative, we picture the narrator’s activities, hopes, and fears. We learn of the tragedies they experienced and how they endured and carried on, even at others’ expense. Through these personal, private descriptions, the public domain with its hardships and complexities becomes vocal and visible. Slepak walks the reader down the packed streets and narrow alleys, the sense of lowliness felt by the crowd, people’s uncertainty and anxiety, and fear of the police— any police. The women’s life stories illuminate the complexity of the ghetto: class differences, social capital and networking, and extreme poverty and daring. Movingly, Slepak envisions each of her interviewees in the Jewish society after the war in which she hoped to live by evaluating the assertiveness and moral strength manifested in the woman’s behavior. According to Slepak, the Jewish woman wanted more than to “endure;” she also wanted to lay foundations for a future women, Jewish women rebirth. This explains her drive to acquire skills and professions. The woman also injects a ray of hope and courage, a touch of humanity and even of heroism, into her dull, dark life.11

11 Paraphrased from Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 243.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

Slepak does not conceal the dark sides of women’s existence, molding their life stories into a reality variously interpreted. We see the ghetto with the knowledge of its destruction; for Slepak, the ghetto was a reality endured but also criticized sharply relating to the social and economic gap. She empathizes with the women and their plight and passes no judgment on their choices, viewing their activities as part of survival and appreciating their energy and ability to adapt to their many new tasks and obligations. They are neither martyrs nor saints.

The Medical Professionals Women were deeply involved in medicine—as doctors, nurses, wardens, and more. Their work became harder and harder to carry out as the deterioration of the physical environment in the ghettos engulfed the medical services in a terrible crisis.12 Nevertheless, in recent years, the literature on health and medicine in the Holocaust has expanded to describe the situation in ghettos and camps, with reference to the contribution of the medical profession to everyday life.13 As women doctors and nurses contributed much to the healthcare services in the ghettos and shared their hardships, their stories have become more central to the historical narrative. With this in mind, let us listen to the words of women doctors. Dr. Anna Braude Heller (1888–April 1943) grew up in an upper-middle-class Warsaw Jewish family. After completing her studies in pediatrics and working for several years in small Russian villages, she returned to Poland in 1915. In 1916, the Berson Bauman children’s hospital opened in Warsaw and she joined its staff, although financial difficulties soon forced the hospital to suspend operations. Braude Heller herself was involved in raising enough funds to reopen it in 1930, which cemented its status as a

12 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 13 For a list and short biographies of Jewish physicians in Poland and an account of Jewish organizations in the Jewish healthcare system, see Lois Falstein, ed., The Martyrdom of Jewish Physicians in Poland (New York: Exposition Press, 1963). For a comprehensive description of the medical profession in occupied Poland, see Miriam Offer, White Coats Inside the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland during the Holocaust [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015); Charles G. Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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major medical center, and in due course she became its chief physician.14 When the war broke out, thirteen doctors were on the hospital staff—eight women and five men. After several of the men were conscripted, most of the remaining staff—nurses, administrative personnel, for example—were women. In the ghetto, Braude Heller was involved in the famous hungerdisease research project and co-authored a chapter on the impact of hunger on children. Braude Heller perished in the ghetto in 1943. Although she left no personal writings about the war years, by using our historical imagination we can hear her voice through the writings of others. Braude Heller’s son Arik, also a physician, together with his wife and children and her sister Yudyta, found shelter on the “Aryan” side (that is, outside the ghetto) with Braude’s assistance. Yudyta gave testimony to Yad Vashem in 1962; her nephew Edgar wrote a memoir in 2012 and sent it to Braude’s Heller’s granddaughters. Another voice that helps us form an picture of Anna Braude Heller is that of Dr. Adina Szwajger, an assistant physician at Berson Bauman.15 Her nephew provided a physical description of his aunt: She was very small of stature but with a very strong personality. She had a very strong temper and often exploded. Hospital employees were afraid of her outbursts. . . . Your grandmother, Anna, endured a double tragedy—to lose a child and soon after that, her husband. From then on she only dressed in black, at first with a veil.16 Szwajger described Braude Heller’s rigid routine of daily rounds at the hospital: Medical diagnoses and decisions had to be documented in detail. Even when documentation was falsified to deceive the Nazi inspectors, an accurate secret report was still strictly required, 14 Dalia Ofer, “Anna Braude Heller,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, March 20, 2009, accessed November 11, 2019, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/heller-anna-braude. 15 Testimony of Juditha Braude. File 03/2360; Adina Blady Szwajer, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1990); see also Offer, White Coats Inside the Ghetto, 195–208. On testimonies on medicine in the ghetto, see Dalia Ofer, “Another Glance through the Historians’ Lens: Testimonies in the Study of Health and Medicine in the Ghetto,” Poetics Today 27 no. 3 (2006): 331–52. 16 Letter received from the family.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

supposedly for future studies on the hospital and its work: But the hospital routine didn’t change. The Head Doctor stood firmly by her principles: report, rounds, case histories that more and more frequently—nearly always—ended with the words: “died at . . . o’clock.” 17 Although surrounded by death, the doctors were dedicated to saving lives. Szwajger described a case in which a young boy died in surgery as a result of malpractice. The chief physician, Anna Braude-Heller, was devastated: In the middle of this hell of raging death, Anna Braude-Heller, the Head Doctor, was crying over this one death, which could have been avoided. The hospital was her home; the sick, crying children, her children. She died with every child that couldn’t be saved.18 When offered and even pressed to move to the “Aryan” side, Braude Heller refused, saying that as long as children remained in the ghetto, so should she. To the very last minute of the ghetto’s existence, long after the hospital floundered and only emergency centers still functioned, she was there to treat the needy. Thus, a little woman in black, hardened by personal and national fate, stood fast to help children despite the Nazi terror and triumph of death over life.19 The voice of another woman doctor belongs the pediatrician Tala Mincz,20 who after dedicating herself to the care of children ended her life by walking with them to their death in Treblinka in August 1942. Mincz was born in Łódź (date of birth unknown, d. 1942) the youngest of six children in a lower-middle-class family. Her father, a Belz Hassid, was unconcerned 17 Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More, 39. 18 Ibid., 38. 19 Letter from the family. In order to respect the memory of the survivors of the family of Anna Braude Heller, I will quote a response to my article in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. “I am the granddaughter of Dr Anna Heller Braude. Her son Leo Arik Heller who lived until December 5, 2008. [. . .] My father died at the age of 91, 8 years after my mother’s death. I live in Stockholm. My sister born here in 1949 and I myself have 9 children and our grandmother would have had seven grand grandchildren by now and another one expected in September. With kind regards Ewa Heller Ekblad.” 20 The information on Dr. Tala Mincz is based mostly on Yad Vashem Archives (henceforth: YVA) 033/1073, in Yiddish. Her story however, apart from being so interesting, is representative of several physician and teachers who acted in the same way.

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about his daughters’ educations. Courageously and doggedly, Tala insisted on her schooling and earned a high school diploma that allowed her to study medicine at the University of Vilna, specializing in pediatrics. She married Henryk Mincz, a medical student who became a gynecologist. Moving to a suburb of Warsaw, both worked for Jewish mother-and-child healthcare institutions—a mission characteristic of the medical profession in the 1920s and 1930s. Tala and Henryk had one son, Karush, who was six years old in 1939. When the war broke out, Henryk was recruited into the Polish army, never to return. After a while, Tala moved out of town with Karush to work at Medem Sanatorium (for orphans with tuberculosis) near Warsaw, a highly regarded educational and clinical facility named after the Bundist leader Vladimir Medem (1879–1923). Although the Germans looted the sanatorium and damaged the building and its facilities, the Bund reopened it.21 In December 1941, Tala sent a letter to her brother Alexander Mincz, a journalist and a Bund activist in Paris: I do not know how I find the strength to assume responsibility for the fate of fifty orphans. We are all hungry, yes the kids are hungry and we have no medicines. Imagine that I, who was never a surgeon, perform operations and difficult ones. It just came to me as a gift from heaven. One does and does not believe. What a buildup of vitality we have when in danger. After advising her brother that her son Karush “is with me and is a gifted kid,” Tala reported that a Polish woman whose son she had treated offered to take Karush into her home and spare him from the hardships and dangers of the sanatorium. “He doesn’t look Jewish; he’s blond and has blue eyes.” She refused for two reasons, one on moral principle: “Why should he suffer a different fate than all the other kids in the sanatorium?” The other was personal, maternal: “After losing Henryk, it’s hard to separate from Karush.” (At that point Dr. Mincz could not imagine the deportations to Treblinka) On August 22, 1942, the day of her deportation, Dr. Mincz was offered again an opportunity to save herself and her son. Instead, taking Karush’s 21 On Medem Sanatorium, see Hayyim Solomon Kazdan, ed.,  Medem-Sanatoryebukh (Tel Aviv, 1971) [Yiddish] and Gertrud Pikchan, “Medem Sanatorium,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, accessed July 7, 2021, https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Medem_Sanatorium.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

hand, and joining the Jewish nurses and staff of the sanatorium, she walked to the train that would take them to Treblinka, as in the heroic marches of Janusz Korczak and Stefania (Stefa) Wilczyńska. With them, among the Bund women who were central in managing the institution, was Manie Zigelboym, wife of Artur Zigelboym, the senior Bund leader who by then had been smuggled out to the west.

The Activist I now cross into a different space, reality, and cultural context to allow a younger, nonprofessional woman to speak. Lili Kasticher Hirt (1923–1973) survived Auschwitz and the Ober Hohenelbe slave labor camp, a satellite of Gross-Rosen.22 I base my portrait of Lili on her writings from Auschwitz, edited after the war (1951), personal letters to her friends and family, my conversations with her daughter Daniela, and the testimonies of her friends who were with her in the camp.23 Kasticher Hirt was born in Ptrovoselo, Yugoslavia, a small village. She was only five when her mother died and left her father with three young children. Two years later, her father remarried and moved to another village. The family was so poor that Lili moved in with her maternal grandparents after her two brothers died from diphtheria. When she turned seventeen, she went on to Novi Sad, lived with her paternal aunt Rosi and learned to be a hairdresser. In her free time, she produced small clay sculptures and pottery that she kept at home. In 1941, after the German invasion of Yugoslavia, her father was murdered. In April 1944, when Lili was twenty-one, the Jews of Novi Sad were rounded up by Hungarian police and sent to Auschwitz. On the train, her Aunt Rosi was murdered in front of her eyes by a German guard who then stole her aunt’s jewelry. Lili reached Auschwitz alone. Her description of the camp resembles the narratives of other women. She writes of cold, hunger, and beatings, hours of standing for roll call, endless headcounts, the death 22 On these camps, see Bella Gutterman, A Narrow Bridge to Life (New York: Berghahn, 2008). 23 Lili Kasticher Hirt’s papers, which include the artwork and poems of other prisoners from Ober Hohenelbe, are kept in in YVA 4–14 / 0.48 (4064459); the materials are not completely catalogued. Lily Kasticher, Memoirs of Auschwitz, ed. Daniela Slea and Lily Bath Ami [Hebrew] is a 2009 translation from the Hungarian by Susanne Braown. The text was written in 1951 by Lili Kasticher on the basis of her original pieces of paper from the camps. This information is valid for each quotation below.

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of women and young girls, German cruelty, and the kapos. While carefully observing this incomprehensible torture, Lili underwent an epiphany. At a certain stage of her imprisonment, she ceased to fear death, realizing that death would actually bring her relief from the torture of life in the camp. However, a small act of friendship (the gift of an apple and other food) from a Polish young man named Iziu made her realize that she was not ready to give up living: “I want to live, I definitely want to go on living and see the inevitable end of the Nazis,” she wrote on a scrap of paper that eventually joined other shreds to become her Auschwitz papers. Iziu’s gesture had become a ray of light for her. Having had this revelation, she became more aware of her fellow prisoners and started to care for and interrelate with them. This strategy of survival was linked to her strong feelings about the need to work in order to avoid deadly thoughts about her wretched condition, her hunger, and her loneliness. She encouraged the prisoners in her bunk by pretending to be an expert palm reader. To her fear and surprise, the German kapo ordered her to predict her future and that of her lover in the war. Inventively, she gained the kapo’s trust and took advantage of it. She became energetically involved in activities known as “organization” in the camps—intense efforts to pilfer commodities from the various warehouses in Auschwitz, such as “Kanada,” where new arrivals’ belongings were “sorted” by inmates, and exchanged them for food. Her personal involvement in this barter entailed much risk and daring. In December 1944, Lili was transported to the Ober Hohenelbe slave-labor camp in the Sudetenland, a satellite camp of Gross-Rosen, where 900 young Jewish women (of whom about were five hundred from Hungary) toiled for Lorentz AG assembling electronic equipment for airplanes and radios. Placed with a group of young Hungarian women, and soon becoming their unofficial leader, she was determined to convince her fellow prisoners not to lose hope and spirit. The war would soon end, she preached, and they would all live to see Germany defeated. Seeking ways to sustain their morale and empower them to endure what she believed was the last stage of their torment, Lili encouraged her comrades to artistically express all of the feelings they were experiencing, both positive and negative, as well as what they thought their lives would be like after the war. She used the one free Sunday afternoon that they were given every other week. Their torturers intended this to be an occasion for washing and mending clothing, but Lili turned it into a day for culture:

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

singing, performing, and writing poetry and drawing on scraps of paper and cardboard that she collected. She also devised ways to energize the other prisoners and get them to participate by holding drawing and singing contests for coveted prizes such as half a potato, a needle, or some other scarce commodity. In her journal, she noted: At first, many of the women giggled and were even unhappy with what I had suggested. My message was: Girls, remember to think in We and not in I. Never insult each other. Lili also had to urge the young women to be considerate—a state of mind to which they had become unaccustomed in the camp: Before we begin, I implore you to remain silent during the talk, each of you in your own bunk or in the bunk of your friend, and listen to the talk attentively. . . . By being attentive, you will make our afternoon a better one. OK, let’s begin. Listen, girls: The saying goes “All beginnings are difficult”—who doesn’t know that? In many entries in her diary, she wrote about trying to convince her inmates to be patient and treat one another cordially rather than competitively. These writings help us to understand the environment that she aimed to create: Remember, girls! Among us there will not be any anger, misunderstanding, or insults. We are sensitive enough and have good intentions so we will not address one another out of ulterior motives—such as to inflict insult. On the contrary, if we point to mistakes of our fellow friends, the purpose is to hold out together and to express our love and sincerity for one another. . . . Let’s change this situation! Let’s try to think differently. We must think, “I” will do the right thing despite the other’s despicable behavior! Our achievement together depends on our personal behavior. As a result of Lili’s efforts and those of several Hungarian girls, some of the young women produced beautiful drawings and various forms of written texts during their five to six months in Ober Hohenelbe. They also performed on a makeshift stage. After a few Sundays, Lili gained everyone’s

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cooperation. These were the hours that all the prisoners, including those who only watched or listened, cherished the most. Lili herself wrote poetry, produced sketches, and conducted performances. She documented these efforts in her writings and cached most of the drawings and essays in hiding places. She managed to retrieve some after her liberation and brought them to Mandate of Palestine upon her emigration in 1947. After the war, Lili had a twofold mission: to remember and publish her sister inmates’, as well as her own, art and writing, and to help to create a better world through her own work. She was proud to be in Israel and viewed the country’s establishment in Zionist terms. In her daily life as a housewife and a mother, she rendered small services to her neighbors, such as cutting their children’s hair and putting on puppet shows with puppets that she made herself. Delighting the children and making her neighbors happy gave her satisfaction. Creating a better environment for the younger generation was her way of fulfilling one part of her mission.24 The other was to live as a free and proud Jew. When her son joined the Israeli army, she wrote to him explaining the lessons one should learn from the Jews’ long history. For Lili, the present generation needed to understand the necessity of fighting for freedom and being a proud Jew—the opposite of what she and millions of Jews had felt during and after the Holocaust in Europe. Wars and violence, she declared, were the scourge of humanity. This scourge, however, had burrowed its way into Lili Kasticher Hirt’s soul and memory and manifested itself in profound angst. The wars that Israel fought during her son’s service drove her to the edge, and then beyond. Unable to endure the torment, she was hospitalized several times and ultimately took her own life. Despite her efforts, she had never been able to publish the material she had brought from the camps. Her daughter gave these important documents to the Yad Vashem Archives for the perusal and appreciation of scholars and students.

Enriching the Master Historical Narrative We want to listen to these female voices; they make us proud as women and as humans. However, there are other voices. Tragedy, hunger, pain, 24 Lily published several of her poems and memoirs in the Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet (New East) in the 1950s.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

and want did not make people kinder and more compassionate. Instead, they frequently elicited actions according to each individual’s personality, social class, and cultural background. Women often responded sequentially after a crisis or a shock that changed them deeply and led them to act in a “non-womanly” way. The development of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policies and the escalating phases of the Holocaust narrowed possible choices and the ability to make decisions in a logical and considered manner. While attempting to continue in their prewar roles—professional, familial, social—women were forced to divert from their expected paths. They adapted to their situations insofar as their strength and character permitted. Thus we hear the voices of a desperate mother who left her child on the doorstep of an orphanage and disappeared, the sound of a sewing machine late at night as a mother, back aching, labored to support her family, the voice of a young woman prepared to gratify a man for nothing but gain, the pain of sexually abused women, the voice of a kapo who exploited her authority to abuse, or assist, other women under her control. We listen in the effort bridge the years that separate us from these difficult days. I conclude by reverting to the conceptualization of the different reactions of women to the Nazi terror proposed above. Both Anna Braude Heller and Tala Mincz drew on their prewar work as professional pediatricians to help people in unprecedented conditions. At a certain point in their horrific lives, however, they realized that the devastation at hand transformed their dedication to saving lives into the knowledge that they were sharing death with those they were serving so desperately and in such blind hope. Is this a sequential reaction? It is hard to come to a definite conclusion. Dr. Braude’s journey from a chief physician at Berson Bauman to a doctor in the Warsaw ghetto and Dr. Mincz’s path from a pediatrician in Warsaw prior to the war to a physician in Medem Sanatorium operating surgeries and starving with the children, show depth of their professionalism, even if they are extreme examples. Braude Heller’s decision to stay in the ghetto with her orphans and Minicz’s decision to go with her son to Treblinka relate to the sequential model. I would argue that they both made their choices after a turning point—when the total destruction of the ghetto and the institution was apparent. In this respect, they illustrate how the human behavior during the Holocaust must be analyzed dynamically. Are Braude Heller and Minicz representative of women in the Holocaust? Lili Kasticher Hirt went in the opposite direction. She was already in the “kingdom of death.” An unexpected act of human kindness was her turning point. She chose life and transformed her

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own strong desire to survive into an effort to convince her fellow inmates to follow her lead. I would also view her response as a sequential one. However, when she was deported to Ober Hohenelbe slave-labor camp, she organized her efforts through her personal talent and love of art, which she practiced before being deported to Auschwitz. I cannot claim that this behavior during the Holocaust was characteristic of women only. Paraphrasing David Boder in his book I Did Not Interview the Dead, I would say that we are only able to listen to a few of the voices of the men and women of this period. Therefore, noting of the small number of voices we are able to find, we should be modest and enrich our master narrative with the experiences that were missing during long years of research. I stress again that women’s experiences make a difference in the master narrative of the Holocaust. They democratize the narrative by integrating both the mundane and the heroic. It is not the heroism of fighters, but of those who ensured that basic needs—such as cooking and laundering—were met. It is Cecylia Slepak’s imagination of future women playing a significant role in public life and leading Jewish society. The history of the Holocaust cannot be unpacked if the emotions of women as mothers, daughters, and members of the family—the most important unit that managed to survive to the very end—are omitted. Without the voices that communicate the experiences and suffering of women, and without their hearing their moments of joy and satisfaction, the Holocaust narrative is inaccurate and contains a void. These voices must be heeded in any description of the professional activity, institutions, families, and rhythm of Jewish endurance and destruction in the ghettos, camps, forests, rescue efforts, and so on. We also must listen to them when describing the German murderers and the few who were prepared to help. Thus, we will realize what Slepak in her way, and Tala Mincz, Anna Braude Heller, and Lili Kasticher Hirt in theirs, expressed and demonstrated about the outburst of women’s energy and vitality under horrific conditions—all without ignoring the breakdown of many and the traumas that affected the lives women and men. As historians and human beings, we yearn to understand these women and men and, through the process of remembering, we reflect on our own lives and societies. Their legacy may be an inspiration, but also, by the same token, an urgent call for caution and responsibility to a world where the numbers of unwanted refugees are growing, radically exclusionary politics have taken hold in many countries, and where discrimination against women goes on. It is a call for us to assume our responsibilities.

“Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis

Figure 1. Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital in Warsaw. After its closure in 1923, the hospital was reopened thanks to the numerous interventions of doctor Anna Braude-Heller. In November 1940, the hospital was incorporated into the Warsaw ghetto. Photo Credit: unknown photographer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bersohn_ and_Bauman_Children%27s_Hospital,_Warsaw#/media/File:Szpital_Dziecięcy_ Bersohnów_i_Baumanów_w_Warszawie_1930.jpg.

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A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship?1 Natalia Aleksiun

In his 1945 Outline of Program for Holocaust Research, Philip Friedman—a survivor and pioneer Holocaust historian—included a section devoted to the impact of Nazi persecution on Jewish life. It contained such categories as biological and economic effects, social and religious life, and various forms of resistance, including armed struggle. But more specifically, it urged future scholars to examine birth rates, confiscation of property and pauperization, the plight of children and orphans, and more broadly what Friedman called “disintegration of the family.”2 For the scholar who underlined the need for writing “the internal history of our people during the Holocaust,”3 this familial focus offered invaluable insights into the unprecedented and dire challenges Jewish communities had faced and another way to document Jewish responses to persecution. Friedman’s approach called for humanizing Jewish victims, paying close attention to everyday life and 1 I would like to thank Eliyana Adler, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Winson W. Chu, Atina Grossmann, Joanna Sliwa, Natalia Judzińska, Marion Kaplan, Simo Muir, Joanna Ostrowska, Katarzyna Person, and Helene Sinnreich for their comments on this essay. 2 Philip Friedman, “Outline of Program for Holocaust Research,” in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York and Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980), 573–575. Friedman’s own family, including his wife and daughter perished in the Holocaust. On Philip Friedman see Roni Stauber, Laying the Foundations for Holocaust Research—The Impact of Philip Friedman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009). 3 Phillip Friedman, “Problems of Research on the Holocaust: An Overview,” in Friedman, Roads to Extinction, 561.

A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship?

efforts to preserve a sense of continuity with Jewish civilization before the war. He argued that “the study of the internal life during the Holocaust is of particular importance not only from a Jewish, but also from a universal point of view.”4 Hence, victims’ experiences not only deserved consideration as part of the broader discourse but facilitated it. The family perspective had already guided the efforts of Jews documenting the crimes against the Jewish population under German occupation. In the Warsaw ghetto, historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his team collected material for the Oyneg Shabes underground archive, paying close attention to the transformation of Jewish families through ghettoization, forced labor, and starvation.5 In this pioneering work, especially in the interviews carried out by Cecylia Słapakowa, the family was front and center, enabling future scholars to discuss the destruction of Jewish communities through the lens of the destruction of Jewish families.6 Given the work carried out during the Holocaust and in its immediate aftermath, one can hardly speak of a definite “familial turn” with regard to the more recent historical scholarship which examines the destruction of European Jewry. Rather, Holocaust scholarship in the past decade that has increasingly and explicitly identified the family as a crucial category of analysis, builds on research that already began during the Holocaust and continued into the immediate postwar period. This article examines three key aspects of Holocaust scholarship and the ways in which a family perspective provides new insights into subfields such as social networks, the history of emotions, and microhistories of the Holocaust. As the emphasis on perpetrators, which was particularly influential in academic historiography until the early 1990s, has expanded to include a more integrated history of the Holocaust that involves bystanders, victims, and perpetrators, this shift has revealed intimate aspects of 4 Ibid., 562. 5 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 137, 178, 181–182; Archiwum Ringelbluma. Antologia, eds. Marta Janczewska and Jacek Leociak (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 2020). 6 See dok. 20: Konspekt opracowania dotyczącego kobiety żydowskiej, in Ludzie i prace Oneg Szabat, Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, vol. 11, ed. Aleksandra Bańkowska and Tadeusz Epsztein (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2013), 137. Moreover, Ringelblum took interest in the “family tragedies” that occurred among converted Jews when the Warsaw ghetto was established. See dok. 15, ibid., 125–126.

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individual and familial experiences, emotional entanglements, and the agency of the Jewish victims.7 In particular, feminist scholars have called for studying the fate of Jewish women and recognizing the role of gender in shaping the experiences of Jewish victims during the Holocaust. Their work has revealed the degree to which gender played a key role in familial contexts—and, indeed, in similar social organizations such as peer groups, youth movements, and armed resistance groups. In her recent book Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History, Zoë Waxman argues: “The themes explored here are central to and should be part of any understanding of the Holocaust. Yet, in other ways, it could hardly not be feminist, seeking as it does not to challenge just the status quo of Holocaust studies, but also some broader assumptions about gender. As we have seen, for rather too long historians and other scholars of the Holocaust have either ignored issues of gender or relegated them to a footnote of history.”8 Last but not least, scholars have begun to publish biographical studies that trace back the fate of their own families in Nazi-occupied Europe, thereby creating an intricate nexus of familial relationships, emotions, and academic writing. This new genre of family biographies and memoirs has further extended the focus on individualizing the reconstruction and examination of collective suffering.

Communal Histories of Destruction In the immediate postwar period, survivor historians continued to pay close attention to the fate of families during the Holocaust. Under Friedman’s leadership, the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland collected hundreds of survivors’ testimonies that often portrayed the experiences of their families as a significant aspect of Jewish responses to Nazi persecution and mass murder.9 Seeking methodological clarity, the commission published instructions for volunteers, designed to help in collecting 7 See Saul Friedländer, “An Integrated History of the Holocaust: A Reassessment,” in Konstellationen: über Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis. Für Dan Diner zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Nicolas Berg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011), 157–165. This shift coincided with a growing sense of an impending crisis that would follow the passing of the generation of survivors. 8 Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust. A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 147. 9 For a discussion of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, its agenda and achievements, see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 84–120.

A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship?

testimonies. These brochures suggest that a familial lens informed the enterprise alongside the effort to document communal history, the role of Jewish councils (Judenräte) and police, and Jewish resistance, among others.10 Similarly, in the early monographs published under the auspices of the commission, their authors applied three frameworks: communal, organizational, and familial. A familial framework was most salient when writing about solidarity and anguish. For example, Gerszon Taffet—himself a teacher, survivor, and a pioneer chronicler—writing about the destruction of the Jewish community in Żółkiew, commented on the efforts of relatives to mark the graves of loved ones executed by the Germans, as well as on the efforts by family members to intervene on behalf of men who were taken to labor camps.11 He delved into both the grief of families when they became separated and their efforts to find out the fate of those captured and deported to Bełżec in March 1942.12 He examined individuals who refused to save their own lives at the price of abandoning their children, parents, or spouses.13 As in other early historical accounts, Szymon Datner—a teacher, survivor and chronicler of the Białystok ghetto—stressed the suffering of Jewish parents unable to protect their children and the fate of children separated from their parents during the ghetto’s final liquidation.14 Continuing with the themes formulated by authors who were simultaneously witnesses and chroniclers, since the 1980s Israeli historians in particular have worked on the experiences of Jewish victims under the

10 Published in 1945, The Instructions for Collecting Historical Material from the Period of the German Occupation did not include a section devoted to family life, but encouraged historians to ask survivors about Jewish demography, birth rates, fictitious marriages, pauperization, religious life, and psychological phenomena. See Instrukcje dla zbierania materiałów historycznych z okresu okupacji niemieckiej (Łódź: Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, Komisja Historyczna, 1945), 12–21. The instruction for interviews with children called for questions about family life, conversations with parents, the material situation of households, underground schooling at home, loss of parents, and other family members. See Instrukcje dla badania przeżyć dzieci żydowskich w okresie okupacji niemieckiej (Łódź: Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, Komisja Historyczna, 1945), 10–16. 11 Gerszon Taffet, Zagłada Żydów żółkiewskich, ed. Natalia Aleksiun (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2019), 31–32. 12 Ibid., 40–41. 13 Ibid., 55. 14 Szymon Datner, Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2014), 49, 60–61.

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Nazis from a familial perspective.15 In the study The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust, Sara Bender maintains a delicate balance between a collective social history of the community under siege and an analysis of the familial. She notes, for example, that when Jewish men were arrested in the summer of 1941, “[t]he Jews of Białystok were convinced that the men had been taken away for work and would soon return to their families.” After representatives of the Judenrat asked the military governor of the city to release the prisoners, the German authorities demanded a ransom in exchange and most of it was “raised by the wives and mothers of the men who had been arrested.”16 She points out that families in Białystok, as in other ghettos, moved in with relatives, where crowded conditions led to tensions and conflicts.17 She also notes the fate of babies who were deliberately suffocated to death when their families hid during the first action in February 1943 and of children separated from parents in August 1943, during the final liquidation of the ghetto.18 Yet, Bender’s interest is in the decisions made by the Judenrat and the underground leadership, and she discusses the situation of the “ghetto population” and the “masses,” rather than the individual or family.19 Indeed, the tension between the study of a 15 See Shlomo Netzer, “The Holocaust of Polish Jewry in Jewish Historiography”, in: The Historiography of the Holocaust Period; Proceedings of the Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, March 1983, Eds.: Yisrael Gutman, Gideon Greif. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988), 133–148. The books and articles about Jewish women, children, and family, which Judith Baumel-Schwartz describes as “the first wave of historiography,” also include memoirs and studies of children. See Judith Tydor Baumel, “Gender and Family Studies of the Holocaust: A Historiographical Overview,” in Lessons and Legacies: Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Donald G. Schilling (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 105–117. On familial perspectives and Israeli scholarship, see also Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Michal Unger, Hageto haaharon: hahayim begeto Lodz’, 1940–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1995); Sara Bender, Mul Mavet orev: yehudey Bialystok bemilhemet haolam hashniya 1939– 1943 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997); Tikva Fatal-Knaani, Yehudey Rovneh 1919–1945: hayeha vekitsah shel kehillah (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2012); David Silberklang, Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013). See also Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” in Women and the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 123–142. 16 Sara Bender, The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 97. 17 Ibid., 103–104. 18 Ibid., 198, 269. 19 Ibid., 194–195, 260.

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collective community and individual families continues in the scholarship that considers the experiences of victims in a particular town or region. In The Death of the Shtetl, Yehuda Bauer studies Jewish communal responses to the policies of persecution and mass murder in small towns in eastern Poland.20 As he seeks to examine the cohesion of Jewish communities before the Holocaust and the German policies of annihilation, he makes family life a secondary concern. Bauer does not take a keen interest in the experiences of individuals when he uses a concept he calls Amidah, or the “unarmed and armed reactions intended to keep the community and its components going and to stand up to the existential threat posed by the German regime.”21 Again, his frame is situated in the shtetl communities and their leadership. However, between his focus on the atomization of communities and the despondency of the Jewish leadership, Bauer only hints at the fate of families torn apart through forced labor, hunger, and humiliation.22 A similar pattern of growing interest in lives ingrained in social structures of communities and families emerges in Eastern European historiography and among historians committed to writing about the victims’ experience. Indeed, historians have increasingly sought to reconstruct the destruction of individual Jewish communities and the fate of the Jewish populations in various ghettos.23 In her study of the Litzmannstadt ghetto, Andrea Löw looks for answers about the meaning of cold and disease for the Jews beyond statistics; she also examines how hunger affected family members (for instance, the consequences of the bitter arguments and conflicts that ensued), while pointing to the importance of witness testimonies.24 20 Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 4. 21 Ibid., 7. This concept was first put forward by Mark Dworzecki. See Boaz Cohen, “Dr. Meir (Mark) Dworzecki: The Historical Mission of a Survivor Historian,”  Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 21, nos. 1–2 (2015): 24–37. 22 See his discussion of the Judenräte’s “impossible tasks”: Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, 82–83. 23 Ruta Sakowska, Ludzie z dzielnicy zamkniętej: Żydzi w Warszawie w okresie hitlerowskiej okupacji, październik 1939–marzec 1943 (Warszawa: PIW, 1975); Elżbieta Rączy, Ludność żydowska w  Krośnie 1939–1946 (Krosno: Muzeum Rzemiosła, 1999); Sylwia Szymańska, Ludność żydowska w Otwocku podczas drugiej wojny światowej (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2002). 24 Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 156, 160–162, 305–307. See also Andrea Löw and Markus Roth, Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein 2011). More recently, Katarzyna Person has mentioned the family context when discussing decisions of assimilated Jews about moving to the Warsaw ghetto.

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However, in numerous other monographs about individual ghettos, questions about communal and institutional responses dominate the analysis.25

From Perpetrators’ History to Victims’ History In the last decade, scholars whose work once focused on perpetrators have increasingly included the victims’ perspective. For prominent Holocaust historians like Christopher Browning and Omer Bartov, this shift, or inclusion, has come with a growing recognition of the centrality of survivor testimonies to highly significant aspects of the Holocaust. Browning calls for using survivor eyewitness evidence more broadly.26 He notes that he became “increasingly fascinated with the methodological and historiographical challenge of how one could write a professionally respectable history of the relatively understudied phenomenon of the factory slave-labor camp through a case study of the Starachowice example” and that he embraced postwar eyewitness testimony as the only available source.27 Jewish testimonies, in turn, have led to a more pronounced presence of topics important to the Jewish experience, including the fate of families. These sources, then, have turned the attention of historians to some of the questions raised early on by survivor scholars involved in documenting the Holocaust.

Katarzyna Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–1943 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 29–30. See also Havi Dreifus, “Jewish historiography of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 29 (2017): 217–245. 25 See Adam Sitarek, “Wire Bound State”. Structure and Functions of the Jewish Administration of the Łódź Ghetto (Warsaw-Łódź: IPN, 2018). See David Engel, “Holocaust Research and Jewish Historiography: Mutual Influences”, in Holocaust Historiography in Context; Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, Eds. by David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008) 67–79. 26 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 8. For another shift in exploring the communal experiences see Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); idem, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: at the Epicentre of the Final Solution (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 27 Browning, Remembering Survival, 3. See also Omer Bartov, “Interethnic Relations in the Holocaust as Seen through Postwar Testimonies: Buczacz, East Galicia, 1941–1944,” in Lessons and Legacies: From Generation to Generation, ed. Doris L. Bergen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 101–124; idem, “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-Christian Relations in Buczacz, 1939–1944,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 486–511.

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Browning finds that in Wierzbnik at the beginning of the war, decisions about staying and fleeing were made within families and carried out by family units.28 Moreover, family issues are implicit in stories of forced labor organized by the Judenrat.29 As Browning notes: “When left to narrate their own stories without the structure imposed by targeted judicial questioning, survivors generally focused on their own families and experiences, not on individual Germans.”30 He points to the tension between individual families and institutionalized strategies of coping with adversity in the period before the destruction of the community. Once he shifts his attention from perpetrators to victims, Browning discusses the living conditions in the ghetto in Wierzbnik, the influx of refugees and expellees from other cities, and families forced to move into the old Jewish quarter and the unbearable overcrowding in formerly one-family apartments.31 He notes that families adjusted differently to the new economic conditions in the ghetto. Some members continued to make a living in the traditional manner, such as in crafts and trade; yet some, “even in the most well-to-do families, eventually sought work in the factories, while others were grabbed off the street for factory work and given no choice. Deprived of any future as merchants and craftsmen, the Jews were increasingly being transformed into an industrial proletariat.”32 This reduction in socioeconomic status often affected family relations, but also created (at least temporary) opportunities for the younger generation to avoid deportation. In his recent book Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov sets out to study the life and demise of a multiethnic city and by doing so to understand not only communal genocide but also his own family’s fate. He concludes: “I may not have found out much about my family, but in a certain sense all history is family history.”33 Bartov turns to diaries and memoirs, court depositions, and testimonies in order to “reconstruct the life of Buczacz in all its complexity and depict how the Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish inhabitants of the town lived side by side for several centuries—weaving their separate tales of the past, articulating their distinctive understanding of the present, 28 Browning, Remembering Survival, 24–29. 29 Ibid., 34–39. 30 Ibid., 41. 31 Ibid., 56. 32 Ibid., 60. 33 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 5.

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and making widely diverging plans for the future.”34 Anatomy of a Genocide shows what “German Order” meant and how over ten thousand Jewish men, women, and children from Buczacz were murdered in the two years during which it held sway in the town. Bartov contextualizes the Jewish inhabitants of the town within their family background. He connects some of the decisions taken during the occupation to failed attempts to protect family members. Such was the case of Judenrat member Jakob Ebenstein.35 Writing about the situation of the Jews, he focuses on the ever-shrinking space for maneuver, especially for individuals who joined the Judenrat or the Jewish police, in part because they hoped to protect their own families.36 When examining Jewish survival strategies, Bartov uncovers heartbreaking accounts of attempts to devise individual and family hiding places, of losing family members, or of identifying non-Jews who could be trusted with surviving members of Jewish families.37 While touching on questions of age, class, and gender, he shows that any survival was random and emerging patterns prove tenuous at best. He interweaves accounts of rescue and survival, engaging with aspects of Jewish testimonies that have rarely been acknowledged by scholars. A powerful case study for further rethinking the daily experience of the Holocaust, Anatomy of a Genocide helps us understand the destruction of families. Wendy Lower’s most recent book – The Ravine “tells the story of one photograph and its power to hold our attention, reveal a wealth of information about the Holocaust, and demand action.”38 She reflects critically on the absence of family in Holocaust scholarship, including in her own work: “In all my years of researching the Holocaust, the theme of the family ran through everything I read. It was there in plain sight, and yet I had not reflected on it as such. Perhaps it was too difficult to face. I joined my colleagues in referring to victims in terms of large numbers: six million Jews, the populations in Warsaw, Minsk, Berlin, Vienna, and so forth. Ironically, we have inherited these versions of death from the Nazis, who relegated human beings to numbers killed, cargo processed in gassing factories, or

34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 232–233. Wendy Lower, The Ravine. A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). 5.

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entire regions made Judenrein (free of Jews).”39 But now, by drawing our attention to the woman and a child being murdered in Miropol, Ukraine, on October 13, 1941, Lower tries to reconstruct the family of the victims whose death had been captured through a perpetrator’s gaze.

Investigating Personal Family Histories Despite their important contributions to the study of the Holocaust from the victims’ perspective, in most communal monographs—academic studies that focus on communal structures and institutions rather than individuals or families—the effects of living conditions in ghettos, deprivation and hunger, and traumas of deportations are not regarded as dramas that played out in Jewish families. For scholars who shifted their attention to the victims’ experience in order to answer broader questions about forced labor or the anatomy of genocide, turning to memoirs, diaries, and interviews was not necessarily motivated by the desire to recover the loss of family memory. In lieu of a formal introduction, Bartov reveals his intimate connection to Buczacz, only to signal the possibility of, but then to abandon, reconstructing his family history.40 But for many authors, such as Theo Richmond, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Monika Sznajderman, Ellen G. Friedman, and Mikhal Dekel, to name just a few, family history and memory serve as the primary framework. They delve into their survivor relatives’ efforts to look away from the painful past and their own desire to understand it, and their books trace their lost families and lost family memories.41 While attempting to discover their roots in Eastern Europe, the writers deal with the experiences of survivors against the background of interethnic relationships, with broader questions about 39 Lower, The Ravine, 96. In fact, Lower’s earlier studies, explored the Final Solution by focusing on the perpetrators Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton, 2013); idem, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 40 Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 4. 41 Theo Richmond, Konin: A Quest (New York: Pantheon Books 1995); Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins Publishers 2006); Joanna Olczak-Roniker, In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004); Monika Sznajderman, Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna (Wołowiec: Czarne 2016); Ellen G. Friedman, The Seven: A Family Holocaust Story (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018); Mikhal Dekel, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

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Jewish relations with their Christian neighbors that then elide the question of relationships inside the Jewish families. Some of these studies are investigative journalism, while others are by professional historians. In Together and Apart in Brzeżany, Shimon Redlich focuses on his middle-class family in Eastern Galicia.42 Meri-Jane Rochelson turns to family archives and interviews with her survivor father, Eli G. Rochelson, to reconstruct his life and survival, and the fate of his first family—wife and son—who perished in the Holocaust.43 She portrays him in the context of his family—their social standing, livelihoods, and ambitions in Kaunas and Rostov-on-Don at the turn of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, during the First World War and the Russian Revolution.44 In the microcosm of one Jewish family, we see the decisions taken after the outbreak of the war, the daily realities of life in the Kaunas ghetto, and the efforts to protect Rochelson’s only son.45 Not all of these books are the product of the gaze of Jewish victims. Some authors seek to shed light on their family’s experiences as rescuers, bystanders, and perpetrators. Olga Hnatiuk writes about her family in wartime Lviv, where her grandparents were involved in assisting their Jewish acquaintances.46 She describes a web of relations that involved family members both on the side of the Jews seeking to escape from the ghetto and her own family.47 Rita Gabis explores family memory of life in Lithuania and the disappearance of Jews from Žeimelis and Švenčionys, where her grandfather served as a local chief of the Lithuanian security police.48

Intersections of Gender and Family While social histories of the Holocaust and studies of historians’ own families and their fates during the Second World War have added to our 42 Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzeżany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 43 Meri-Jane Rochelson, Eli’s Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018). 44 Ibid., 29–38. 45 Among the variety of new genres, there are also books on refugee families, Jewish and not Jewish. See Ian Buruma, Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). See also Dekel, Tehran Children. 46 Olga Hnatiuk, Courage and Fear (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019). 47 Ibid., 12–14. 48 Rita Gabis, A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather’s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 10–13.

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understanding of how Jewish families responded to exceptional challenges, it was the earlier feminist demand to pay closer attention to women and to ego documents that galvanized interest in the familial framework. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, new trends in scholarship emerged, particularly the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte). In her recent essay “Did Gender Matter During the Holocaust?” Marion Kaplan alludes to the connection between the push to explore women’s experiences and the private sphere of the family.49 With women’s identity closely tied to family, and women’s testimonies, including oral histories and memoirs, that focused more often on the private sphere, feminist scholars brought to our attention new intimate and familial experiences that had been largely overlooked in Holocaust narratives. Indeed, already in such pioneering publications as When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, edited by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, Women and the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, and Judith Baumel-Schwartz’s “Gender and Family Studies in the Holocaust,” scholars outlined new research avenues for investigating women and their roles in preserving families, stepping into new economic roles, pushing for emigration, and negotiating rescue for their children.50 Ofer and Weitzman declare that their volume shows how questions about gender lead us to a richer and more finely nuanced understanding of the Holocaust. They help us envision the specificity of everyday life and the different ways in which men and women responded to the Nazi onslaught. The discussion of women’s unique experiences provides a missing element of what we must now see as an incomplete picture of Jewish life during the Holocaust.51 Accordingly, in her article, Ofer calls for reading Jewish testimonies and diaries to gain insight into women’s experiences under the German 49 See Marion Kaplan, “Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust?” Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 37–56. 50 Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Ofer and Weitzman, Women and the Holocaust; Judith Tydor Baumel, “Gender and Family Studies of the Holocaust” in her Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 105–117. 51 Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, “Introduction. The Role of Gender in the Holocaust”, in Women and the Holocaust, i.

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occupation, in the ghettos, and during deportations. Describing the “increased burden placed on women,” she considers their responsibilities as breadwinners, attempting to cope with food shortages, and their experiences of dislocation and loss of privacy in relation to their roles as daughters, wives and mothers.52 Thus she shows how studying women and gender are entangled with a family framework, as “[w]omen most often explained their coping strategies as natural reactions rooted in their duties to husbands, children, parents, or siblings.”53 Scholars increasingly see daily life as an “integral part of the complex history of the Holocaust.”54 Seeking to work on topics other than persecution and mass murder, Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, and Joachim Tauber posit ghettos as “sites of restricted life.”55 They call for examining “[e]veryday life, culture, communication and interaction, perceptions, room for maneuver, decision making patterns, as much as their efforts to hand down the life and death in the ghetto to posterity.”56 In particular, researchers continue to explore the intersection between daily life and gender. By examining women’s experiences in the Holocaust, social historians have looked at family and domestic life, as well as at gendered aspects of women’s experiences in the ghettos and camps.57 There is a substantial literature on the so-called surrogate families in concentration camps and how they were a major strategy of survival. More recently, Sarah Cushman has argued in her study of Jewish women in Birkenau that “[b]iological family could be both a luxury and a burden.”58 It is now 52 Ofer, “Gender in Ghetto Diaries and Testimonies,” in ibid., 147. See also ibid., 146, 155–157. 53 Ibid., 163. 54 Andrea Löw, Doris L. Bergen, and Anna Hájková “Warum Eine Alltagsgeschichte des Holocaust,” in Löw, Bergen, and Hájková, (eds), Alltag im Holocaust. Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich 1941–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2013), 1. 55 Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, and Joachim Tauber, “Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung im Kontext von nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung und Ghettoalltag,” in Lebenswelt Ghetto. Alltag und soziales Umfeld während der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, ed. Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, und Joachim Tauber (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013), 8. 56 Ibid. See Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert, eds., Im Ghetto 1939–1945. Neue Forschungen zu Alltag und Umfeld (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009), 15–24. 57 Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 119–204; Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Sarah Helm, If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2015). 58 Sarah M. Cushman, “The Women of Birkenau”, PhD diss., Clark University, 2010, 133. See also Na’ama Shik, “Infinite loneliness: Some Aspects of the Lives of Jewish Women in

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commonly understood that women became the main anchor of existence in the face of economic deprivation and uncertainty.59 But there is also a substantial body of scholarship about the ways in which Jewish families in Eastern European ghettos shifted from cohesion to dissolution and rupture.60 This crisis and eventual dissolution of family life played out especially among the Jewish refugees who arrived in Warsaw from other towns in Nazi-occupied Poland, as Lea Prais shows in her monograph on the ghetto. She argues that “[o]f all population groups interned in the ghetto, the refugees had the worst living conditions and their family setting was immeasurably more vulnerable than that of the ‘locals.’”61 Inquisitiveness about women’s experiences and gendered analysis of Jewish survival strategies has led scholars to broach sensitive topics, such as leaving family members behind when emigration opportunities presented themselves first to young males. In her work on German-Jewish women under Nazi rule, Marion Kaplan shows that although women tended to pressure their families to emigrate, they were also frequently left behind, especially elderly family members. The combination of gender and age proved lethal.62 Indeed, one reason why some women remained in Germany was to be with their mothers and, which ultimately led to their deaths. Gender also made a tremendous difference in decisions about flight when Jews attempted to escape to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. Prais notes that [t]he need to leave home and find refuge elsewhere was one of the primary causes of rupture. Even though family members often separated and lost contact with one another due to the realities the Auschwitz Camps According to Testimonies and Autobiographies Written between 1945 and 1948,” in Bergen, Lessons and Legacies, 125–156. 59 See Natalia Aleksiun, “Girls Coming of Age during the Holocaust: Gender, Class, and the Struggle for Survival in Eastern Europe,” in Gender and Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Winer, forthcoming with Wayne State Universty Press. See also Lea Prais, Displaced Persons at Home: Refugees in the Fabric of Jewish Life in Warsaw, September 1939–1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 408. 60 Dalia Ofer, “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish Family in East European Ghettos during the Holocaust,” in Coping with Death and Life. Jewish Families in the 20th Century, Studies in Contemporary History, vol. 14, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143–165. 61 Prais, Displaced Persons at Home, 407. For the chapter see ibid., 407–428. 62 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62–73.

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of the occupation, this was most prevalent among young men for whom displacement from home was a watershed event and who fled due to fear of the occupier. In the early months, frantic escape was frequent, often forcing families to split up, agonize, and quarrel.”63 More recently, Havi Dreifuss, Miriam Ofer, and others have written about the various tactics used to keep families together or split them up in order to survive, about family dynamics and psychological tensions, and about the ghetto conditions that took a toll on the stability of the Jewish family and led to tragedy for individual families.64 Scholars have also increasingly discussed decisions to break up families in order to save some of their members, most notably children. There is excellent work on the Kindertransporte, for example, showing how parents made the agonizing decision to send their children away. Indeed, this was the last active decision most families were able to make with regard to their children.65 More recent authors have stressed the parental agency behind sending children to the Aryan side in Eastern Europe.66 Thus, the experiences of fragmented families become a subject of historical focus. As part of the interest in family relationships, then, scholars have paid close attention to the experiences and fate of Jewish children.67 63 Prais, Displaced Persons at Home, 408. See Eliyana R. Adler, “Hrubieszów at the Crossroads,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 1–30. 64 Havi Dreifuss, “‘Hell has Come to Earth: An Anonymous Woman’s Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 2 (2008): 13–43; “‘At the Present time, Jewish Warsaw is like a cemetery’: Life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Great Deportation,” in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime; Essays by Three Generations of Historians; a Festschrift in Honor of Otto Dov Kulka, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 2006), 353–383; Miriam Ofer, White Coats in the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2020); idem, “Medicine in the Shavli Ghetto: in Light of the Diary of Dr. Aaron Pik”, in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust, ed. Michael A. Grodin (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 164–172. 65 Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 116–118. 66 See Anna Bikont, Sendlerowa w ukryciu (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2018). 67 See Deborah Dwork, Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). For work on occupied Poland see Justyna KowalskaLeder, Doświadczenie Zagłady z perspektywy dziecka w polskiej literaturze dokumentu osobistego (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009); Joanna B. Michlic, Piętno Zagłady. Wojenna i powojenna historia oraz pamięć żydowskich dzieci ocalałych w Polsce (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2021); Joanna Sliwa, Jewish

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Indeed, Joanna B. Michlic sees the marginalization of women and children as a major flaw in what she calls “conventional history”—that which centers on formal Jewish leadership.68 Of course, families more often experienced a sense of helplessness and disintegration, as parents, spouses, and siblings faced the realization that any meaningful mutual help was hardly possible during roundups for deportation to death centers or sites of execution. The turmoil of the expulsion to the Warsaw ghetto with its attendant violence was often a significant stage in shattering the family unit. Prais shows that “[d]islocation, instability, deprivation, and protracted hunger toppled most refugee families to the extreme fringes of ghetto life with uncontrollable speed.”69 And yet, statements from both witnesses and survivors are a testament to those families that strove to maintain integrity and resilience during these terrifying moments.70 Perhaps another indication of the family perspective becoming a subject of its own, rather than a side interest, is the appearance of the collection Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present, edited by Joanna B. Michlic, which delineates elements of Holocaust history through the eyes of Jewish parents, children, and youths in East Central Europe.71 In her introduction, Michlic underlines the mutual help that characterized family relations in Eastern Europe when Jews were forced to leave their homes.72 She declares that the main goal of the volume is “to broaden our understanding of wartime and postwar histories and (self)-representations of mainly central east European Jewry through Childhood in Kraków. A Microhistory of the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2021). For the Netherlands, see the important works by Diane L. Wolf: Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); “Child Withholding as Child Transfer: Hidden Jewish Children and the State in Postwar Netherlands,” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3 (2013): 296–308. On child survivors in Belgium and their rescuers, see Suzanne Vromen’s pioneering study, Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 68 Joanna B. Michlic, ed., Preface to Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2017), xvii. 69 Prais, Displaced Persons at Home, 427. 70 See Taffet, Zagłada Żydów żółkiewskich; Ofer, “Gender in Ghetto Diaries and Testimonies,” 148. 71 Michlic alludes to possible future comparative studies. See her preface to Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present, xi. See also the focus of the writings in Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, collected and edited by Alexandra Zapruder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 72 Michlic, “Preface,” xi.

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the lenses of Jewish parents, children, and youth, and to a lesser degree, through Jewish organizations and institutions.”73 In the volume Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, editors Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler explain the importance of the familial focus. Asking “Why the Family?” they point to new perspectives on the wartime experiences of families, both Jewish and Romani. They reveal that the familial approach makes comparative research possible on the life of families during the Holocaust and their efforts to reconstitute themselves after the genocide.74 Indeed, family networks are key to understanding Jewish survival strategies throughout the Holocaust. Many survivors credit family solidarity when seeking to explain their own survival.75 The subject of the family is crucial for understanding the decisions Jews made when they left ghettos or jumped off the trains, although not all personal accounts are explicit in discussing what leaving behind family members entailed.76 Some survivors simultaneously depended on a family network while forced to “abandon” relatives they could not save. The same dramatically complex family lens allows us to see not only the survival strategies Jews employed when organizing food supplies in ghettos or arranging for hiding places, but also who evaded capture and deportation by relying on the intervention and support of close family, which could both increase and limit individual and group chances for survival. In Province Night, published by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and the recently published companion volumes Night Without an End, this duality informs the analysis and the

73 Ibid., xvi. 74 See Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler, “Introduction. Why the Family?”, in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 1–14. 75 In her Yiddish memoir written in Canada, Esther Stermer of Borszczów (Eastern Galicia, today Ukraine) declares, “Our family in particular would not let the Germans have their way easily. We had vigor, ingenuity, and determination to survive. Above all our family would stand together. When one of us was in danger, the others could not cower to escape. They proved their personal strength and character, time and again.” Esther Stermer, We Fight Back (Montreal: Jewish Institute of Higher Research, 1975), 61–2. 76 See for example: Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Warszawie (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, ŻIH), 301/15, Testimony of Chana Barasz, recorded in Łódź, April 14, 1945; AŻIH, 301/1652, Testimony of Hieronim Majzlisz.

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conclusions about Jewish death in rural areas of Nazi-occupied Poland.77 Detailed studies of Jewish daily lives written by Barbara Engelking, Małgorzata Melchior, Andrzej Żbikowski, and others demonstrate that family relations always shaped choices, however limited they may have been. Nevertheless, family loyalty and a sense of obligation could be an obstacle when fleeting opportunities for rescue arose. In his chapter on Dębica County in the Cracow district of the General Government (GG), Tomasz Frydel concludes that Jews in the GG did not choose between “life and death,” but between “family and life.” He argues that decisions to stay together ultimately doomed individuals who may otherwise have been able to survive on their own.78 Abba Kovner, among other survivors, commented that when his mother asked if she could come with him, he realized that he and his colleagues could only escape from the ghetto in Wilno (Vilnius) and get to the forests without their mothers.79 While research on the Jewish experience during the Holocaust often relies on the accounts of those who survived and can therefore easily allow us to place the individual at the heart of survival, the family lens points to the limited agency that Jews seeking rescue actually had when tapping into social networks, whether for “low-level,” ad hoc survival measures, more organized if often clandestine modes of survival, or elaborate rescue operations. This limited agency pertains not only to the singular nature of survival, it also helps us understand the complex psychological economy of hiding and surviving in Eastern Europe. In addition to biological families, scholars have addressed “families of choice” and relationships created when families were separated. In the camp system especially, the dispersal of family sometimes led to the creation of new bonds that helped inmates by providing them with a network of mutual support, including hetero and homosexual romantic bonds and

77 Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak, and Dariusz Libionka, eds., Prowincja Noc. Życie i Zagłada Żydow w dystrykcie warszawskim (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2007) and Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, eds., Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach, vol. 1–2 (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2018). 78 Tomasz Frydel, “Powiat dębicki,” in, Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polsce, vol. 2, 521. 79 Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow. The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 137.

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rational relationships.80 Some women imprisoned in camps bonded in this way, caring for one another and increasing individual chances for survival. In particular, “camp sisters” have been described as a source of material and psychological strength in the absence of biological siblings.81 Looking at the surrogate families and new networks that replaced families allows us to go beyond this camp context.82 Jennifer Marlow’s research on the role of domestics in the rescue of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland shows how complex these relationships sometimes became.83 She argues that many female Catholic domestics who rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust “loved their charges even before the war, but the time spent together living in fear as part of a conspiracy formed a new and deeper bond. Some of these women risked everything to keep these children, not just from discovery by the authorities that could result in death, but the loss of their families of origin, loved ones, acquaintances, and friends.”84 Thus new family attachments might replace those that were lost—in turn engendering more traumatic conflicts.

Conclusion Is there then a “familial turn” in Holocaust scholarship and how does it shape historians’ work? Has the paradigm irrevocably shifted or have historians sharpened an already existing lens? Given that historians have by no means neglected the subject in their research since the field of Holocaust studies first emerged, one can hardly point to a radical change arising with the recent turn toward scholarship on families. Indeed, when exploring Jewish institutional responses or the fate of communities, scholars have 80 See Anna Hájková, Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub. Homophobie und Holocaust, Reihe: Hirschfeld-Lectures; Bd. 14 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021). 81 For a more popular account see Heather Dune Macadam, 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz (New York: Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corp., 2020). See the current project and forthcoming publication of Janine Holc, The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor and the Holocaust, under review. 82 See Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003). See also Natalia Aleksiun, “Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families,” in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, 85–99. 83 See Jennifer Marlow, “Life in Hiding and Beyond,” in Michlic, Jewish Families in Europe, 110–129. 84 Ibid., 112.

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consistently mentioned the struggles of Jewish families. But individual and familial perspectives have long been dominated by a communal one. The immediate postwar period seemed preoccupied with exposing and understanding the perpetrators, and asking who was to blame, as well as studying the scope and patterns of Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Historians wrote about the family experiences of victims when analyzing communal histories, in particular, providing glimpses of Jewish families’ everyday lives, economic changes, and role changes. But until social and gender historians in the 1980s called for closer attention to women and children, the family as a unit of analysis made only cameo appearances. In recent years, the scholarship on the victims has changed; scholars have made their interest in families more explicit, researching family roles, values, and strategies. In the 1980s, as Judith Baumel-Schwartz observes, “[t]he idea to group gender and family studies of the Holocaust together had its genesis in the early conception of gender studies being an outgrowth of the more familiar category known as ‘family studies.’”85 The relationship between gender and family studies remains complex, especially with the apparent more recent reversal in the dynamic between the two interconnected approaches, as a gendered lens has become more prevalent in historical scholarship. On the one hand, scholarship on gender, including studies of Jewish masculinity during the Holocaust, continues to shed new light on family relations. On the other hand, possibly due to the reservation towards historians seeking to study the Holocaust from the perspective of gender and to build a picture of the experience of Jewish women, family history may appear to be taking a step backward applying a traditional lens or limiting the questions about women’s experiences to their roles as mothers, wives, and daughters. This does not need to be the case. Indeed, this renewed interest goes hand in hand with, and is reinforced by, gender analysis, the use of Jewish testimonies, and increased scholarly interest in Jewish agency during the Holocaust. Writing about family relations, the new scholarship accomplishes more than just the meticulous reconstruction of victims’ lives. Rather, raising explicit questions about family strategies, networks, and emotions offers a useful and fresh way to understand the Holocaust. By incorporating personal accounts and victims’ testimonies with close attention to family relations, scholars are recovering the voices of victims 85 Judith Tydor Baumel, “Gender and Family Studies of the Holocaust: The Development of a Historical Discipline,” in Esther Hertzog, Life, Death and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008), 22.

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as gendered individuals in their local, familial contexts. Moreover, they are attentive to Jewish efforts to come up with effective means of survival, the victims’ wartime and postwar accounts of personal emotions, as well as the Jewish understanding of resistance. Perhaps in the most challenging way, taking notice of family units helps us to look not only at survival and resistance but also at how ordinary Jewish families faced devastation and death in various geographic contexts. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann insist that microhistory entails a change of scale, and brings out elements that would be invisible, giving “increased attention to the categories of actors, the strategies of individuals and small groups, as well as to ways of writing history.”86 Therefore, the familial lens provides an indispensable dimension and focus to writing about the fate of the Jews, about non-Jewish bystanders, and about the perpetrators. While the question of a familial turn or a familial lens is quite broad, ultimately it fits well with the microhistorical perspectives. Indeed, concentrating on families introduces a change of paradigm in historical scholarship on the Holocaust.87 With a family lens, we gain new insights into Jewish agency, choices, strategies, emotions, communal patterns, and gender roles, to name just a few. Through the perspective of individual family trajectories, it becomes possible to attempt to write about individual emotions, psychological tensions, and dynamics. Personal documents bring us more or less explicit expressions of dramatic emotions. While in many diaries, letters, and testimonies, the authors write about fear and the prospect of a terrible death, they address especially the pain of fractured families, and the loss of closest relatives.88 The newfound understanding of family experiences during the Holocaust will likely continue to illuminate the field and fall into a larger historical comparative framework.

86 Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, introduction to Microhistories of the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), ii. 87 Ibid. 88 See Kassow, Who will write our history?, 172.

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Figure 2. Photograph of the Marmorosh family, from the right: Rachel, Bracha, Zvi (the child on her lap), Asher and Mendel, in Kosow, Poland before the war. Photo credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archives, Archival signature 9770/12.

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Masculinities under Occupation: Considerations of a Gender Perspective on Everyday Life under German Occupation Agnes Laba

Introduction The most recent research on everyday life under German occupation during the Second World War has shown that the context of the experience of “occupation” must be conceptually distinguished from war societies, that is, those societies that were at war but did not share the experience of occupation.1 Under this precondition, commonalities between the various occupied countries can be found on the level of everyday life and the experiences of the people living under German occupation, even though the respective occupational policies varied from country to country. Common features included the fact that foreign rule was accompanied by the incapacitation of one’s own statehood and the physical or regulative presence of the occupying forces. In everyday life, this meant that people living under occupation 1 For Great Britain, a distinction must be made between the mainland and the Germanoccupied Channel Islands.

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soon had to live under severe conditions, including a deteriorating supply situation, the threat of violence, and the fact that different everyday practices were criminalized and not infrequently punished severely. Members of occupied societies were, therefore, often directly or indirectly “occupier-driven”2 in their actions.3 Following this assumption, this paper is based on the presupposition that German occupation did have a decisive impact on social relations as well as on the gender orders and hierarchies of occupied societies. As research has already pointed out on numerous occasions, war must be seen as an event that places stress on the negotiation processes of gender orders. This paper goes one step further by focusing on occupational situations—in this instance, German occupation during the Second World War—by identifying the particularities of the impact the occupation situation had on the gender orders and hierarchies of occupied societies. My main argument here is that the occupation situation affected the gender orders of occupied societies in a different way than, for example, the war affected belligerent nations that did not share the experience of occupation. Gender must be understood as a central factor in structuring the everyday lives of people. At the same time, feminine and masculine identities are constructed and reaffirmed through gender-specific everyday life practices.4 My argument is that, by putting enormous pressure on members of occupied societies, which led to a restructuring of their everyday lives, occupation also challenged their gender-specific everyday life practices, and, therefore, the prevailing gender-specific social roles as well as accompanying gender images, meaning images, and concepts of masculinity and femininity. These effects on the masculinities and femininities of formerly occupied societies, I argue, continued to have an effect even after the end of German occupation: widowhood, fatherlessness, but also remasculinization processes had a far-reaching influence on European societies of the 2 István Deák, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6. 3 Tatjana Tönsmeyer, “Besatzungsgesellschaften. Begriffliche und konzeptionelle Überlegungen zur Erfahrungsgeschichte des Alltags unter deutscher Besatzung im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, last modified December 12, 2015, http://docupedia.de/zg/Besatzungsgesellschaften. A systematic documentation of everyday experiences under German occupation from a pan-European perspective is provided by the international editorial project “Societies under German Occupation— Experiences and Everyday Life,” http://www.societies-under-german-occupation.com. 4 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no.  2 (1987): 126–127.

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immediate postwar period and must be considered against the background of the experience of life under occupation. Therefore, analyzing the effects German occupation had on the gender orders of occupied societies will not only help to understand the impacts occupation had on those societies, but will also help to understand European postwar societies. Applying gender as a category of analysis and interpretation to the history of German occupation, furthermore, can be used as a means to shed light not only on the relationships between occupier and occupied but also between members of occupied societies. Gender orders must be seen as structures that are fed by social power relations and, at the same time, contribute to the creation and perpetuation of those power relations. Hence, gender can work as a prism to illuminate (changing) societal power constellations in a context that puts enormous pressure on societies.5 This paper, therefore, is meant as a plea for, and a reflection on, a gender-integrated history of everyday life under German occupation. With this in mind, the main aim of this paper is to raise questions and highlight central aspects of possible analytical perspectives for the analysis of gender orders under German occupation. To achieve this, it will rather draw on examples from various occupied countries than give an in-depth analysis of one single country. The individual country specifics, thus, may have differed not only at national, but also at regional and even local level. However, one thing that to a certain degree all occupied societies had in common, as I argue, was that occupation had a deep impact on typical male everyday practices and thus concepts of masculinity, understood as male self-perceptions and identities. This can be a first anchor point for further analysis, allowing not only nationally oriented studies but also to raise pan-European comparative questions.

5 In terms of intersectionality, gender must be seen as an attribute that links and interacts with other social, regional, and ethnic markers. For example, the experience of a Catholic man under German occupation would have been different from that of a Jewish man; the experience of an old man in an urban bourgeois milieu would have differed from that of a young working-class man. I cannot adequately analyze all of these distinctions and interconnections in this article and I will concentrate here above all on bourgeois urban milieus. The gender-specific distribution of tasks in the context of marriages and family in rural societies and in the working-class milieu under German occupation still forms a research desideratum. However, this article aims to raise awareness of the fact that gender as a category of analysis opens up approaches for a nuanced consideration of the social effects of occupation on the respective societies.

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How to Write a Gender-Integrated History of Everyday Life under German Occupation, and for What Purpose: Some Considerations In order to lay out my argument about how a gender-integrated history of everyday life under German occupation can be written, I would like to start by outlining the main strands of research on everyday life in those occupied societies. So far, research has focused mainly on the policies of occupation, exploitation, and termination of the German occupying power. The experiences of the local occupied societies and their coping and survival strategies still form a research desideratum.6 Most studies that do focus on the experiences of occupied societies, however, do not use gender as a category of interpretation, while those who do take a gender historical approach can be divided into two main strands: a) studies that concentrate on the everyday lives and the experiences of women, and b) studies dealing with male experiences, mostly in noncivil contexts such as partisan movements, prisoner of war camps, and so on. While the former has been explored by newer studies discussing the role of women in the resistance and partisan movements,7 there is a lack of research on male civil experience. Studies of female sets of experience, however, have laid the foundation for a better understanding of the functioning of occupied societies by introducing gender as a research category for analyzing civil experience more broadly. By highlighting female agency in dealing with occupation, researchers have convincingly shown that women were not only victims.8 In the context of families, for example, many women (wives, for example, but mostly mothers) suddenly became the main or even sole breadwinner and had to develop new income strategies to cope with the missing (main) breadwinner. The variety of coping strategies extended from many different kinds of conventional employment (for many bourgeoise women, their first paid work in years) up to illegal activities, such as black market trading, barter, smuggling, and theft—even the maintenance of strategic relationships with Germans and prostitution.9 6 Tönsmeyer, “Besatzungsgesellschaften.” 7 For Ukraine, see Olena Petrenko, Unter Männern. Frauen im ukrainischen nationalistischen Untergrund 1944–1954 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018). 8 For France, see Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939– 1944: Choices and Constraints (Harlow: Longman, 1999). 9 Maren Röger, Kriegsbeziehungen. Intimität, Gewalt und Prostitution im besetzten Polen 1939 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2015). Eric Alary confirms for France what must have been true for all other occupied countries in different forms, namely the fact

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Writing focused on the diverse (sexual) relations between German occupiers and local women have shown that, despite National Socialist racial hierarchies, there were numerous contacts between Germans and civilians that varied from consensual love and sexual relationships to sexualized violence. This was even the case in those countries in which the population was classified as racially “inferior” by the National Socialist ideology.10 These studies have not only raised questions regarding the interaction between gender and race,11 they have also shown that deliberately seeking closeness to German occupiers, whether through relationships or employment, could be a survival strategy, as it could mean access to food or the prospect of a higher salary.12 Of course, the conditions for such a rapprochement were different for each occupied country, region or even city, and were determined not only by racial ideology, but also by the local conditions for, and of, the implementation of occupation policy. Women from countries where the alleged racial disparity was not so great may have had greater scope for action in some situations. However, studies from Poland show that racial hierarchy was not the only factor determining levels of female agency. Rather, the respective situational contexts of the interactions between German men and local women must be reconstructed as they open up further perspectives with which to assess the scope for action, and thus the agency of, individuals. It was this closeness to German that there must also have been homosexual relations between occupiers and occupied. Unfortunately, the sources for such cases are often simply nonexistent. Éric Alary, Les Français au quotidien, 1939–1949 (Paris: Tempus, 2009), 324. 10 As the example of Poland shows, research has long assumed that German soldiers complied with the ban on contact with Polish women. However, the work of Maren Röger, for example, shows that these relationships not only took place on a large scale, but also in numerous instances even led to pregnancies and children. Maren Röger, “Sexual Contacts between German Occupiers and Polish Occupied in World War II Poland,” in Women and Men at War: A Gender Perspective on World War II and Its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Maren Röger and Ruth Leiserowitz (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2012), 135–155. 11 Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). These studies focus primarily on the gender orders of German occupiers and the extent to which they were challenged in the concrete reality of occupied territories. An “Aryan” woman had a higher standing than a “non-Aryan” man, a fact that not only upturned traditional gender hierarchies but also opened possibilities of action for (German) women as occupiers beyond otherwise restrictive gender roles. 12 According to Eric Alary, working as waitresses in restaurants regularly frequented by Germans could also be seen as closeness to the occupier and it certainly presented opportunities to engage in even greater familiarity. Alary, Les Français au quotidien, 324.

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occupiers—as research has shown most prominently in the French example—which often led to attacks on women for “horizontal collaboration” at the end of German occupation and in the immediate aftermath. According to these studies, public retaliatory measures (for example public humiliation or the shearing of hair) taken against these women must be regarded in the context of a symbolic re-masculinization of the male sections of formerly occupied societies.13 The phenomenon and medial instrumentalization of the “femmes tondues,” as they were called in France, differed in the many national, regional, and local manifestations in which they were found.14 These variations make it necessary to ask: What were the circumstances that led to this ostensible need of (certain) men at the end of occupation to restore and/or reassure their own male identity by degrading (certain) women. And what societal needs did public spectacles and the reaffirmation of male identities fulfill in the wake of occupation? These questions are central to the development of a gender-integrated history of everyday life under German occupation. Regarding gender relations in occupied societies during the Second World War, one of the main arguments propounded in existing research is that they were characterized by significant discrepancies in social composition in terms of gender and age. Most of the occupied societies throughout Europe had a higher percentage of women, children, teenagers, and senior citizens because men, particularly those young and fit enough for military service, were conscripts, dead, prisoners of war, forced laborers in the Reich, or partisans hiding out.15 Popular culture, such as movies and literature, as well as early memoirs, add to this picture of a gender division between a militarized male and a civil female social sphere. A recurring topoi is the wife who, during the absence of her husband, waits, provides

13 Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France. (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002). 14 A comparative study which raises pan-European questions, however, is still pending. Even in national-oriented studies devoted to the everyday life of women during occupation, questions about the fate and the experiences of women who had become involved with German soldiers after the end of the occupation are often only a marginal note. For the Polish example, see Maren Röger, Kriegsbeziehungen, 128–138. For the diverse treatment of Norwegian women who had been involved with German men, see Kjersti Ericsson, ed., Women in War: Examples from Norway and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 15 Tönsmeyer, “Besatzungsgesellschaften.”

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for her family, and sacrifices herself in order to nurture and save her children.16 In Poland, for example, despite the fact that one-quarter of forced laborers sent to Germany were women, the most common postwar image of Polish women during German occupation is the above picture of women as waiting wives and mothers.17 To this image—and using postwar France as an example this time—are added images of men predominantly as soldiers and partisans.18 Here, the monuments erected and the streets named between 1944 and 1950, honored men in the Resistance, while home resistance efforts, as well as the roles of women partisans, were marginalized.19 This oversimplified gendered portrait of the occupational experience of the Second World War, therefore, has established a clear gender hierarchy in which women, who are located in civil space, are subordinated to the militarized and thus “heroic” world of men.20 It has also failed to do justice to the complexity of life under German occupation. While the aforementioned absence of men in most occupied societies is crucial to the analysis of the role of gender for everyday life under German occupation, it requires a more nuanced analysis than it has so far received. The Soviet Union is an example of where the disproportion between women and men can be confirmed to a very dramatic degree. While there is still no consensus on the figures, the most recent estimates of Soviet deaths are around 26.6 million; three-quarters of the dead were male and most of them were born between 1901 and 1931.21 In France, about 1.6 million French men were taken as prisoners of war in 1940 alone, which accounted for four percent of the overall population. Of these 1.6 million men, who were mostly between twenty and forty years old, fifty-seven 16 Throughout occupied Europe, mothers tended to forgo their rations and keep what little there was for their children. See Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 36. 17 Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, “Making Up for the Losses of War: Reproduction Politics in Postwar Poland,” in Röger and Leiserowitz, Women and Men at War, 313. 18 Fabrice Virgili, La France “virile”: Des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot, 2004). 19 Luc Capdevila, “Le mythe du guerrier et la construction sociale d’un «éternel masculin» après la guerre,” Revue française de psychanalyse 62, no. 2 (1998): 617–20, doi:10.3917/ rfp.g1998.62n2.0607. 20 Kristen P. Williams, “Women and War,” in Ericsson, Women in War, 17. 21 The immediate consequences of this demographic crisis were realized in the workplace and on the collective farm but were most keenly felt by families across the Soviet Union, who were left dealing with the realities of single parenthood, fatherlessness, and bereavement. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments 1945–1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 20.

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percent were married and about thirty-nine percent had children. A substantial number of these men were absent from their families throughout the whole period of German occupation.22 The numerous men who were taken to the Reich for forced labor also need to be added to these numbers.23 However, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, men remained at home during most of the occupation,24 as was the case in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. Even in occupied Poland, there were more men than was claimed after the war.25 There had not been a protracted wartime situation there, nor had it been anticipated; as such, entire cohorts of men had not been mobilized and conscripted, as they had been in France, for example. But even in France, soon after the defeat, thousands of soldiers were demobilized and returned to their families,26 while only about five hundred thousand men were officially part of the armed resistance forces, approximately ten percent of all French men between nineteen and forty years.27 In Belgium, of the approximately 225,000 soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht in 1940, POWs of Flemish origin were repatriated quickly whereas Walloons in many cases even had to wait for years before they could return home. As a result, the gender ratio in Flemish regions differed significantly from that in Walloon areas where a large number of men remained absent. This naturally led to great variation in the gender-specific everyday lives of both men and women from region to region.28 By themselves, the Polish, French, and Belgian examples indicate 22 Sarah Fishman, “Waiting for the Captive Sons of France: Prisoners of War Wives, 1940– 1945,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Des Moines: Iowa Department for the Blind, 1998), 182–183. 23 Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948, 31. 24 Melissa Feinberg, “Dumplings and Domesticity: Women, Collaboration, and Resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 96. 25 Waldemar Grabowski, “Raport. Straty ludzkie poniesione przez Polskę w latach 1939– 1945,” in Polska 1939–1945:  Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, ed. Wojciech Materski and Tomasz Szarota (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej— Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2009); Barbara KlichKluczewska, “Making up for the Losses of War: Reproduction Politics in Postwar Poland,” in Röger and Leiserowitz, Women and Men at War, 309–311. 26 Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 31. 27 Capdevila, “Le mythe du guerrier”: 614–615. 28 This unequal treatment resulted from the National Socialist Flamenpolitik intended to exacerbate conflicts between Belgium’s Flemish and Walloon populations and foster support for the German occupiers in the north of the country. This was to be

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that, in numerous countries or/and regions or even cities, men were actually part of occupied societies and thus subject to the same conditions as women. In the following, I will argue that in order to more fully understand life under German occupation, it is necessary to observe its effects on gender identities and gender-specific everyday practices at national, regional, and even local levels.

From Defeated Masculinities to Masculinities under Occupation Since (at the very latest) the European nation building of the ninetieth century, masculinity and the military have been interconnected and intertwined parts of national identities—a connection that was (and still is) especially pronounced in times of war. In essence, as “citizen-warriors,” men go to war to protect innocent civilians, namely women and children.29 This link between masculinity and the military has meant that women are associated with the civil sphere and/or the home front, which since the nineteenth century has traditionally been feminized as the sphere of the weak and those “responsible” for the reproduction of the nation.30 This idea prevails even during times of peace. Societies are underpinned by a promise of male protection, which shows that it is not actually a question of whether men protect women in real material terms. Rather, the notion of male protection expresses a fundamental gender hierarchy governing (Western) societies, where the protection of women equals their subordination.31 This gender hierarchy is deeply disturbed by defeat in war and—to an even greater extent—foreign occupation.

achieved by giving preferential treatment to the Flemish who were considered capable of “Aryanization.” Around sixty-four thousand Belgian soldiers were still in captivity by 1945, of whom just two thousand were Flemish. Werner Warmbrunn, The Germans and Belgian Prisoners of War: The German Occupation of Belgium 1940–1944 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 187. 29 Usually, this concept of gender hierarchy means that a hegemonic masculinity renders “deviant” masculinities and all femininities subordinate. R. W. Connell and J. W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005). 30 Compare Claudia Lenz, “Gendered Relations in War: Norway—A Case Study,” in Ericsson, Women in War, 100. 31 Compare Kristen P. Williams, “Women and War,” in ibid., 20–21.

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Both world wars, as many researchers have claimed, led to a crisis of masculinity.32 In the First World War, the image of the noble and heroic soldier was disrupted above all by the reality of mechanized warfare—the incomprehensible visual and acoustic horror of the battlefields, and the physically injured and psychologically traumatized men who returned. However, in the Second World War, it was largely the occupational experience that posed the strongest challenge to masculine identities. While defeat by the German Reich was a blow to nations as a whole but especially to men’s perception of themselves as warrior-protectors, it was occupation, I contend, that posed the greater shock to masculine identities, as it transferred the consequences of defeat directly into the daily lives of every member of society. Occupation by the Reich was tantamount to a double defeat. The beginning of the occupation meant the end of an active and classic frontline conflict (if such a situation had existed at all— the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia being a good example).33 The points of contact with the enemy were thus transferred from battlegrounds into civilian spaces at home.34 The most important thing, however, is that the occupation challenged the standard societal image of war: men as soldier/protectors, women as civilians/victims of war, and their respective, gendered, social functions. It goes without saying that this gendered distinction between front and home front is nothing more than an ideal and simplistic construction. Nonetheless, this division was (and frequently still is) an integral part of the self-descriptive narratives of societies at war, and is often promoted by belligerents with the goal of mobilizing the population or raising morale.35 Yet, when men were separated from their families and could not provide for or protect them, or when they found themselves supposedly defenseless in civil life during occupation, there were considerable consequences for their identities. 32 Luc Capdevila, “Identités masculines et féminines pendant et après la guerre,” in 1939– 1945, combats de femmes: Françaises et Allemandes, les oubliées de l’histoire, ed. Évelyne Morin-Rotureau (Paris: Éd. Autrement, 2001), 202. 33 Johanna Urbanek argues similarly. Joanna Hytrek-Hryciuk et al., “Wojna i okupacja w Polsce z perspektywy historii kobiet i płci: co i jak badać, jak upamiętniać?,” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość: Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej 26, no. 2 (2015): 23. 34 Capdevila, “Le mythe du guerrier”: 609–11. 35 Cynthia Enloe has coined the term “womenandchildren” for this. Cynthia Enloe, “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Village Voice, September 25, 1990.

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Competing Masculinities As already mentioned, occupation fully transferred the conflict situation from the frontline to the civil space by bringing the enemy into local societies. German soldiers and other representatives of German occupational regimes became a central part of the everyday lives of civilians. They represented and exercised National Socialist occupational policy as well as racist ideology. Members of occupied societies of both genders and all age groups thus ran the risk of coming into contact with the predominantly male German occupiers, or at least observing such interactions. Men living under German occupation faced a particular attack on their identities: the Germans not only represented and exercised political domination, but also embodied a hypermasculinity36 which became hegemonic. Consequently, the presence of the occupiers in the occupied countries did not simply reflect and sharpen the asymmetrical power relations between Germans and members of local societies; this asymmetry also merged hierarchies of power and different concepts of masculinity.37 That this clash of masculine identities was felt and, at the same time, reinforced by both sides is most evident in confrontational encounters between male occupiers and local men, many of which can be analyzed through the lens of gender. As current research on Norway has convincingly shown, confrontations in public or semipublic spaces especially can be read as clashes between competing masculinities. These interactions might start with what can be called provocative male behavior—jostling on the street, for example, where both German soldiers and local men did not want to clear the way for each other, or insults in bars, in which alcohol often also played a role.38 Thus, two moments appear to be of crucial 36 Numerous historians have referred to the Nazi male gender ideal as “hypermasculine”—a masculinity associated with virility, militarism, and brutality. For example, see B. E. Westerman, “Ordinary Drinkers’ and Ordinary ‘Males’? Alcohol, Masculinity, and Atrocity in the Holocaust,” in Beyond “Ordinary Men”:  Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust historiography, ed. Thomas Pegelow, Jürgen Matthäus, and Mark W. Hornburg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019), 38. That the National Socialist male selfimage was “hypermasculine” was also recognized by contemporaries, as the attempts to feminize National Socialists by representatives of French anti-fascism show. Mark Meyers, “Feminizing Fascist Men: Crowd Psychology, Gender, and Sexuality in French Antifascism, 1929–1945,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (2006): 109–142. 37 See Thomas Kühne, “Introduction: Masculinity and the Third Reich,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 354–366. 38 Maria Fritsche understands restaurants, bars, cinemas, and shops as semipublic places. Maria Fritsche, “Umkämpfte Räume. Konflikte zwischen Besatzern und Besetzten im

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importance here: the assignment of public spaces as typical male spheres of influence since the ninetieth century (in contrast to private spaces, which are typically regarded as female spheres of influence) and the fact that public and semipublic spaces allowed for the possibility of witnesses to conflictual encounters. According to current spatial theories, public spaces are always a contested territory in which social power relations are expressed and confirmed or undermined.39 As a traditionally male domain, public spaces not only represent male power but are also an arena in which competing male claims to power are fought out. Therefore, these conflicts between male occupiers and Norwegian men can be read as practices of (re-)conquering symbolic spaces in which political power and gender relations had merged.40 Of course, as a part of a population group that stood quite high in the National Socialist racial hierarchy, Norwegian men had greater room for action than, for instance, their counterparts in Poland, whose status as “Slavs” and the greater degree of violence they experienced influenced their behavior very differently. Nevertheless, it would be productive to analyze the actual and symbolic occasions and spaces where the concepts of conflicting masculinities of occupier and occupied met, as well as the extent to which these occasions challenged the male identities of local men—not just in the sense in which they influenced their behavior, but also how they affected their male self-perceptions. To return to the Norwegian example, I would like to highlight one aspect that is of central importance for the analysis of the effects of the occupation on male identities: the possible audiences for performances of masculine behavior. The occupational setting forced the male parts of the occupied societies to perform the duties and social functions expected of them as typically male in confrontation with the male occupiers and visible for the rest of the nation, that is, their women and children. According to the concept of “doing gender,” gender is performative and relational in the sense that individuals are constantly reproducing and trying to live up to prevailing gender norms in order to meet societal expectations. In short, individuals expect to be judged and “held accountable” according to gender norms, and if they fail to “do gender Zweiten Weltkrieg,” L‘Homme. European Review of Feminist History, no. 2 (2019): 123. 39 Simon Gunn, “The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place,” in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, ed. Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 8. 40 Fritsche, “Umkämpfte Räume”: 120.

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appropriately” they may be “called to account.”41 This constant evaluation of one’s gender performance takes on a unique intensity in times when gender norms are being put under particular pressure, as was the case during the German occupation in the Second World War. At the same time, the specific conditions of the occupation profoundly impacted the ability of men (and women) to fulfil or live up to expected gender performances. Not only did the presence of the occupiers in the civilian sphere testify to the fact that local men had not fulfilled their role as “citizen-warriors” and had not been able to protect their women and children from the enemy, but also the tense economic situation, the reprisals, and violence made it difficult for men to fulfill their second role, which was considered an integral part of male identity: to be the breadwinner of the family.

In Search of the Breadwinner: Supply Situations under German Occupation and Gender Orders One of the central goals of National Socialist occupation policy was to exploit occupied countries for the war economy and, above all, supply the German population. The so-called “hunger plan” developed by Nazi Germany to seize food from the Soviet Union is probably the best-known and most extreme example of National Socialist exploitation policy as it entailed the death by starvation of millions of “racially inferior” Slavs following the invasion in 1941.42 Although shortages took different forms and concerned different areas of life, scarcity made itself felt rather quickly in the whole of occupied Europe. Wherever hunger raged, the effects were felt directly. But shortage also played its part indirectly: malnutrition and dire 41 C. West and D. Zimmermann, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 146. 42 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Furthermore, exploitation itself took different forms in Western and Eastern Europe. As a result of German demands, national economies were transformed into waroriented autarkies. In contrast to Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, however, the German occupational regime in Western and Northern Europe and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia did not take the production infrastructure, but mostly only its output. In France, this policy only partly succeeded, and the country therefore also lost much of its labor and food. Tatjana Tönsmeyer, “Supply Situations: National Socialist Policies of Exploitation and Economies of Shortage in Occupied Societies during World War II,” in Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II, ed. Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger, and Agnes Laba (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4.

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living conditions—such as a lack of heating material, catastrophic sanitary conditions, and insufficient medical care—increased people’s exposure to (hunger-related) diseases.43 Another common feature of German occupation was the institution of rationing systems that, in accordance with a racist and utilitarian categorization of people, specified who could exchange ration cards for what foodstuffs and for what amount. Despite the prescribed quantities, which in the majority of cases were still too small, there was no guarantee that required foodstuffs were actually available. As a consequence, long queues in front of grocery stores soon became common in many cities. The sensation of hunger, general scarcity, and the experience of dealing with rationing systems, together with questions about how to eliminate hunger and scarcity, dominated the lives of occupied populations throughout Europe.44 Since the supply situation was a fundamental experience under German occupation, and affected everyone in society to one degree or other, I propose that it also was central to the negotiation of gender relations and orders. The lack of supplies and the resulting strategies to rectify the situation can be used to gauge the extent to which socially expected gender-specific behavior patterns changed under the specific circumstances of the occupation. As already mentioned, research has shown that because women were forced to work outside the home—often becoming their families’ sole or main earners—their realities changed under German occupation. This did not only alter the lives of urban, bourgeois married women who had not pursued employment. It also conflicted with prevailing societal expectations of those behaviors considered typically male and female, especially for married women and men. Occupation profoundly affected the everyday practices that were central to men’s identity construction. Along with its military component, a major part of (married) men’s hegemonic identity construction—a discourse widespread in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century—was anchored in a civilian life in which their societal role was to provide for the family. Now, however, they were frequently absent, unemployed, or doing jobs inadequate to their prewar social status. In Poland, for instance, but in many other countries as well, numerous men lost their jobs, especially in 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 7.

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urban areas, most often due to the expropriation of businesses and factories and the subsequent dismissal of workers.45 Jewish men in particular rapidly lost their sources of income.46 The loss of a husband’s or father’s employment often meant the loss of the main source of income for a family. At the same time, this had far-reaching effects on the self-images of these men, as studies focusing on National Socialist rule and persecution on Jewish masculinities indicate. These studies show how the collapse of the societal role of Jewish men in the German Reich and in Nazi-occupied countries led to a crisis of their masculine identity.47 I would like once again to come back to the Norwegian example mentioned above by considering the spatial aspect of male identity construction and maintenance and applying it to the supply situations in occupied countries. The everyday task of obtaining food through the official rationing system—which included trying to find out where and when it was available and then standing in long queues for hours—in most cases remained within the responsibilities of women.48 Those queues, which could be seen in many cities, soon became symbols of the shortage; social places primarily filled by women.49 In the streets in large numbers, that is, in public spaces, having become sole or main earners, women not only challenged 45 Wacław Długoborski, “Die deutsche Besatzungspolitk und die Veränderungen der sozialen Struktur Polens 1939–1945,” in Zweiter Weltkrieg und sozialer Wandel:  Achsenmächte und besetzte Länder, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Bd. 47, ed. Wacław Długoborsk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 306. 46 Karen H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 47 Despite both being persecuted by the Nazi terror regime, Jewish men living in the German Reich after 1933 and Jewish men living in one of the occupied countries after 1939 experienced completely different conditions under which they could act and react to the denial of integral parts of their male identities. While some Jewish men living in the Reich, for example, could align themselves with fundamental aspects of the discourse of German hegemonic masculinity (as decorated veterans of the First World War [Frontkämpfer], for instance) in order to restore or preserve their male identity, Jewish men in other countries were unable to make such claims. On the collapse of male gender identities and the “role reversal” of men and women during the Holocaust, see, e.g., Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 73; Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59–62, 229–37. 48 Paula Schwartz, “The Politics of Food and Gender in Occupied Paris,” Modern & Contemporary France 7, no. 1 (1999): 35–45. 49 Tatjana Tönsmeyer, “Hungerökonomien. Vom Umgang mit der Mangelversorgung im besetzten Europa des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” Historische Zeitschrift 301, no. 3 (2015): 675.

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the classic gender distribution of tasks, their role and merit as those who maintained life under occupation became particularly visible in this way. Consequently, areas of male identity building lost importance under the conditions of occupation. Male identity building practices were restricted or even prevented altogether, while on the other hand, everyday practices with female connotations gained in importance and attained special visibility. Occupation, thus, may not have led to a full reversal of gender roles, but it certainly necessitated their modification, which led to a renegotiation of gender hierarchies.

Conclusion As this analysis shows, it is reasonable to distinguish the specific situation of the occupation from that of war societies as it opens new analytical perspectives for thinking about gender under German occupation. It also shows that the peculiarity of the occupational situation only becomes apparent if its effects on both genders and their everyday practices are included in analysis. The occupation, which severely restricted or even brought to a standstill the civilian life of the occupied societies, had the most far-reaching effects on gender-specific practices here. And, in societies in which civil life was largely shaped by men, it is only understandable that its restriction primarily meant restrictions on men’s everyday practices which also affected prevailing concepts of masculinities. If at the same time women were to take over roles and functions within their families that formerly had been exercised by their husbands (or fathers), it seems crucial to ask what consequences these shifts within the gender orders had on their perceptions of their husbands, fathers, and masculinity itself. Furthermore, one can ask what consequences these shifts within the gendered division of social tasks within families had on male self-perceptions, as well as male perceptions of their wives, daughters, and femininity in general? And questions open up as to which new male everyday practices the occupation situation promoted and whether these can be read as strategies for strengthening or even restoring male identities. Without neglecting national and regional particularities of the occupational situations, gender as an analytical category can thus shed light on the effects that German occupation had not only on gender orders in general, but also on social structures such as marriages and families by revealing

Masculinities under Occupation

the changing power relations of societies subjected to enormous pressure through occupation. It also opens up new possibilities and the basis for elaboration on further comparative research questions.

Figure 3. Women who had (allegedly) engaged in relationships with the German occupiers were accused of “horizontal collaboration.” After the end of occupation, this was often accompanied by public humiliation, including shaving their hair, as here in Auxerre, France. These events must be considered in the context of changing gender orders during the occupation. Photo credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archives, Archival signature 1DO6.

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4

New Slovak Woman: The Feminine Ideal in the Authoritarian Regime of the Slovak State, 1939–1945 Eva Škorvanková

“We want to reeducate Slovaks. We want to rebuild Slovakia. We want to create a brave, heroic Slovak man, a sacrificing and faithful Slovak woman, a healthy and satisfied Slovak family.” —Jozef Tiso, November 1938

To legitimize themselves and establish a new social order, authoritarian regimes tend to distance themselves from the past. At the same time, they often present a vision of a new type of human being. Along with the claim that they are building a perfect society, such regimes produce utopian images of men and women living in a future that has solved problems that were once believed insuperable. In short, this advanced breed of humans is part and parcel of the golden world that the regime proposes is imminent. Indeed, authoritarian governments also claim that this new breed can be created in the here and now, and that it will act as a vanguard for others to follow. In effect, these new people are a force that will speed the arrival of the promised future and its inhabitants.1 In short, the envisaged people 1 * This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-18–0333, “Database of historical terminology on the history

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are images of the supreme society and its de facto individual and collective identity. They are the men and women who have already crossed over into the future.2 In all regimes the transformation towards a new man is supposed to happen in a complex manner—on a mental, spiritual, and physical level. Michel Foucault, particularly, stresses the ability of modern society to control and discipline human bodies. He calls this control of bodies (that is, “control of life, . . . to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities”) “biopower”3 or the “biopolitics of the population.”4 Biopower manages the population and its constituent individuals via diverse techniques and subtle mechanisms (such as universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops, political practices, and the economic observation of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration). Building on these concepts, I will analyze the image of the new Slovak woman that was advanced by the Slovak Republic’s government between 1939 and 1945. I will discuss the policies that aimed at generating and establishing this feminine ideal. The ideal of the “new woman” was a small part of the Slovak State’s attempt to set itself apart from the country’s liberal and democratic past in the Czechoslovak Republic, the political elites of which were accused of demoralizing and endangering Slovak women and youth (i.e., through coeducation at high schools, benevolent religion, and government’s “permissive” stance towards the family). Such efforts were part of a systematic approach to presenting the government as alone capable of strengthening the ethno-national nature of the country. In my eyes, the Slovak State’s new feminine ideal is of vital importance if we are to understand the position of women in the period. Furthermore, it enables us to compare the Slovak State with other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. While the position of women played only a minor role in of Central Europe Denisa Nečasová, “Nový člověk 20.  století ve víru sociálních experiment,” in Svůdnost sociálního experimentu / Nový člověk 20.  století, ed. Lukáš Fasora et al. (Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2018), 8. 2 Roger Griffin, Modernismus a fašismus (Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze nakladatelství Karolinum, 2015), 20. 3 Michel Foucault, Dohlížet a trestat. Kniha o zrodu vězenňství (Praha: Dauphin, 2000), 199–202; Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 261. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol, 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139.

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the ideology of the regime, its analysis can help us grasp the character of the Slovak State more precisely, track individual ideologies, and examine foreign influences on the ideas and opinions of the governing elites (conservative and Catholic groups on one side, radical and National Socialist on the other). The Slovak State’s gender ideology was inconsistent and evolving; at the same time, newspaper debates about laws dealing with women’s education and work often rejected the regime’s policies. The broader relationship between the public and regime concerning the role of women thus occurred in contrasting forms and approaches.

Sources and Methodology In this article, I will use a constructionist understanding of gender. I regard gender identity as a cultural construct—a system of symbols that express the relation between a body as a biologically given fact and its social meaning.5 The notion that gender is socially constructed facilitates enquiry into those power relations, and concomitant inequalities, that govern hierarchical systems and the division of labor.6 The position of women in authoritarian or far-right regimes and movements was determined by the patriarchal structures of society, where men hold power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property.7 The material for my analysis is a set of published speeches by political representatives of the Slovak State (such as President Josef Tiso and Minister of Education Josef Sivák) and important religious and public figures (Eugen Filkorn, for instance),8 as well newspaper articles largely aimed at female readers—mostly girls—that show the regime’s approach to the new Slovak woman. I will also write about the following: the official daily newspaper Slovák (the Slovak); the weekly daily newspaper Gardista (the Guardsman, founded in 1940 and published by the elite paramilitary organization Hlinka’s Guard) that represented the opinions of the radical Hlinka’s 5 Katherina Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 62. 6 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 42. 7 Kevin Passmore, introduction to Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, by Kevin Passmore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 4. 8 Eugen Filkorn (1881–1974)—papal prelate, spiritual governor of the Slovak Catholic Student Center, and founder of the Catholic Unity Association of Women. From 1938 to 1945 he was a member of the Slovak Council.

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People’s Party; the Catholic magazine of the St. Adalbert Association Kultúra (Culture); and women’s magazines such as Nová žena (New woman, published in Bratislava by the Catholic Union of Women based in Trnava) and Živena, published in Martin by the traditional women’s association of the same name. I also consider the women’s magazine Úsmev slovenských žien a dievčat (The smile of Slovak women and girls—issued from 1940 to 1941 and very similar to Gardista). The chief staff of Hlinka’s Guard had a major ideological influence on the girls and involved with Hlinka’s Youth (HM; the girls’ branch was called HM-D), on the HM-D magazine Slovenská deva (Slovak maiden), and on the magazine Stráž (Guard) for Hlinka’s Youth leaders.

New (and) Christian Slovakia During the Slovak State period, the idea of a woman was strongly connected with traditional Christian morality.9 This enabled the regime to clearly separate itself from the liberal culture of interwar Czechoslovakia. The ruling political party was Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, the ideological program of which appealed to Christian values, Slovak nationalism, and social justice.10 The party’s outlook was not consistent, however, as it intermixed domestic conservative and Christian traditions with foreign totalitarian and authoritarian influences. By fusing National Socialism with its own right-wing ideology, the Slovak State pursued a unique version of fascism.11 The leader of Hlinka’s People’s Party was Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest. A characteristic trait of the regime was the prominence of Catholic priests: they were some fifty percent of the party’s officials, especially at the regional level. They occupied almost one-sixth of the seats in the Slovak Republic Assembly and approximately the same number in the State Council. In 1943, as commanded by the bishop’s office, these numbers were reduced.12 9 See Eva Škorvanková, Strážkyne rodinných kozubov? Ženy v  ideológii a  politike slovenského štátu (Bratislava: Veda, 2020). 10 Katarína Hradská and Ivan Kamenec, Slovenská republika 1939–1945 (Bratislava: VEDA, 2015), 156–157. 11 Štefan Polakovič, “Ideová stránka slovenského národného socializmu,” Slovák, February 2, 1941, 1. Ľubomír Kopeček, “Slovensko v éře první diktatury: politický režim a jeho proměny (1938/1939–1945),” Politologický časopis 9, no. 1 (2004): 4–26. 12 In October, 1943 the Conference of Bishops in Žilina decided that only one priest per diocese should be allowed at the Slovak Assembly. Róbert Letz, “Hlinkova slovenská

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Priests also took part in educating and molding members of Hlinka’s Guard and Hlinka’s Youth.13 When it came to defining the roles and tasks of Slovak women in the new Slovak reality, the political elites of the state relied on the Church authorities and referred to the papal encyclicals of Leo XIII14 and Pius XI15 about marriage. These confirmed the authority of man over woman in their cohabitation and stressed the indissoluble character of the institution; separation was only acceptable in special cases and the dissolution of a marriage was not permitted. The encyclical doctrine of Pius XI titled Casti Connubii denounced female emancipation and calls for the equality of the sexes, and condemned marriages of mixed religions.16 In addition, Pope Pius XII promoted an ideal image of Christian marriage.17 Many of his remarks during audiences were reported to practicing Slovak Catholics via the Katolícke noviny weekly. The Slovak Church establishment addressed believers via pastoral letters and deputations, and if the state requested it they even advised on the laws and regulations the Vatican was planning to announce (e.g. the act on conception and the protection of the fetus). It is important to note here that Slovak society was very religious. The state declared itself Christian (enabling unrestricted activities for established Christian churches—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Reformed). Some denominations were considered sects and therefore banned (Adventists, Baptists, New Baptists, etc.), and the state was hostile towards anyone without a confession. Religious education at elementary schools and high schools was obligatory and also central to ľudová strana (Pokus o syntetický pohľad),” in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách 1905– 1945, ed. Róbert Letz et al. (Martin: Matica slovenská, 2006), 98. During the war, the Church authorities, well as the Vatican itself, were anxious to prevent politically active priests coming into conflict with its official teachings. 13 Hradská and Kamenec, Slovenská, 200. 14 “Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Christian marriage (February 10, 1880),” last modified October 28, 2019, http://w2.vatican.va/content/leoxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10021880_arcanum.html. 15 “Casti connubii Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Christian marriage (December 31, 1930),” last modified October 28, 2019, https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html. 16 In his encyclic on godless communism, Pope Pius XI also refused the emancipation of women and was adamant about the indissoluble nature of marriage. “Divini redemptoris Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on atheistic Communism (March 19, 1937),” last modified October 28, 2019, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/ hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html. 17 “Slová Pia XII. o manželstve,” Katolícke noviny, January 24, 1941, 1–2.

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other subjects, such as geography, history, and general studies.18 During the interwar period, almost 95 percent of Slovakia’s inhabitants belonged to Christian churches. According to the census of 1940, as many as 74.1 percent of the Slovak Republic’s population declared itself to be Catholic, 14.6 percent Evangelical of Augsburg Confession,19 6.9 percent Greek Catholic, and only 0.5 percent belonged to the Reformed Church, due to the substantial loss of the southern territories.20 In the same period, approximately 4 percent of inhabitants identified as Jewish, though their numbers dropped to 3.3 percent in the census of 1940. The numbers representing other religions were minimal: non-believers, for example, were 0.51 percent of the population (17,148) in the interwar period.21 The character of the political regime of the republic was defined by the constitution of July 21, 1939, a document that demonstrated the governing party’s and elite’s inclination towards authoritarian, Christian, and corporatist rule.22 While the constitution stated that women had political, human, and civil rights, as well as the right to vote, as was previously the case,23 they could not actually exercise these rights freely. There was extensive support for marriage, family, and motherhood (§ 86). Policies “released” Slovak women from work. Chief among these was the limitation of women’s access to both secondary and tertiary education. With the cancellation of coeducational 18 Igor Baka, Politický systém a režim Slovenskej republiky v rokoch 1939–1940 (Bratislava: Vojenský historický ústav, 2010): 126–130. 19 The Evangelical-Protestant Church was originally loyal to the state yet in a tense relationship with it, since its representatives were not willing to accept the constant preference for and emphasis on Catholicism, as well as because of various verbal and physical attacks. The leaders of the Evangelical Church were accused of Czechoslovakism and sympathies towards the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Despite the fact that some of them participated in the public life of the state, many quickly became openly antagonistic towards the policies of the regime and formed an opposition party. See Baka, Politický, 126–130 and Hradská and Kamenec, Slovenský, 200–201. 20 Based on the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Czechoslovakia had to satisfy Hungarian territorial claims, too. The unsuccessful bilateral negotiations led to the decision that Czechoslovakia had to hand over vast southern territories of Slovakia (approximately 10,390 km² with 854,277 inhabitants) and a territory in the Carpathian Ruthenia. 21 Branislav Šprocha and Pavol Tišliar, “Demogeografický profil náboženského vyznania obyvateľstva Slovenska za posledných 100 rokov,” Populačné štúdie Slovenska 3 (2014): 111–187. 22 For more on the constitution, see Baka, Politický, 45–49. 23 Constitutional law No. 185/1939 Slovak Code of Law, from July 21 1939, §§ 9 and 10.

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institutions, it was difficult for girls to graduate from high school. Changes to the curriculum meant that girls could not study mathematics, physics, or classical languages, and were instead taught household management, sewing, and so forth. Despite the fact that the family and household were considered naturally female spheres, Slovak girls were expected to be educated in a limited and particular manner that would prepare them for family life and child-rearing.24 If they happened to be employed, they worked in traditional women’s jobs, such as dressmaker, milliner, florist, hairdresser, nurse, social worker, teacher, professor, doctor, and (in the business world) merchant—but not office or clerk jobs.25 Only extremely gifted girls and women were encouraged to study, yet once again the choice of jobs was limited to “feminine” ones, such as doctors for children and women. Otherwise, studying with the goal of a well-paid job or high-status career was frowned upon.26 Practical subjects such as cooking and family caretaking were meant to prepare girls for their future roles as mothers and housewives and were introduced into the curricula of high schools for girls. The best form of education was believed to be that provided by girls’ special schools (which trained their students for typically female jobs) and housekeeping schools. The debate about a limit on girls’ high school studies correlated with the Slovak government’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce quotas on female university study in June 1941.27 During the Salzburg Conference28 on July 27 and 28, 1940, the radical wing of Hlinka’s People’s Party pushed to transform the Slovak regime towards National Socialism.29 It proposed increasing efforts to interest and include women in public life and politics. As a result, a girls’ branch

M., “Našim maturantkám,” Slovenská deva, May–June, 1942, 144. Žofka Gáborová, “Vyber si ženské povolanie!,” ibid., May–June, 1942, 146–147. N. S., “Našim študentkám k polroku,” ibid., January, 1942, 79. After high school, teachers and professors at Slovak University strongly complained, the Ministry of Education was unable to prevent girls from going to university. See Eva Škorvanková, “Snahy o obmedzenie vysokoškolského štúdia žien v období Slovenského štátu,” Historický časopis 66, no. 4 (2018): 649–670, https://doi.org/10.31577/ histcaso.2018.66.4.4. 28 An event that included representatives of the Third Reich (namely Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop) and representatives of the Slovak State (namely Josef Tiso, Vojtech Tuka, and Alexander Mach). It was a direct German intervention into the internal affairs of Slovakia. 29 Ivan Kamenec, Slovenský štát (Praha: Anomal, 1992), 72–73. 24 25 26 27

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of Hlinka’s Youth Organization was established along German lines30 and there was an attempt to create a united women’s organization within Hlinka’s People’s Party. The establishment of the Women’s Branch of Hlinka’s Peoples Party (ŽO HSĽS) was delayed until the end of 1941 and was not particularly successful. Eventually, the initiative was taken over by the conservative wing of the party together with president Jozef Tiso himself, who even annotated the organization’s rules and regulations.31 Indeed, despite the original intentions of Hlinka’s People’s Party militants, the activities of ŽO HSĽS were exclusively social, charitable, and educational. No real political activity was expected from its members. In the fall of 1940, a new girls’ branch was established in Hlinka’s Youth (HM-D). Girls aged six to twenty years could apply and were later divided into three groups according to their age: “fairies” (six to eleven years old), “Tatra girls” (eleven to sixteen years old) and “maidens” (sixteen to twenty years old).32 Membership in HM-D was not compulsory, just as it was not for boys.33 The aim of the organization was to include girls in “the rhythm of the national life” and to raise “loyal, devoted and uncompromising Slovak women.”34

The Developing Role of Slovak Women In the official press, representatives of the state stressed the need to create “a new Slovak woman in new Slovak life.”35 Based on the preferred conservative and Christian ideal of a woman, female emancipation and feminism were denounced as derailment or a deviation.36 The Catholic Church was especially critical of feminism and emancipation. Emancipation was positioned “in stark contrast to the valid 30 “Zákon č. 166/1940 zo dňa 4. júla 1940 o Hlinkovej garde a Hlinkovej mládeži,” Stráž, September–October 1940, 17–19. 31 Slovak National Archives (SNA), Fund (F.) The Presidential Office, Kr. 83/101–2A–020, Nr. 5387/41. “Organizačný poriadok Ženského odboru HSĽS.” 32 “Ženská mládež složkou HM,” Stráž, September–Oktober, 1940, 20–21. 33 In 1941 there were approximately forty thousand girls the Hlinka’s Youth girls’ section; in 1942 there were approximately seventy thousand. For more on this subject, see Michal Milla, Hlinkova mládež 1938–1945 (Bratislava: Ústav pamäti národa, 2008), 56–57, 242. 34 Štefánia Poláková, “Milé sestry vodkyne!,” Stráž, November–December, 1940, 55–57. 35 Eugen Filkorn, “Nová žena v novom slovenskom živote,” Nová žena, January 8, 1939, 2–3. 36 “O miesto ženy . . . ,” ibid., December 4, 1938, 4–5.

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Christian principles.”37 Modern Czechoslovak women were routinely called “butch” and denounced as lacking elegance and beauty; they were sporty types with angular body movements, demonic in appearance, and coarse of voice. Gentle and kind women represented the future. A huge wave of criticism washed over those girls who enjoyed modern lifestyles, dressed fashionably, went to cinemas and theaters, sunbathed on beaches, or hiked in the woods. The prevalent argument was again supported by the negative opinion of the Catholic Church which prohibited “all such things under the threat of a mortal sin.”38 Applying perfume and makeup were also condemned.39 Smoking was seen as an ugly, “unfeminine habit”40 and sign of emancipation.41 The “true” beauty of women and mothers was praised and located in their deep religious devotion. A face without cosmetics was “the face of a working, happy, hopeful and joyful mother!”42 It was generally held that educated and working women were either childless or had only one child. It was claimed that self-sufficiency, independence, and employment robbed women of their ability and willingness to mother.43 Propaganda claiming that women should return home to their families raised the issue of the unemployment of young men, and thus formed a radical solution to the issue of women employment in state and public services. At the same time, the regime expected that younger jobless women would find their calling in family life and maternity. Releasing women from state and public service started as early as in the fall of 1939. The government-drafted bill on the regulation of the employment of married women teachers counted on them to voluntarily leave their jobs. Should they refuse to do so, it stipulated a forced abandonment of their employment without financial compensation.44 Married women working as

37 A. K., Zásluhy kresťanstva o  povznesenie ženy,” Kultúra 11, June–August, 1939, 161–163. 38 Libor P. Mattoška, “Katolícke dievča a  apoštolstvo,”Nová žena, November 12, 1939, 2–3. 39 Betka Z., “Milostivá, na slovíčko . . . !,” Úsmev, November 14, 1940, 7. 40 Alica Borošová, “Žena slnkom v rodine,” Nová žena, January 15, 1939, 7. 41 A. K., “Žena a cigareta,” ibid., April 23, 1939, 10. 42 Klimko, “Vyfarbená žena,” Kultúra 11, March 1939, 61–65. 43 Ľudovít Michalský, Spoločenský lexicon (Trnava: Nakladateľstvo Pavla Gerdelána, 1941), 115. The piece was taken over and published by Úsmev slovenských žien a  dievčat. “Poslanie slovenskej ženy,” Úsmev, December 19, 1940, 16. 44 Act No. 246/1939 Slovak Code of Law on the regulation of the employment of married female teachers was approved on the September 28, 1939.

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state employees were dealt with similarly.45 An effective argument to support a general acceptance of such methods was a stereotypical depiction of the childless teacher and office/clerk couples and their luxurious and amoral lives.46 The financial, emotional, and psychological problems of women teachers and clerks who had to leave their jobs on short notice was discussed at least in the papers for women, thus revealing the discontent of young educated women who had invested family savings into their studies and were working towards a better life for parents and siblings they had planned to support.47 Education was financially demanding. Therefore, if parents invested in their daughter’s education, they naturally expected their daughter to financially support them and their dependent children in the future. Formerly, society had perceived investment in a girl’s education both as a dowry for the girl and as a form of future social security for her parents.

What Should a New Slovak Woman Be Like? The new state saw women’s natural place as within the family and home— having babies and looking after children, in short. The family was romantically depicted as a woman’s kingdom. Women were “queens and protectors of family hearths.”48 The Slovak woman was expected to “effuse happiness” and “lovingly model a household into a warm nest” where her husband could relax and enjoy himself.49 Some female authors compared a woman in the family to the sun, her light and warmth bringing calm to family life; she created a peaceful home by being modest and having a loving and understanding heart.50 The peaceful family atmosphere of the home was regarded as the opposite of the

45 Act No. 150/1940 Slovak Code of Law on the regulation of the employment of married female state employees was approved on June 5, 1940. 46 Ján Dafčík, “Výchova dievčat v slovenskom štáte,” Kultúra, January–February 12, 1940, 23. 47 “Čo je s vami?,” Nová žena, May 12, 1940, 3; Margita Ihriská-Haidová, “Čo je s nami?,” ibid., June 2, 1940, 3–4. M. Hečková, “Ešte o nás,” ibid., June 16, 1940, 9. 48 “Milá je ženská práca,” Slovenská deva, October, 1942, 23. Hana Tureková-Tisová, “Naša mama,” ibid., October, 1943, 25–26. Alica Borošová, “Žena slnkom v  rodine,” Nová žena, January 15, 1939, 7. Anna Abelovská, “Ženské srdce,” ibid., June 18, 1939, 5. 49 Mariena F-Á, “Viac úsmevov, viac šťastia!,” Nová žena, March 3, 1940, 2. 50 Alica Borošová, “Žena slnkom v rodine,” ibid., January 15, 1939, 7.

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restless world outside . A woman’s smile was to encourage and support her man during his hard work in the “field of the nation.”51 The most important component of the new ideal woman was motherhood, which was presented as a female duty.52 The stereotypical image of the Slovak mother as a simple, quiet, and religious woman, proud and resilient inside, was used again and again.53 Motherhood was presented as “the profession of every [bold in the original text] woman.”54 The regime officially commemorated the cult of the mother annually: in May, women were celebrated on Mother’s Day—renamed The Day of the Slovak Family in 194055—which was meant to “support the cult of self-sacrificing and brave mothers.”56 The celebrations occurred throughout Slovakia and gave endless opportunities for the ruling elite to propagandize about motherhood and advertise its family-friendly policies. On the Day of the Slovak Family, President Tiso awarded multiple mothers a special decree with the words: “Hlinka’s People’s Party expresses gratitude to you for your sacrifice and effort which [has] brought up children for the Slovak nation.”57 Traits connected with the idealized image of a Slovak woman were predominantly goodness, modesty, humility, kindness and devotion, bravery, and resilience. These ideas and character traits were reproduced in various surveys and agony aunt columns in magazines for young women in women’s magazines (“Word of Advice to a Young Bride;”58 “Aunt Hanna Knows the Answer”59). It was another channel used to control young girls with the new ideal. A submissive woman was undoubtedly a role model: she was respectful and submissive to her husband, understanding, always kind to him (even in case of his infidelity),60 pure, devoted, taciturn, humble, and 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Mariena F-Á, “Viac úsmevov, viac šťastia!,” ibid., March 3, 1940, 2. Zatovičová, “Naša anketa: Čo radím mladej neveste,” ibid., August 25, 1940, 12. Juraj Ohrival, “Matky nám vychovávajú hrdinov,” Slovák, May 23, 1939, 2. Eugen Filkorn, “Nová žena v novom slovenskom živote,” Nová žena, January 8, 1939, 2–3. This holiday was celebrated in interwar Czechoslovakia from 1923. “Najkrajší sviatok srdca,” ibid., June 11, 1939, 2–3. “Slovenský národ sa nemusí báť vymierania: Vodca vzdal vďaku slovenským matkám v mene národa,” Slovák, May 30, 1943, 1. A German award (Ehrenkeuz der Deutschen Mutter/Honor Cross of the German Mother) for multiple mothers was of a similar nature, and from 1939 it was awarded exclusively to mothers of Aryan origin. Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2013): 49–50. Published in the women’s weekly Nová žena in 1940. Ibid. 1943 and 1944. O. Š. M., “Naša anketa: Čo radím mladej neveste?,” ibid., March 10, 1940, 10.

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calm.61 Her faith and deep piety were her source of strength. A Woman were expected to bear and overcome all of married life’s problems, including its “disruption,” in which unfortunate case she would have to try to win her husband back.62 Even in case of a full collapse family and married life, women were still supposed to hole an ideal family environment together.63 The aforementioned “Aunt Hanna” regularly offered advice on keeping a marriage intact or dealing with domestic violence.64 Protecting and supporting the Slovak family, as well as family oriented state politics, were meant to target public immorality, fight prostitution, and curtail the use of contraception.65 Therefore, in the framework of family politics, it was necessary to promote the institution of marriage and to fight against separation and divorce.66 In 1940 and 1943, marriage law was adjusted by changing civil conflict regulation in cases of marital conflicts. Pursuant to the new adjustment, the judiciary was obliged to find agreement between spouses and thus prevent divorce or separation. Only the senate could decide on the termination of a marriage, rather than a regular judge.67 A decisive fight against childbirth regulation was a way of preventing a decline in population. Women who refused to have children were declared enemies of the state. Childless women or mothers with only one child were called immoral.68 The draft bill on crimes against human life from October 1940, initiated by the government, was a result of a broad 61 H., “Naša anketa: Aké rady dám budúcej neveste,” ibid. 62 “Jedna z mnohých: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., January 2, 1944, 2. 63 “Bože ako? Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., May 21, 1944, 2. Aunt Hanna counsels a deceived wife in the article “Východniarka: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., April 4, 1944, 2. 64 The woman was always required to stay with her husband even if he was an alcoholic, violent, unfaithful. She was supposed to make things better because “with a bit of good will from at least one of the spouses, arguments and fights could be evaded.” “Vernosť nadovšetko: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., June 11, 1944, 2; “Smutný život: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., June 11, 1944, 2; “Jedna z mnohých: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., January 2, 1944, 2; “Nešťastná a bezradná: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., February 6, 1944, 2. “Bože ako?: Teta Hana vám poradí,” ibid., May 21, 1944, 2. 65 Justín Štibraný, “Budujme zdravé základy rodiny!,” Katolícke noviny, January 31, 1941, 1–2. 66 It is difficult to know to what extent the divorce rate in Slovak society was a serious issue. According to the population census in Czechoslovakia between 1921 and 1930, 2–3 percent of men were divorced and 0.3–0.5 percent of women were divorced or separated. See Branislav Šprocha and Pavol Tišliar, Demografický obraz Slovenska v sčítaniach ľudu 1919–1940 (Brno: Tribum EU, s. r. o., 2012): 82–83. 67 Act No. 31/1940 Slovak Code of Law No. 41/1943 Sl. z. 68 Ján Dafčík, “Výchova dievčat v slovenskom štáte,” Kultúra 12, January–February, 1940, 27.

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campaign and discussions on abortion and protection of the fetus.69 An amended draft bill prohibiting abortion completely was approved on March 29, 1941.70

New Slovak Girls are the Foundation of the Slovak State Girls were expected to gain abilities to fulfill the role of a Slovak woman-mother in the family.71 So-called “fairies,” were Tatra girls and maidens preparing for the role of “conscious protectors of Slovak hearths, Slovak faith and language” and to become “new Slovak girls” who would grow up into brave women and devoted Slovak mothers.72 Girls as future wives and mothers were supposed to form a functional, religiously oriented, and happy family. Choosing the right partner for life was also an important issue, with the recommendation of a same religion spouse.73 Separating the upbringing of boys and girls was an important issue from the very beginning of the existence of the HM-D branch, in line with the politics of the state which canceled high school coeducation in July 1939 as well as coeducation in teacher’s academies in 1940.74 Gradually, schools for girls or at least separate rooms in school buildings were created. Girls and boys could meet together in Hlinka’s Youth only at public events and always under supervision.75 In September 1941, a magazine aimed at the Tatra girls and maidens started being published. The Slovak maiden was supposed to guide the girls on the way to national pride, loyalty to the nation, and to “good taste, health, natural beauty, practicality and skillfulness,” as well as simultaneously prepare them for “their future role in the Slovak family.”76 The 69 Slovak National Archives, F. The National Assembly of Slovak Republic, Kr. 104, Inv. No. 1245, II–6a/1–330. “Vládny návrh zákona o ochrane plodu, jeho vzniku a o zmene §§ 285 a 286 trestného zákona a §§ 423 až 427 vojenského trestného zákona.” 70 Act No. 66/1941 Slovak Code of Law on protection of the fetus, its conception, and the change of Criminal Code §§ 285 and 286 and Army Criminal Code §§ 423 to 427. 71 Štefánia Poláková, “Milé sestry vodkyne!,” Stráž, November–December, 1940, 55–57. 72 Margita Valková, “Slovenské dievčatá v HM,” Nová mládež, December, 1940, 318. 73 Nelica Slobodová, “O rodinnej výchove diev,” Stráž, February–March, 1944, 189–192. 74 Decree of the Government No. 168/1939 from July 11 1939 on the organization and administration of high schools § 11. Act No. 288/1940 Slovak Code of Law from October 29 1940 on teacher´s academies. 75 Margita Valková, “Slovenské dievčatá v  HM,” Stráž, December–January, 1942–1943, 110–111. 76 “Na cestu,” Slovenská deva, September, 1941, cover.

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magazine printed poems, didactic stories, practical advice, quizzes, and contests. The articles were supposed to entertain and inform girls while at the same time conveying idealized images of “a new Slovak maiden, a product of HM-D branch.” Alojz Macek, the leader of HM summarized it well: “The new Slovak maiden—that is a notion, a program. Harsh life requires a gentle, noble-minded yet strong Slovak woman and she must be raised in Hlinka’s youth organization.”77 The presentation of female ideals for girls and stereotypes was either direct (informative articles, advice, and practical counsel) or indirect (stories of Tatra girls and maidens). Girls were expected to be agreeable, smiling, willing to help, kindhearted, quiet, and neat and clean in appearance.78 Slovak maidens were to be diligent, hardworking, detail oriented, and resilient. Deep religious devotion, unshakable faith in God,79 and adherence to moral rules80 were crucial. The brave, religious and self-confident Slovak maiden was expected to be the main pillar and “safest guarantee of Slovak culture” and a “guardian of the spiritual values of the Slovak nation.”81 Therefore, the need for moral chastity and high-minded girls was often mentioned.82 Physical beauty and health played an important role in the life of the Slovak maiden. She was to be “healthy, with pink cheeks, [and] well-built” because health was seen as both “theirs and national treasure.”83 Girls were advised to mind their physical and mental “hygiene” and practice a “suitable” sport. Hlinka’s Youth aimed at developing physical activities and thus support the health of Slovak girls. HM-D was to teach the girls discipline, order, modesty, and endurance. At the same time, it was used to shape girls’ bodies, for which the preferred activity was folk dance.84 By contrast, summer walks, bathing, and swimming were not suitable for Tatra girls and maidens, since they were said to potentially cause immoral behavior.85

77 “Odkazy mládeži,” ibid., September, 1941, 2. 78 “Vieš, kedy budeš príjemná?,” ibid., January, 1944, 113. 79 Štefan Janega, “Buď mocnou jedľou, nie klátiacou sa trstinou!,” ibid., October, 1943, 28–29. 80 “Prečítaj, si sestra . . . ,” ibid., October, 1942, 26. 81 J. H., “Na stráži hodnôt ducha,” ibid., January, 1942, 83. 82 Štefan Janega, “Radujte sa v Pánu . . . ,” ibid., December 1943, 73–74. 83 “Musíš byť zdravá!,” ibid., January, 1942, 77. 84 E. M., “HM rozhýbala slovenskú dievčenskú telovýchovu, ibid., September, 1942, 6–7. 85 A. M., “Slová dievčenskej duši,” ibid., June, 1943, 155.

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“Wrong” fashions were criticized for their “robbing of good manners”; wearing Slovak national costume was encouraged.86 Magazine articles largely affirmed traditional female roles. The role of girls in the future of the Slovak nation was unambiguously defined. “Heroic maternity” was expected of girls. This did not only mean bringing a child into this world, but also the willingness to sacrifice said child for the good of the nation.87 The image of motherhood as a “holy service” was often foregrounded—a service that went hand in hand with the notion of duty. Motherhood was thus presented a duty, as “the most beautiful and noble meaning of woman’s life.” Tatra girls and maidens, then, were required to systematically prepare for motherhood.88 They were to be the “guardians of good manners, vessels of strong spirit.”89 It was assumed they would demonstrate their loyalty “to their only home—the Slovak state and . . . the Slovak blood.”90 Slovak maidens starting a new life in a family should remember that “their love only belongs to a Slovak and they should only form a Slovak family.” Their life goal was not only to have a family, but to have a Slovak family. There was, furthermore, a connection between a woman’s role as a wife and mother and her interest in household chores, such as cooking, preserving fruit, managing household expenses, sewing, and gardening. A natural inclination to these chores was regarded as part of the life of the Slovak maidens. A city environment was seen as problematic for girls, as there they might study or have jobs, and therefore not have time for housework.91 The city would undermine their destiny of raising children in the national spirit. (There had been similar ideas about girls’ education in nineteenth-century Slovak society, but Hlinka’s People’s Party took them to the ultimate extreme.) The press in this period also included “didactic stories” which conveyed ideologically correct political and social messages. The girls in these stories were depicted as brave, courageous, helpful, and self-sacrificing.92 In such romantic stories the heroines had to cope with the complications 86 Ibid. 87 “Slovenský vojak,” ibid., February, 1942, 94. 88 “Pripravujeme sa,” ibid., February, 1943, 85. 89 Margita Valková, “Čo od teba čaká národ,” ibid., March, 1943, 102. 90 Ibid. 91 “Milá je ženská práca,” ibid., October, 1942, 23. 92 Zlatica Horská, “Tatranky na stráži,” ibid., September, 1941, 4–6.

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of love affairs to finally find the true love of an honest young man or a bold Slovak soldier on the eastern military border.93 Educational, romantic, and ideologically colored stories were written to guide Tatra girls and maidens through the perils of growing up, and their finding their “new way of life.”94 The stories had happy endings, with the girls either finding ideal husbands or choosing to embark on a religious journey.

From General Role Models to Specific Examples The regime of the Slovak State imagined true women as the embodiment of the publicly presented ideal. For example, President Jozef Tiso’s mother served as a role model—a mother who was at once a brave woman, a good Catholic, and a housewife.95 Terézia Tisová was promoted as the ideal keeper of the family hearth, an exemplary Catholic woman, and loving mother of many children; she was naturally wise, sharp, provident, diligent, and tenacious.96 Slovak women could also identify with the wives of the significant representatives of the regime. Alžbeta Machová, the wife of the internal affairs minister, took an energetic interest in her husband’s busy political career; but her greater task was rearing her children and creating a harmonious family life.97 The wife of the minister of the economy, Ella Medrická, was a socially active woman, dedicating her energy mostly to charity and working for various clubs.98 The wife of the minister of education was depicted as a kind, goodhearted lady, meticulously maintaining the household and taking care of her little daughter.99 Gradually, the spotlight shifted to the wife of the prime minister Božena Tuková.100 When it came to the wives of important political figures, the press stressed their superior modesty, housekeeping skills, dedication to their children, but also their humility, and the simplicity of their appearance—for example, their lack of

93 Maruša Jusková, “Učiteľka Marta Kalická,” ibid., October, 1943, 38–39. Jela Jedlinská, “Elenine listy na front,” ibid., November, 1943, 62. 94 Jela Jedlinská, “Magdaléna,” ibid., May–June, 1944, 206–208. 95 Jozef K. Hrabovský, “U Tisovcov vo Veľkej Bytči,” Slovák, January 29, 1939, 5. 96 Hana Tureková-Tisová, “Naša mama,” Slovenská deva, October, 1943, 25–26. 97 V. Mikič, “Žena a politika: Rozhovor s pi. Alžbetou Machovou,” Nová žena, October 15, 1939, 4–6. 98 I. S., “Priateľské posedenie u pani Medrickej,” ibid., November 26, 1939, 4–5. 99 Prievidžanka, “Naša pani Siváková,” ibid., April 9, 1939, 8. 100 “Ako organizujú naše ženy zimnú pomoc,” ibid., February 2, 1941, 2–3.

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nail polish. These female representatives of the regime were thus presented as real-life manifestations of the new Slovak woman.

Conclusion When the image of a new Slovak woman was constructed, the Slovak State constructed it from a clearly defined conservative and patriarchal ideological blueprint. Defining the ideal of the new Slovak woman was an attempt by the regime to set itself apart from the Czechoslovak Republic, which had enabled the political and economic emancipation of Slovak women. The new, misogynist, regime wanted to exclude women from the public sphere and restrict them to the private sphere. Limiting them by using the aforementioned concept of biopower—which in the case of the Slovak State meant forbidding coeducation, trying to limit access to higher education, and firing married women teachers and clerks, as well as a complete ban on abortions—the regime disciplined and supervised the lives of women while also intruding on the private sphere. Supporters of National Socialist ideology were also eager to encourage the conservative ideal of the domestic angel, a woman who would find her true calling in the private spaces of kitchen, church, and childcare (Kinder, Küche, Kirche). The ideal Slovak woman was committed to motherhood, the devoted protector of her home and family, and unstinting in the succour she provided her husband. She was uncomplicated, religious, and hardworking. A submissive woman, unquestioningly bound by her husband’s wishes, she embodied every stereotypical feminine virtue: kind, smiling, traditional, tolerant, quiet, uncomplaining, almost invisible. This was the kind of woman to which girls were encouraged to aspire. The concept of a new Slovak woman was closest to becoming reality among the young women and girls who were members of the female branch of Hlinka’s Youth. As a part of their training in the organization, they prepared systematically for their future task. Emancipation and feminism, modern lifestyles, including smoking and wearing makeup as well as fashionable or expressive clothes, were unacceptable. Idealized images of the new Slovak woman were reproduced everywhere, including in magazine advice columns. The wives of leading representatives of the regime, including President Jozef Tiso’s own mother, served as women to imitate. The Slovak State aimed to establish a new social order, and by doing so, it also targeted women to create distance from the previous period of

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Czechoslovakia. As a result, an image of an ideal Slovak woman was re-introduced. The regime was inspired by an idealized historical imagery of a traditional rural Slovak woman in folk attire during field work, surrounded by children. Such an idea of a Slovak woman did not correspond to the harsh social reality of Slovak society in the twentieth century, but it was still present in literature and the fine arts.

Figure 4. The front page of the Hlinka’s Youth (Hlinkova  mládež) girls’ section magazine Slovenská deva (Slovak maiden) allows us to examine the Slovak regime’s imposition of its ideology on a generation of girls. Photo credit: Slovenská deva, October, 1943. Reprofoto: Eva Škorvanková.

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“Our mother organized it all”:1 The Role of Mothers of Sereď Camp in the Memories of Their Children2 Denisa Nešťáková

An analysis of the testimonies of those who survived the Holocaust as children allow us to step further away from the male-dominated narrative of the Holocaust. Aside from obtaining wider knowledge about the realities of the Holocaust as seen by children, their testimonies also allow us to better understand the experiences of adults. Research on children’s testimonies sheds more light on one of the substantial differences defining gendered experiences—motherhood. In this article I analyze children’s recollections as recorded in postwar testimonies, focusing on their perception of the role of mothers in Sereď camp.3 1 Testimony of Naftali F., m/1932. Interview conducted with and recorded by the author in Haifa on June 15, 2017. In this article I refer to testimonies by archival collection, year of birth, and gender of the interviewee (“f ” for female and “m” for male). I am aware of the limitation of this binary gender classification and would like to turn the reader’s attention to the extensive work of scholars on gender and the Holocaust, i.e., Anna Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” Jahrbuch Sexualitäten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), 86–110. 2 This article is the result of research financially supported by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris. 3 The name of the camp in Sereď changed several times during its existence.

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The lives of Jewish women, mothers in particular, in countries that became allies of Nazi Germany, such as Slovakia, dramatically changed in many ways. While Slovak authorities deported most of the local Jewish women and men from Slovakia, some were forced to work in Slovak labor camps. Imprisoned in Sereď camp, one of the three main camps for Jews in Slovakia, the inmates lived in an extreme environment when compared to their prewar lives, but most forced laborers did not perceived conditions in the camp as life-threatening.4 Nevertheless, the camp had a prison-like regime in which inmates experienced humiliation, malnutrition, violence, and sexual abuse, and witnessed the tragedy of deportations and, in some sporadic cases, death. As internment in Sereď did not completely disrupt prewar gender structures, many women tended to fulfill their former gender roles, while they were, at the same time, burdened by new responsibilities. Married women most often entered the camp as spouses and mothers. It was the man who was economically important—responsible providing for his family and most, significantly, protecting it from deportation. While, unofficially, some women acted as “heads of family” and brought in the money, others could not carry or did not want this new responsibility. In the following, I will consider the experiences of mothers in Sereď camp as depicted by their children in testimonies.5 Although these survivors saw the camp through children’s eyes, their ability to reflect on their experiences as adults offers a unique perspective on how their mothers lived. I offer a detailed analysis of two aspects of camp life which were frequent or significant for children. The first relates to the public sphere 4 Such statements were given by the former inmates when describing Sereď, its facilities, food rations, guards, etc. In comparison to other camps, such as Auschwitz, to which many inmates of Sereď were eventually deported, Sereď was a camp with “relatively bearable conditions.” 5 I try to avoid any discussions on topics such as motherhood as a constructed role, mother-child relationships, or the image of a “natural” bond between women and their children, prevalent in society in both the past and today. About motherhood and patriarchy see, e.g., Fiona Joy Green, “Patriarchal Ideology of Motherhood,” in Encyclopedia of Motherhood, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 2010), 969–970. The categories of “mothers,” “monsters,” “heroes,” and “whores” were introduced by Sjoberg and Gentry, who argue that these are central to the representation of women in various conflicts. See Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Monsters, Mothers, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Narratives (London: Zed, 2007). Similarly, see such categorization in the Holocaust in, e.g., Deb Waterhouse-Watson and Adam Brown, “Mothers, Monsters, Heroes and Whores: Reinscribing Patriarchy in European Holocaust Films,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 2 (2016): 142–157.

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and concerns mothers’ or women’s work; the second focuses on private life—female sexuality and family planning. I am particularly interested in investigating the collapse, change, or continuation of prewar gender roles of these Jewish women. Yet, as this study is based on a relatively small number of testimonies it should be seen as a foundation for further inquiry.

Current Research Gender and issues regarding Jewish women is still on the margins of Slovak historiography.6 While more “established” Jewish female heroes such as Gisi Fleischmann7 or Chaviva Reik8 have been permanently written into the narrative of the Holocaust in Slovakia, Jewish women without a “heroic” story remain almost invisible. Among the few scholars who have dealt with gender or women’s experience are Eva Škorvánková, Monika Vrzgulová, and the author of this article.9 Indeed, the first Slovak collection of articles focusing primarily on gender in World War II and the Holocaust was published only in 2016.10 The body of research, then, is rather meager in comparison to the rich scholarship on gender.11 This chapter aims to contribute 6 In order to avoid problems of terminology, I would like to point out that when I write about Slovak Jews, the Jewish community in Slovakia, or the Slovak Jewish community, I address all Jews in the territory of the Slovak Republic at the time of its existence from 1939 to 1945, regardless of their belonging to Slovak, Hungarian, German, or other nationality, their native language, or any other self-identification. 7 For more, see Katarína Hradská, Gizy Fleischmannová. Návrat nežiaduci (Bratislava: PT Marenčín, 2012); Denisa Nešťáková, “Gisi Fleischmann – przywódczyni Żydów na Słowacji podczas II wojnyświatowej,” in Elity i przedstawiciele społeczności żydowskiej podczas II wojny światowej, ed. Martyna Grądzka-Rejak and Aleksandra Namysło (Warsaw: IPN, 2017), 473–489. 8 For more, see Stanislav Mičev et al., Život a osobnosť Chavivy Reickovej – Zborník z medzinárodnej konferencie konanej v Banskej Bystrici dňa 21. novembra 2014 (Banská Bystrica: Múzeum Slovenského národného povstania, 2015). 9 Eva Škorvánková, “Život v koncentračnom tábore Osvienčim v spomienkach židovských žien z územia dnešného,” in Judaica et Holocaustica 6. Slovensko a nacistické koncentračné tábory, ed. Eduard Nižňanský and Michala Lônčíková (Bratislava: Stimul, 2015), 162–189; Monika Vrzgulová, We Saw the Holocaust (Bratislava: Nadácia Milana Šimečku, 2005); Denisa Nešťáková and Eduard Nižňanský, “Regulation of Sexual Relations between Jews and Non-Jews According to the Decree 198/1941 during the Slovak Republic,” in Judaica et Holocaustica 7: Women and WWII, ed. Denisa Nešťáková and Eduard Nižňanský (Bratislava: Hlbina, 2016), 89–117. 10 Nešťáková and Nižňanský, Judaica et Holocaustica 7. 11 There are several important works that discuss motherhood in the context of the Holocaust: Esther Hertzog, “Subjugated Motherhood and the Holocaust,” Dapim:

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to existing work on Jewish women during the Holocaust, thereby adding an underresearched perspective to the history of Slovak Jews and their persecution.

Unreliable Sources? This article includes the stories of children who were imprisoned in Sereď camp between February 1942 when the first families arrived and April 1, 1945 when the Red Army found the camp empty, as the Nazis had evacuated all its remaining inmates to Theresienstadt a day earlier. While scholars who focus on children’s experiences have finally allowed them to become the main narrators of their own stories, the actual testimonies of these survivors have not been satisfactorily linked to other elements of existence in the camps.12 Regardless of the limitations of any type of source, including the testimonies of survivors who were children during the Holocaust, such documents can tell us a great deal about the roles of women, and mothers in particular. Such testimonies do not only offer a different perspective, but can also uncover those realities about which mothers could not or did not speak. Nearly all of the testimonies and memoirs related to Sereď camp have not been systematically examined.13 There are a number of reasons for Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 1 (2016): 16–34 and articles included in Hertzog, Life, Death and Sacrifice. 12 For various reasons it is a complex issue to establish an age range that would be appropriate for all Jewish “children” during the Holocaust. Families entered Sereď camp from 1942 onwards. Thus, for this article, I decided to investigate the testimonies of children who were born between 1927 and 1936. For more about the history of childhood in context of the Holocaust, see Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933); Verena Buser, “Displaced Children 1945 and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration,” The Holocaust in History and Memory 7 (2014): 109–123; Boaz Cohen, “Research on Child Holocaust Survivors and DP children: Goals and Challenges,” in Freilegungen: Rebuilding Lives— Child Survivors and DP Children in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and Forced Labor, International Tracing Service Yearbook, vol. 7, ed. Henning Borggräfe, Akim Jah, Steffen Jost and Nina Ritz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 265–275; Joanna Beata Michlic, “Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Survival and Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust as Reflected in Early Postwar Recollections,” in Search and Research: Lectures and Papers (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008): 7–92. 13 In the context of the Holocaust in Slovakia, several crucial works by Monika Vrzgulová have employed testimonies of survivors as the main source: for example, Monika Vrzgulová, Deti holokaustu (Bratislava: Dokumentačné stredisko holokaustu, 2007). The only monograph on Sereď camp uses testimonies as supplementary, but not as a main

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this: many of these documents, scattered in multiply archives, have been overlooked, few official documents from the time contain children’s voices, and children were not taken into consideration when postwar politicians and scholars constructed their version of the Slovak Holocaust memory.14 To rectify this hole in the historical record I contextualize the testimonies of child survivors by citing relevant documents of Slovak authorities such as the Ministry of Interior and official documents and correspondence of the Jewish Center, a Slovak version of the Jewish Council, which are in the archival collections of the Slovak National Archive and the Yad Vashem Archives.15 Once contextualized, I believe that child testimonies become an important and useful historical source for researching daily life in the camp, major events there, and how adults reacted to the ongoing persecution. The main arguments of this article are supported by the testimonies of five persons who were children in camp Sereď between 1942 and 1945. These testimonies are in the Oral History Project of the Foundation of Milan Šimečka (NMŠ), Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), and the Visual History Archive (VHA) of the USC Shoah Foundation. The interviews with survivors were conducted in the 1990s. These testimonies disclosed responses that can be found in other children’s accounts, and thus represent common perceptions and experiences. So as not to avoid some important issues, I put these accounts into relation with additional testimonies.

source: see Ján Hlavinka and Eduard Nižňanský, Pracovný a koncentračný tábor v Seredi (Bratislava: DSH, 2009); for a new approach to research on Sereď camp’s society see Denisa Nešťáková, “‘Privileged’” Space or Site of Temporary Safety? Women and Men in the Sereď Camp,” in Places, Spaces, and Voids in the Holocaust, ed. Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátova (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021), 315–321. 14 On the creation of the national narrative in Slovakia and Slovak People’s courts, see Vanda Rajcan, “Anton Vašek, Head of the Interior Ministry’s 14th Department, His Responsibility, and Information about the Deportees,” in Uncovering the Shoah: Resistance of Jews and Their Efforts to Inform the World on Genocide: Proceedings of the International academic Conference Held on 26th August 2015 in Žilina (Bratislava: Historický ústav SAV and Praha: Mezinárodní křesťanské velvyslanectví Jeruzalém, 2016), 25–39. See also Rajčan’s dissertation-in-progress (at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL) “Unpopular Justice: Holocaust-related Crimes in Slovak People’s Courts, 1945–1947.” 15 For more about the Jewish Center, see Denisa Nešťáková, “The Jewish Centre and Labour Camps in Slovakia,” in Karoline Georg, Verena Meier, and Paula A. Oppermann, Between Collaboration and Resistance: Papers from the 21st Workshop on the History and Memory of National Socialist Camps and Extermination Sites (Berlin: Metropol, 2020), 117–145.

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The Slovak “Solution to the Jewish Question” and Sered’ Camp Antisemitism became a key element of Slovak politics when the Slovak Republic was established on March 14, 1939 with Catholic priest Jozef Tiso as president and Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSPP) as the ruling party. Even though Slovakia’s sovereignty and the integrity of its territory were in the hands of Nazi Germany,16 the persecution and murder of the Jews was “successfully” carried out thanks to Slovak anti-Jewish policies. Antisemitic laws legalized the liquidation of Jewish businesses and banned Jews from professions, leading to the swift pauperization of the Jewish community. Subsequently, the Slovak government decided to deport Jews living in the territory of Slovakia. Those who were not deported were made to do forced labor in Slovakia by the state.17 By September 1941, various governmental decrees and regulations had gradually imposed the obligation to work on all Jewish men and women from sixteen to sixty years of age.18 As the number of unemployed and dislocated Jewish citizens rose, labor camps were temporarily established to get labor out of those people who were no longer seen as “productive.” In 16 See Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Quinkert, and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Kooperation und Verbrechen. Formen der “Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003): 25–31; Stanislav Mičev, Slovenské národné povstanie 1944 (Banská Bystrica: Múzeum SNP, 2009): 125–137. 17 The first phase of the deportations from Slovakia was carried out from March 25 to October 20, 1942, in which almost fifty-eight thousand Jews from Slovakia were deported. The HSPP was a major actor in this phase of the deportations of Slovak Jewry. Between September 30, 1944 and March 31, 1945, the second phase of deportations occurred under German administration. Between 10,500 and 13,500 Jews were deported, and about 10,000 of them were killed or died due to the camp conditions. Jews as well as non-Jews were also killed in Slovakia by the Einsatzgruppe H, the Hlinka Guard, and Freiwillige Schutzstaffeln. See Hlavinka and Nižňanský, Pracovný a koncentračný tábor, 119–125; Ján Hlavinka, Eduard Nižňanský, and Radoslav Ragač, “Koncentračný tábor v Seredi vo svetle novoobjavených dokumentov (september 1944–marec 1945),” in Druhá vlna deportácií Židov zo Slovenska, ed. Viera Kováčová (Banská Bystrica: Múzeum SNP, 2010), 50–80. 18 For more about labor duty, see Ivan Kamenec, “Koncentračné a pracovné tábory pre rasove prenasledovaných občanov na Slovensku v rokoch 1938–1945,” in Terezínske listy 5 (1975): 12–25; Ivan Kamenec, “Nútená pracovná povinnosť ako súčasť politicke j a rasovej perzekúcie občanov I. Slovenskej republiky,” in Pracovné jednotky a útvary slovenskej armády 1939–1945. VI. Robotný prápor, ed. Dezider Tóth (Banská Bystrica: Zing Print, 1996), 19–24; Ivan Baka, Eduard Nižňanský, and Ivan Kamenec, Holokaust na Slovensku 5. Židovská pracovné tábory a strediská na Slovensku 1938–1944 (Bratislava: Nadacia Milana Šimecku, Židovska náboženská obec Bratislava, Vojenský Historický Ústav, 2004).

“Our mother organized it all”

other words, the camps permitted their inhabitants’ an existence until their emigration.19 The whole prison system was organized by gentile Slovaks, and the Hlinka Guards, Slovak gendarmerie, and Freiwillige Schutzstaffeln, recruited from the German minority in Slovakia, who oversaw the daily work of the Jewish (and Roma) forced laborers. In the town of Sereď, which is approximately fifty kilometers from Bratislava, rebuilding the existing army barracks into a forced labor camp for Jews began on September 18, 1941. Sereď, together with Nováky and Vyhne, were the three main labor and concentration camps in Slovakia. From the very beginning of 1942, the only Jewish newspaper Vestník Ústredne Židov (hereafter Vestník)20 that the state permitted published calls for its Jewish readers to enroll for placement in these labor camps in Slovakia.21 Many unemployed Jewish men, often in the name of their families, sent applications to the Jewish Center with requests to be interned in Sereď.22 By 1943, Sereď was the most profitable camp in Slovakia. Its annual income was approximately seventeen million Slovak crones (abbreviated Ks) (approximately 447.368 Euros) which, after all expenses are deducted, was two million Ks (approximately 52.631 Euros). The seemingly low profit was due to the fact that Sereď was self-sufficient and provided for all the requirements of its inmates and staff.23 The Jewish Center, however, contributed monthly subventions for social welfare and health care. Thanks to its involvement, Sereď was the first among the three main camps in Slovakia in which the inmates received salaries. By May 1943, the average wage per hour was no more than four Ks (approximately 0.11 Euros). This was about fifty percent of the daily average wage in Slovakia in 1943—7.78 Ks per

19 See, for example, Gila Fatranová, Boj o prežitie (Bratislava: SNM – Múzeum židovskej kultúry, 2007), 138; Nešťáková, “The Jewish Centre,” 117–145. 20 The English translation of the title would be Bulletin of the Jewish Center. 21 See Vestník, February 26, 1943, 1. For more about announcements and their influence on enrollment to Slovak labor camps, see Denisa Nešťáková, “Židovské reakcie na antisemitské postupy na Slovensku na stránkach Vestníka Ústredne Židov (1941– 1944),” in Judaica et Holocaustica 9. Propaganda antisemitizmu na Slovensku 1938–1945, ed. Eduard Nižňanský (Bratislava – Banská Bystrica – Zvolen: Univerzita Komenského, 2018), 25–54. 22 See the letters of enrolment, YVA M.5/85. 23 For more details about the turnover and profits of Sereď in 1942, 1943, and 1944, see SNA, Fund MV, Box 1, 570, and 579.

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hour (approximately 0.21 Euros) or 14.940 Ks per annum.24 Most of the earnings of inmates could be spent only in the camp store on basic items.25 However, salaries were not the motivation to enter the camp. Placement in the camp was perceived by the Jewish Center and many members of the Jewish community as a way to secure one’s family’s life in Slovakia.26 Though stripped of human rights, forced to work with no or only a very low salary, working in a camp such as Sereď meant possible security and protection from deportation. As one of the child survivors describes her time in Sereď: “We wanted to stay where we were, even though it was not marvelous. Everybody wanted to try to not to get to the transport.”27 From early 1942, after rebuilding and preparing the camp, entire families began entering the camp.

Families in Sered’ While there were numerous positions a woman could occupy in a prewar Jewish family, apart from some exceptions, the status of women was constant in relation to motherhood in Czechoslovakia throughout the 1930s.28 Thus, when the women entered Sereď camp, they did not arrive alone. Male heads of families, many of whom had lost their economic independence and prewar social status, arrived in the camp distressed and depleted together 24 For more information on the salaries of inmates, see Katarína Hradská, Holokaust na Slovensku 8. Ústredňa Židov (1940–1944). Dokumenty (Bratislava: Klemo, 2008), Doc. 147, 306–308. For more regarding the average wage in Slovakia in the 1940s, see Adam Šumichrast, “Analýza historiografie dejín robotníctva v slovenskom štáte (1939–1945) v období do roku 1989,” Studia Historica Nitriensia 23, no. 2 (2019): 259–292; Michal Barnovský, Sociálne triedy a revolučné premeny na Slovensku v rokoch 1944–1948 (Bratislava: Veda, 1978): 42. 25 The conversion into Euros is provided just for illustration. The conversions were calculated via DM-EURO-Rechner, accessed February 28, 2020, https://www.dm-eurorechner.de/die-reichsmark/. 26 For more about seeking safety in labor camps in Slovakia, see Nešťáková, “The Jewish Centre,” 117–145. See also Rudolf Vrba, Utekl jsem z Osvětimi (Prague: Sefer, 2007), 41. 27 Testimony of Gizela V., f/1934, YVA, O.93/35050. 28 There were major differences in Slovak Jewish communities. Additionally, Jewish religious affiliation in Slovakia was divided into three branches—Orthodox, Neolog, and Status Quo Ante—which were adapted in the successor states that had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. These characteristics of the Slovak Jewish community continued to exist during the wartime Slovak Republic. Yet the perception of a woman’s role as mother remained quite conservative in all of these communities. See Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 131–170.

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with their wives and children. Children were always part of camp society in Sereď. The camp, which functioned as a transit, concentration, and labor camp, accommodated families for different periods of time. Some people were taken there prior to deportation and stayed only several days without having their labor exploited. I will pay attention to those families with children who stayed in the camp for anything from several weeks to years, and who were usually forced laborers. Unlike most of the Jewish women and men who went through this camp, these forced laborers were not subjected to deportation to camps located on the territory of today’s Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, or Sobibor.29 In Sereď, which was designed to be, and indeed was, a profitable camp, children were not seen as cost-effective, but rather as “burdens.” Both mothers and fathers worked from early morning to late afternoon and thus childcare was needed. Therefore, first the inmates themselves, then the Jewish Center, and later the Slovak authorities organized nurseries, kindergartens, schools, and after-school work for older children.30 Child survivors recalled their education in the camp school, as well as games, bar mitzvas, and their first platonic loves. However, they also remembered forced labor, the brutality of the guards, and their fear of being separated from their parents as they witnessed deportations. In the case of the testimonies analyzed here, children remained either with their whole families or at least with one parent, usually the mother. The suddenly limited presence of their mothers, though, caused a shift in children’s perspectives on women’s roles.

Working Mothers In their prewar lives, many women were housewives and their duties were oriented to their families. Yet some women worked in offices, service, or family businesses. That said, in most cases women’s work outside the home

29 For more about the deportations of 1942 and the locations of deportees, see Eduard Nižňanský, ed., Holokaust na Slovensku. Zv. 6. Deportácie roku 1942 (Bratislava: Nadácia Milana Šimečku, 2005); Ján Hlavinka and Peter Salner, eds., Tábor smrti Sobibor. Dejiny a odkaz (Bratislava: PT Marenčín, DHS, 2019). 30 The Jewish Center had to provide finances for children’s facilities. For more on the establishment of the school and activities of children can be found in many testimonies. For historical documents, see YVA, M5/84.

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was thought undesirable or trivial.31 Similar opinions about women’s labor continued in the newly established camp society of Sereď. Vestník saw women’s work as domestic and focused on husband and children: “Oh the Jewish woman . . . she may even continue work in the barracks of the labor camp after compulsory labor. . . . The fatally exhausted father, tired from his worries, needs a fondle.”32 The article continues to list a Jewish woman’s jobs: taking care of her children, sick mother, and poor neighbor, all the while keeping her household clean and serving hot dinners. The piece ends: “This list of countless, ideal duties cannot frighten a real Jewish woman . . . yes, it is almost superhuman [übermenschlich, German in original—D. N.].”33 Vestník stressed the domestic role of women, reproducing gender stereotypes about the “weaker sex”: women were expected to be nurturing and dutiful caregivers. Thus, the Vestník article supports the thesis of Dalia Ofer who proposes that the role of the Jewish woman, from the very beginning of the persecution of Jews, was to absorb the suffering of her husband and children.34 In labor camps, women were similarly expected to keep up family spirits, on the assumption that the misery of children and husbands would lift at “home”—that retreat women were supposed to create. Generally, most camp income was earned through trades such as carpentry. However, the work of unqualified laborers, many of whom were women lacking any training, meant additional revenue for the camp. Their prewar roles as housewives, their dominance in private life, and absence in public life continued in the camps. Even when women were actively contributing to the profits of the camp by laboring in various workshops, their contribution still considered insignificant by the Slovak guards, the camp leadership, and sometimes their husbands. This attitude about the role of women in Sereď was often adopted by children too. Pavel G. came from an assimilated, but to some extent observant, family. Prior to his arrival in Sereď, his father had a carpentry business was therefore considered an expert in the camp’s furniture workshop. Due to his position, the family was somewhat protected from deportation. The father therefore was the head of 31 For more on the private and public life of Jewish women, see Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 50–61. About the status and gender roles of women in Slovakia during the Second World War see Eva Škorvánková, Strážkyňe rodinných kozubov? Ženy v ideológii a politike Slovenského štátu (Bratislava: Veda, 2020): 171–200. 32 M. H. “Jüdische Frauen,” Vestník, December 18, 1942, 4. 33 Ibid. 34 Dalia Ofer, “Motherhood under Siege,” in Hertzog, Life, Death and Sacrifice, 41–68.

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the household in every prewar sense: he was both provider and protector. However, while Pavel’s mother had been a  housewife in her former life, in the camp she had to become “profitable” as well. As soon as her baby daughter was old enough for the Sereď nursery, Pavel’s mother was forced to begin camp work. At first, she made net bags, thereby also becoming a provider for the family to some extent. According Pavel G., his father’s job was fundamental for maintaining the family’s existence, and also allowed them to enjoy some privileges, such as a higher salary or bigger private room for the family. On the other hand, he considered his mother’s work as unimportant, bringing in “some little money to buy some essentials from the camp shop, such as a soap.”35 Later on, in September 1942, Pavel witnessed his mother have a nervous breakdown, when his maternal grandmother was deported from Sereď. Pavel—a seven-year-old child—could not fully comprehend that his mother was distraught. However, he testified that the deportation of his grandmother affected his mother’s work and even her day-to-day functioning in the family. While Pavel did not describe how his mother’s distress affected him, he made it clear that his mother never recovered from the loss of her mother and became apathetic and suicidal. Some children found their mother’s new occupation both surprising and empowering. Kitty F. arrived in Sereď in autumn 1944 when the SS took over the camp and changed all the rules in place while the Slovak’s ran the camp. Kitty’s mother had been a housewife in a wealthy household and came from a rich family in Budapest. According to her daughter, she was a very snobbish lady who—though Jewish herself—associated everything Jewish with poverty. She volunteered in the camp laundry in Sereď even though she had never stepped inside a  laundry room before. Kitty’s mother made friends with Jewish women she would once never have wanted to know. Kitty recalled: “I was stunned. My mother, . . . the arrogant Mrs. H., became somebody with great Star of David, getting up at six in the morning.”36 Kitty’s father, who was a merchant before the war, struggled to support the family in the camp, as his injury from World War I made hard manual labor impossible.37 The family was able to stay together in Sereď for longer than others because Kitty’s mother’s was “somebody” in the hierarchy of 35 Testimony of Pavel G., m/1935, YVA, O.93/17333. 36 Testimony of Kitty F., f/1927, YVA O.93/1677. 37 Ibid.

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the camp thanks to her work and the social contacts she built up through it. This example shows that a woman who mobilized her resources and skills in a time of crisis could benefit her family. While Pavel’s father remained the main provider and protector of the family in Sereď because of his prewar position, Kitty’s mother achieved her position from a standing start. Some women in Sereď saw their prewar employment and involvement in public life continue. Gisela V. was eight when she and her mother entered the camp. Prior to their arrival, her father was already preparing the furniture workshop the camp. Gisela was the only child of her middle-class, observant parents who kept kosher as long as it was possible. She described her mother as being “very capable”38 when speaking about her prewar employment in a family shop. In Sereď, Gisela’s mother became the principal of a workshop in which prisoners manufactured hats. Gisela recalled her mother having contact with the guards and managing to obtain a pass to leave the camp in order to make business trips.39 From Gisela’s testimony, it is clear that her mother, although placed in a very different social and economic situation in the camp, was nevertheless able to continue using and performing her skills as a businesswoman in the camp. As a result, she was essential for her family’s income and protection. The testimonies above show how three very different women responded to working life in Sereď. Kitty’s perception of her father’s and mother’s work suggests a shift, if not collapse, of the prewar man’s expected role as provider; it shows women’s ability to create a new social network as a survival strategy; and it demonstrates that not all inmates were able to make such necessary adjustments. Some, such as Kitty’s father, for instance, were unable to contribute much to their family due to their physical handicaps. Pavel’s father, on the other hand, who had a trade the camp valued, secured his family some privileges. As Pavel’s mother had a newborn and a toddler to take care of, she was in a more vulnerable position. Her experiences, as described by her son, can stand as an example of the preservation of prewar gender roles. Furthermore, a certain continuation of women’s economic activity can be seen in Sereď, illustrated by the case of Gisela’s mother who was able to apply her prewar skills to life in Sereď. It is also worth noting that Sereď included families with missing fathers. Men might be in hiding, fighting with the partisans, or already deported. 38 Testimony of Gisela V., f/1934, YVA, O.93/35050. 39 Ibid.

“Our mother organized it all”

This meant that mothers gained the right to represent their children legally before officials, previously the right of their husbands.40 These women had to provide for and protect their families, making their lives within the camp extremely difficult. Alone without their husbands and their prewar networks, such women were sometimes bullied by other inmates.41 If a single mother could not overcome her ingrained prewar gender identity, she would likely experience violence and sexual assault at the hands of both guards and other prisoners, and face rapid deportation.

Motherhood and Sexuality Even though most families stayed together in Sereď, they were already under enormous pressure in the Slovak Republic during the war. Antisemitic laws which substantially restricted Jewish daily life in prewar Czechoslovakia and the progressively worsening financial situation of Jewish families certainly effected changes in reproductive behavior, including the avoidance of pregnancy or increase in abortions. According to Trude Maurer, such adjustments to family planning can be viewed as a sign that Jews no longer saw a future for their children in countries that were introducing antisemitic legal regulations.42 Nevertheless, there were still Jewish women who entered Sereď camp with newborns, or became pregnant and gave birth in the Jewish hospital which was moved to camp in July 1942.43 While more and more women and couples decided to not have children, the Jewish elites that ran the Jewish Center still encouraged parenthood. Lacking reliable information about the seriousness of the persecution, a journalist called Ernest László wrote in Vestník that protecting children was the “highest value” and insisted they were the future of the Jewish community. He further argued that the protection and education of children was deeply rooted in Judaism. According to László, the main role of all men 40 Such cases can be tracked in trials—for example, ŠA Bratislava, Fund Krajský súd v Bratislave, III. manipulačné obdobie, Trestné spisy TK, Tmk, MI IV (1940–1945), File 479/1944; or in testimonies—for example, the testimony of Bibiana W., f/1932, VHA, 17604. 41 According to the testimony of Viola B., f/1936, YVA, O.93/2815. 42 About similar behavior in Nazi Germany, see Trude Maurer, “From Everyday Life to a State of Emergency: Jews in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 271–376. 43 For more information on the Jewish hospital in Sereď, see SNA, Fund MV, Box 421.

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who were also parents was to educate their children in mitzvot, Judaism’s 613 precepts and commandments. Meanwhile, the main role of the mother was to give birth: A child is the blessing God has given to mankind. This was claimed by Jews, and this view is reflected in the Bible in every step. A childless woman is inferior, even if she is a wife as Sarah was, she was not valued. Her maid Hagar who gave birth to her husband Abraham’s child was more respected than Sarah. Therefore, the foremothers asked for children to be honored and blessed by God. That is why Rachel roared, desiring to die rather than endure the shame of infertility!44 In the context of lowering the birth rate among the community, the religious authorities within the Jewish Center decided to spread their opinions with an intention to encourage Jewish men and women to expand their families. No actual impact, however, can be detected in the birth rate. In their testimonies, child survivors often asserted their opinions on, and judgments of, the their parents. Yet, as one would expect, few of the child survivors reflect on sexuality of their parents. Pavel G.’s testimony does contain some details on the reproductive behavior of women—including pregnancy, birth, and having a newborn in the camp. Pavel’s family entered Sereď in spring 1942 with two children—six-year-old Pavel and a three-month-old girl. He remembered his sister’s birth and presence in the camp as a burden: “When my sister was born—for God sake what kind of an idea was to have a child in that time?!”45 For a short time, the whole family stayed in one room together with an elderly man and his teenage daughter. Pavel G. commented on the difficultly of this new kind of family arrangement in the camp. Even though the people in the room tried to be as kind and respectful towards each other as possible, living in such a shared space was desperately hard. He recalled the endless cries of his sister at night, adding, “if I only could, I don’t even know what I would have done with that sister of mine.”46 Women’s pregnancies were usually viewed negatively by their children. They usually accepted the view of camp society that it was solely the woman’s job to avoid pregnancy, that the father had 44 Ernest László, “Ochrana detí u Židov,” Vestník, June 13, 1941, 6. 45 Testimony of Pavel G., m/1935, YVA, O.93/17333. 46 Ibid.

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no responsibility at all in the matter. In short, mothers were to blame for bringing infants into the wretched world of the camp. In the testimonies, sexually active men were perceived as normal and socially acceptable, whereas women who pursued a sex life in Sereď had “loose morals.”47 As was common in the strictly patriarchal society of the 1940s, children linked the moral standing mothers with their sexual behavior. For example, eleven-year-old Bibiana W. entered Sereď without her father, who had been sent to another camp. She remained with her older sister and mother. Bibiana’s view of Sereď was very much influenced by the fact that her already strongly assimilated middle-class family had converted to Catholicism in the early 1940s. She was one of a small number of other prisoners who were allowed to visit the church in Sereď for Sunday services. In her description of the “loosening morals” of the camp, she suggests her single mother maintained her morals through self-discipline: “It was such a place where people lost their shyness and dignity. There were some of those who kept them. Among them was my mother.”48 Though Bibiana found many flaws in the behavior of adults in Sereď, she emphasized the relationship between sexual conduct and sinfulness, most probably due to her adherence to Catholic dogma, If children avoided speaking about their parents’ sexuality, they frequently told stories that had some bearing on the sexual behavior of adults in the camp, especially when broaching the subjects of young families who lacked privacy and young people in love.49 Men and women became couples, people got married, and children were born in the camp.50 One cannot assume that sex was always consensual in these and other cases, however. 47 For more about the “sexual licentiousness” in Sereď recorded in the diary of the rabbi Abraham-Abba (Armin) Frieder, see Emanuel Frieder, To Deliver Their Souls: The Struggle of a Young Rabbi during the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), 122. For more on the double standards applied to Jewish men and women in camps, see Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–533. See also work on the intersection of Holocaust and gender studies by feminist scholars such as Joan Ringelheim, Marion Kaplan, Dalia Ofer, Lenore Weitzman, and Atina Grossmann. 48 Testimony of Bibiana W., f/1932, VHA 17604. 49 See, for example, the testimony of Naftali F., m/1932. Interview conducted with and recorded by the author in Haifa on June 15, 2017. 50 About new relationships and the sexuality of teenagers and young adults, see for example the testimony of Eva D., f/1925 YVA, O.93/7383014 and the testimony of Berthold K., m/1922 YVA, O.93/7382836, as well as Testimony of Akiva N., m/1922, NMŠ, 134. About marriages in Sereď, see “Chýrnik,” Vestník, May 7, 1943, 3; about children born in Sereď, see USHMM, 2012.491.1.

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Sexual assault and rape were not unusual in Sereď, but none of the young child survivors examined here mention sexual violence—they either did not know about it or decided not to talk about it.51 Indeed, as Annabelle Baldwin points out, “the silence surrounding sexual violence should not be viewed as a reflection of the rarity of experience, but as a result of many different factors.”52 Therefore those children who might have witnessed sexualized violence either could not integrate it with their worldview or decided to remain silent. Undoubtely, the postwar stigmatization of Jewish victims and survivors of sexual violence played an important role in affecting the testimonies of survivors; those child survivors who did know that what they had seen was sexual violence decided not to talk about it because of the combination of stigma, shame, or marginalization of the topic by society and, indeed, scholars.53 This analysis of a small number of testimonies of child Holocaust survivors shows that children—testifying as adults—often adopted patriarchal understandings of women and female sexuality in context of the persecution of European Jewry.54 Such a continuation of often misogynist perceptions of women have had a major impact on the collective memory of the Holocaust. There is an urgent need, then, to critically reexamine the ideas about gender, women, women’s sexuality in testimonies—something that that has been neglected for far too long.55

51 There are numerous testimonies about sexual abuse and violence in Sereď described by teenagers and young adults. See for example the testimony of Eva G., f/1929, YVA, O.93/2723, or Terézia Ch., f/1922, YVA, O.93/23554. For several decades now, scholars have been researching the topic of sexual violence against Jewish women. See, for example, Helga Amesberger, Brigitte Halbmayr, and Katrin Auer, Sexualisierte Gewalt: Weibliche Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2004). 52 Annabelle Baldwin, “Sexual Violence and the Holocaust: Reflections on Memory and Witness Testimony,” Holocaust Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 114 53 See, for example, Zoë Waxman, “Rape and Sexual Abuse in Hiding,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2010), 124–135; on the scholarly criticism, see for instance, Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 741–761. 54 About patriarchal views on motherhood, see Green, “Patriarchal Ideology of Motherhood,” 969–970. 55 For more about sexuality and the Holocaust see, for example, Hájková, “Sexual Barter”: 503–533; Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe. A  Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

“Our mother organized it all”

Conclusion Thanks to the work of feminist historians, the initial state of Holocaust research and the male-dominated canon of testimonies and literature has moved towards research that focuses on women. Recent writing has stressed the fundamental impact of motherhood on life during the Holocaust. In this article, I have demonstrated the value of in-depth textual analysis of child eyewitness’s testimonies for uncovering the diverse roles of women in the camps. By considering two aspects of public and private life, namely work and sexuality, this article describes some representative experiences of women. I argue that with this kind of study we can better understand the ways women experienced, and dealt with, their new social realities. Camps like Sereď contained societies forced to rapidly accommodate profound differences from prewar life, societies in which people now had to exist, every day, with the threat of arbitrary death. While my examination of child survivors’ testimonies demonstrates the wide range of shifts in prewar gender roles, it also shows the difficulties of leaving them behind and the various strategies employed to adapt to life in the Sereď camp. Yet, it also proves that the change or adjustment of female gender roles did not only affect their role as mothers. Drawing my conclusions from the analysis of children’s testimonies, it could be argued that Sereď did not strengthen prewar gender roles. On the contrary, by forcing women into workplaces, and thus public life to some extent, Sereď was a threat to the prewar family in which men were breadwinners and women were caregivers. Such key findings based on the analysis of child survivors’ accounts then suggest that further studies these testimonies beyond research on children’s own experiences should be encouraged and can result in more nuanced assessments of Jewish experience during the Holocaust. These testimonies offer a new lens on the society of Sereď camp, and thus provide a greater understanding of the lives of hundreds of Jewish women and their specific experiences in this particular physical place and social space of internment during the Holocaust. Research on the testimonies of child survivors, then, may open up new paths for work in Holocaust studies, especially on places where not many documents and survivors’ accounts were exist, places perceived as peripheral and that are neglected in the historical literature.

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Figure 5. The kindergarten for children of employed women in Sereď camp started to operate in late 1942. Similar pictures were taken for propaganda reasons by the Jewish Centre. Such pictures were either used in the local Slovak press to justify the internment of Jews in camps, or employees of the Jewish Centre sent them to various Jewish organizations based in countries which were not allies of or occupied by Nazi Germany to request funding for improving conditions in Slovak camps. Photo credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archives, Archival signature 3984/11.

6

Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 19391 Marína Zavacká

The detention camp in Ilava, Slovakia, began operating at the end of March 1939. In contrast to political prisoners, detainees were held in the camp without due process—and in such cases all that was required was for the Ministry of the Interior to accuse an individual of “obstructing the building of the State.” Both supporters and opponents of the ruling Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (Ľudák) regime openly referred to it as a “concentration camp,” thus acknowledging that it was modelled on the camps that the Nazis built for their political adversaries upon seizing power.2 This article explores the initial phase of the development and functioning of the Ilava detention camp, which operated from 1939 to 1945 in the wartime Slovak state. Drawing for the most part on Mária Janšáková’s memoir, it focuses on the camp’s female inmates. Analyzing their living conditions and the reasons for their detainment, it shows how and why women’s position was specific in comparison with their male counterparts.

1 The chapter is a result of the project VEGA 2/0140/18, Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences. 2 “Biľagovaní! Slovenská vláda zúčtovala s národniarskymi rozvratníkmi. ‘Samostatná’ politika za cudzie peniaze. Pripravujú sa koncentračné tábory,” Slovák, November 26, 1938, 3.

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Sources This article reads several memoirs that were published just after World War II. The most thorough woman’s account of life in the Ilava camp was written by Mária Janšáková and appeared in 1946.3 In about sixty pages, Janšáková describes her two-month internment in autumn 1939. There are also two extensive memoirs by men that cover the same period—one by Elo Šándor (a left-wing bank clerk from a Protestant family, who was interested in Soviet culture)4 and another by Ján Gál-Podďumbiersky (a democratically oriented Catholic journalist and cultural activist, who worked as a notary).5 Detainment in Ilava is also briefly described in other memoirs and correspondence, such as the autobiography of the surgeon and writer Hela Volanská, a Polish Jew by origin and a Communist by belief.6 But in most biographies by former inmates—which often include accounts of persecution during the Holocaust, the Nazi suppression of the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, or the horrors of the Stalinist 1950s—recollections of Ilava camp are few and far between. Those institutional documents from Ilava which survived deliberate destruction at the end of the war,7 as well as the postwar chaos and the Communist regime’s refiling and culls are accessible in the Ministry of Interior’s collection in the Slovak National Archives. While interest in 3 Mária Janšáková, Cela č. 20 (Bratislava: B. Buocik, 1946). The edited version of Janšáková’s memoir, with an extensive introduction, was published in 2018 as Marína Zavacká, Ľudácka prevýchova: Mária Janšáková v Ilave roku 1939 a jej Cela č. 20 (Bratislava: Artforum, 2018). This chapter relates to the original publication from 1946. 4 Elo Šándor, Ilava. Zážitky z policajného lapáku a z koncentračného tábora z čias, keď sa rodila naša sloboda (Brno: Mír, 1947). 5 Ján Gál-Podďumbiersky, Z kalicha utrpenia. Rozpomienky na zážitky v koncentračnom tábore v Ilave (Komárno: self-published, 1947). 6 Hela Volanská, Ako na cudzej svadbe (Bratislava: Marenčin PT, 2009), 136. Volanská’s memoir was first published as “samizdat” Concordia (Praha: Edice Petlice, 1987); in 1990, a German translation was published under her maiden name: Chaja Wolfowitz, Wie auf einer fremden Hochzeit (Hamburg: Gerold & Appel, 1990). 7 According to J. Vicen, most of the institutional documents were destroyed in March 1945 during the evacuation to Germany, on the orders of Pavel Denk, the last head of the Slovak Central State Security Office. See Jozef Vicen, “K problematike Zaisťovacieho tábora Ilava v rokoch 1939–1945 (Perzekučno-represívny prostriedok),” in Slovenská republika očami mladých historikov IV, ed. Michal Šmigel and Peter Mičko (Banská Bystrica: UMB, 2005), 140–141. However, according to the postwar testimonies of some of its staff, the orders were not carried out completely or even at all. The remaining documents were seized by the Communist secret police. Matej Medvecký, Spravodajské eso Slovenského štátu: Kauza Imrich Sucký (Bratislava: ÚPN, 2007), 54–55.

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concentration and labor camps built specifically for Jews, such as Sereď8 and Nováky,9 remains strong, attention rapidly shifted away from wartime political persecution in Slovakia after 1989. There were two reasons for this marked change: 1. Communist scholars before 1989 had completely appropriated the topic as part of the suppression of the historical memory of the democratic (that is, non-Communist) anti-Ľudák opposition; 2. writing that did focus on the wartime Ľudák regime was largely produced by proĽudák activists-in-exile. As a result, there is neither specialist work on the Ilava camp nor is there a database of its inmates.10 If Maria Janšáková’s memoir initially seems brief and less dramatic than more “popular” and well-known memoirs from the period, its immediacy is of great value. Written in late autumn of 1939 after her return from Ilava, it bears no signs of postwar rewriting. By comparing her experiences solely with her life before, rather than after, internment, she depicts the shock of someone witnessing the rapid collapse of a democracy.

The Ilava Detention Camp The Ilava camp, about 150 kilometers northeast of Bratislava, operated from the end of March 1939 until the end of the war.11 The town was already known for the state prison that was founded there in the nineteenth century.12 Inspired by the early concentration camps of Nazi Germany,13 the ruling Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party’s representatives established the Ilava 8 Ján Hlavinka and Eduard Nižňanský, Pracovný a koncentračný tábor v Seredi 1941–1945 (Bratislava: DSH, 2009). 9 Igor Baka, Židovský tabor v Novákoch 1941–1944 (Bratislava: ZingPrint, 2001). 10 For brief account on the history of Ilava camp see Jozef Vicen, “K problematike Zaisťovacieho tábora Ilava v rokoch 1939–1945,” 135–143. 11 The camp functioned until Ilava was liberated on April 24, 1945; but from September 1944, it was directly controlled by the German security services. The quoted statistical estimates, then, apply to 1939–1944. Vicen, “K problematike Zaisťovacieho tábora Ilava,” 140–141. 12 Formerly a fortress, the building was a monastery in the eighteenth century. At the end of 1938, one of the prison buildings was given over to a youth reformatory which had been relocated from the town Košice/Kassa due to border changes. With the addition of the detention camp, the fortress now housed three institutions that operated at the same time. See Alexander Balucha, Hrad a  väznica Ilava: od založenia po súčasnosť (Ilava: Ústav na výkon trestu odňatia slobody a Ústav na výkon väzby, 2019). 13 Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann, “Before Auschwitz: The Formation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–9,” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (July 2010): 515–534.

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camp within two weeks of the proclamation of the wartime Slovak State.14 The legal framework of the camp was defined by the governmental edict N. 32/1939 Sl. z. “on detainment of enemies of the Slovak State,”15 issued on March 24, 1939. Though the official date of the camp’s foundation was April 2, 1939, the first group of inmates had already been transported to Ilava at the end of March. The arrest warrant of the first female detainee was issued on April 1, 1939.16 Within a dense system of camps for people targeted on racist or social grounds, Ilava remained the only camp in Slovakia intended specifically for political opponents.17 In contrast to regular prisoners, including those tried for political offenses, the detainees were held in the camp without any judicial process. They were deprived of their right to counsel, defense, and appeal. No proper formulation of an indictment was required, and some cases were not even formally investigated. Detainees were not provided with information about the duration of, or reasons, for their detention, and they were not advised on how to regain their freedom. Edict N.  32/1939 Sl. z. stated that detainment in Ilava was for individuals whose current or previous activities “raised concern” that they intended to “obstruct the building of the Slovak State.”18 The camp, then, existed to both prevent inmates engaging in activities the state believed they were planning and to deter the rest of population from even thinking about dissent. The standard duration of detainment was four to eight weeks. However, some people were released within days, while others were interned for years. According to postwar estimates, from the spring of 1939 until the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 (when the country was directly occupied by the Third Reich) over three thousand 14 For the general context of the wartime Slovak state see, e.g., Elena Mannová, Conscise History of Slovakia (Bratislava: AEP, 2000); Jozef Lettrich, The History of Modern Slovakia (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955); James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 15 Vládne nariadenie č. 32/1939 Sl. z. o zaisťovacom uväznení nepriateľov Slovenského štátu, from March 24, 1939. 16 Slovak National Archives (SNA), fund (f.) 209, box (b.) 106, unit (u.) 58, warrant for Dr. Jozef Šmida, Anna Styková, and Aurel Styk. 17 Geoffrey P. Megargee and Joseph R. White, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. 3, Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2019), 842–893. 18 Vládne nariadenie č. 32/1939 Sl. z., § 1.

Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 1939

inmates in total were detained in the Ilava camp.19 Due to a lack of data, we can only estimate that female detainees were less than ten percent of the total number of inmates. While prisons were managed by “inherited” staff affiliated with the Ministry of Justice, an institution that for decades had been working hard to improve conditions for inmates,20 Ilava camp was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior. The camp’s workers were primarily recruited from the police and the Hlinka Guard. In a departure from Europe’s long-established humanist principles, respecting the special status of political prisoners, who were traditionally allowed to order their own meals, keep regular correspondence and receive family visits, and were not limited in intellectual activities, such as reading, writing, translating or studying in general, detainees were deprived of all of these benefits.21

Reasons for Detainment As a newly introduced repressive act, detention in the Ilava camp had multiple consequences for the broader sphere of measures aimed at controlling the public. The carefully chosen composition of the very first transport to Ilava, dispatched from Bratislava on March 29, 1939, served as a demonstration that no one’s prewar social standing exempted them from the new political order’s rules. The first dozen detainees included veteran Social Democratic senators, journalists, a sociology professor, a nonconformist Catholic priest, and even the leader of the Protestant Slovak National Party, who had resisted its imposed unification with the ruling People’s Party.22 The main reason Mária Janšáková was detained remains unclear. While presenting her with an easily refutable denunciation concerning her alleged public statements, the police inspector who was “investigating” her admitted that he did not know why he had to arrest her. He complained to her that he “would prefer being at the front rather than arresting people,

19 Ivan Daxner, Ľudáctvo pred Národným súdom 1945–1947 (Bratislava: SAV, 1961), 89. The number of 2,354 persons related to the date May 1, 1944 is mentioned in SNA, f. Národný súd, b. 76. 20 Clara Leiser, “A Director of a Nazi Prison Speaks Out,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology [1939–1951] 29, no. 3 (September–October, 1938): 345–352. 21 Gál-Podďumbiersky, Z kalicha utrpenia, 57, 98. 22 SNA, f. 209, b. 418, u. 65.

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especially women” and advised her that she should “just confess something” to speed up the whole case.23 According to members of her family, as well as the opinions of some of her contemporaries, Janšáková was most likely selected for her hostage value. The Ľudáks could use her to force her husband Štefan Janšák—a highly skilled construction engineer and geodesist. A ministerial advisor, Janšák had participated in the demarcation of Slovakia’s border with Hungary both after 1918 and 1938. In between, he had led the ministerial department of public works in Bratislava, continuing in this position even after the proclamation of the Slovak State. His loyalties were unswervingly democratic and pro-Czechoslovak, but with his wife behind bars Janšák found himself in an impossible position. He had to humbly ask for permission to send her vitamins and a warmer blanket so she could retain health in her moldy cell, and beg for her release. Janšáková detention is outstanding also because her profile almost perfectly matched the ideal citizen promoted by the regime. She was a Slovak, a Catholic, a caring mother, and an educated and socially active wife married to a “merited Slovak,” who had been tried and sentenced for his nationalist activism before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. She had continuously supported her husband in his professional and social activities. That said, while on the one hand, her position among traditional elites was strong and stable, on the other her family was known for dissenting from the Ľudák regime. Her detainment was reported in the official media as the “arrest of the wife of the governmental counselor.”24 From the outset of the camp’s operation the social composition of women inmates was broad and any “political” dimension to an individual’s alleged offenses was often difficult to see. In many cases, women were arrested together with some male members of their families, be it their husband, father, or brother, who were usually perceived as the primary targets. The first female inmate of Ilava, Slovak National Theater actor Hana Styková, was sent to the camp on April 2, 1939, for her “daring” attempted visit to her cousin, who came to Ilava with the very first group of detainees two days before.25

23 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 16. 24 Slovenská Pravda, September 19, 1939, 3. 25 Ján Ursíny, Spomienky na Slovenské národné povstanie (Liptovský Mikuláš: Tranoscius, 1994), 30–31.

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Detention frequently resulted from denouncements rooted in a neighbor’s petty malice. Janšáková’s memoirs record the case of a retired eightyyear-old female teacher and veteran member of the People’s Party Janka Buday, who was denounced by her dismissed maid. She had been overheard privately describing the quality of speeches delivered by governmental representatives as “low,” “revealing shallowness, lack of education, deficiency in conscientiousness and responsibility.”26 This comment on rising aggressiveness in media and the decay of civilized behavior in public space was classified by the authorities as “critical about the government.”27 Holding a teaching position, even simply having a connection to education, increased the risk of being denounced. Since the beginning of 1939, in accordance with a new “pro-family” policy of the Ľudák regime, hundreds of female teachers had been forced to vacate their jobs for men.28 This policy had hurt the professional pride and family welfare of many, and had also generated both quiet and full-voiced complaint. An individual women’s detainment was often due to a comment about economic hardship when unwisely talking to a malevolent neighbor or in front of strangers in a rations line. The new regime classified such remarks as unlicensed “government criticism.” Janšáková describes meeting a mechanic’s wife from the city of Nitra, who had already served two months for complaining to her neighbor that for a whole week she had been unsuccessfully trying to get a bit of fat to make roux soup for her children. In the woman’s opinion, fat could be imported from Hungary, where—she was sure—it was a surplus commodity. Apparently, “the next day a policeman came” and escorted her to Ilava just as she was, “in a dirty skirt and an apron.” Since then, the woman had heard anything about her husband or their three small children.29

26 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 77–78. 27 Ibid. 28 Eva Škorvanková, “Späť do kuchýň, kostolov a k deťom. Ženy počas autonómie 1938– 1939,” Forum Historiae 13, no. 1 (2019): 19–39. Marína Zavacká, “Crossing Sisters: Patterns of Protest in the Journal of the Catholic Union of Slovak Women during the Second World War,” Social History 37, no. 4, (2012): 425–451. The career prospects of dismissed married female teachers opened up once again after number of male teachers were dispatched to the Eastern front. See also the article by Eva Škorvánková in this volume. 29 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 55–56.

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Detained women were likely to have a central role in the families from which they were forcibly separated.30 This means that they not only secured food for their families, but they were also responsible for looking after their health.31 An artificially perpetuated lack of information concerning the daily survival of their dependents remaining at home, be it children or the elderly, was enormously distressing for detainees, particularly for those whose husbands were absent when they were arrested. Besides listening to the life stories of those she knew personally in Ilava, Janšáková also occasionally learned about women in the camp whom she had not met. Memories informally preserved as anecdotes were passed on by inmates detained prior to her arrival; and these stories evolved into a “folk” history of the camp. These histories serve as valuable sources when reconstructing the various reasons women were held in the Ilava camp. They provide a good idea of the class composition and geographic diversity of the women in the camp. For example, in the women’s voiced dreams about the first meal they wanted to eat on release they revealed “all tastes of the former monarchy, from Romanian borders to the town of Lehár’s operettas on the blue Danube.”32 When the camp became temporarily overcrowded, Janšáková was assigned a cellmate for a few nights. Mrs. Penzová, a mother of four and the widow of a brewery employee, had earned her living by sewing for neighbors and baking for weddings, and then acquired a job at the post office. After the proclamation of the Slovak State, she had been accused of being a “Czechoslovak” by somebody who was after her job, and dismissed. She pointed out that she had been deported to Ilava after the minister of the interior had given a speech on the need for a general cleansing of society— an announcement that a wave of repression against political opponents of the regime was imminent.33 She was desperate, not knowing the destiny of her old mother and children, two of whom were still underage.34 Another of their fellow inmates was Mária Klopfstocková, who said that to her mother’s 30 Stephen Ginn, “Women prisoners,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 346, no. 7891 (2013): 22–24. 31 N. Douglas, E. Plugge, and R. Fitzpatrick, “The Impact of Imprisonment on Health: What Do Women Prisoners Say?” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 63, no. 9 (2009): 750. 32 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 73. 33 Alexander Mach, “Ide sa čistiť na všetkých stranách!,” September 8, 1939, transcript of a radio broadcast, Slovák, September 10, 1939, 2. 34 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 41–42.

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dismay she had married a Jew, “despite receiving a Catholic-school education,” and that she had earned her living by renting three rooms to traveling salesmen.35 The more experienced inmate Fischerová taught Janšáková that their low opinion of the conditions in the camp was not shared by all. Fischerová explained that she had met an unnamed peasant woman,36 who had been pleasantly surprised by “having for herself such a nice little walled room” and enjoyed not having to worry about cooking. During the summer season the aforementioned peasant had even been assigned to some fieldwork, to which she was accustomed to. Her only concern had been how she would get home, since she had never traveled by train before and was afraid of not finding her way. When she had been released, she begged the commander to let another detainee from a nearby town go with her so that they could “travel together.” Asking how a poor woman who had never stepped out of her village neighborhood could “commit a political crime,” Janšáková learned that she was accused of “inciting a whole village against the government.”37

Women and Their Living Conditions in the Camp Despite a determined attempt at the time to move away from a coeducational school system and an increasingly gender-based division of public space,38 a separate women’s camp was never created. According to published accounts, the female inmates of the Ilava camp were in a separate corridor or a wing of a common building.39 In contrast to standard prisons, which employed a limited number of women guards,40 men and women 35 Ibid., 62. 36 She was allegedly from Santov, which is the Slovak name of Pilisszantó, a  village in Hungary, at the time inhabited by ethnic Slovaks. It could have been be mistaken for the village Santovka, which is seventy kilometers north, near Levice, in an area which also belonged to Hungary in the period. The person was not identified. 37 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 65–66. 38 Zavacká, “Crossing sisters”: 425–451. 39 Elo Šándor, Ilava, 34–42. 40 Špaňárová Grossz mentions that a guard from the prison of the regional court in Ružomberok, who she met at her workplace, later got married to Rudolf Strechaj, a Communist functionary. Author’s interview with Gertrúda Špaňárová Grossz (18 June 1922–31 August 2007), 20 April 2004. Balucha notes that a few Vincentine nuns from the Ladce monastery were employed as guards in the Ilava women’s penitentiary (established in May 1939). Balucha, Hrad a väznica Ilava, 30.

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in the Ilava camp were supervised by the same all-male personnel. The camp rules specified that arriving women should be searched by “a trusted woman appointed by the commander,”41 but a reference to such a person can be found in neither documents nor memoirs. Janšáková described the limited ability of the guards to orientate themselves in what they perceived as feminine. Processing on arrival at the camp required Janšáková to leave all her personal belongings in the Bratislava police directorate’s prison. She decided to take only a small amount of money, some soap, and a silver spoon with her. She then found a lipstick that she had forgotten about in her bag. The gendarme “thoroughly observed a hollow tin pipe with a piece of color, having no idea what to do with it,” and only after a while “succumbed to his official duty”42 and asked what it was for. After learning its function, he did not hesitate to remark maliciously that she would be “in no mood to color lips” in the camp.43 Both men and women were also bound by the same set of camp rules, which were clearly aimed at generating psychological discomfort and pressure. During the initial “chaotic” days of the camp the detainees were treated by the commander in accordance with long-established standards of dealing with political prisoners. They were allowed to communicate among themselves, order their own meals, and so forth.44 But soon camp rules issued by the Ministry of the Interior ensured that the detainees would experience far worse conditions than criminals in prisons. The inmates in Ilava were to be kept isolated in solitary cells, forbidden to speak (including to themselves), prohibited from reading and writing, and, for the most part, not allowed to receive any private food parcels. All their personal belongings were confiscated, with particular attention paid to “such things that could be used for communication.”45 Married couples were separated and forbidden to meet or even openly greet each other, even in the chapel. Current research shows that, in contrast with the concentration camps of the Third Reich, there is no known instance of a woman being held in

41 Väzeňský poriadok zaisťovacieho tábora v  Ilave. SNA, f. Úrad predsedníctva vlády 1939–1945 , b. 129, n. 2550/39 and 6530/1939. 42 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 36. 43 Ibid. 44 Ursíny, Spomienky na Slovenské národné povstanie, 30–31. 45 SNA, fond ÚPV 1939–1945, b. 129, N. 6500/1939, Väzenský poriadok zaisťovacieho tábora v Ilave.

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Ilava on the grounds of “improper” sexual behavior46 or other kinds of what was classified as “antisocial behavior.” There was no formal exception for pregnancy, despite the intensively promoted cult of motherhood.47 However, the lack of mentions concerning such cases itself indicates that pregnancy, as well as breastfeeding, either exempted women from deportation to the camp or secured them early release.48 Due to the all-male personnel, female inmates were at a disadvantage when trying to access medical care. In order to see a doctor, a commander’s prior consent was needed, and a medical examination was possible only with a guard present. This humiliating rule caused a number of women serious problems, especially those suffering from internal diseases—gallstones, ovaritis, vaginal mycoses, and other kinds of gynecological diseases that developed in the permanently cold and moldy conditions.49 The commandant’s approval was also needed to get an additional blanket or pillow, or receive a parcel of warm clothing. However, even an extra blanket did not help without proper airing, especially in cases when, due to lack of bed frames, sleeping mats were placed straight on the floor. As Janšáková wrote, this was especially trying when “the cold forced us to warm up by walking.”50 The hygienic standards of the prison cells, with their clay floors and moist walls, were low. Inmates had to make do with one bucket for water, one for feces, and a small washing bowl. The cells were further equipped with a folding iron bed, which could be turned into a table during the day, and a small hanging cabinet with two cups, a saltshaker, spoon, and three

46 Victoria Harris, “The Role of Concentration Camps in the Nazi Repression of Prostitutes, 1933–9,” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (2010): 675–698. 47 Bohunka Koklesová, V tieni Tretej ríše: oficiálne fotografie Slovenského štátu (Bratislava: Slovart, 2009): 112–120. Katarína Bajcurová, Petra Hanáková, and Alexandra Kusá, eds., Sen a skutočnosť: umenie a propaganda 1939–1945 (Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2016). 48 The only known example of the prolonged detainment of a pregnant woman concerns a woman with an extraordinarily complicated status—the Belorussian refugee Zina Kireeva. Although her release was recommended by the camp commandant, before her case was processed by the ministry she gave premature birth to a stillborn child in the camp in April 1944. Both the camp doctor and the local midwife were immediately called to help by the guards. SNA f. 209, b. 724, u. 28. 49 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 39. 50 Ibid., 42.

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brushes–to clean clothes, shoes, and the floor.51 Bread was stored in the same place. Shared living further reduced the already limited living space and privacy. Janšáková remarked that “a woman’s existence is more fixed to the question of underwear and clothing” and that the cell was insufficient for two women wanting “to fulfill the resulting needs.” She was presumably referring here to the drying of both washed underwear and menstruation cloths.52 Another problem was caused by clothing in general. If a man and woman were arrested unprepared, the man’s casual wear usually proved far more suited for life in the camp than, for example, the woman’s shift dress.53 Except in the short periods of time in which the camp was overcrowded to the extent that some longer-serving inmates were temporarily put in cells in pairs, a strict rule of solitary confinement was observed. The resulting lack of mental stimulation led many to develop serious psychiatric problems, such as “color hunger,” the subconscious craving for color.54 After a few weeks of solitude, receiving a cellmate could result not only in the joy of having human company, but also shock. An inmate might lose self-control, feel irrational, have crying fits in the presence of a stranger, and so forth.55 Detainees were allowed to work after two weeks in solitary. Unlike men, who occasionally worked outside in the parish field, women were usually assigned jobs indoors. However, as there was not much work that was considered suitable for them, they quite frequently stayed alone in their cells for days on end. Higher social status limited a woman’s chances of getting work even more. Janšáková wrote about how hard it was for her to persuade the commandant that she—“a lady”—was eager to participate in manual work, which would have given her the chance to spend a few hours with other people. Besides occasional fieldwork, potato peeling was reserved for the male detainees. Held to be a lighter form of men’s work, it became known as something of a gentlemen’s discussion club and was given the name “potato casino.”56 Men also distributed food and dealt with waste.57 Women were 51 Gál-Podďumbiersky, Z kalicha utrpenia, 34. According to Elo Šándor a standard cell was 1.5 meters wide, 3 meters long and 3.5 meters high. Šándor, Ilava, 115. 52 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 42. 53 Ibid., 74. 54 Ibid., 43–44. 55 Ibid., 41. 56 Šándor, Ilava, 254. 57 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 73.

Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 1939

tasked with washing the camp’s bowls and preparing pasta in a special room. On one occasion, Janšáková recalled, a woman complained about having backache and the guard threated to assigning her to the laundry58 instead of her usual work with dough. However, it seems that this notion related to a laundry operated by the criminal prisoners, not by camp detainees. Preparing pasta, a common meal, was a highly coveted job, as it allowed women to gather and secretly communicate with one another. Moreover, the workplace was clean and warm and the detainees were rewarded with “warm black coffee and fresh bread that was worth more than the daily ration in the camp.”59 Since the number of workers needed in the workshop was limited, new arrivals had to wait until some post was vacated.60 Contact between male and female prisoners was rather scarce. Occasionally, it was possible during the common Sunday mass. Men and women were escorted to the chapel in separate groups, but passed each other. Also, the dish-washing sinks near the central staircase became an observation post and a women-operated informal news channel.61 From there, they tried to establish eye contact with the new arrivals being escorted to the commandant, and gathered news from the detainees who had to pass by them when they were sent to walk in the courtyard or work in the fields.

Facing Maltreatment In certain situations, prevalent social stereotypes worked in the women’s favor. For example, it seems that, excepting some extraordinarily strict jailers, the guards tolerated women talking amongst themselves at work, so long as the volume was kept low. It was also much easier for women to address a guard with a particular demand and to use collective persuasive strategies in appealing to his emotions. In their memoirs, women regularly mention moments in which they “surrounded” a guard with a particular question—such as when they collectively appealed on behalf of an intellectually disabled Jewish inmate when two guards frightened him for their own amusement with being sent to a dungeon, or when women promised a

58 Janšáková, Cela č. 20 64. 59 Ibid., 50. 60 Ibid., 61. 61 Ibid., 47.

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sympathetic guard that they were “able to keep secret” in order to get valuable information about planned releases.62 The adherence to strict policies on the separation of male and female detainees occasionally clashed with the practicalities of daily life. Women’s casual contact with male detainees charged with the distribution of food or collecting waste in the corridors usually remained under the full control of the guard. In cases when more physically demanding labor was required for a significant length of time in women’s workplace, the guards considered it, somewhat paradoxically, safer to entrust such assistance to a “lended” sentenced criminal. Thus, Janšáková described meeting Juri, a fire stoker in the women-staffed pasta workshop, whom she recalled as a friendly young mechanic sentenced to two years for having shot his unfaithful wife.63 There was also a strong connection between gender and the application of additional punishment or the use of physical violence. While there is evidence of harsh—brutal, even—treatment of some women when arrested by local Hlinka Guard patrols,64 it appears that at the time of Janšáková’s detainment there was no known case of a woman being sent to a dark dungeon or being battered by the camp staff. In this regard, men were certainly treated very differently. Nevertheless, some vaguely worded comments suggest that women were sometimes dealt with physical violence. For example, when Janšáková was verbally attacked by a guard, her inmate Fischerová tried to console her by telling her that “women’s tears are a too-precious liquid” to waste on such people, and added that if she “had let herself be overcome by all the wickedness” which she “had to withstand” there, she “would have already rested in the Ilava cemetery.”65 Concerning the guards’ behavior toward male detainees, memoirs note isolated cases of bullying and harassment, including battery, a starvation diet of a slice of bread and some water, periods spent in the dungeon,66 and at least one case of a death that was officially described as a suicide but many believed was a murder during interrogation.67 The worst physical vio62 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 69–72. 63 Ibid., 53–54. 64 Postwar testimony of Gregorová, participant in Ružomberok Juniales 1939. Edited group interview with the textile factory veterans in Rybárpole, June 11, 1951, published as a mimeographed working paper by the County national committee (KNV). Regional state archives (ŠOBA) Bytča, f. Former textile enterprise Texicom. 65 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 49. 66 Ibid., 36. 67 Gál-Podďumbiersky, Z kalicha utrpenia, 211–212.

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lence against women Janšáková witnessed was a tin cup thrown by a guard in the direction of women talking at work having been told to be quiet. The cup did not hit anybody.68 The quality of life experienced by women in the camp life depended on age, health, and disposition. Gertrúda Špaňárová Grossz, a detainee after Janšáková had left the camp, reflected on her experience as a young and (according to her) careless girl: [Y]ou know, I was about twenty, twenty-two . . . and there everybody was kept in solitary. But if a good jailer was in charge, we could have a party in the evening. Then, we were maybe ten people in one cell, they left our doors open. . . . We could laugh. . . . And if it was a bad jailer’s turn, we had to be silent in our cells.69 Janšáková interpreted the guards’ “benevolence” and the permission they gave inmates to have “parties” very differently. Just a few weeks after her release, in January 1940, she was summoned by the police again. She was asked to testify in an investigation into rumors of sexual abuse of female detainees by camp personnel; in particular, she was asked whether she had been “importuned by some of the guards” with “amorous proposals,” witnessed “any immoral acts being committed in other cells, day or night,” or if she had heard about such things. In contrast to information on harsh conditions in the camp, which had deterring effect, rumors of this kind contradicted the official claim that the camp’s purpose was one of reformation. Janšáková reported that her cell was far away from the young inmates’ cells and that, since her hearing was damaged, she could neither confirm nor refute the accusations. But she supported the presented scenario indirectly, admitting that “the unequal approach towards younger women and to us, older inmates, indicated that there must have been something between them.”70 Moreover, she decided to turn the implicit squeamishness of the Ľudáks against them while pursuing her own agenda. Thus, in her testimony, she drew attention to the harsh behavior of the jailers in general.71 In contrast to the men, who were generally accustomed to army routines because of their military service, and who often also had firsthand 68 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 48. 69 Author’s interview with Gertrúda Špaňárová Grossz. 70 SNA, f. 209, b. 853, u. 6. 71 Ibid.

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experience of short-term confinement, women of this generation were as a rule completely unprepared for life in detention.72 On the other hand, many of them had considerable experience with establishing their existence in new places and making do in restricted conditions. Their usually conservative upbringing stressed their adaptability and ability to support and comfort others. Under the constant psychological tension, inmates quite often had to face both others’ outbursts and their own unexpected sentiments and learn how to handle them. On certain occasion, the small mirror, which her cellmate smuggled into the cell as an basic necessity for a woman to keep herself “in order,” became a source of horror for Janšáková: Whom do I see there? A complete stranger looks at me. A yellow skin, a long nose, sunken black shadowed eyes with a net of wrinkles around, streams of grey hair near ears. Is that me? What for Mrs.  Penzová smuggled that mirror? Even risking a harsh punishment! In another moment, Janšáková’s attempt to cheer up women in the pasta workshop backfired. Instead of lifting spirits, a familiar song about becoming a small bird and flying off to see what is going on at home made everybody stop working. They “drew their faces into their hands covered with flour, and all started weeping.” When a surprised guard opened door, grumbling at the sudden change from cheerful singing to weeping, he remarked that the staff broadly agreed that women were not fit for the detainment camp, “spoiling discipline and order” since their arrival.73

Conclusion Janšáková was released at the end of October 1939. But even after leaving the gates of Ilava fortress she did not regain her previous freedom. She was not allowed to engage in public activities and social life. She had to write and sign an addendum to the conventional text of the rules of release, stating that she would “tear all contacts” with her “former women friends” and that she would not “enter public spaces (i.e. cafés)” or other places where “she

72 See Dagmar Šimková, Byly jsme tam taky (Praha: ME-V Karavana, 2007): 17. Published also in Italian as Io n. 1211. Nell’inferno delle carceri comuniste cecoslovacche (Milano: Paoline Editoriale Libri, 2013). 73 Janšáková, Cela č. 20, 56–57.

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could expect coming into contact with these friends.”74 By being ordered to write these words at the request of the minister of the interior, she was made well aware that she was returning to a different world, where many of her friends would succumb to intimidation and really would become “former” ones. Her husband confirmed that “she kept absolutely no personal contacts, did not leave home except to see the doctor and to do unavoidable shopping, and avoided meeting any acquaintances.”75 Janšáková did not experience the intensely violent period in the camp at the start of the war against the Soviet Union when a large group of inmates involved in Communist resistance were interned.76 Nor was she there when the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad and Kursk changed the behavior of the guards: some started “thinking about their future,”77 while others became excessively brutal in an attempt to convince themselves that they were still on the winning side.78 She did not witness how Ilava got temporarily inundated with dozens of female strikers from textile factories in the towns of Žilina and Rajec in June 1943.79 Nevertheless, her memoir is a valuable source of knowledge about women detained in the Ilava camp in its early stage of its existence. Janšáková met and wrote about women who came from widely different social, ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds; women whose officially declared reasons for detainment varied substantially. Female camp inmates thus included opponents of the regime involved in escape networks and armed resistance, victims of false accusations of “espionage” motivated by propaganda, and women denounced out of envy, because they were petty violators of the rationing system, or allegedly disparaged the “new order.” Despite the Ľudák regime’s radical pivot toward policies that separated the genders and promoted women as the heart of the family, the living conditions and daily routines of women in Ilava did not differ from men’s except for in the allocation of work. The ban on speaking, writing, and even reading broke the traditional penitentiary rules of dealing with political 74 SNA, f. 209, b. 716, u. 32. 75 Zavacká, “Crossing Sisters”: 425–451. 76 Jozef Štaudinger, “Ilava,” Hlas oslobodených, October 3, 1945, 3. According to this source, in 1944 interrogations that used torture were also taking place in the Protestant chapel which was located way from the main block. 77 Volanská, Ako na cudzej svadbe, 136. 78 Gál-Podďumbiersky, Z kalicha utrpenia, 210–213. 79 SNA, f. 209, b. 716.

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prisoners and left the camp inmates—men and women alike—in worse conditions than those of the imprisoned criminals. In contrast to the male inmates who had routinely experienced general military conscription, women usually had no previous knowledge or instruction related to coping with the extreme institutional limits imposed on personal freedom. However, analysis of Mária Janšáková’s case shows that women inmates could benefit from their experiences of adjusting to marital living arrangements or adapting to new places having moved for their husbands’ work. In short, they were often skilled at dealing with family disputes and disharmony. They were accustomed to being physically or hierarchically weaker, were used to having to get by with limited resources, knew how to read body language and steady the mood of people in a closed environment, and could keep up others’ spirits. In her descriptions of the power mechanisms of the Ľudák regime, both inside and outside the camp, Janšáková noted that the Third Reich provided the models, but she tried to focus on the decisions of local Slovak actors, from top politicians down to camp guards. She captured the perverse spirit of the camp’s rules, which aimed at breaking the inmates psychically by means of total isolation. Her memoir is important because it also pays attention to a number of other women inmates—individuals whose names and destinies she strove to remember and pass on to her readers. Her writing helps to better understand the Ľudák detention system, a long-neglected but central institution of their regime in Slovakia. It can also stimulate further research on the destruction of the democratic social fabric inherited from the interwar period and the impact of the state-initiated intimidation of political opponents on the public.

Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 1939

Figure 6. Mária Janšáková with her husband Štefan Janšák and their son Fedor, September 1937. Photo credit: Literary Archive of the Slovak National Library: LA-NK, Zbierka fotodokumentov osobností, sign. 9/170.

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Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust? Anna Nedlin-Lehrer

When Warsaw’s only female Jewish resistance leader Zivia Lubetkin described the foundation of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa [ŻOB]) in the Warsaw ghetto, she spoke about the pioneering youth movements and their heroic actions.1 Yet she only briefly mentioned her own role as one of six ŻOB founders.2 Reading her account, it seems like it was common to have a female leader in an armed resistance group during the German occupation. However, Zivia was an exception. As such, she was perceived as a heroine by, among others, her contemporaries, who contributed greatly to this image by talking and writing about her.3 * This article is part of my PhD thesis on the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz). I wish to thank the scholarship funds of the FriedrichEbert-Stiftung and Yad Vashem. I would also like to thank the organizers of the “XX. Conference: If This Is a Woman” and its participants for their helpful comments. I am also very grateful to Ulrich Herbert, Roni Lehrer, Vera Marstaller, and Tom Tölle for their comments on this article. 1 I use the term gender as a person’s self-representation as male or female, as well as society’s perception of this person as male or female. I will use the term biological sex when referring to physical differences between men and women. 2 Zivia Lubetkin, In the Days of Destruction and Revolt (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1981), 111–130. 3 As Ralf von den Hoff and his colleagues have convincingly argued, heroes only emerge through representation and communication via different media. Ralf von den Hoff, et. al., “Heroes—Heroizations—Heroisms: Transformations and Conjunctures from Antiquity to Modernity, foundational concepts of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 948” in:

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As a heroine, she had a certain function, as Tobias Schlechtriemen writes: “because heroes stand out, the masses can project their collective values and affects onto them” and they are “regarded as serving an integrative function that stabilizes the collective.”4 Being a member of the Socialist Zionist youth movement Dror, Zivia was socialized in a particularly egalitarian society. Only for those like her, and only in that specific social and historical context, it seemed to be logical to recruit Zivia, as well as other female youth movement members in the Warsaw ghetto, for the movement’s fight against the Germans. Zivia and other Dror-women fought side by side with their male comrades in arms, and evidence suggests that they experienced the German persecution in a similar way. In this chapter, I study both Zivia Lubetkin and Havka Folman Raban who were both youth movement members and resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto.

Sources and Methodology Many groundbreaking studies have shown the extent to which women’s Holocaust experiences were significantly different from those of their male counterparts.5 Among Jews, for instance, young men had the highest chances of surviving selection in the camps. Women of the same age group had virtually none. Mothers with young children were also often barred from entering ghetto bunkers and other hiding places.6 When they did manage to hide, women were usually given tasks that confirmed their traditional roles, such as housekeeping.7 Moreover, young women were

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Helden Special Issue 5 (2019), ed. Nicole Falkenhayner, Sebastian Meurer, and Tobias Schlechtriemen (2019): 9–16, 12, DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2019/APH/03. Tobias Schlechtriemen, “The Hero as an Effect. Boundary Work in Processes of Heroization,” in ibid.: 17–26, DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2019/APH/03. Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, ed., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1998); Doris L. Bergen, “What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?,” in Different Horrors/Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 16–27. Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013), 22. Natalia Aleksiun, “Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 27 (2014): 46–48.

Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust?

particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and often became pregnant as a result.8 In what follows, I compare women’s lives during wartime with their prewar lives in a society that declared itself egalitarian. I focus on the Socialist Zionist pioneer youth movement Dror, which before World War II imagined, among other things, a society without predefined gender roles. While it has been shown that in other social units, including families for example, gender roles often shifted and changed due to the occupation and ghettoization,9 I suggest that the groups that sprang from Dror sought to retain equality as an ideal throughout the war. Paradoxically, this also meant that Dror members still had gendered experiences. Crucially, however, these did not result from active gender discrimination on Dror’s side, but rather reflected existing biases and preconceived roles in Poland at this time which Dror, in fact, strategically exploited. These findings expand Holocaust gender research by demonstrating that gendered experiences at that time need not be a consequence of discrimination, prejudice, and their effects, but can also be a result of a war-induced strategy and – in this case – of an (attempted) egalitarian praxis. I present two case studies to make this blind spot of (aspired or real) gender-neutrality in the literature on female Holocaust experiences visible. To show what possibilities were available to Dror’s female members within the movement’s leadership and across the youth movement’s resistance organization, I will first focus on Zivia Lubetkin’s rise as a leader. Her position, biography, and her personality made her, in the movement’s eyes, perfectly suited for an important function within Dror’s Warsaw ghetto branch, as well as in ŻOB. Furthermore, Zivia’s story exemplifies the continuity of Dror’s egalitarianism from the interwar period, through the war, and in its aftermath. In a second case study, I will look at Havka Folman-Raban’s activities and roles. This young activist worked as a liaison between the Warsaw ghetto and members outside the ghetto walls, various resistance 8 Ibid.: 49–52. 9 Lenore J. Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust,” in Jewish families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46–66. My second case study also illustrates this shift, as the protagonist transformed from the youngest child to a daughter who smuggled valuables in order to improve her family’s financial situation. Havka Folman Raban, They Are Still with Me (M. P. Western Galilee: Pinkasei Edut, Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, 2001), 46–47, 106–107.

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groups, and other ghettos. Most fighters who did this job were women which makes this part of Havka’s experience specifically female. Yet she was chosen for her skills and her gender did not limit her scope of action. On the contrary, her story shows that gender ascriptions were consciously used and that pronounced femininity was turned into both a disguise and technique for operating in traditionally male areas. This article is based on autobiographical sources and ego-documents.10 Almost all of them originated much later than the events that they describe. These time gaps, as well as the general character of ego-documents as a source, generate several difficulties and peculiarities for a historian. To mention only two: “hard facts” like dates and places, which are often necessary to frame a source in its historical contexts, are sometimes missing and difficult to reconstruct; sources that emerged much later address a fictitious (noncontemporary) reader and strongly emphasize not only the author’s own biography, but also explain the general circumstances of German occupation, resistance activity, and the youth movements’ general principles. This kind of contextualization arises from a post war context. Regardless, these sources—implicitly or explicitly—give us access to people’s thoughts, daily lives, and (ex post facto) explanations for certain actions. There are details contained within these documents that might seem minor or might be overlooked if present in different kinds of material. In contrast with other types of material, ego-documents and autobiographical sources paint multifaceted portraits of the people I will discuss and reveal how these two women were perceived as heroines by their contemporaries.

Zivia Lubetkin: The Muting of Gender in Zionist Leadership Zivia Lubetkin’s education and her family’s Zionism laid the groundwork for her adult turn to egalitarian politics and set her on the path to leadership. She was born in 1914 in Eastern Poland into a traditional Jewish family. At least four of the Lubetkin siblings joined three different nonreligious Zionist youth movements, Zivia following her older sister Mayte into the left-wing Zionist pioneering youth movement Freyheit, one of Dror’s

10 I use Eva Kormann’s definition for Autobiographik and Benigna Krusenstjern’s definition for ego-documents. Eva Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott: Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert (Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2004); Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse?” Historische Anthropologie 2, no. 3 (1994): 462–471.

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two predecessors.11 As a teenager, Zivia became not only a counselor in her hometown of Byten but also a representative on the movement’s regional committee.12 As it did for many other Zionist youth movements, Freyheit yielded a manifest effect on youngsters’ ties to their families. Since (secular) Zionist youth movements were built around the idea of migration, many sought to prepare their members for a life in an agricultural kibbutz in the Land of Israel. Young people, then, were placed in agricultural communes in Poland where they learned a trade or how to work the land. At the age of twenty, Zivia convinced her parents to allow her to join a preparatory training farm,13 and thus she broke with traditional Jewish shtetl life as well as traditional gender roles.14 The narratives that emanated from Zivia’s peers shed light on the ideals of Zionist youth, which sought to steer clear of preconceived gender roles. These accounts may have been topical, giving a fairly standardized narrative of a good Zionist and eager activist, but they eschewed paying any special attention to Zivia’s biological sex. Her strength of character and 11 Ayelet Heller, dir., Zivia: A Blue Bird (Israel: 1998). Zivia’s sister Ahuva Fried describes the Lubetkin family home in an interview. See also Bella Gutterman, Fighting for Her People: Zivia Lubetkin 1914–1978 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2014), 30–35. Zvi Dror, The Dream and the Revolt and the Vow: The Biography of Zivia Lubetkin 1914– 1978 (Tel Aviv: Histadrut and Ghetto Fighters House, 1983), 6. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, members of a Russian movement named Dror left their homeland and joined Hechaluz in Poland, an umbrella organization and administrative institution that organized Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel in the interwar period. In 1925, Hechaluz became a member of Hakibbuz Hameuchad, a kibbutz movement based in the Yishuv. A year later, in 1926, Freyheit was founded as a movement for adolescents and had a close connection to Hechaluz. In 1931, Freyheit declared itself an integral part of Hechaluz and it became its members’ ultimate goal to join Hechaluz when they became old enough. Almost at the same time, in 1925/1926, Hechaluz Hazair was established as a movement for youth younger than seventeen and concentrated its activities in Kresy. In 1938, Freyheit merged with Hechaluz Hazair and the joint youth movement was named Dror. As a consequence of the entangled relationships between youth movements and political and administrative organizations, most of Dror’s members—at least at some point—were also members of at least one other organization mentioned above. See Ido Bassok, “Movements.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 10 November 2010; Eli Tzur, “Dror.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. 05.08.2010; Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement: A History, vol. 1, Origins and Growth 1909–1939 (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1992), 125. 12 Dror, Dream, 8; Gutterman, Fighting, 35; Heller, Blue Bird. 13 The first training farms or hachsharot were established in 1921 and run by Hechaluz. Near, Kibbutz, 103, 107–108. 14 Dror, Dream, 10.

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leadership skills were what set her apart from her peers.15 In short, by putting such store in talent, Freyheit’s Zionist leaders attempted to combat traditional gender roles. Typically, narratives of Zivia’s rise in the movement present her as a natural leader who could be entrusted with sensitive tasks because of her ability to overcome obstacles. Zivia’s story—or rather the stories told about her—can be summarized as follows: Freyheit’s and Hechaluz’s functionaries saw her potential and quickly sent her to work at Hechaluz’s head office in Warsaw. By the end of the 1930s, she was responsible for all the organization’s preparatory kibbutzim and the entirety of its training programs.16 During this time, in 1938, Freyheit merged with Hechaluz Hazair to form the joint youth movement Dror. However, her advancement came at personal cost. As Zivia writes in a letter to a friend, she would make personal sacrifices, perhaps most clearly displayed in her postponement of her emigration to the Land of Israel during this time.17 In the summer of 1939, Zivia was also chosen to attend the Zionist Congress in Geneva as a delegate. During the gathering, she learned of the imminent outbreak of war. As a result, Bella Gutterman writes, although an emigration certificate was available, Zivia decided to return to Warsaw and reassume her position.18 After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, however, Dror could no longer continue as an open organization in a free country; instead, it became a covert movement working in the territories of an occupied Poland either under a hostile fascist or a hostile socialist regime. While this change required a new strategy, the movement’s egalitarian model remained in place. Ready to lead by example, Zivia arrived in Warsaw on September 2, 1939, organized Dror’s young members, and relocated with them to the Eastern part of the country.19 In November 1939, Zivia’s group received a request from Frumka Płotnicka, their youth leader stationed in Warsaw, 15 Gutterman collected many accounts. Many emerged either during or after the Holocaust. Some, in particular those originating from a gathering in Zivia’s memory in 1943 when she was falsely believed to be dead, show hagiographic tendencies. See Gutterman, Fighting, 45–61. However, numerous authors, and at different times, characterize Zivia as a natural leader and eager Zionist activist. 16 Gutterman, Fighting, 62; Dror, Dream, 13. 17 Zivia Lubetkin, “Letter to Leib Levite from Kielce on March 7, 1935,” in The Dream and the Revolt and the Vow: The Biography of Zivia Lubetkin 1914–1978, ed. Zvi Dror (Israel: Histadrut and Ghetto Fighters House, 1983), 11–12. 18 Ibid., 68. 19 Ibid., 90–94.

Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust?

who asked for reinforcements and for Zivia herself. In early January in 1940, she arrived in German-occupied Warsaw.20 Zivia started to work in the city right away. Warsaw’s Jews had been living under German rule since October 1939 and were already suffering great hardship.21 Dror faced challenges—providing food and medical care to the capital’s Jews, for example—and its loftier prewar goals were sidelined. Yet the movement adapted well. Dror’s Warsaw branch began to reestablish kibbutzim and they set up several education programs, providing a home for Jewish youth.22 Yet soon Jews were struck by more devastating developments. Starting in March 1940, the isolation of Jews began and by November 15 more than 380,000 people were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto.23 Dror’s preexisting organizational structures, its resilient ideological framework, and its network of supporters inside and outside Poland gave it an advantage over other groups at work during the occupation. This meant that Dror leaders soon also took on roles outside the movement. Yitzchak Zuckerman remarked after the war that leaders who had no links with youth movements also accepted Zivia’s position as a general leader very quickly. Due to her social clout and her personality, she was quick to establish connections with various institutions and groups: “she haunted corridors, went to meetings, began to be known.”24 Zivia managed to acquire funds for Dror and Hechaluz and was soon put in charge of administrating welfare funds that bodies and individuals, as well as foreign donors, granted to the youth movements.25 Aid packages to the Warsaw ghetto from the Relief Committee for Jewish War Victims in Switzerland, for example, were addressed to the young activist; and eventually her name became a code word for Poland itself in correspondence among people.26 20 Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 27. 21 Andrea Löw and Markus Roth, Das Warschauer Ghetto: Alltag und Widerstand im Angesicht der Vernichtung (München: C. H. Beck, 2013), 20–24. 22 Zuckerman, Surplus, 45, 62–63. 23 Andrea Löw and Markus Roth describe the process of the ghettoization in detail. Löw and Roth, Das Warschauer Ghetto, 24–28. 24 Zuckerman, Surplus, 45. 25 Gutterman, Fighting, 129. 26 See Zivia’s correspondence with Dr. Abrahm Silberschein in Geneva (Yad Vashem Archive, Record Group M.20, File 115b+c), or her letters to Nathan Schwalb (Yad Vashem Archive, Record Group M.20, File 86). In her reports, Gisi Fleischmann uses

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The German mass atrocities against Jews further altered Dror’s goals and made Zivia and other leaders, male and female alike, central to the gathering, authentication, and distribution of evidence about what was happening to the Jews. They were now heads of the resistance. Some months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dror’s Tema Schneiderman was among the first who reported the mass murder of Jews in Vilna in the end of 1941.27 While the Jewish leaders of non-youth movements refused to believe that the massacres had happened (or considered these news reports to be exaggerated), leftist (and separately, also right-wing) youth movements decided to change their course of action. They effectively ceased their educational and cultural activities and started to prepare an armed resistance.28 In the middle of their preparations for self-defense, the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto began. Between July 22 and September 21, 1942, more than 265,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka. Eleven thousand were sent to transit camps and more than ten thousand were murdered in the Warsaw ghetto itself. By the end of these deportations, only fifty thousand Jews remained in the ghetto.29 Shortly after the beginning of the deportations, representatives of the major political and social organizations in the ghetto met to discuss events. It soon became clear that while youth movement representatives were in favor of organized actions against the Germans, the older generation still dismissed this idea.30 On July 28, 1942, representatives of the pioneering youth movements Dror, the secular Hashomer Hazair, and the more traditional Akiva met and decided to Zivia’s name as a code word for Poland—for instance, in her letter of February 12, 1943 (Yad Vashem Archive, Record Group M.20, File 93). 27 Lubetkin, Days, 45. More information was brought by other (male and female) couriers. See Gutterman, Fighting, 159; Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980), 222–223. 28 Lubetkin, Days, 83–90. Dror sent more liaisons to verify the news from Vilna as well as a report about Chełmno death camp. Afterwards, two of their first goals were to inform the public about evolving developments and to discuss a joint course of action with other groups within the ghetto. Lubetkin, Days, 91–94. 29 Havi Ben-Sasson, “‘At the present time, Jewish Warsaw is like a cemetery’: Life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Great Deportation,” in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime: Essays by Three Generations of Historians: Festschrift in Honor of Otto Dov Kulka, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), 353. 30 For a detailed description see Havi Dreifuss, “The Leadership of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: A Reassessment,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 31, no. 1 (2017): 26–27.

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establish a union for armed resistance named ŻOB. Its original leadership consisted of five men and one woman. At this point, there was no hierarchy within the leadership and decisions were made during meetings and discussions.31 Zivia was the only woman among the ŻOB leaders and by now her gender had been practically irrelevant. Starting out as a young activist from a shtetl who existed in a society that believed in egalitarianism, she won over her peers and the heads of her movement through her work. As a consequence, Zivia gained more authority and assumed higher positions. In the summer of 1942, she became an equal member of the ŻOB leadership. If there was a lack of women at the top of ŻOB, it was less because of prejudice against women than the organization’s emphasis assigning rank according to seniority and skills.32 While other female Dror leaders of similar rank, such as Frumka Płotnicka and Lea Perlstein, operated both inside and outside the Warsaw ghetto, Zivia remained solely inside its walls. In contrast to other senior Dror activists, it was believed that she lacked the necessary looks and skills to pass for a non-Jewish woman.33 As a consequence, by seniority and limited options to operate outside the ghetto, she was assigned to the ŻOB command inside the ghetto. As Gutterman has argued, Zivia’s position in the ŻOB leadership may also have been because of her efforts to unite the Zionist pioneering youth movements during ŻOB’s formation and, later, during its expansion when other groups and organizations inside the ghetto started to join.34 There is little evidence to suggest any gender-specificity in how ŻOB initially handed out jobs. During its first months Zivia performed tasks

31 In her article, Dreifuss explains the ŻOB’s structure and the process of decision-making. Until the ŻOB leaders were not pushed by Polish Armia Krajowa and the Polish government-in-exile to represent all Jewish organizations and implement a hierarchical structure, there was no hierarchy within the ŻOB. Even after it established a hierarchy for the purpose of negotiating with the Polish resistance, the ŻOB’s decision-making in the ghetto was still based on discussions. A top-down command was formed only shortly before the ghetto uprising. Ibid., 30–36. 32 This method of assigning ranks was used during the change in Hashomer Hazair’s representation to ŻOB. Since its two most senior members, Wilner and Altman, were working outside the ghetto, Anielewicz assumed command as ŻOB’s most senior member inside the ghetto. Ibid., 29. 33 See the second case study for a more detailed description. 34 Gutterman, Fighting, 178.

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similar to her male comrades.35 She worked to raise morale among younger members36 and, in order to establish an umbrella organization to represent the Jewish organizations in a ghetto, she met with the leaders of all the ghetto’s major political parties and movements.37 In combat, gender roles did not always apply either; Zivia’s engagements with the Germans during the January uprising on January 18, 1943 attests to this.38 She became part of Zecharia Artstein’s fighting unit,39 and during preparations for the next fight, she often helped Mordechai Anielewicz ease tensions between fighters who belonged to different youth movements.40 Later, during the April 19, 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, Zivia was also a negotiator and messenger between different resistance units. At night, she would visit a number of bunkers in the ghetto, exchanging information and delivering messages and commands. For instance, on one occasion, she left her bunker on 18 Miła Street; as someone with significant authority she was sent to persuade the owner of another bunker to let ŻOB members into his hiding place so that they could use the opening to a sewage tunnel as an escape route. She was also chosen to deal with a different man hiding in the same bunker in order to help some fighters get out of the ghetto. Upon her return to Miła Street, Zivia discovered that Germans found her bunker: almost all of ŻOB’s leaders had been killed or had committed suicide.41 Fellow activist Simcha Rotem helped the remaining fighters 35 In addition to her duties as a movement leader, Zivia might have also performed traditional female tasks in the ghettos such as cooking and laundering. I am not aware of any evidence that either supports or refutes this hypothesis. Ibid., 79. 36 Although Gutterman describes this as a rather traditional female task, Dreifuss mentions that Anielewicz used the same techniques to raise moral. Ibid., 79; Dreifuss, “Leadership”: 37. 37 By November 1942, ŻOB included major political parties and movements, with the exception of the Revisionists. However, this unification was difficult at first. For instance, Poalei Zion Left called for political oversight of ŻOB’s military actions and the Bund refused to join an exclusively Jewish resistance organization. To meet both demands, the ŻNK (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy), as political body, and the Komisja Koordynacyjna (KK), as a joint authority for all Jews in the ghetto and consisting of members of both the Bund and the ŻNK, were established. However, as Dreifuss points out, there was no hierarchy between ŻOB and the two new bodies, as many of ŻOB’s official and unofficial members served in both of these two organizations. Dreifuss, “Leadership”: 30–31; Gutterman, Fighting, 196; Lubetkin, Days, 133–135. 38 Ibid., 150–159; Dreifuss, “Leadership”: 34. 39 Lubetkin, Days, 180. 40 Dreifuss, “Leadership”: 37. 41 Lubetkin, Days, 220–229.

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escape from the ghetto via the sewage tunnels. Together with others, Zivia hid in an apartment in the city; but although she stayed in hiding until she joined the Warsaw Uprising as a combatant the following year (1944) she was still part of the movement’s executive, involved in decision-making and maintaining relationships with other members inside and outside Poland.42 She survived the war and, before she immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1946, began to rebuild Dror so that it could help survivors. In Palestine, Zivia was welcomed as a heroine, and her reputation increased even more after she delivered a speech at a Hakibbuz Hameuchad conference in Yagur in June 1946. For several hours Zivia spoke about German atrocities and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in 1953 her testimony was published. Zivia’s position within the movement and the extent of her activities in the Warsaw ghetto and during the uprising were due to her reputation, biography, personality, and skills, rather than her gender. During the interwar period, Zivia had advanced within the movement, starting out as a regular member. Her actions before and during the war attested to her commitment to Dror’s values. In the Warsaw ghetto and outside its walls, her authority was never questioned by the movement’s members—who had been socialized towards an egalitarian society—nor by leaders of other organizations who were almost all male, older than Zivia, and mostly lived in accordance with traditional gender concepts.43 For egalitarian socialists like Zivia herself, who accepted established women in leadership roles, it seemed only logical, perhaps even necessary for the movement’s success, to delegate such a senior member with her extensive network, people skills, and dedication to the ŻOB’s command. As a seasoned member of this circle of secular Zionist leaders, Zivia’s experiences were thus most likely very similar to those of her male comrades. If gendered assumptions such as that women were only in charge of cooking 42 See Gutterman, Fighting, 269–280. For example, Zivia corresponded with the Yishuv or tried to persuade her friend Frumka Płotnicka not to start an uprising in the Będzin Ghetto. 43 Yehuda Bauer reflects on traditional gender roles prior to World War II. He describes the absence of any noticeable female leadership at the beginning of the twentieth century, the period in which many of the men with whom Zivia worked were socialized. In Poland, women could be teachers or activists in social welfare causes “but their public role was generally limited to influencing their husbands when they had the urge to do so and when the husbands were willing to listen.” Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001), 170.

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and cleaning were alive in the movement, they were often muted in practice. The necessities of the war, combined with an ideology committed to denying differences between men and women, even declaring them detrimental to the success of the Zionist project, made them matter less in leftist organizations.44

Havka Folman-Raban: The Strategic Use of Difference The case of Havka Folman-Raban, a wartime courier for Dror, drives home a complementary point about gender differences. While biological sex, as opposed to traditional gender roles, was impossible to deny, Dror made an effort to turn it into a strategic tool. Differences between the sexes could be harnessed. While being a woman during the German occupation was often very dangerous, it could also have major advantages, as there was no physical proof that a woman was Jewish.45 Furthermore, it was generally acceptable for non-Jewish women to be out shopping during daytime. Men, on the other hand, especially during ghettoization, were likely to rouse suspicions that they were Jewish if they walked the streets outside the ghetto when non-Jews were at work.46 In addition, Dror believed that the Germans assume that women were not involved in illegal activity. Jewish women, then, could usually operate more freely than men.47 Havka was born in 1924 and grew up in Warsaw in a traditional Jewish family. Her family was affiliated with Zionism in a number of ways. Havka came in contact with secular Zionism before the beginning of World War 44 Eli Tzur reaches a similar conclusion when discussing Hashomer Hazair’s female leaders. He concludes that the movement’s women became recognized leaders because this specific period was unique there was a cultural gap between earlier generations and the generation that came to maturity during the Holocaust. Eli Tzur “The Forgotten Leadership: Women Leaders of the Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement at Times of Crisis,” in Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Replacing Ourselves, ed. Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen (London, Portland, Orgeon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 63. 45 Yisrael Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), 127. 46 Sheryl Silver Ochayon “The Female Couriers during the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem, accessed August 30, 2019, https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/couriers. html. Lenore J. Weitzman, “Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 27 February 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed September 25, 2019, https://jwa.org/ encyclopedia/article/kashariyot-couriers-in-jewish-resistance-during-holocaust. 47 Folman Raban, They Are Still with Me, 84.

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II when she joined a discussion circle which eventually became the student circle of Dror under the guidance of Yitzchak Zuckerman.48 Only a few months after she became a member, Dror was changing in response to the German occupation of Poland. Havka participated in Dror’s underground educational programs, and in 1940, she entered its commune in Warsaw.49 Havka slowly became involved in other resistance activities and at the age of sixteen she became a Dror courier.50 In her memoir, she remarks that such a selection was based on a combination of three necessary attributes: the courier’s appearance, her (or his) language skills, and his or her trustworthiness. Since liaisons often needed to talk to strangers, a flawless Polish accent was also indispensable.51 In her memoir, Havka describes this transition: Although unaware of the change, I found myself less involved in studies and educational activities. More and more I found myself on active duty—I went on missions. I began to deliver movement publications and/or messages to our members all over the “Generalgouvernement.”52 Havka’s job as a courier also included smuggling forged documents and weapons, collecting information, and accompanying “important members of the movement, whose appearance or speech might betray them.”53 She developed many strategies such as bribing guards or joining workers for leaving the Warsaw ghetto.54 On her first mission, Havka escorted Zivia to a nearby farm in Czerniaków, as her “face clearly showed that she was 48 Ibid., 17–36. 49 Ibid., 49–51; Zuckerman, Surplus, 52–57. 50 I do not think the term “courier” fully captures the work of Havka and others. Rather, it diminishes their accomplishments and suggests that they were mere messengers. While Weitzman also criticizes the term and prefers the Hebrew word kashariot, Sharon Geva suggests using “spearheads.” However, “courier” and “liaisons” are the most common terms in the literature and sources, and therefore I will use them interchangeably. From today’s point of view, it would be probably more accurate to speak of intelligence work. Sharon Geva, “Female Spearheads of the Uprising: The Untold Story of the Courier Girls Whose Wit and Daring Made Them Key Players in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” Haaretz, April 12, 2018. 51 Ibid., 63, 87; Weitzman, “Kashariyot.” 52 Raban, They Are Still with Me, 63. 53 Ibid., 63. For a more general description of the couriers’ different tasks, see Silver Ochayon “Couriers” and Weitzman, “Kashariyot.” 54 Raban, They Are Still with Me, 63–64.

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Jewish.”55 As time passed, her assignments took her further and further away from Warsaw. Havka was not only chosen as a courier because of her skills and looks, but also because she was a young woman who could exploit preconceived gender roles as a disguise. Using traditional gender assumptions to their advantage, Dror women could ask men for favors, such as carrying a heavy suitcase. By appealing to male chivalry in this way enabled them to transport heavy secret deliveries of ammunition.56 Although the Dror leadership was well aware of the risks, it tended to choose young women57 for this kind of work—women who sometimes would not even be accepted as full members because of their age. It was, however, necessary that these women also had other abilities.58 In other words, an unskilled young woman would not be selected as a courier purely because of her sex. A courier’s skill and intellectual ability was of utmost importance since the job was so essential to the youth movement. They performed vital functions, such as getting information to Jews in ghettos which were increasingly cut off from the outside. A liaison would act as a “human radio,”59 and many ghetto inhabitants relied solely on their reports to gain a realistic picture of the situation. What is more, some couriers lived outside the ghettos under assumed names and could provide safe apartments and other forms of assistance to Jews in hiding;60 and at a later stage, they were also responsible for making contacts with the Polish resistance and procuring weapons. Finally, couriers acquired a very important symbolic value. They were considered the embodiment of Jewish resistance61—in large part, perhaps, because they risked their lives by defying German orders and leaving the ghettos on a regular basis. While historians have neglected the stories of these activists for a long time,62 the couriers’ contemporaries held their actions in the highest regard. In their eyes, not only these deeds themselves, 55 Ibid., 65. 56 Weitzman, “Kashariyot.” 57 However, Dror and Hashomer Hazair also chose some of their most senior female members. Some liaisons were also male. 58 Weitzman, “Kashariyot.” 59 Ibid. 60 See Ochayon, “Couriers.” 61 Weitzman, “Kashariyot.” 62 Weitzman convincingly analyzes different possibilities why couriers were neglected and not recognized as heroes and ghetto fighters. She considers sexism, the false perceptions on risk of life, danger and duration of danger as well as the lack of knowledge about the circumstances of the couriers’ deaths as possible explanations. Ibid.

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but also the fact that they were performed by women, were exceptional and, as a consequence, female couriers especially were perceived as heroines.63 Zivia Lubetkin herself praised the couriers: We would not have been able to perform all of our activities throughout the German zone had it not been for our women liaisons . . . . They risked their lives scores of times as they traveled from place to place. After each mission they rested for a few days and then set out once more. One cannot possibly describe this work of organizing the Jewish resistance, or the uprising itself, without mentioning the role of these valiant women.64 What set Dror’s female couriers apart from nearly everyone else in the organization was that they witnessed German atrocities. Believing that bearing witness—whether willingly or not—was a heroic act, the leadership further sidelined gender assumptions. Let me offer some examples. Once, Havka arrived in Hrubieszów right in the middle of the deportation of Jews to a death camp and saw killings.65 Another time, she was sent to Treblinka to investigate rumors that had reached the Warsaw ghetto. She arrived at 63 For example, by the founder of the clandestine Oneg Shabbat archive Emanuel Ringelblum. See Emanuel Ringelblum, “The Girl Couriers of the Underground Movement, May 19, 1942,” in Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews, ed. Yitzhak Arad et al. (London and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 239–240. Schlechtriemen writes that exceptionality is a necessary trait attributed to heroes, which sets them apart from the masses and contrasts their personalities and their actions to those of their antagonists. “Tobias Schlechtriemen, “‘Der Held als Effekt,’ Boundary Work in Heroisierungsprozessen,” Berliner Debatte Initial 29, no.1 (2018): 106–119, 110. 64 Lubetkin, Days, 73–75. 65 Raban, They Are Still with Me, 94–96. Havka named Bełżec as the destination of the deportation in her memoir; however, she did not include a specific date, and it is not clear how and when she found out about the destination of the deported Jews. Historian Martin Gilbert framed Havka’s account in a wider story about the destruction of Hrubieszów’s Jewish community. In his book, he assumes that Havka’s journey happened on June 1, 1942 and the actual destination of the transport was Sobibor death camp. However, in an earlier account, Havka mentioned that her trip happened in the beginning of spring and before April 17, 1942. Following her account, it had to be an earlier deportation and not the one in June in the course of which about half of the town’s population was murdered. For Havka, witnessing this deportation and all its horrors was probably an unprecedented situation. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy (München: RosettaBooks, 2018), 225–226; Havka Folman, “Information from Hrubieszów—No one believed it in Warsaw” in Pinkas Hrubieszow: Memorial to a Jewish Community in Poland, ed. Baruch Kaplinsky (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yots’e Hrubyeshov. in Yisroel un in di fareynik.t.e sht.at.en 1962), 693–694.

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the town’s railway station and overheard some Poles talking about what was happening in the extermination camp and about the distinct smell of the crematorium.66 On both occasions, Havka had to continue with her information-gathering, all the while concealing her true feelings and even pretending to support the crimes happening in front of her. The slightest slip would have led to a life-threatening search and inspection of her forged papers. Later, Havka was sent to inform other ghettos about the extermination of Jews. However, people sometimes refused to accept what she said. Like Tema Schneiderman, Havka was often the only eyewitness with enough credibility (bestowed by her association with the movement thought of as heroic) to be able to convince people in the Warsaw ghetto of the veracity of what she had seen. As such, couriers held a central role in changing strategies of the youth movements towards the German occupation (discussed in the previous part on Zivia). In essence, by seeing unimaginable things and bearing witness to them, these women left the limits imposed by traditional gender attributions far behind. Couriers had an exceptionally challenging job. They experienced enormous anxiety and fear, were isolated and lonely for long periods, and experienced the extreme hardship of undercover work (in short, fraternizing with Germans and Polish antisemites). They were often the first to know about a mass killing and the deaths of friends, and then they had to pass along the news.67 The ghettos, in fact, would take on a peculiar significance to couriers. They became almost a refuge from the constant danger of exposure during an operation. Ultimately, Havka was captured during an assignment in Crakow. She was found with a group of other young Jews, who had just returned from an attack against several cafés popular with Germans. Sent to Auschwitz, she managed to pass as a (non-Jewish) Pole.68 Havka survived the war, and later (like Zivia) returned to Dror in order to organize illegal emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine until she immigrated herself in 1947. Havka’s example tells the story of a young girl who became a Dror member, participated in its educational offers, and committed herself to the movement’s ideals. She assumed the responsibility for very dangerous tasks and worked as a courier. Havka was chosen for this task because she 66 Raban, They Are Still with Me, 103. 67 Ibid., 72. 68 Ibid., 138–150. This happened on December 22, 1942.

Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust?

provided the combination of all necessary attributes including, but not limited to, that of being female. The leadership chose her due to strategic considerations and it trusted her with important tasks. She experienced the time on the road and outside the ghetto under an assumed identity in a very liaison-specific way and hence, had to cope with completely different challenges than the Jews in the ghetto.

Conclusion The Zionist pioneering Dror youth movement was acutely aware of gender stereotypes and predefined gender roles. Yet they tried not to let these ideas influence the distribution of work and managed to maintain their prewar egalitarianism throughout the Nazi persecution. In Dror, women and men worked together in the kibbutzim and an individual’s talents determined the tasks they received. While historians have argued that in almost all social contexts men and women experienced the Holocaust differently, precisely because they fulfilled highly specific gender roles, I propose that in organizations like Dror this was not straightforwardly the case. Zivia—Dror’s delegate at the Zionist Congress in Geneva and a key member of the ŻOB command in the Warsaw ghetto—was rather unusual. If there were reservations against women in leadership positions in the resistance, the war and Dror’s politics brushed them aside. Growing up in a traditional environment, Zivia knew about women’s chains; but in Freyheit’s and Dror’s egalitarian culture she flourished and effectively transcended gender. Havka also underwent a double transformation—from the youngest child in a traditional Jewish family to an independent woman, and from an enthusiastic member of a Zionist reading circle to a covert resistance operative. Her gender did not limit her scope of action, although as a liaison she experienced the Holocaust in a way that only a woman could. However, this was not because of gender discrimination on the side of Dror, but rather a consequence of Dror leadership’s strategy of exploiting gender stereotypes existing in Poland during the war. These findings have implications for further research. First, scholars must analyze the, arguably rare, cases in which men and women had similar experiences (such as in Zivia’s case). To understand the part played by ideology, historians must explore whether the experiences of the women discussed above were unique to egalitarian movements—such as secular

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Zionist youth groups in the first half of the twentieth century in Poland— and ask whether other factors were also at work.69 At the same time, it is vital to analyze gender-specific activities and think about as they need not be due to discrimination but might stem from other motives such as strategy (as in Havka’s case). Further, contemporaries’ perceptive should be taken into account more strongly when certain organizational structures or tasks are discussed.70 In the case of couriers, the perceptions of historians versus contemporaries’ point of view show striking differences. This case study also demonstrates that when actors have certain gender perceptions, other actors can use them to their advantage. A possible consequence, that this case study reveals, is a change in organizational structures and adaption to the new circumstances. In the example of Dror, the movement’s hierarchy changed and suddenly, young and new members became crucial assets to the leadership.

69 Stefanie Schüler-Springorum suggests that women were more equal in other movements as well. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “Liebe im Ausnahmezustand. Geschlechterbeziehungen im jüdischen Widerstand in Osteuropa,” in Liebe und Widerstand. Ambivalenzen historischer Geschlechterbeziehungen, ed. Ingrid Bauer, Christa Hämmerle, and Gabriella Hauch (Wien, Köln, and Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 331. 70 For instance, Dreifuss convincingly demonstrates in her study on the ŻOB command structure how a new analysis of relevant sources can change the perception of certain institutions. Dreifuss, “Leadership”: 24–60.

Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust?

Figure 10a. Zivia Lubetkin. Photo credit:  National Library of Israel, Schwadron collection.

Figure 10b. Havka Folman Raban with Yitzchak Zuckerman. Photo credit: unknown author. Accessible via Wikimedia.

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Female Involvement in the “Jewish Councils”1 of the Netherlands and France: Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern Laurien Vastenhout

It was then [February 1941] the Germans decided to create a Jewish Council through which they could deal with Jewish problems. They first called the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Dr. Sarlouis, who refused to co-operate. Then they called Professor Calin [Cohen] and David Esscher [Asscher], who agreed to head 1

It should be noted that, in the context of France, it is incorrect to refer to the representative body that was forced upon the Jewish communities by the German authorities, the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), as a Jewish Council because its form and function was markedly different from the Judenräte in Eastern Europe. Apart from the title, this article therefore uses the term “Jewish organizations” rather than “Jewish Councils” when making broader claims about these institutions in the Netherlands and France. For further reading on terminology used in relation to the Jewish Councils, including an explanation as to why the term Jewish Council is used in the context of the Netherlands, see, Dan Michman, “The Uniqueness of the Joodse Raad in the Western European Context,” in Dutch Jewish History, vol. 3, ed. J. Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1993), 371–380; ibid., “‘Judenräte’ und ‘Judenvereinigungen’ unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Aufbau und Anwendung eines verwaltungsmassigen Konzepts,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 46, no. 4 (1998): 293–304.

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a Jewish Council. They appointed eighteen members to constitute the Council, all prominent businessmen, lawyers and rabbis, but no women.2 In an autobiographical manuscript titled “The World was Mine,” Gertrude van Tijn reflects upon the institution and nature of the Dutch Jewish Council (Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam [JR]), accurately highlighting the absence of women in the organization’s leadership. In her position as head of the emigration department of the JR and later its department named “Help for the Departing,” Van Tijn was among the few women who obtained an important position in the council, even though she was not seated on its central board. She refused to become an official member of the organization, but nevertheless “played a major role in the gatherings of the central committee, which brought together all the council’s departments heads.”3 Little has been written about the role of women in the Jewish organization instituted at the behest of the German occupier throughout Europe.4 This is partly the result of their relative absence, compared to their male counterparts, on the organizations’ central boards, and, perhaps, the perceived peripheral nature of their positions. Furthermore, historians have dedicated much attention to the decisions made by the organizations’ leaders and their supposed collaboration with the Nazis. These studies have often resulted in moral judgments about their controversial role in the deportation of the Jews.5 The Jewish leaders were caught in a burdensome position 2 Gertrude van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” undated (1950s), 32, Doc1 248–1720B, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. There exist various copies of Van Tijn’s memoirs at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the Leo Baeck Institute Archives in New York, and the NIOD in Amsterdam. As noted by Bernard Wasserstein, there are some minor differences among these copies. See Bernard Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the fate of Dutch Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 271–272. For this article, the copy stored at NIOD was used. In this report, David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, the two chairmen of the Joodsche Raad, are referred to as David Esser or Esscher and Abraham Calin or Calvin. 3 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 120. 4 An exception is Bernard Wasserstein’s monograph on Gertrude van Tijn (The Ambiguity of Virtue). Yet, in general works on Jewish Councils, or similar organizations, the role of women is hardly reflected on. 5 A well-known example of this approach is the work of Hannah Arendt. She underlined the “role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people” and argued that if the Jewish people had been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and six million people. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality

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between the increasingly brutal demands of Nazi officials and the need to provide social welfare to the deprived communities. As a result, they faced impossible choices. Many Jewish leaders, at least initially, believed that while serving at the helm of these institutions they would be able to alleviate the suffering of their communities. Through their policy of legality, they attempted to serve as an intermediary between the Jewish communities and the German occupier “in order to prevent worse.”6 Jewish leaders’ cooperation with the Nazis and the privileges they received in return (including temporary exemption from deportation for themselves and their families) often provoked indignation, especially among those who did not personally benefit from the organizations’ existence. The moral framework from which research on the “Jewish Councils” has often been conducted, then, with its strong focus on apportioning blame for the deportations, has reinforced a predominant focus on the determinations and behavior of the organizations’ male leaderships. This article is centered around two women who were engaged in important welfare work for the Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam and its French counterpart, the Union Générale des Israélites de France (General Union of Jews in France [UGIF]): Gertrude Van Tijn and Juliette Stern, respectively. Unlike Van Tijn, who worked for one of the council’s subdepartments, Stern worked at the highest level of her organization, as she served on its conseil d’administration (central board) and also headed its social services department. Van Tijn and Stern attest to the advancement of Jewish women in their wartime societies, and we will see that they initiated independent activities during the occupation, both within and outside the legal parameters set by the Nazis. The following demonstrates that the JR and the UGIF were dynamic institutions and that Stern and Van Tijn used the organizations’ legal covers for various activities that were not in line with the official policy of compliance of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 104–119. It extends beyond the limits of this article to discuss all the studies that approached the Jewish Councils and their leaders similarly. For the case of Western Europe, see, for example, Jacques Presser, Ondergang: de vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom, 1940–1945, vol. 1 (Den Haag: Staatsuitgeverij Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 507–514; Hans Knoop, De Joodsche Raad: Het drama van Abraham Asscher en David Cohen (Amsterdam and Brussels: Elsevier, 1983); Maxime Steinberg, L’étoile et le fusil: La traque des juifs 1942–1944, vol. 2 (Bruxelles: Vie oeuv ouvrière, 1986), 248; Maurice Rajsfus, Des Juifs dans la collaboration: l’UGIF 1941–1944 (Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales, 1980). 6 In the Netherlands, this phrase was used to explain and excuse the tactics of the Jewish leaders in that they had attempted “to prevent worse” (om erger te voorkomen) by complying with Nazi regulations.

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that was propagated by male leaders. In doing so, these women went beyond their anticipated role as suppliers of social welfare to the increasingly impoverished Jewish communities in the Netherlands and France.

Female Representation on the Councils’ Boards It is difficult to measure exactly how many women were actively involved in the UGIF and the JR. In the Netherlands, Jewish functionaries created jobs simply to assure individuals JR membership, which safeguarded them from deportation.7 In reality, these positions were symbolic and did not entail any actual function. In the case of France, an exact number of female employees is particularly difficult to provide, because the UGIF consisted of two organizations which, in turn, consisted of numerous departments and subdepartments: the UGIF-Nord in the occupied zone and the UGIF-Sud in the unoccupied zone (renamed the “southern zone” after the German invasion of the south of France in November 1942). The armistice that followed the German military victory of June 1940 had left France divided, politically, socially, and geographically. The German army directly occupied the northern two-thirds of France, including the entire Atlantic coast. A new French regime governed the country from the town of Vichy in the unoccupied zone. The UGIF-Nord and the UGIF-Sud were entirely different in terms of their organizational structures, functioning, and personnel, and should be considered separate organizations. The subdepartments of the UGIF-Nord and the UGIF-Sud were officially part of the organizations while, especially in the case of the UGIFSud, they continued to operate as (financially) independent bodies in practice.8 It is impossible to determine how often women were represented in the forty-eight subdepartments of the UGIF-Nord, or how many women were engaged in the Jewish organizations that were incorporated into the UGIF-Sud.9 Yet if we look at the number of women on the Jewish bodies’ 7 Koert Berkley, Overzicht van het ontstaan, de werkzaamheden en het streven van den Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Plastica, 1945), 78. 8 Richard Cohen, The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 137–139. Also see: Laurien Vastenhout, “The ‘Jewish Councils’ of Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis” (PhD diss, The University of Sheffield, 2019), 27. See http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk. 9 Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; 1st ed. 1985 115–116. French.

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boards, in comparison to its counterparts elsewhere in occupied Europe, the UGIF stands out, with two women on the central board of the UGIFNord, Juliette Stern and Lucienne Scheid-Haas (head of the UGIF-Nord’s juridical department), and one woman represented on the central board of the UGIF-Sud, Laure Weil.10 In the Netherlands, as we have seen, women were not part of the JR’s central board.11

Mirroring Prewar Lives: Zionism and Social Welfare The personal histories of Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern are strikingly similar. Van Tijn was born in July 1891 in Braunschweig (Brunswick, Saxony) and Stern was born to Dutch parents in December 1893 in Paris. Van Tijn (née Cohen), grew up in a highly integrated German-Jewish family: “like many German Jews of her generation, she was barely aware in her childhood that she was Jewish.”12 Her father was a merchant and the family belonged to the respectable middle class. Juliette Stern’s father, Louis Jacob Spanjaard, grew up in the north of the Netherlands and belonged to a family of industrialists. Her mother, Sophie Cohen, had been born into a diamond merchant’s family originally from Antwerp. Like Van Tijn’s family, the Sterns were well integrated into the non-Jewish community.13 Both women were in their late forties when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and France in May 1940 and, as we will see, both had held similar jobs and positions before the war. Coincidentally, both women were also separated from their first husbands, the father of their children, before the outbreak of the war. Stern’s husband Waldemar Sylvain Hauer had died during WWI in 1915.14 More than twenty years later, in May 1937, Gertrude’s husband Jacques van Tijn announced that he had fallen in love 10 For a full overview of the composition of the UGIF-Nord and the UGIF-Sud central boards, see Michel Laffitte, Juif dans la France allemande: institutions, dirigeants et communautés au temps de la Shoah (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 404. 11 For a full overview of the composition of the JR central board, see Erik Somers, Voorzitter van de Joodse Raad: de herinneringen van David Cohen, 1941–1943 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2010), 83n75. 12 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 6. 13 Joëlle Hansel, “Juliette Stern: Portrait d’une femme juive à la rencontre de son peuple,” L’Arche, no. 613 (2009): 70–74; Laffitte, Juif dans la France allemande, 423n37. 14 “Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre, Ville de Paris,” accessed September 18, 2020 http://memorial14-18.paris.fr/memorial/. There are different accounts of the exact date on which Hauer was killed. Whereas “Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre” reports that Hauer died on 12 November 1915, Joëlle Hansel stated that he was killed

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with Gertrude’s secretary and wanted to dissolve their marriage.15 Gertrude dedicates a few paragraphs of her autobiographical manuscript to the loss she felt after the breakup, which had come as a complete surprise to her. Shortly thereafter, she also lost a good friend in a car crash.16 She seems only to have recovered from these blows, and her subsequent depression, two years later.17 The mirrored lives of Van Tijn and Stern are especially highlighted through their shared zeal for Zionist ideals in the 1930s, which was quite unique for the well-integrated, assimilated communities they had been brought up in. While it is now recognized that Zionism in the 1920s and 1930 in Western Europe was more widespread than initially thought, leaving its imprint in the Netherlands and France after the influx of refugees in this period, for the majority of assimilated Jews in Western Europe, Zionism was considered to be contradictory and even a threat to their privileged position.18 Van Tijn moved from Germany to England in her early twenties and, as an enemy alien, was given ten days to leave the country in 1915. She moved to the Netherlands because she wished to reside in a neutral country rather

on 15 December. Hansel, “Juliette Stern,” 70. However, it is not clear from where she retrieved her information. 15 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 44. 16 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 14. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 For perspectives on the nature of Zionism in France in this period, see, for example, Cathérine Nicault, “Face au Sionisme, 1887–1940,” in Histoire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle de 1860 à nos jours, ed. André Kaspi (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 189– 226. Ibid., “La France et le sionisme, 1897–1948. Une rencontre manquée?” (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992); ibid., “L’ Acculturation des Israélites Français au Sionisme après la Grande Guerre,” Archives Juives 1, no. 39 (2006): 9–28; Michel Abitbol, Les deux terres promises: les Juifs de France et le sionisme, 1897–1945 (Paris: Perrin, 2010; 1st ed. 1989), 146–158. For the nature of Zionism in the Netherlands in this period, see, for example, Joseph Michman, Hartog Beem, and Dan Michman, Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1999; 1st ed. 1992), 122; Hans Blom and Joel Cahen, “Jewish Netherlanders, Netherlands Jews, and Jews in the Netherlands, 1870–1940,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. Hans Blom, Renate Fuks-Mansfeld, et al., trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (Oxford: Littman library of Jewish civilization, 2002; 1st ed. 1995 [Dutch]), 273–274; Chaya Brasz, “Dutch Jews as Zionists and Israeli Citizens,” in Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. Yosef Kaplan and Chaya Brasz (Leiden/ Boston/Köln: Brill, 2001), 223.

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than to return to Germany.19 In Amsterdam, she was introduced to Zionism by an unidentified young man at a dinner party who persuaded her to read Zionist literature. In “The World Was Mine,” she remarks that it was a revelation to realize that Jews could be proud of their heritage and “actually worked for a renaissance in a country of their own.”20 Inspired by Herzl’s writing, Van Tijn joined the Dutch Jewish Women’s Council and headed its department for social services: “The acceptance seemed unimportant at the time; it proved a turning point in my life,” she writes.21 With the influx of large numbers of refugees in the Netherlands in the 1930s, especially from Germany, the Comité voor Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen (Committee for Special Jewish Affairs [CBJB]) and its subcommittee the Comité voor Joodsche Vluchtelingen (Committee for Jewish Refugees [CvJV]) were established. Headed by Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, who would later chair the Dutch Jewish Council, these committees attempted to ameliorate the fate of these refugees, for whom the government did little.22 The CBJB worked closely together with Stichting Joodse Arbeid, a Zionist organization that aimed to prepare young Jews for their emigration to Palestine. Van Tijn was asked to organize the daily work of the CvJV: “the registration, interviewing, housing and feeding. Whenever refugees had or could procure emigration visa, I had to further their emigration.”23 As secretary of the CvJV, Gertrude van Tijn attempted to cover the large expenses of the organization and traveled through Europe to secure funds. She met representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and was appointed as the official representative of the Netherlands by the organization’s European director Bernhard Kahn.24 Van Tijn was also responsible for a Zionist youth training farm in Wieringen, where she hoped to “train 300 young people in agriculture, horticulture, and various trades such as carpentry, welding etc.” that would prepare them for work overseas, including in Palestine.25 One of her dreams became reality when she initiated the Wieringen project. After the British government had announced strict new limits on Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1939, 19 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 19–20. 20 As cited in ibid., 11–12. 21 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 1. 22 Michman, Beem et al., Pinkas, 134 23 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 5. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Ibid., 9.

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Van Tijn successfully organized the illegal departure of more than three hundred immigrants from Amsterdam to Palestine with the aid of several Zionist agents.26 Until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Van Tijn was thus engaged in many different activities that were primarily dedicated to the provision of social welfare to refugees and to the emigration of Jews from the Netherlands. Juliette Stern was likewise engaged in numerous social welfare activities before the German invasion of France and was also actively involved in the Zionist movement. Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 and the refugee crisis during this period had made her more sensible to her Jewish roots. She wrote: “And I, being French, who believed that I forgot my Jewish origin, I suffer with them, their wounds are mine. Judaism, in my eyes, will become alive again. . . . I feel attached by distant fibers that I thought were dead.”27 In this period, she was also won over to the Zionist cause and instituted a women’s organization that was specifically dedicated to the study of Zionism named Kadimah.28 Other women who were involved in Kadimah included Denise Gamzon, who was an early supporter of Zionism.29 In 1935, Stern approved the organization’s merger with the Jewish Women’s Union for Palestine, which became the Fédération Française and was part of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO). The WIZO had been established in London on July 11, 1920 in the belief that women had to contribute in their own way to the Zionist cause. In 1935, the French WIZO branch was inaugurated and Juliette Stern was nominated as its director. As Lazare has argued, the WIZO in France was exceptional in terms of its nature and area of activity when compared with other organizations. At the time, the vast majority of Jewish women’s organizations were dedicated to charitable work and abstained from participation in the religious or political spheres of Jewish life.30 WIZO, on the other hand,

26 For a full overview of this episode, see Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 58–64. 27 Juliette Stern in Hansel, “Juliette Stern,” 70–74. 28 Laffitte, Les juifs dans la France allemande, 39; Lucien Lazare, “Le réseau SF-WIZO, Service familial clandestin de placement d’enfants,” in Organisation juive de combat, ed. Catherine Richet (Paris: 2006), 464. 29 Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940– 1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40. For Denise Gamzon’s testimony on her involvement in various Zionist organizations, see her Memoirs (Jerusalem: published by author, 1997), 45–47. 30 Lazare, “Le réseau SF-WIZO,” 464.

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helped women in Palestine and set up subsidiary agencies and fundraising for political activity. In total, around one thousand women joined the French Federation of the WIZO, including representatives of the Parisian Jewish bourgeoisie. Stern attended the WIZO world congress in the summer of 1937 and wrote in her “Notes on the Congress” that nothing got her more excited than “the debates on Palestine itself.”31 Much more than simply a matter of social welfare, as it often turned out to be in practice in this period in Western Europe, Zionism for Stern was intrinsically related to the strong conviction that a Jewish homeland was necessary.32

The German Invasion: a Radical Change The German invasion of the Netherlands and France in May 1940 radically changed the lives of Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern. The presence of the Nazi regime directly affected their day-to-day occupations. Both women had to decide whether to continue their work or to flee abroad, as many tried to do during the chaos. In the end, they were convinced that the Jewish community needed their aid. Through her network, Van Tijn had opportunities to get out and could easily have sailed to England on of one of the last “escape” ships that left the port of IJmuiden. While she had successfully encouraged her son to leave for the United States earlier on, and continued to beg her daughter to do the same, Van Tijn stated that she could not desert her post and wanted to continue to care for Jews in the Netherlands by helping them emigrate abroad.33 Stern likewise decided to stay in Paris, even though many fled abroad or joined the general exodus south until the armistice in June 1940.34 Both women continued to engage in their pre-occupation activities— Van Tijn as secretary to the CvJV and Stern as director of the French WIZO branch. Their work evolved during the course of the war. For example, the CvJV was no longer solely concerned with refugees from Germany, but also tried to arrange tickets and visas for Dutch Jews who wished to leave the country.35 Although the committee’s financial situation worsened, Van Tijn 31 Stern as cited in Hansel, “Juliette Stern,” 5. 32 Ibid., 2. 33 Van Tijn, “The World Was Mine,” 22, 26. 34 Adler, The Jews of Paris, 6. 35 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 91.

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had access to some clandestine movement of funds from overseas through the contacts she had made with representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee. She continued to arrange Jewish emigration with the use of this money, but this became increasingly difficult.36 The creation of the Dutch Jewish Council in February 1941, by order of Hans Böhmcker (representative of Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart for the city of Amsterdam), ended the activities of the CvJV. The council’s leadership was given authority over all existing Jewish (aid) organizations in March 1941 and, as a result, it incorporated the activities of the CvJV. In a similar vein, Juliette Stern faced the forced reorganization of the WIZO under the umbrella of the UGIF in November 1941. While after the German invasion of France in 1940 Zionist organizations had not initially been officially dissolved, they no longer enjoyed a solid legal status. They were banned from organizing public gatherings and their leaders were not allowed to issue any official publications.37 After the UGIF-Nord’s establishment, Stern became the head of its social services section.

Using the Protection of the “Jewish Councils” for Social Welfare and Clandestine Activities During the war, Zionists in France were prominently represented in social welfare organizations that dedicated their efforts to aiding the increasingly deprived Jewish communities. As head of the social services section of the UGIF-Nord, Juliette Stern was mainly responsible for Jewish children, including those whose parents had been arrested and interned in Drancy camp. These children were “blocked” and could not be transferred to another location as they would eventually be interned in Drancy as well. In the meantime, they were in need of care; while some of them went to the children’s homes administered by the UGIF, others were placed in foster homes through the so-called “service 42.”38

36 Ibid., 88–91. 37 Georges Wellers, André Kaspi, Adam Rayski, and Bronia Klibanski , L’activité des organisations Juives en France sous l’occupation (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1947), 181–182. 38 Adler, The Jews of Paris, 124–126; Nancy Lefenfeld, “Unarmed Combat: Humanitarian Resistance in France during the Shoah,” in Jewish Resistance against the Nazis, ed. Patrick Henry (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 106–107.

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After the notorious Vélodrôme d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv) roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942, Stern decided, against the orders of the SS, and the Vichy Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), which directly oversaw the UGIF, as well as against the UGIF’s official policy of legality, to transfer the children elsewhere. Forced into illegality to continue its social work, the WIZO, still headed by Stern, was reorganized into an illegal department of the UGIF in this period: service 42B or SF-WIZO.39 Service 42B was structured and organized by Stern and Joséphine Getting, who also had extensive experience in providing social assistance.40 Those who worked for the department illegally dispersed the children whom the Gestapo had placed under the control of the UGIF, among non-Jewish families. The illegal UGIF department received aid from clandestine groups, such as the Amelot Committee. This was a Jewish relief organization that united several preexisting immigrant Jewish organizations and engaged in various extralegal activities, including helping Jews in hiding.41 In a postwar interview, Denise Schorr Khaitman, who worked in the children’s homes of the UGIF, indicated that there was a whole network of clandestine organizations that attempted to move these children from the occupied to the unoccupied zone, or even to Switzerland and Israel. The work unfolded under the cover of the UGIF and with Juliette Stern’s knowledge, according to Khaitman.42 Interestingly, in addition to private donations and support from the American Joint Distribution Committee, money that originated from the UGIF was also used to finance such underground activities.43 The general commissioner of the Keren Kayemet Leisraël (KKL), Joseph Fischer, testified to Stern’s role in embezzling the legal funds of the UGIF for illegal purposes. He did so in a statement during the postwar honor court, instituted by the Jewish community to investigate the wartime 39 Catherine Richet, “Biographies des membres du réseau SF-WIZO,” in Organisations juive de combat, ed. Catherine Richet (Paris: Autrement, 2006), 467–470. 40 Lefenfeld, “Humanitarian Resistance in France,” 106. 41 Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. Nathan Bracher (Brandeis: Brandeis University Press, 2001; 1st ed. 1994), 343–344; Lazare, “Le réseau SF-WIZO,” 465. 42 Interview with Denise Schorr Khaitman, 5 December 1996—Interview No. 23092, USC Shoah Foundation. Accessed at the American University of Paris. 43 Laura Hobson Faure, Un “plan marshall juif ”: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 49–59; Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981), 240–244; Lazare, “Le réseau SF-WIZO,” 465.

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conduct of the Jewish leadership.44 On November 6, 1944, Fischer indicated that he had been charged with the financial commission of the Joint Distribution Commitee during the war and that he supported certain covert Jewish initiatives in this capacity. He was in frequent contact with Stern and distributed funds to her. According to his testimony, “the UGIF was for Stern only a means of obtaining funds and giving her clandestine activity the outward appearance of legality.”45 Stern needed eight hundred thousand francs per month to finance her activities and since the Joint could “only” provide for five hundred thousand francs, she managed to fill the gap with money that belonged to the UGIF, thanks to a jeu de reçus fictifs, as stated by Fischer.46 Stern thus used her position in the legal UGIF to secure funds for clandestine activities that were not in line with the policy of legality that was officially advocated by its leadership. In spring 1943, Stern’s activities drew the attention of both Vichy and Nazi officials. Joseph Antignac, head of the Vichy-led CGQJ, reported on the existence of the illegal 42B service and the placement of Jewish children in Aryan families.47 Juliette Stern was directly implicated, but managed to escape a roundup in July 1943 in which around twenty Jews who worked for the social welfare department were arrested. By then, more than one thousand Jewish children had been saved. In the case of Gertrude van Tijn, the establishment of the Dutch JR directly affected the activities in which she had previously been engaged. In March 1941, the responsibilities of the CvJV were transferred to the Dutch Jewish Council, and Gertrude was appointed as head of its emigration department. This department was responsible for providing Jews information on the possibilities of emigration and helped Jews in filling in

44 The court was set up by the Conseil Répresentatif des Israélites de France (CRIF), established in January 1944 to coordinate political action among Jews in France and consisting of both immigrant and French Jews. The CRIF included representatives from the Central Consistory, the FSJF, the UJRE, and other Bundist, Zionist, and youth groups. For an overview of the institution of the CRIF, see Jacques Fredj, “Le Consistoire Central et la création du CRIF,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah: Le Consistoire durant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, no. 169 (2000): 164–180; ibid., “La création du C.R.I.F. 1943–1967” (master’s thesis, Université de Paris, 1988) can be consulted at the CDJC, Mémorial de la Shoah. 45 Testimony of M. Fischer, 6 November 1944, MDI-311, CRIF, Mémorial de la Shoah. 46 Ibid. 47 Report of the CGQJ to SS-Obersturmführer Röthke on the clandestine activities of the UGIF, 22 April 1943, XXVIII-159, CDJC, Mémorial de la Shoah.

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the necessary emigration documents.48 In this capacity, Van Tijn continued to help German-Jewish refugees and Dutch Jews flee to neutral countries. As Wasserstein has highlighted, while she continued to work in the same building, behind the same desk, and with the same employees who had aided her when she still headed the CvJV, her position had significantly changed: “She was now answerable not to an independent charity body but to an organization created by and subservient to the Nazis.”49 Yet, Van Tijn was keen not to become an official member of the JR. Throughout the war, she became increasingly critical of its activities “and, in particular, of professor Cohen and some of his closest advisors.”50 As a consequence, she could not attend the organization’s meetings unless she was specifically invited.51 On June 26, 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand aus der Fünten indicated that Jews between the age of eighteen and forty would be subjected to so-called polizeilicher Arbeitseinsatz, forced labor, in Germany. Gertrude refused to assist in the bureaucratic preparation of this measure and decided to resign.52 One month later, when the emigration department had become practically redundant, the JR leaders asked Van Tijn to head the newly established “Help for the Departing” section, which was instituted to prepare those who were to be deported for the journey ahead. Van Tijn asked for twenty-four hours to make a decision. In the end, she agreed: “I consented on condition that this department, although formally under the Jewish Council, as were all Jewish activities, would yet be independent . . . [and] that I would in no way be responsible for any political decisions the Jewish Council might take.”53 Van Tijn’s disagreements with JR chairman David Cohen became apparent while she maintained her operational independence. Whereas Cohen generally attempted to operate within the margins set by Nazi officials, Gertrude van Tijn often balanced on the edge of what was, and was not, accepted. At times, she refused to carry out German demands that were imposed on the JR leadership. She was discouraged from providing 48 Gids van den Joodschen Raad voor Amsterdam, Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam, 182.1, NIOD. 49 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 98–99. 50 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 47–48. 51 Ibid. 52 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 136. 53 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 53.

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lists after an incident in June 1941, when she had given information to the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) on the whereabouts of Jews who had formerly resided in the Werkdorp Nieuwesluis in Wieringen. They had been sent to Amsterdam on orders of the Sipo-SD in March 1941. Under false pretenses, namely that they planned to send the students back to Wieringen, the Sipo had requested these lists and had used them to arrest and deport these Jews. Not long thereafter, the first official notices of their deaths arrived. By February 1942, all missing Wieringen boys were reported dead.54 Van Tijn wrote: “It was then I swore to myself that never, never again would I give any list of Jewish names to the Gestapo, no matter what they promised or threatened.”55 In early 1942, Van Tijn indeed refused to provide lists to SS-Hauptsturmführer Aus der Fünten. From early on, when she still worked for the emigration department of the JR, she had been in direct contact with SS functionaries, including Klaus Barbie, aus der Fünten and, according to her own recollections, Wilhelm Zöpf, although it remains questionable whether it was indeed Zöpf who had summoned her to his office in April 1941.56 Her encounters with aus der Fünten in early 1942 were disquieting. He summoned Van Tijn to his office and demanded that she provide a list of all those who had not yet registered for emigration. Aus der Fünten summoned Van Tijn three more times and pressured her to give in to his demands; but, as her testimony shows, he never threatened her with retaliations.57 She remained loyal to the promise she had once made to herself, and this remained without consequences. In May 1943, when aus der Fünten ordered Asscher and Cohen to provide him lists with the names of 7,000 Jews who would lose the protection they had previously been granted through special stamps issued by the JR, Van Tijn again strongly objected.58 54 H. B. J. Stegeman, J. P. Stegeman, and J. W. Reutlinger, Het Joodse werkdorp in de Wieringermeer, 1934–1941 (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1983), 122; Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London and New York: Arnold, 1997), 81–82; Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 115–117. 55 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 41–42. 56 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 102–103, 112. 57 As cited in ibid., 130. 58 Van Tijn, “Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland van 10 mei 1940 tot juni 1944,” 2 October 1944 Nahariah, Palestina, 57, Doc I 248–1720B, NIOD. Even though Van Tijn indicated in this report that she quit her position, Cohen declined to accept her resignation. She therefore officially continued to work for the organization until it was dissolved in September 1943. On the issue of the protective stamps, see Berkley, Den Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam 77–79, 84–85.

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Van Tijn also claims to have been involved in an activity that was considered illegal by the Nazis: the transfer of “black money” to secret groups. While still working for the emigration department, she received money that was given to her “by each of the fortunate allowed to leave the country” and, according to Van Tijn, “the sums involved were considerable.”59 This money was increasingly needed for underground work—to aid people in hiding, among other things. Van Tijn recalled discussing the illegal transferal of these sums of money with the Joint Distribution Committee’s executive Morris Troper at the European headquarters of the JDC in Lisbon when she went there in May 1941.60 Troper was concerned about the risk she was taking but realized that “somebody would have to do it,” according to Van Tijn.61 Since Jews continued to emigrate from the Netherlands, even though their number was small, Van Tijn recalled that she had continued access to the “black money” and that she fed it to the underground and people in hiding until the very last stages of the war.62 The nature of these activities is such that they are poorly documented. As far as we know, there is no evidence that corroborates Van Tijn’s statements. We do know, however, that she was involved in helping Jews bribe their way out of the Netherlands. As Wasserstein has written, “the main reason they succeeded was a decision by the German authorities, who urgently required foreign currency to permit very wealthy Jews to ransom their way to freedom.”63 In return for Swiss Francs, paintings, and other precious items, at least four hundred Jews in the Netherlands escaped from the Nazis.64 It might have been that opportunities like these were used to illegally secure funding for clandestine activities via de JR’s Emigration department.65

59 Ibid., 38–39. 60 For Van Tijn’s remarkable mission to Lisbon, see Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 105–110. 61 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 39. 62 Ibid., 39, 65. 63 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 165. 64 Ibid., 167–168. 65 For an overview of Jews who managed to escape persecution in the Netherlands by emigrating abroad, see Generalkommissariat für das Sicherheitswesen (Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer Nord-West), 077.1485, NIOD.

Female Involvement in the “Jewish Councils”

Reassessing the Jewish Councils and the Role of Women in These Organizations With regard to their possible collaboration with the German occupier, both the UGIF and the JR received considerable scrutiny from Jews during the war and, since then, have been subject to further investigation by Jews and non-Jews. Among the Jewish community, the JR was referred to as Joodsche onraad (danger) or Joodsche verraad (treason).66 Stern and Van Tijn were aware of this during the war and we have seen that Van Tijn, in particular, openly showed her discontent with the nature of the JR. At the same time, both women realized that the legality of the organization provided opportunities to (covertly) aid Jews. Despite the controversy that surrounded the UGIF, Stern viewed it as the only source of relief that was still available to Jews, and continued to focus on this task.67 As Fischer concluded in his statement during the trial of the UGIF leaders in the Jewish honor court: “my personal impression is that, for Mrs. Stern, the political considerations were only of secondary importance and that she was driven by one sole motivation: to what extent she could exploit the UGIF to finance the clandestine hiding and illegal placement of children.”68 Van Tijn repeatedly attempted to distance herself from the policies carried out by the JR leadership. In a letter to her children, she wrote that several people could “vouch that I had nothing to do with Jewish politics since the deportations.”69 Fearing that the controversy that surrounded the JR would affect her legacy, she continued: “I know that I shall be able to look people in the face and continue serving my people anywhere, in any capacity. This is to me tremendously important. You must know that, whatever happens, I am leaving you an untarnished name.”70 In her memoirs, as well as in a report she wrote in Palestine in the summer of 1944, where she arrived after she was released from BergenBelsen in exchange for Germans in Palestine, Van Tijn openly disassociated herself with the Joodsche Raad and emphasized that she had only used its legality to carry out her own policies.71 She was keen to stress that she did 66 Moore, Victims and Survivors, 86–87. 67 Adler, The Jews of Paris, 152–153; Cohen, Burden of Conscience, 105. 68 Testimony of M. Fischer, 6 November 1944, MDI-311, CRIF, Mémorial de la Shoah. 69 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 65. 70 Ibid. 71 For the story of her exchange, as part of a group of 222 people, and the journey to Palestine, see Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 206–212.

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not accept a salary from this organization.72 Van Tijn made a distinction between those who had simply complied with the German regulations, including the Dutch JR leaders Asscher and Cohen, and people like herself who “believed that non-compliance would have saved many lives.”73 Van Tijn believed—and as the Nazis who had directly overseen the workings of the Joodsche Raad during the war later confessed (Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, SS-Sturmbannführer Willy Lages, and the commander of Westerbork transit camp Albert Conrad Gemmeker, for example)—the Germans “would never [have been] able to organize their anti-Jewish measures so quickly and efficiently without the help of the many . . . departments of the Jewish Council.”74 She claimed that Cohen, whom she considered to be a ‘weak man,’ should have “refused the leadership the Germans imposed on him when he realized what it would entail.”75 It is necessary to read these remarks critically, however. Van Tijn reproached the JR chairmen for having failed to foresee the fate awaiting Jews, but at the same time she conceded that she could not anticipate German measures either.76 It was impossible to predict how Nazi policies would evolve and how exactly this would affect Jews. The courageous acts of Juliette Stern and Gertrude Van Tijn have been highlighted, but one must bear in mind that their position was different from that of the Jewish organizations’ chairmen, who were closely watched by their overseers— the Sipo-SD, Vichy officials (in the case of France), and the civil and military administrations in the Netherlands and France respectively. Perhaps because they were women, Van Tijn and Stern were not strictly monitored. On numerous occasions, the JR chairmen were intimidated. For instance, during a meeting on May 21, 1943, SS-Sturmbannführer Willy Lages threatened Asscher and Cohen with severe punishment if they did not somehow pressure seven thousand Jews into forced labor in Germany.77 As 72 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 47–48. 73 Ibid., 32. 74 Van Tijn, “The World Was Mine,” 32. For the statements of Seyss-Inquart and Lages, see Procedural documents, dossier Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, Nationaal Archief (NA), Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (CABR), nummer toegang 2.09.09, inventarisnummer 107491 I (PF Amsterdam T70982); Statements in preparation for the trial against Aus der Fünten, NA, CABR, nummer toegang 2.09.09, inventarisnummer 66 (BrC 50/55). 75 Van Tijn, “The World was Mine,” 33. 76 Ibid. 77 Report of meeting between Aus der Fünten, Lages, Blumenthal, Asscher, and Cohen, 21 May 1943, 182.4, NIOD. Also see Cohen, Voorzitter van de Joodse Raad, 166.

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we have seen, Van Tijn’s refusal to provide such services to the occupiers were accompanied by neither threats nor retaliation. Compared to the male leadership, women like Van Tijn and Stern were thus in a better position to determine and shape their own course of action. This article, then, does not propose that these women were the heroic antitheses to their male counterparts. In fact, in the case of France, some of the male leaders were also directly engaged in activities that were not in line with the policy of legality they officially propagated.78

Conclusion Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern found their own way to save as many Jews as possible. While pushed into their traditional role of caretaking, they refused to stand on the sidelines while Jews were increasingly persecuted. Instead, the war created a momentum in which both women, in a male-dominated world, were confident to follow their own course of action under the legal cloaks of the JR and the UGIF. In the end, both women managed to survive the war. Allowed to leave Bergen-Belsen, Van Tijn wrote a report for the Dutch government-in-exile that was one of the first witness statements that reached the “free world.”79 Stern went into hiding and lived to see the liberation of France in the summer of 1944. Even though their stories have been told on the side-lines in monographs on the JR and the UGIF, the predominant attention to the male leaders and their decisions has ignored the fact that women such as these played a remarkable role in a world that was dominated by men.

78 An analysis of the engagement of some of the French leaders in clandestine activities extends beyond the scope of this article. This is, for example, highlighted by Robert Gamzon, board member of the UGIF-Sud who engaged in the clandestine sixth section of the Service Social des Jeunes (SSJ) that was integrated in the UGIF (also referred to as the sixième) and which was active in both the occupied and in the unoccupied zones. See Robert Gamzon, Les eaux claires, journal 1940–1944 (Paris: Éclaireurs Israélites de France, 1981), 78–79. Also see, Vastenhout, “The ‘Jewish Councils’ of Western Europe”, 231–249. 79 Gertrude van Tijn, “Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland van 10 mei 1940 tot juni 1944,” 2 October 1944, Doc. 1 248–1720B, NIOD.

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Figure 8. Gertrude in her office at Lijnbaansgracht, 366 in Amsterdam, date unknown. Photo credit: Collectie Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam.

9

“Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?” The Betrayal of Polish Women and the Jewish Children They Hid during the Holocaust—the Case of Cracow* Joanna Sliwa

Introduction In August 1943, when all but two ghettos (in Bochnia and Tarnów) remained in the Cracow District in German-occupied Poland and Jews’ legal presence was confined either to them or to labor camps, the German authorities intensified their search for Jews in hiding.1 Serafina Fesenko was caught by * I thank Adara Goldberg and Natalia Aleksiun for reviewing drafts of this text. I am grateful to the editors for their constructive feedback. “Cracow” is the publisher’s preferred spelling of the Polish “Kraków” and the Anglicized “Krakow,” and not the author’s choice. However, I use “Kraków” in the footnotes to adhere to the original titles of archival sources. 1 The German authorities liquidated the two “remnant ghettos” in September 1943. The Cracow District was one of five administrative districts in the General Government.

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surprise in the early morning on August 23, 1943, with the question: “Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?” The man who asked was a Polish policeman, Adam Juny.2 Juny and Lindert (whose name could not be established), a German officer, had recently commandeered a room in the woman’s house in Pychowice, a district of Cracow.3 By then, Serafina’s home already housed three other residents. In June 1943, she learned from her tenant Rozalia Lieberfreund, who had introduced herself as Anna Pieniążek just two months earlier, that Rozalia and her two children were Jewish. Yet Serafina continued to shelter them in spite of the risk. On that fateful day of August 23, she denied that any Jews hid in her house (and there were more than just Rozalia and her family). Nevertheless, Juny barged into the room where the Jewish family was sleeping. Rozalia’s son managed to escape the ambush, but his mother and nine-year-old sister were trapped. Rozalia bribed Juny with a considerable sum. Still, the policeman took her and her daughter to the Kripo (German criminal police) headquarters at 40 Szlak Street, from where Rozalia was eventually shipped to the Skarżysko-Kamienna labor camp and her daughter to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Juny returned to threaten their former rescuer to reveal the boy’s hiding place. Rozalia and her daughter were not the only Jews whom Juny apprehended that day. At the Special Criminal Court in Cracow, set up after the war to prosecute German perpetrators and their local collaborators who committed crimes against Polish citizens during the German occupation, a witness in Juny’s case testified: “On August 23, [1943] following an announcement of the German authorities that an award will be paid out to employees of the police who expose Jews, the defendant contributed with his behavior to apprehending a Jewish woman, Frania Rosenberg, and a five-year-old child.”4 According to his indictment, Juny received a portion of the money found on the Jewish woman.5 2 IPN (Institute of National Memory) Kr 502/235 Akta w sprawie: Adam Juny, p. 15; USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) RG-15.179M, Sąd Specjalny Karny w Krakowie (SSKr) (Sygn. GK 203), 1947–1949, SSKKr 163. Jan Grabowski writes about the involvement of the Polish police in the persecution of Jews, including in Cracow, in Na posterunku. Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2020). 3 The Germans incorporated twenty-seven communes and parts of two municipalities into Cracow on June 1, 1941. Pychowice became one of the city’s districts. 4 IPN Kr 502/235 Akta w sprawie: Adam Juny, 5. 5 Juny was found guilty for denouncing Jews in hiding. He maintained that his behavior stemmed from an order that he had received from Lindert.

“Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?”

Juny’s file reveals the difficulties surrounding the rescue of Jews in German-occupied Poland and prompts numerous questions: What were the responses of ordinary Poles to the ghettoization and deportation of Jews? What challenges did Jews face when trying to find shelter and survive in hiding? How did the danger posed by denunciation affect non-Jews’ decisions to take action on behalf of Jews and the Jews’ chances of staying alive? What were the motivations of informants and denouncers? And what role did gender play in the rescue of Jews and the efforts to thwart such endeavors? During the Holocaust, those non-Jews who empathized with the Jews’ suffering, who provided ad hoc assistance, as well as temporary and permanent aid were in the minority. In fact, these helpers were seen by the majority as breaching social and national mores and contracts. Aid givers could neither expect help from their compatriots nor trust them. Betrayal and the fear of betrayal undermined interpersonal and community relations, and thereby sowed further distrust and conflict. This chapter centers on the notion of betrayal that non-Jewish Polish women faced when they sought to help the most vulnerable Jewish victims—children.6 While the women were ostracized, blackmailed, threatened, and denounced, it was the children they sheltered who bore the brunt of the betrayers’ actions. Their already limited survival strategies continued to shrink or were exhausted altogether. By focusing on the contexts in which betrayal occurred, I examine how women aid givers navigated the web of dangers lurking inside and outside the home, and how these circumstances and pressures affected the women’s attitudes toward rescuing Jewish children, specifically in Cracow.7 A gender lens enables us to analyze daily domestic life during the Holocaust, and consider the extent to which the household, traditionally a woman’s realm, was still shaped by gender norms. 6 Scholars examine the concept of the betrayal of Jews seeking to survive on the “Aryan” side in Poland and, by extension, of their aid givers, from a variety of perspectives. For the most recent major study, see Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, eds., Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski, vols. 1 and 2 (Warszawa: Stowarzyszenie Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2018). Sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda charted the concept of betrayal in societies in Betrayals and Treason: Violations of Trust and Loyalty (New York: Routledge, 2018). 7 For a case study of the “ambivalence of assistance and rescue” in Tarnów, see Agnieszka Wierzcholska, “Helping, denouncing, and profiteering: a process-oriented approach to Jewish-Gentile relations in occupied Poland from a micro-historical perspective,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23, no. 12 (2017): 34–58.

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If gender offers one angle of looking at betrayal, age constitutes another. The perspective of children provides insight into how the youngest Jews, those with the least resources and greatest reliance on adults, recalled and experienced their attempts to reach and survive on the “Aryan” side. As the histories of non-Jewish female rescuers and the children they sheltered show, betrayal by non-Jewish Poles was not the exception. Betrayers were not simply people in positions of authority, such as Polish policemen, but were relatives and neighbors, acquaintances and strangers. Prejudice against Jews factored in the betrayers’ modes of operation. Antisemitism was an inextricable part of Polish Jewish life and relations with non-Jews during the interwar period. In the 1930s, Polish nationalists called for the mass emigration of Jews from Poland, and many ordinary Poles sought to eliminate the economic competition they believed Jews represented.8 As a consequence, Nazi-incited persecution of Jews provided an opportunity for many non-Jewish Poles to express their anger, enrich themselves, and refashion Poland economically and demographically. Their principles were underpinned by wartime propaganda, terror, demoralization, and the legally and socially approved marginalization of Jews, enhanced by antisemitism, and augmented by greed.9 Non-Jewish Polish women faced betrayal for transgressing presumably shared values and social codes. They were targeted by their fellow Poles who themselves were subject to Nazi racial policies. Ideals of trust, loyalty, and solidarity, if and where they existed, crumbled. Those nonJewish Poles who facilitated Nazi anti-Jewish policies and cooperated with German authorities engaged in collaboration.10 In their understanding, their choices reflected compliance with the rules of the occupiers. Yet 8 For an overview of the history of Jews in Poland between 1918 and 1939, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 11–83. For a recent study on the efforts of the Second Polish Republic to push Jews to emigrate, see Zofia Trębacz, Nie tylko Palestyna. Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935–1939 (Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2018). 9 See Jan Grabowski, “Rescue for Money: Paid Helpers in Poland, 1939–1945,” in Search and Research: Lectures and Papers, vol. 13, Rescue for Money—Paid Helpers in Poland, 1939–1945 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008); and Jan Grabowski and Dariusz Libionka, eds., Klucze i Kasa. O mieniu żydowskim pod okupacją niemiecką i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (Warszawa: Stowarzyszenie Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2014). 10 Scholarship that examines forms of collaboration in the Polish context has accelerated with the publication of the now seminal book by Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002).

“Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?”

collaborators violated neighborly conventions and encroached on the ideals of human decency, as their decisions and actions were detrimental to both the Jews in hiding and the non-Jews who sheltered them.11

Sources Informants and blackmailers did not record how they acted toward their fellow citizens who sheltered or helped Jewish children, and few aid givers documented their own efforts.12 This kind of information is found mainly in accounts of survivors—children and adults—recorded by the Central Jewish Historical Commission.13 The stories of betrayal emerge in the essays that child survivors wrote, encouraged by their guardians in children’s homes.14 If self-censorship and external influences played a role in how witnesses narrated their lives at the time, survivors were often forthcoming about their negative experiences with non-Jews and did not shy away from providing the names of informants. They described how the actions of the latter affected survivors’ fates, and they emphasized the decisions and actions of their aid givers. While these sources offer much insight, they are brief and often incomplete. Therefore, testimonials recorded in later years offer another layer of knowledge.15 Many such testimonies provide extensive information about how rescue was organized and what challenges aid givers faced. What’s

11 Natalia Aleksiun examined how Jews grappled with “intimate violence” in their accounts in “Neighbours in Boryslaw. Jewish Perceptions of Collaboration and Rescue in Eastern Galicia,” in The Holocaust and European Societies. Social Processes and Social Dynamics, ed. Frank Bajohr and Andrea Löw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 243–266. 12 See, for example, Emuna Nachmany-Gafny, “The Fortunate Few. The Rescue of Jewish Children in Poland during the Holocaust as Seen from the Standpoint of the Rescuers in the Immediate Aftermath of the War,” Yalkut Moreshet: Holocaust Documentation and Research 2 (2004): 109–144; and Joanna B. Michlic, “‘I will never forget what you did for me during the war’: Rescuer-Rescuee Relationships in the Light of Postwar Correspondence in Poland, 1945–1949,” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 169–207. 13 Regarding child accounts, see Feliks Tych, Alfons Kenkmann, Elisabeth Kohlhaas, and Andreas Eberhardt, eds., Kinder über den Holocaust: Frühe Zeugnisse 1944–1948 (Berlin: Metropol, 2008). 14 See Joanna Michlic, “The Raw Memory of War: Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock,” Yad Vashem Studies 37, no. 1 (2009): 11–52. 15 For a study of how survivors narrate their histories over time, see Sharon KangisserCohen, Testimony & Time: Holocaust Survivors Remember (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014).

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more, they demonstrate how the survivors assessed—many years after events—their own experiences and the actions of rescuers and betrayers.16 Another source for examining wartime betrayal comprises of files submitted for the Righteous Among the Nations Award from Yad Vashem. These are among the few sources that contain accounts written by aid givers themselves. Lastly, this chapter draws upon Polish court documents amassed during the “August Trials,” or criminal proceedings based on the decree of August 31, 1944, to prosecute collaborators and perpetrators.17 The testimonies of defendants, as well as of witnesses and survivors, provide information about rescue and efforts to thwart it.

Familial Betrayal The German army occupied Cracow on September 6, 1939. By October, the city had become the capital of the so-called General Government and the seat of the Cracow District. Seeking to mold Cracow into a representative German city, the German authorities expelled about twenty thousand Jews between May and November 1940. When the Germans created a ghetto in Cracow on March 3, 1941, they forced some eleven thousand Jews (remaining from a prewar population of more than fifty thousand) to enter it. The Germans unleashed two major actions in the ghetto—in June and October 1942—in the course of which they deported several hundred Jews and killed others on-site. That same year, after unsuccessfully attempting to hide in Niepołomice near Cracow, eleven-year-old Nana Sztro (also known as Jenta Strok), her younger brother Loluś, the children’s mother Fela, and their aunt Ita Frank fled to Cracow on false papers. By the time they arrived, the German authorities had instituted the death penalty (October 15, 1941) for Jews found without permission on the Aryan side and for non-Jews who helped them.

16 For studies on the use and role of survivor accounts, see Rachel Einwohner, “Ethical Considerations on the Use of Archived Testimonies in Holocaust Research: Beyond the IRB Exemption,” Qualitative Sociology 34, no. 3 (2011): 415–430; Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); and Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 17 On the history of the August Law and the trials, see Andrew Kornbluth, The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).

“Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?”

At first, Nana and her family found shelter at Wiktoria Suchniowa’s house at 83 Prądnicka Street, far from the ghetto. As Nana explained in a short biography that she wrote in 1946 while in a children’s home, eager to purloin the items belonging to Ita and Fela, Suchniowa denounced the two women. Meanwhile, the children escaped to a shelter operated by an elderly woman named Ms. Piechura, at 37 Starowiślna Street in Kazimierz, the former Jewish district. While Nana recalled Ms. Piechura as kind, the woman’s grandson, who was about twenty-one years old at the time, “beat us very badly and threatened to shoot us.”18 In effect, the woman willing to hide the two Jewish children faced danger from inside her own family. While the man may not have threatened to denounce his grandmother, he did torment her emotionally and terrorize the children. It is impossible to ascertain the reasons for the young man’s behavior, but he eventually impeded his grandmother’s efforts to save Nana and Loluś. Nana’s recollection of him offers only a glimpse of the range of attitudes toward hiding Jewish children that could exist within one family. Her story shows that some non-Jewish women exercised their agency to help Jewish children and practiced traditional female roles as caretakers. But their activities, regardless of their age or the closeness of their relationship with the betrayer, could be compromised by their own relatives or household members. The situation escalated to such an extent that Ms. Piechura arranged with a man from Ostrów in the Lublin District, Stefan Sak, to take in Nana. Loluś, eight years old at the time, remained with the Piechuras. A Jewish woman acquainted with the case explained in an account later submitted to the Jewish Historical Commission that the Ms. Piechura’s grandson hid Loluś, who reportedly had a “Semitic” look, under the bed in his apartment for two years, until liberation.19 One may only conjecture why the young man was keen on hiding the boy only. Then too, protecting and feeding two Jewish children was certainly a major undertaking. Perhaps the Piechuras arrived at a compromise. They simply had more luck securing a new location for Nana while finding a home for a boy with “Semitic” features, and circumcised at that (as a rule, Christian boys were uncircumcised), posed a greater challenge. 18 Account of Nana Sztro, GFH (Ghetto Fighters’ House) 2544, 2. 19 Account of Karola Guterman, AŻIH (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute) 301/1598, 3.

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Like Ms. Piechura, Lucyna Pawlak encountered domestic opposition to her rescue efforts, initially from her mother. After the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto on March 13 to 14, 1943, seven-year-old Ewa Lewi and her sister hid with other Jews in an emptied house in the ghetto. A Jewish man stumbled upon the two girls and contacted their father, a prisoner in the nearby Plaszow camp.20 Ewa’s father arranged with Lucyna, with whom he worked in a factory outside the ghetto, to hide his daughters. “Mrs. Pawlak [Lucyna’s mother] was not happy at all when she saw us,” Ewa recalled in an account she submitted soon after the war to the Jewish Historical Commission.21 Explaining the reason for her anxiety, Ewa offered, “She was afraid of her female neighbors and reproached her daughter.” Mrs. Pawlak’s fear was grounded in her appraisal of her neighbors’ stances toward the Jews’ plight. She suspected—from interactions or just instinct—that they would go to the authorities. Mrs. Pawlak’s initial hostility to the plan to harbor the children was somewhat assuaged with payments from the girls’ parents. Still, Ewa recalled, Mrs. Pawlak was unkind, and she became worse when money for the girls’ upkeep ceased after their parents’ deportation to camps outside Cracow. To compound the already tense situation, Mrs. Pawlak’s daughter Lucyna was involved with a German policeman, Oswald Bousko. His desertion from service led to a raid on the house in which Ewa and her sister were hiding. The two girls, Mrs. Pawlak, and other family members were taken to the Montelupich prison, where they endured interrogations and witnessed violence against detainees suspected of being Jewish.22 Eventually, through Lucyna’s intercession, the Pawlaks and their Jewish charges were released. Lucyna managed to persuade the German authorities that the two children were, in fact, Catholic Poles. The Germans did not raid the Pawlaks’ house because someone had denounced them for hiding Jews, but because they tracked down Lucyna’s lover. However, upon the family’s return, a new threat arose—and this time from within the house. “Mrs. Pawlak’s son blackmailed her. She had to give 20 Polish diacritics distinguish Plaszow, the German camp created in summer 1942, from Płaszów, a district of Cracow, where the camp was located. 21 Account of Ewa Lewi, AŻIH 301/3868, 1. See also Chava Mandelbaum (Cyla Chava Lewi), MJH (Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust), 1986.T.47. 22 The prewar correctional facility was located at 7 Montelupich Street in Cracow, and known simply as Montelupich. During the war, it served as a prison for enemies as defined by the Nazis.

“Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?”

him a lot of money every month because otherwise he threatened to inform on her to the Gestapo that she was hiding Jewish children,” Ewa explained.23 Opportunities for enrichment led family members to turn against one another. This kind of situation was not uncommon and, obviously, the Jewish children in hiding bore the consequences of the threats and extortions. As Ewa recounted, Mrs. Pawlak’s “wrath focused on us. She yelled at us terribly.”24 In coping with the blackmailer within the house, Mrs. Pawlak apparently sought to distract from the perilous familial relationship and instead directed her emotions at the Jewish children in her care. If Mrs. Pawlak continued to exhibit malevolence toward the children she was sheltering, her husband and daughter were more caring; but, as Ewa recalled, the two sisters had to live with this tension until the end of the war. Just as grandchildren turned against their grandparents, children against their parents, and siblings against one another, partners also turned against each other. Upon the liquidation of the labor camp in Prądnik Czerwony (a district of Cracow), Helena Stoeger, then about eight years old, could no longer hide there. Her father arranged for a false birth certificate for his daughter (under the name of Halina Słonecka) and placed her with a Polish family with whom he was acquainted. Helena’s brother remained in Prądnik Czerwony in another place that the children’s mother had managed to secure. However, after an argument between the boy’s caretaker and her fiancé, a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German), the man denounced Helena’s brother, who was then taken to Auschwitz, from where he did not return.25 Conflict between the couple may have caused the man who, by professing a German identity, enjoyed a privileged status, to commit an act that he deemed righteous—to inform on and eliminate a Jew. Then too, the Jewish child may have served as a pawn in personal vendettas between the couple. Betrayers could also be found among spouses. Four-year-old Ala Kaufman and her older sister were sent by their parents from Lviv to Cracow, probably in summer 1941.26 According to her caretaker, Ala had a less stereotypically “Semitic” appearance and could spend time outside playing with local children. However, at home she witnessed, and most likely endured, violence. “The man with whom we lived was very bad to us. 23 24 25 26

Account of Ewa Lewi, AŻIH 301/3868, 2. Ibid., 2. Account of Helena Stoeger, AŻIH 301/4221, 2. “Lviv” (the Ukrainian term used today) is the preferred spelling of the publisher. At the time, the city was referred to by Poles as “Lwów” and by Germans as “Lemberg.”

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He beat his wife and cursed her for keeping Jewish ‘bastards,’” Ala wrote in an account submitted to the Jewish Historical Commission soon after the war. The man unloaded his anger at his spouse for sheltering Jewish children, possibly because of fear for putting the couple at risk or because of his antisemitic feelings—or both. “The worst was when he got drunk,” Ala continued, “then it was unbearable in the house. I ran from the house or hid behind the closet, under the bed. I feared him very much.”27 Alcohol, domestic violence, and the threat of denunciation all played a role in Ala’s experience, and other stories of betrayal also reveal this cluster of problems. In 1942, twelve-year-old Rachel and four-year-old Krystyna Verderber appeared in the home of Maria Gruca, her husband Marian, and the couple’s daughter Halina.28 Maria had been the girls’ prewar nanny and was thus a first point of contact when they escaped from the Cracow ghetto.29 After the war, Halina submitted an account for Yad Vashem proceedings to have her mother recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. In her testimony, she detailed her memory of her parents’ wartime activities. She recounted that it was her father who agreed to shelter the two Jewish girls for three days, but that turned into months. The Grucas agreed to hide Rachel and Krystyna, although the family’s home—one room in the annex on the ground floor at 7 Długosza Street in Podgórze, not far from the ghetto—was not conducive to hiding Jews. The neighborhood itself was high risk—an adjacent building held an underground printing shop. The family environment at the Grucas’ was difficult too. Halina claimed that while her father was a violent drunkard, he was not a “bad person.” That is how she explained and excused his actions. However, Marian’s actions influenced the decisions that his wife made on Rachel’s behalf. Maria decided to find a new hiding place for Rachel after Marian’s two drinking buddies attempted to rape Rachel and after Marian had 27 Account of Ala Kaufman, AŻIH 301/4112, 1. 28 File of Rachel Verderber-Garfunkel. GFH 28606; File on Maria Gruca, AŻIH 349/650; Maria i Marian Gruca, AESIP (Archive of the Embassy of the State of Israel in Poland), Folder: Kraków 16.III.2008; “Black Snow: Survivor Stories of the Holocaust,” dir. Laurie Long and Terra Jean Long. USHMM RG-50.601*0061; Rachel Garfunkel (née Verderber), MJH 1980.T20; and Rachel Verderber, Interview 55341, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, January 1, 2007. 29 For a study of the role of domestic help and rescue of Jews, see Jennifer Lynn Marlow, “Polish Catholic Maids and Nannies: Female Aid and the Domestic Realm in NaziOccupied Poland” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2014).

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thrown an axe at the child. She managed to place Rachel with a female acquaintance who did not know about the girl’s Jewish identity. These events took place in 1943 during the liquidation of the ghetto, and Rachel explained that Marian may have acted out of fear and stress. In her postwar account, she alleged that she never blamed him for that. But the year that she stayed with the Grucas certainly affected her psyche. Exhausted by hiding, the physical assaults, and the constant danger of betrayal, Rachel threatened to report herself. This decision would have been disastrous for the Grucas, as Nazi law specified the death penalty for anyone assisting or hiding Jews. Women like Maria Gruca were forced to confront various dilemmas and settle problems on their own, often with very little help from their family members or partners. As we have seen, caring for Jewish children in hiding and sheltering them usually belonged to the domain of women. As women were responsible for the domestic sphere, men often unleashed their fury on the women and the Jewish children hiding in their home. Consequently, the supposed values, trust, and relationships that traditionally glue families together were betrayed. In fact, women often had to be wary of the people closest to them. Opposition to aiding Jewish children could take the form of hostility, financial exploitation, threats of denunciation, and actual betrayal to the authorities. Family members did tend to stop at threats, however. They knew that denouncing their grandmother, mother, sister, or wife would incriminate not only the woman, but also themselves and other members of the household. Women in the same household, as in the case of Ewa Lewi and the Pawlak family, did not necessarily share the same sentiment either when it came to hiding Jewish children. The conventional gender roles that meant women took on mothering did not always hold. Individual personalities, combined with bias and fear, affected women’s decisions and actions.

Neighborly Betrayal Internal constraints were but one factor in the challenges facing women when protecting Jewish children. External pressures affected them in yet other ways. Helena Stoeger who, as we have seen, lived under a false identity in Prądnik Czerwony (her younger brother was denounced and sent to Auschwitz) and her caretakers sensed growing danger: “The neighbors most likely knew that I am Jewish, because one of them had forbidden his

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daughter to play with me,” she recounted in an immediate postwar testimony.30 After two months with the Polish family, Helena was forced to leave them because of a Volksdeutsche woman who harassed the girl, calling her names. A new rescue plan had to be devised, and Helena was transferred to her caretaker’s sister in western Poland. Neighbors, then, were the ultimate reason why Ala Kaufman’s aid giver faced danger: “Eventually they found out about me in Zakrzówek [a district of Cracow]. The children called me ‘kike’ and the adults incited my lady [caretaker].”31 Non-Jewish Polish children were sometimes cruel toward peers they knew or suspected of being Jewish. Before the war, it was not uncommon for non-Jewish children to call their Jewish contemporaries derogatory names and throw stones at them. These kinds of assaults and manifestations of antisemitism were normalized. The prewar attitudes and behavior not only carried over to the wartime but also intensified. In the case of Ala, both young and old neighbors tormented her aid giver and, after a few months, the woman’s mother took Ala to a new hiding place outside Cracow. Ala’s sister, although hidden from public view, could not stay with their initial helper either and was moved elsewhere. One reason close neighbors were those most likely to betray was due to the spatial proximity that adjacent residents shared and, as a result, the ease of accessing information about one another. Another reason was that familial and close ties (where they existed) did not necessarily correspond to bonds among neighbors. Soon after Stefania Dobosz took in her fiveyear-old Jewish nephew in 1942, her neighbors, Anna and Anna’s mother Maria Kozioł, threatened to denounce Stefania. The danger posed by these two women forced Stefania to return the child to his Jewish mother in the Cracow ghetto. Two days later, a Polish policeman turned up to search Stefania’s apartment. She was taken to a precinct, beaten, and interrogated. Although she was released after bribing the Volskdeutsche policeman Jan Getz, Stefania could not save her nephew. The mother and child were shot in the ghetto in September 1942: “I blame Maria Kozioł for the death of my child, because she, through her denunciation, made my child’s stay with my sister impossible, and returning the child to the ghetto became a reason for his death, and the police searched for me so that I had to go into hiding,” Stefania’s brother and the boy’s (non-Jewish) father stated after the war.32 30 Account of Helena Stoeger, AŻIH 301/4221, 1. 31 Account of Ala Kaufman, AŻIH 301/4112, 1. 32 IPN Kr 502/1040 Akta w sprawie: Maria Kozioł, 40. Kozioł was acquitted.

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A Polish policeman was instrumental in the failure of another rescue effort. In fall 1940, twenty-six-year-old Sabina Gutfreund and her threeyear-old daughter Anna arrived in Cracow from Bochnia. They stayed in the apartment of Maria Kałucka, her daughter Maria Kot, and her sister Łucja Nowak. The housekeeper lived in the kitchen and an Austrian postal clerk occupied one room. When the clerk moved out, Zyzio Broszkiewicz, a Volksdeutscher, moved in: “His company caused a lot of troubles,” Maria Kot relayed in a postwar account.33 Adding to the already risky living arrangements, her husband was a member of the Polish Underground. The location of their building at 24 Getrudy Street, and the local residents, made it both a dangerous and an unlikely place for a Jew to hide. The neighboring Hotel Royal housed the German administration. German airport workers lived on the first floor of their building and a Polish policeman lived in the annex across from the women’s apartment. The three women took care of Anna while the girl’s mother remained in hiding. Łucja even strolled with Anna around the nearby Wawel Castle, the headquarters of Hans Frank, the governor of the General Government. The child did not escape the attention of their neighbor, the Polish policeman. At the beginning of 1943, the policeman came to the women’s apartment, stating that a Jewish child was hiding there. Maria Kałucka and Anna left the apartment with the man (he did not know about Sabina, who managed to slip out and hide elsewhere in the building). Maria bribed him, but nevertheless, the hiding place of the child and her mother was disclosed and the rescuers exposed. As the women knew that the blackmailer could continue to terrorize them and return for more money, Sabina and her daughter sought shelter elsewhere and eventually fled to Warsaw.

Anticipating Betrayal Prospective and active helpers had to learn to assess potentially disastrous situations and spin reliable stories in an instant. Under the conditions of war, it was not unusual for orphans to stay with their relatives. But the 33 File on Kałucka Zofia, Kot Maria, and Tadeusz, Nowak Łucja, AŻIH Yad Vashem 349/2311, 9; “Kalucka, Maria; Nowak, Lucja; Kot-Kalucka, Maria; Kot, Tadeusz,” in The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Poland, vol. 1, ed. Israel Gutman, Sara Bender, and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 329; Annette Nissenbaum (Anna Schiff), Interview 43791, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, July 3, 1998.

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appearance of a strange child often sparked questions and rumors. Single women, in particular, were exposed to neighborly mistrust. Katarzyna Krystian, a childless widow of about forty, was a supervisor in a factory that employed workers from the Cracow ghetto. Before the ghetto’s liquidation in March 1943, when parents were at their most desperate to secure hiding places for their children, a Polish woman asked Katarzyna to take in her Jewish acquaintance’s one-year-old daughter, Miriam Kwiaśnicka. Miriam had been smuggled out of the ghetto by her mother. But before bringing Miriam home, Katarzyna needed a cover story to give her neighbors. She dressed the child in rags and attached a letter to her, explaining that the girl’s mother had been seized for forced labor and her father was sick. According to Katarzyna’s story, a woman dropped off the baby at her doorstep in the hope that someone would take mercy on the infant. To emphasize the child’s supposed Catholic background, Katarzyna hung a medallion with the Holy Mary and a note with the girl’s date of birth around the baby’s neck. Katarzyna created a spectacle, which she hoped would normalize the situation. She also had the child baptized. The neighbors, however, were suspicious and the Gestapo visited her a few times. Fortunately, the cover story held up and Katarzyna continued to shelter the child until liberation.34 If some Jewish children could pass as non-Jews, others had to remain in hiding. Rachel Verderber’s “Semitic” looks and manner of speech could raise alarm, so her aid giver Maria Gruca hid the girl in the attic or behind the wardrobe: “When a stranger came to the room, my mother spoke very loudly, coughed, moved the furniture,” Maria’s daughter Halina recalled in a postwar testimony-letter to Rachel’s sister Krystyna (Lynn). “She did everything so that your sister who was sitting behind the wardrobe could breathe easily, so that she could not be heard. And this was the only space, this room, where various people came.”35 To keep her neighbors’ suspicions in check, Maria had to exercise great creativity to shelter Rachel in a one-room apartment: “[My mother] lived under constant pressure and fear because she was afraid not only of the Germans but also of the closest neighbors who were very much interested in the children in the apartment,” Halina recalled.36 Neighbors inquired about the couple’s own daughter and

34 “Zabierzowska-Krystian, Katarzyna,” in The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 2, 911. 35 File of Rachel Verderber, GFH 28606, 2. 36 Ibid., 3.

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about Krystyna Verderber, who lived openly. When the situation became too tense, Maria removed the girls from the city until the curiosity subsided. Transferring children from one location to another was often a ruse that female aid givers used. This way, women tried to avoid situations that could turn deadly for them and the children they sheltered, to allay neighbors’ suspicions and fears, and to deceive blackmailers. But they also devised other methods to counter potential betrayal. In September 1943, Rozalia Zegarlińska took eleven-year-old Danuta Stremer from the Tarnów ghetto. The situation around her departure foreshadowed the attitude toward Jewish children in hiding and their rescuers with which the two later had to deal: “Our exit from the ghetto was accompanied by screams from the Aryan side ‘they are taking out a child from the ghetto,’ but we managed to reach the train station and come to Cracow,” Danuta stated in a testimony she submitted when applying for a Righteous Among the Nations award for her prewar nanny.37 Protecting Danuta was a joint endeavor, in which Rozalia’s sister Stefania Przebinda and her niece Stefania Pepkowska participated. At first, Danuta was introduced as Rozalia’s granddaughter and lived with Rozalia’s relatives in Krowodrza (a district of Cracow), “but quickly the neighbors realized my origin and we had to move out.”38 Danuta was later hidden while her caretaker traveled to villages to obtain foodstuffs that she then sold: “Although I was locked inside [the apartment], the neighbors somehow found out about me, they threatened to inform the Germans, and we had to move.”39 Left without any other options, Rozalia left the building with the child one morning, saying that she was sending her away from Cracow. Danuta stayed somewhere until dusk, after which Rozalia’s niece brought Danuta back to the apartment. Afraid of possible denunciation by others, aid givers faced dilemmas when maintaining secrecy. An accidental meeting with a prewar Jewish colleague or neighbor could lead to serious consequences. When a Jewish woman called Lea Jakubowicz greeted a non-Jewish woman Bronisława Dzierwa in Market Square, things quickly spiraled out of control when Dzierwa pointed out Lea to a Polish policeman. Maria Leśniak, who was with Dzierwa at the time, had worked for a Jewish family before the war in the same building where Lea had lived and Dzierwa had been a supervisor. Maria stated, “I was present for the duration of this entire occurrence, but I 37 File on Rozalia Zegarlińska, AŻIH Yad Vashem 349/1901, 1. 38 Ibid., 2. 39 Ibid.

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did not charge Lea Jakubowicz with being a Jew, and I could not influence Bronislawa Dzierwa not to make that denouncement because at that time I was hiding a Jewish girl, Rysia [Irena] Rosner, who was smuggled out of the ghetto.” The girl, three years old at the time, was the niece of Maria’s prewar employer. Maria faced an impossible choice. She could either intercede on behalf of the Jewish woman or protect herself and her Jewish charge. “Dzierwa had some proof that I had taken this child out of the ghetto. Therefore, I feared for myself so that she would not point me out that I, as well, was hiding a Jewish child,” Maria explained in a court deposition after the war.40

Defense Strategies of Accused Collaborators If the accounts submitted by survivors and rescuers highlight some of the possible motivations of those who betrayed them, the few court cases pursued after the war that investigated alleged collaborators expose some of the betrayers’ post-factum defense strategies. The case of Karol Garczyński and his two female colleagues Tekla Dudziak and Maria Czajka serves as an example. In March 1943, the parents of ten-year-old Rena and seven-year-old Roman Kardisz could no longer hide their two children at the factory where they worked. They arranged with Rozalia and Bolesław Posławski, both of whom had worked at the factory, to take in their children, although the Posławskis already had three children of their own. According to Rozalia, in October 1944 a Polish neighbor from their building at Rękawka Street in Podgórze, Karol Garczyński, discovered the Kardisz siblings and blackmailed the Posławskis. Rozalia refused to pay the man, so he denounced her. She claimed that a tipsy Garczyński came to her with two Gestapo men and demanded to see the Jewish children. Rozalia and Roman were arrested; Rena managed to escape.41 While Rozalia interpreted the situation as an intentional denunciation, Garczyński and his two female colleagues presented it as an accidental betrayal in their postwar version of events during court proceedings against Garczyński. Garczyński claimed that he had been celebrating his 40 IPN Kr 502/437 Akta w sprawie: Maria Leśniak, Bronisława Dzierwa, 40. Maria was acquitted. 41 IPN Kr 502/308 Akta w sprawie: Karol Garczyński, 2. See also “Poslawska, Rozalia; Poslawski Boleslaw,” in The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 2, 635.

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birthday that day and drinking alcohol. Due to rumors that had been circulating for about a year about the presence of Jewish children in the building, he assumed that the child he saw was Jewish and ran out onto the street. His mistress Tekla Dudzik chased after him, beating and cursing Garczyński. A German patrol took an interest in the argument: “I, being drunk, explained to them that I was running from the German authorities because in the building that I live are Jewish children,” Garczyński asserted.42 He did not, however, explain how the policemen made their way straight to the Posławskis’ apartment. Following Rozalia’s return from prison in December 1944, and given the murder of the seven-year-old Roman, “Garczyński asked me for forgiveness for this act [betrayal], explaining that two women, Maria Czajka and Tekla Dudziak [. . .] pushed him to do this.” At first, Rozalia resolved to keep quiet. However, after being accused by Garczyński’s female colleagues of being a German confidante, Rozalia appealed to a postwar court. Garczyński pleaded guilty, although he blamed alcohol for his lapse in judgment: “This [the denunciation] was an unfortunate coincidence,” the sentence read.43 Despite the gravity of the event and the rescuer’s testimony, the court showed leniency toward the man who betrayed his neighbor.

Conclusion The histories of non-Jewish Polish women and the Jewish children they sheltered in Cracow discussed in this article illuminate some of the contexts in which betrayal occurred, the various forms of betrayal, individual decisions and actions in face of the Jews’ plight, and the experiences in hiding of the youngest and most helpless Jewish victims of the German occupation. A focus on women aid givers offers a gender perspective on fulfilling, transgressing, and struggling with traditional gender norms under extreme pressure. Some women, acting as conventional guardians of the private, domestic sphere, exercised their agency to help children, even if doing so was punishable by death. This position exposed these women to threats, harassment, violence, and danger that emanated both from inside and outside the home.

42 IPN Kr 502/308 Akta w sprawie: Karol Garczyński, 5. 43 Ibid., 79.

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What emerges from this exploration is a complex picture of relations among relatives, neighbors, strangers, and authority figures. Proximity both to aid givers, by virtue of either residence or kinship, and to the persecuted Jewish children, did not result in greater empathy and understanding. Rather, fear, greed, complaisance, and bias often motivated betrayal. Gender, age, or social status did not define betrayers. The phenomenon was certainly not marginal either. The case of Cracow elucidates how nonJewish Poles reacted to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors in a medium-size city in which Jews (who had comprised about twenty percent of the prewar population) had been relatively well-integrated.44 To be clear, the German authorities bore responsibility for instituting and enforcing measures against the Jews, as well as for enacting legislation and penalties that targeted prospective and actual aid givers. However, as the histories of the female aid givers and the children they helped illustrate, the main and immediate threat they faced radiated from a more intimate, private and communal setting: Polish non-Jews; family members and neighbors.

44 For the history of Jews in Cracow, see, for example: Andrzej Żbikowski, Żydzi krakowscy i ich gmina w latach 1869–1919 (Warsaw: DiG, 1995); and Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–1939 (Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004).

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“And with these boots, I’m gonna run away from here”: The Significance of Female Narratives in the Sobibor Uprising and Its Aftermath1 Hannah Wilson

In June 1942, Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote in his diary, which would later form part of the famous Oyneg Shabes archive: The historian of the future will have to devote a fitting chapter to the role of Jewish women during the war. It is thanks to the courage and endurance of our women that thousands of families have been able to endure these bitter times.2 Despite Ringelblum’s words, it is undeniable that women’s narratives have been neglected in the development of collective Holocaust memory. Research on Sobibor death camp has, indeed, paid far greater attention to the hegemonic male narrative of resistance pertaining to the uprising there. Established by the Nazi SS in the Lublin region of Poland, Sobibor 1 This article is the result of research financially supported by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris. 2 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 294.

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was an official death camp from May 3, 1942, until October 1943. It was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the German plan to murder the approximately two million Jews residing in the areas under control of the General Government. Initially, a small number of both male and female Jews were spared for various labor assignments upon their arrival at Sobibor; others were sent straight to the gas chambers. The brutality with which the SS men and collaborating Trawniki3 guards carried out their task resulted in relentless humiliation and acts of violence, many of which are described in the testimonies of survivors. Before the camp’s closure in 1943, at least 180,000 Jews had been murdered, either by shooting or gas. Having dismantled the camp and destroyed most of the evidence pertaining to the Sobibor’s existence, the Nazis left virtually nothing of the original structures behind, as the Soviet army discovered when they arrived in the area in July 1944. As a result, public awareness of Sobibor is considerably less than that of other killing sites, even to this day. Despite this, the prisoner uprising at the death camp is considered one of the most greatest acts of Jewish resistance during the Second World War. An escape plan was formed by members of the Jewish underground in the camp who saw an opportunity when a transport of Jewish Soviet POWs with military expertise arrived, including Aleksander Pechersky, a former lieutenant in the Soviet army. On October 14, 1943, a small group of prisoners were successful in the killing of eleven SS men and several Ukrainian guards, allowing for the subsequent mass escape of camp inmates. It is estimated that around three hundred prisoners fled Sobibor initially, although most were chased down, killed, or did not survive the minefields surrounding the camp. The small number of prisoners who remained in the camp were also murdered before its closure. It is estimated that only about forteight of the escapees survived the war, nearly all of whom relocated outside of Poland.4 As the uprising was an important moment during the camp’s existence, Sobibor itself has become part of a wider collective memory often 3 SS and police officials inducted, processed, and trained 2,500 auxiliary police guards (Wachmänner, also known as Trawniki men) at Trawniki training camp between September 1941 and September 1942. Virtually all of them had been Soviet prisoners of war. (Definition according to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org). 4 This exact figure is still disputed; current research by the State Museum at Majdanek suggests forty-eight survivors.

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influenced by varying national politics that portrays survivors of the Holocaust as heroes and those who died as martyrs. In short, the story of the uprising counteracts the assumption that victims were “lambs led to the slaughter.”5 The revolt has also became the subject of mainstream film adaptations, such as the British television film Escape from Sobibór (1987), Claude Lanzmann’s Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), and the 2019 Russian production Sobibór. I propose that by focusing primarily on the uprising at Sobibor—and generally ignoring our social and cultural understanding of the Holocaust— has limited how we witness to the experiences of those who suffered and died at the camp. For the escaped prisoners, struggle, fear, and violence did not end on October 14, 1943; it continued right until the end of the war and, in some instances, even afterwards. Moreover, the “hero” rhetoric of the uprising at Sobibor tends to place men at the fore, despite the numerous female participants. This article, then, seeks to emphasize the value and importance of the individual female narratives of Sobibor. It does so by outlining the roles of women within camp structures, the uprising itself, and women’s lives in the months that followed uprising. Furthermore, it presents the efforts women survivors to preserve the memory of Sobibor by providing testimony and participating in the war trials of former camp personnel from the 1960s onwards. By drawing attention to the women who endured the conditions of the camp and the impact it had on them, I contend that their experiences should be introduced into the public memory and commemoration of Sobibor and have the same status as the men’s experience. The women’s histories are a complex layer of memory within the more familiar perspective on the camp. In my research, I have found that the behavior and methods of survival of women do not always adhere to preconceived gender norms, nor do female and male survivors remember the same things. Thus, this study can also contribute to the discussion of issues surrounding gender roles and assumptions with Holocaust studies more broadly.

5 “When you refer to the expression ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ (used by Abba Kovner in his famous pamphlet of December 13, 1941/January 1, 1942), it was a means of causing people to rebel.” “Like Sheep To The Slaughter”?—excerpt from interview with Professor Yehuda Bauer, Interview by Amos Goldberg (Yad Vashem Jerusalem, January 18, 1998).

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State of Research and Methodology As abovementioned, the role and experiences of women involved in the Sobibor Uprising and its aftermath has not yet been explored as the sole subject of investigative research. Much like the memory of Sobibor in public discourse, existing research has examined the camp in terms of Operation Reinhard and its perpetrators, and assumed that men were responsible for planning and executing the uprising.6 Certainly, postwar testimonies provided by women who survived helped inform many of the defining works on Sobibor, all of which employed traditional research methods; yet these studies have often overlooked the social and emotional impact of the Holocaust experience. Historian Miriam Novitch, however, did an impressive job collecting early Sobibor testimonies from survivors living in Israel in the 1970s, using an approach that did not prioritize the role or experiences of men. Similarly, British scholar Michael Flemming offered a commendable, albeit very brief, discussion of female involvement in the uprising in his 2016 paper “A Reconsideration of the Revolt at Sobibór.”7 Flemming highlights how gender and nationality were entangled in both the preparing for and carrying out the revolt, while also noting the strong bonds that many of the women—particularly Jewish Polish women—had with one another. He does not discuss the experiences of female survivors following their escape, though. His study is one of the first to address the hegemonic forms of memory about Sobibor, but by privileging nationality and friendship, his work still overlooks women’s own individual stories of survival. Accordingly, I have sourced several central studies pertaining to women in the Holocaust to help ground my study. Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, has become a definitive 6 Miriam Novitch, Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), Yitzhak Arad, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, English ed. (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007 [1993]), Thomas Blatt, Sobibor, The Forgotten Revolt: A Survivors Report (Hollywood: Holocaust Education Project, 1997), Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung: Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 2013), Marek Bem, Sobibor Extermination Camp 1942–1943 (Amsterdam: Stichting Sobibor, 2015), Chris Webb, The Sobibor Death Camp—History, Biographies, Remembrance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 7 Michael Flemming, “A reconsideration of the revolt at Sobibór,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 22, no. 4 (2016): 321–338.

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anthology of women’s experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. The volume, which covers a wide range of topics from many contributors, reveals differences in the treatment of genders, as well as the comparative reactions of Jewish men and women throughout the period.8 Moreover, numerous chapters examine both the strength and vulnerability of women in the camps, often arguing that the Nazis intentionally assaulted gender identities. Myrna Goldberg, for example, also discusses three common themes within the testimonies of women survivor who survived AuschwitzBirkenau: the translation of homemaking skills into lifesaving skills in the camps; the prevalence of nurturing and social bonding as a coping strategy; and the heightened fear of sexual violence, humiliation, and shame relating to femininity and the female body.9 Female Holocaust survivors can thus be perceived as “double-victims,” who endured victimization both as prisoners and as women. Lillian Kremer also contends that whilst women’s biology heightened their vulnerability, their domestic training and resourcefulness actually enhanced their chances for survival.10 (In my own analysis, I note that these themes are present in the testimonies of female Sobibor survivors as well.)11 In her 2003 article “Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories,” Zoë Waxman observes that women’s Holocaust experiences are a growing area of scholarly interest; but she also identifies a reluctance to acknowledge survivor testimony that do not concur with preconceived gender roles, patterns of “suitable” female behavior, or preexisting narratives of survival.12 Such testimony, she argues, has been overlooked because it represents 8 Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 9 Ibid., 270. 10 S. Lillian Kremer, “Holocaust-Wrought Women: Portraits by Four American Writers,” Studies in American Jewish Literature: Contemporary Women Writers 11, no. 2 (1992): 150–161. 11 For further reading on the subject of sexualized violence during the Holocaust, see Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010). Alana Fangrad, Wartime Rape and Sexual Violence: An Examination of the Perpetrators, Motivations, and Functions of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Bloomington: AuthorHouse Publishing, 2013), Steven T. Katz, “Thoughts on the Intersection of Rape and Rassenchande during the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism—A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience 32, no. 3 (2012): 293–322, and Beverly Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule (Surbiton: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd., 2015). 12 Zoë Waxman, “Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories: The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 661–677.

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difficult experiences that call into question our understanding of this period in history and what might be considered the “norm.” Not only do these testimonies challenge the preconceived patterns of Holocaust experience, but they also make us “rethink our relationship to the gendered nature of knowledge itself.”13 This study primarily makes use of selected postwar testimonies provided by the female survivors of Sobibor. Although there are instances in which I refer to the recollections of male survivors, I use such testimony to further explore the female experiences discussed.14 The women’s interviews, written or recorded on video, were taken at various stages of their lives and primarily collected by the USC Shoah Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.15 A number of recorded testimonies are available via Dutch online databases, including Sobibór Interviews NL and the Long Shadow of Sobibór” project initiated by Selma Leydesdorff.16 In the case of Selma Engel-Wijnberg, who wrote a diary in the days following her escape, I have used the English translation provided to me by her daughter Alida Engel. The original diary can be found in the archives of the USHMM. Where appropriate, I also reconsider representations of the female survivors in feature films, such as Escape from Sobibór, Sobibór, and Shoah: Four Sisters. In this chapter, then, I seek to stress the importance of women’s narratives about Sobibor, and their extraordinary experiences following the camp uprising. By investigating their postwar testimonies and a number of films, I seek to establish the resilience and willpower of women during the war, and to challenge traditional readings of the Holocaust by providing examples of female prisoners defying accepted gender norms. In the case of Sobibor—a place for which we have so little original documentation and evidence— these testimonies are of great historical significance and, for this reason, they 13 Ibid. 14 I found this to be the case for the subject of rape and sexual violence in the camp, to which both male and female prisoners were witnesses. 15 Although I am aware of the issues surrounding “authenticity” and postwar testimony, particularly when given many years after events, individual narratives from Sobibor have proven to be highly accurate and support with one another, the differences between them being minor details. 16 Selma Leydesdorff (interviewer), Dept. of Arts, Religion, and Culture, University of Amsterdam; Mirjam Huffener (project manager), Stichting Sobibór/Sobibór Foundation. Thematic collection: Project “The Long Shadow of Sobibór”—description and all interviews. DANS. https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui/datasets/id/easy-dataset:51548.

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should be utilized in a meaningful way. As we enter the “post-witness” era, I hope to contribute to the crucial task of expanding the comparatively limited understanding of Sobibor death camp in public Holocaust memory.

Women in Sobibor: Labor, Resistance, and Survival As far as I am aware, at least eight of the Sobibor prisoners to survive the uprising and its aftermath were women: Selma Engel-Wijnberg, Zelda Metz, Ada Lichtman, Esther Raab, Ursula Stern, Hella Weiss, Regina Zielinski, and Salomea Hannel. Despite the existence of the written testimonies of Laja Reisner (née Lea Reisner- Bialowitz) regarding her experiences in the camp, one of which is available in the USHMM archives and another in the collections of Miriam Novitch, the author’s conversations with the Bialowitz family have shed light on some uncertainty regarding her imprisonment at Sobibor.17 The published memoir of Philip Bialowitz also presents a different narrative to that of Laja.18 For this reason, I will not refer to Laja’s testimonies in this article. It is also important to mention Catharina Gokkes, who managed to flee to the forest and join the partisans, died of typhoid in 1944.19 Of the three hundred prisoners who contributed to the escape and did not survive, a number of those were also female. It is precisely the limited number of female survivors that has contributed to the dominance of the male narrative about Sobibor. After arrival in the camp, only a very small number of women were selected for specific jobs, primarily domestic roles. This included knitting, cleaning, laundry, and ironing, as well as sorting through packages and victims’ belongings. Hella Weiss, aged fourteen when she arrived at Sobibor, recalls: “As in a dream I heard a voice of one of the Germans say, ‘who can knit?’ and I stepped out of line . . . in my childhood my mother taught me how to knit socks.”20 Though many of the female prisoners were young and 17 Novitch, “Testimony of Lea-Reisner-Bialowitz” in Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt, 100, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database, Selected records from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD): “Avant Sobibor Et Sobibor” 1963, ID: 4265. 18 Philip Bialowitz, A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 19 Joods Monument, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 20 Hella Felenbaum-Weiss, “From Lublin to Sobibór, Testimony of Hella Felenbaum-Weiss in Sobibór: Camp of Death and Revolt, ed. Miriam Novitch (Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, 1979).

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had little work experience, they adapted quickly to the tasks required of them for fear of punishment and beatings by the guards. In Weiss’ case, she was able to apply the skills she had already acquired at home.21 It did not take long for the women to realize the purpose of Sobibor: the women described the smell of burning bodies and the smoke rising up from the section of the camp they were forbidden to enter. Some of them, including Regina Zielinski, even found their families’ belongings whilst working in the sorting barracks: “There was even my mother’s jacket. Later on, we had to sort those clothes, and I even undid a little pocket on the jacket where she had her wedding ring sewn in. It was very hard to bear that, but life somehow had to go on till the next moment, and our life in Sobibór was only counted by the moments.”22 They knew that their position as laborers, and the “privilege” of not being killed immediately, was their only chance for survival. Esther Raab remembered being approached by a sixteen-yearold boy who suggested that she give him her food rations: “He said, ‘You . . . you won’t survive. Nobody will survive.’ [. . .] I said, ‘Listen, I’m not gonna give nothing away because I’m not going to the frying pan. [. . .] And with these boots, I’m gonna run away from here. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. But I’m gonna make it.’”23 This exchange is testament to Raab’s will to live, so much so that she does not assume the role of carer or “mother” by offering the boy extra food. In this exchange, she does not match the portrait of the self-sacrificing women.24 This form of behavior and self-preservation contrasts with the assumed gender roles within Holocaust narratives.25 Moreover, the cunning and courage of the women who used their jobs to their advantage is evident. Selma Engel-Wijnberg, who was assigned to the task of sorting prisoners’ belongings, was able to steal extra food and clothing from the 21 Goldenberg also alludes to this in her study of female Auschwitz prisoners. Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in Women in The Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 327–340. 22 See interview with Regina Zielinski [English subtitles], Sorbiborinterviews.nl, accessed March 3, 2021, https://sobiborinterviews.nl/en/search-interviews?mivast=967&mizig= 317&miadt=967&miaet=14&micode=804b&minr=1412604&milang=en&misort=int %7Casc&mip1=Regina%20Zielinski&miview=ff1983. 23 The phrase “frying pan” is used by Raab to describe the gas chamber. Interview with Esther Raab, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 30, 1990, RG-50.030*184. 24 Waxman, Unheard Testimony, 663. 25 Ibid., 662.

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wealthier transports which she would share with the other women: “We sorted clothes and what we could steal from them, what the Germans wouldn’t get, we stole also food. . . . I put it all between my bra and in my, uh, underpants and took it with me to where we slept, and shared it with them girls.”26 Engel-Wijnberg also refers to this act as “sabotage” against the Germans, which indicated the varying degrees of resistance that the women undertook against their persecutors, aside from the widely known revolt. Moreover, it is known that whilst sorting through the clothing of the transports from the liquidated Bełżec death camp, several of the women—including Metz—found notes hidden in the deceased prisoner’s clothing. Written in Yiddish, these notes, which asked for Jewish deaths to be avenged, were passed on to members of the resistance network. There was a shared consensus amongst the survivors that these notes acted as a warning sign and directly influenced the urgency for escape. As Hella Weiss remarked: “In the pockets of the clothing of the corpses we found notes which were written in Yiddish and said: [. . .] ‘Avenge our death.’ I often thought about those notes. They became a source of inspiration and courage for me.”27 The female prisoners came from a variety of different nationalities and social backgrounds. As Flemming notes, friendships were often formed, and co-nationals would often support and trust each other.28 Lichtman, Zielinski, Raab, and Metz were all Polish Jews, while Selma Engel-Wijnberg and Ursula Stern were transported together from the Netherlands.29 Hella Weiss, whose story is often overlooked in Sobibor memory, was born in Langori, Germany, but deported from the Netherlands after her family had relocated there in about November 1938.30 Undoubtedly, the strong bonds and friendships the women formed contributed to their survival and, as Goldberg stresses, acts of nurturing and compassion protected the women against loneliness, violence, and despair.31 The older women in the camp,

26 Interview with Selma Engel-Wijnberg, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 12, 1992, RG-50.042*0010. 27 Interview with Hella Weiss, Sorbiborinterviews.nl, accessed March 3, 2021, https:// www.sobiborinterviews.nl/en/interviewees/2-profielen/16-hella-weiss. 28 Flemming, A reconsideration, 329. 29 Metz and Zielinski were, in fact, cousins. 30 The story of Hella Weiss is often forgotten. It appears that in her postwar life she did not speak about her experiences. 31 Goldenberg, Memoirs, 329.

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or those who had been there for longer, became “mother figures” for the younger girls who did not have much work or life experience. Ada Lichtman, for instance, became what Flemming calls a “surrogate mother” to the younger female prisoners.32 Lichtman’s role was primarily doing laundry, washing, and ironing for the camp guards; however, she was also made to restore toy dolls brought by Jewish children so that they could be given to the families of SS officers. In her testimony, she said: “It lay heavy on our hearts. . . . There were many young girls who also were with us, Jewish ones, and among them was a small girl. I think she was perhaps ten years old. She looked like a doll herself, she was always the first to take the dolls and play with them [. . .] she was there until the revolt, after that I don’t know.”33 Ada discusses this particularly painful aspect of her forced labor in the late Claude Lanzmann’s 2018 film series Shoah: Four Sisters, which aired on French TV in early 2018. Importantly, the women also attempted to protect one another from the punishments of the guards. Raab recalls the women covering up for each other’s lack of work, holding their hands to keep them upright, dragging them to their jobs or hiding them in the barracks until the evening.34 Such acts of compassion and resistance were punishable by death and attest to the support the women provided one another during their time in the camp.35 It is also crucial to study the issues surrounding sexuality as part of women’s experience in Sobibor. As mentioned before, women were subject to sexual harassment by the guards and more vulnerable to humiliation than male prisoners. Though none of the women who survived the uprising discuss their own experiences of sexual abuse in the camp, several of the postwar testimonies—both male and female—describe SS men and Ukrainian guards assaulting female Jews. The following is Lichtman speaking at the legal proceedings in Hagen in 1965, where a number of former Sobibor guards were tried: “And what is the meaning of the screams? 32 Flemming, A reconsideration, 329. 33 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, interview with Ada Lichtman, October 1979, accessed via USHMM, RG Number: RG-60.5023. 34 Interview with Esther Raab, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 30, 1990, RG-50.030*184. 35 “The experience of women during the Holocaust shows that traditionally feminist values of cooperating and caring are important conditions for the perpetuation of civilization”—Myrna Goldberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women’s Holocaust Narratives,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 78–93

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The Ukrainian guards are raping the young girls before pushing them into the gas chambers.”36 SS officers Erich Lachmann and Kurt Bolender were both witnessed raping Jewish girls, and were later removed from Sobibor their superiors, as Sobibor survivor Stanisław “Szlomo” Szmajzner noted: “Sometime later the day came for Bolender. He forcefully grabbed a girl who had come in one of the latest transports and raped her. Both officers were sent from the camp.”37 Such recollections emphasize the increased danger that the female prisoners faced in an environment where girls and women were at the mercy of men who, through their desire to express their domination, took violent sexual liberties.38 In private, however, nonviolent and meaningful relationships between the male and female prisoners were also established and, unlike in other camps, it was quite easy for female prisoners to visit the male barracks. Yet, in Sobibor, the prisoners were acutely aware that the consequence of a pregnancy was death. Raab described an instance where a woman arrived at Sobibor with a baby; her husband had been spared for labor. They were given an ultimatum: kill the baby and be allowed to work or die as a family. They chose death.39 Despite the consequences, romantic pursuits provided the prisoners with a sense of normality and humanity. As Stanisław Szmajzner wrote: “As we knew all was lost—and so did the girls—we gave ourselves to the only pleasure still left to us . . . love.”40 Seemingly, it provided a distraction mechanism and another motivation to make it through. In the case of Sobibor, then, sexual expression can also be understood as a form of resistance, particularly amongst the younger generations. Notably, it seems such relations were of great importance to some of the women in the camp—particularly when it came to the uprising. Both Engel-Wijnberg and Lichtman later married men they had met in the camp. Engel-Wijnberg met her husband Chaim when they were forced to dance together for the pleasure of the Germans. In her postwar testimony, Engel-Wijnberg repeatedly states that without 36 Miriam Novitch, “From Mielec to Sobibór: The Testimony of Ada Lichtman,” in Sobibór, 23. 37 Stanisław Szmajzner, Hell in Sobibór: The Tragedy of a Teenager Jew (Rio de Janeiro: S.l:S.n Publishing, 1979). 38 Steven T. Katz, “Thoughts on the Intersection of Rape and Rassenschande during the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience 32, no. 3 (2012): 293–322. 39 Ibid. 40 Szmajzner, Hell in Sobibór, 116.

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Chaim she would never have survived: “Because we were together, Chaim and I, we, we held. We were not insane, and I think that saved us a lot, we could be more than people that was alone.”41 Interestingly, Engel-Wijnberg makes no secret of the fact that Chaim had had relations with Raab before she arrived, suggesting that there may have also been tensions between the women at times, particularly when it came to matters of the heart: “Now Chaim was really with a girlfriend, with somebody else, with Esther Raab— what was interviewed here [referring to USHMM]—and I think she was jealous. Chaim right away fell in love with me.”42 It seems that through such disputes the women were able to maintain a sense of self, and, even in the most extreme circumstances, issues of love and romance prevailed. Female Roles and Participation in the Camp Uprising As the testimonies suggest, certain coping methods and survival behaviors as adopted by the female prisoners were also applied to their roles in the revolt on October 14, 1943. Generally, the only woman who regularly features in the uprising leadership narrative is a German woman named Luka (Gertrude Poppert-Schonborn), who was close to Aleksander “Sasha” Pechersky. According to historians, Luka was invited to meetings between the Polish and Soviet underground leaders in the camp responsible for planning the escape and killing of guards. While the men talked, Luka would act as a decoy, creating the illusion for other prisoners that nothing unusual was happening.43 Unable to understand either language, she was ignorant of their plans and, consequently, could not pass them on to anyone else. In the public memory of Sobibor, however, Luka has become a romantic figure, particularly with recent film adaptations, to the extent that her presence in Sobibor has received greater attention than the experiences of the women who survived. Yet, the actual terms of the relationship between her and Pechersky remain unknown.44 Pechersky discusses this emotional relationship in his postwar testimonies, having been unable to find her again after the uprising. It is assumed that, like so many of the prisoners attempting to escape, she was killed by the SS or in the minefields surrounding Sobibor. Luka has now been almost entirely subsumed beneath Pechersky’s own account of the uprising: she 41 Interview with Selma Engel-Wijnberg, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, July 16 1990, RG-50.030*0067. 42 Ibid. 43 Flemming, A reconsideration, 328. 44 Pechersky was married with children before the outbreak of World War II.

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acted as a decoy and died during the event. However, as Flemming comments, her role should not be mistaken for the sum of women’s involvement in the revolt.45 For example, Ada Lichtman had arrived in the camp earlier than many of the girls and had adapted to life in Sobibor. She also had an advantage in that she was familiar with the male Polish prisoners in the so-called “underground,” who were able to help facilitate Pechersky’s escape plan. One of them, Itzhak, later became her husband. It seems that Ada was regarded highly by most prisoners, and as a result was directly informed about the upcoming escape plot in 1943.46 Moreover, because Lichtman had been told of the uprising plans, she and several other women in her close circle were entrusted to carry out important tasks in its preparation. Due to their work in the sorting barracks, the women had greater access to useful items than the men, and so were asked to obtain bullets from the rooms of German guards. The heightened mobility of women also meant that they could acquire information about the organization and administration of the camp, as well as the SS vacation schedule.47 Furthermore, the female prisoners were instructed to obtain substantial clothing that would contribute to the survival of the escapees. Warm clothes for the upcoming winter were essential, as were valuables and money for bribes and barter in the towns outside of Sobibor. Although female participation in the revolt undeniably contributed to its success, most of the women involved were not given full details about it. Due prewar mores and gender assumptions, Pechersky’s escape strategy did not require women to kill SS and Ukrainian guards. Most women were only informed of the plans the evening before, and most only in outline. Regina Zielinski noted in her testimony: “They [the male prisoners] never confided in the women . . . not everybody had to know about it. But one day, they told us not to ask too many questions, but to be ready for October 14th.”48 Other men’s postwar testimonies suggested that the resistance network members were worried that the women would “talk.”49 This seems unfair, as does the view that only a woman in a close relationship 45 Flemming, A reconsideration, 329. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Oral history interview with Regina Zielinski, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Accession Number: 2006.70.192, 06th November 1991, RG Number: RG-50.583.0192, November 6. 49 Flemming, A Reconsideration, 329.

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with a male prisoner could be trusted. In fact, it was a notorious male kapo who, having learned of the uprising plans through another prisoner, posed the most danger. He was subsequently beaten and killed as a precaution. Certainly, the female prisoners who were informed by their male companions of the plans were at an advantage, but they were also told explicitly not to pass the information on, for which some of them felt a sense of guilt. Engel-Wijnberg recalls a conversation with Chaim about this dilemma: “I didn’t know anything, what was the uprising . . . then he told me to take some warm clothes, and he told me what the plan is to do. Then he told me I was not allowed to tell anybody—and that’s my always and guilt feeling. I had a cousin there and I didn’t tell her.”50 Despite these issues, however, the efforts of women who helped prepare for the Sobibor Uprising should not be overlooked, nor should their courage on the day.

Female Prisoners’ Experiences after the Revolt and Beyond After their escape, the female survivors endured very different experiences of survival from one another. In studies pertaining to Sobibor, little attention has been paid to the period between 1943 and 1945, when many of the escapees struggled enormously to survive. The immediate aftermath of the uprising was frightening and dangerous; the prisoners were hunted by Germans and local Poles alike.51 It also divided the group; many of the Polish and Dutch Jews were left behind by Perchersky and his men to fend for themselves, with little or no military training. These often stayed in groups of two or three, while some regrouped later in the surrounding forests. As time passed, many went on alone. The comradery that was felt in the resistance network disintegrated quickly in the “outside world,” and therefore does not lend itself easily to the “hero” narrative that we now associate with the uprising. Even Pechersky failed to gain immediate recognition for his efforts and was later briefly imprisoned in the Soviet Union for being an enemy of the “Stalinist regime.”52 As well as living in constant fear, the escapees lived and in filthy conditions—both men and women alike. Each Sobibor survivor carried with them 50 Interview with Selma Engel-Wijnberg, July 16, 1990, USHMM. 51 Marek Bem, Sobibór Extermination Camp 1942–1943 (Amsterdam: Stichting Sobibór, 2015). 52 Selma Leydesdorff, Sasha Pechersky: Holocaust Hero, Sobibór Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History (London: Routledge, 2017).

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their own story of survival, and these stories are an important testament to the human spirit. The women showed tremendous courage, leadership, and determination when outside the camp. Some joined anti-Nazi partisan groups in the Polish forests, engaging in clandestine warfare and acts of violence against the German occupiers; some applied their survival skills to hiding and seeking help from locals. Esther Raab, who was injured during her escape from the camp, managed to hide on a farm in Chełm. Remarkably, in 1946 she and another Polish prisoner named Samuel Lehrer recognized the former Sobibor SS officer Ernst Bauer on the streets of Berlin and reported him to the police. Regina Zielinski was able to reach Frankfurt from Poland by posing as a Catholic Polish woman, where she worked as a nanny until the end of the war. Similarly, Zelda Metz survived by posing as a Catholic woman. Ada Lichtman, after weeks of begging local famers for food, found a partisan camp which took her in. Similarly, Ursula Stern joined the partisans and, in 1945, she became the commissioner of a civil army group in Lublin. Perhaps most extraordinary is the experience of young Hella Weiss. She and a male prisoner named Abraham, who was very ill, came across a Soviet partisan brigade. The Soviets did not want Abraham to join them, but Weiss was invited to stay.53 For her service with the partisans, Weiss received two medals from the Soviet authorities: the Medal for Bravery and the Order of the Red Star, as well as five decorations for combat.54 She was given shooting lessons and took part in several important battles alongside the Red Army until 1945. Weiss was wounded twice but managed to survive, and later started a family in Israel after the war. In her remarkable postwar testimony, she recalls: “We hid in the woods with the partisans, and we put up a fight. . . . Then they gave me a big gun, and we terrorized them [Germans] big time. At the Czech border, we were inducted into the Soviet Red army. By then, I was already a different person. With them I moved on.”55 Hella’s survival experience challenges traditional gender norms and the expected behavior of women during the Holocaust, resembling as it does the “violent” and “brave” male narrative of resistance we have come to accept with respect to Sobibor. She was not given the task of cooking or providing medical aid for the men in her unit, as women often were. Rather, she fought beside them as an equal, and thus had a different 53 Weiss does not say what happened to Abraham after leaving with the partisans. 54 Felenbaum-Weiss, From Lublin to Sobibór, 3. 55 Video interview with Hella Weiss (German), Sorbiborinterviews.nl, accessed March 3, 2021, https://www.sobiborinterviews.nl/en/interviewees/2-profielen/16-hella-weiss.

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experience from others in similar situations.56 The leader of their partisan unit warned the men that if anyone touched Hella or make sexual advances he would execute them on the spot.57 Moreover, the comradery and safety of being in an armed group helped her to move on with her life and recover from the horror of the camp. Weiss’ experience contrasts quite considerably with that of Selma Engel-Wijnberg, who managed to escape together with her future husband Chaim. Engel-Wijnberg, who passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-six, arguably became the most well-known female survivor of Sobibor, particularly in her native Netherlands and the United States. Engel-Wijnberg is also one of only two women individually represented in the recent Russian film adaptation of Pechersky’s escape plan Sobibór (the other being Luka). After the young couple made their escape from the camp, they hid on a Polish farm for nearly two years, bribing the owners with stolen items from Jews killed at Sobibor. Immediately after she hid, Engel-Wijnberg began writing about her time at Sobibor, as well keeping a day-to-day journal of her life on the farm. The diary remained unknown for years, until she mentioned it to a journalist and later donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In terms of sources, Engel-Wijnberg’s diary is invaluable: it covers Sobibor, the escape, and the antisemitic purges in the village in which she hid. She describes her fear and both her physical and mental health. In the entries detailing her life in hiding, Engel-Wijnberg drifts between hope, grief, and despair. She also discovers that she is pregnant and describes her mixed feelings about it: “I hope that we succeeded in washing away the skin rash and that I am not pregnant.”58 Later she writes, “That I am pregnant is great news for us . . . my belly is growing by the day. I hope that the child can be born in Holland and that it will be healthy.”59 Yet, ultimately, EngelWijnberg fears that the child will not be happy with her and Chaim as parents, claiming that they have “nothing left to give.”60 The child, Emiel, died 56 In her testimony, it remains unclear why, exactly, Weiss was treated as an equal by the male partisans. Perhaps gender was not important to the Soviet fighters at this stage of the war, particularly if the number of partisans had diminished by that time. 57 Author’s conversation with Richard Rashke, writer of the book Escape from Sobibór (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), who interviewed Hella Weiss in 1980 and kindly shared this anecdote with me. 58 Translated diary of Selma Engel-Wijnberg, provided to the author by Alida Engel. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid.

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aboard the ship carrying the couple to the Netherlands and was buried at sea off the coast of Greece. Notions of love and relationships also feature heavily in her thoughts. Referring to Chaim she writes, “My dearest friend who means everything to me sits beside me. . . . I never imagined that being married would be so wonderful.”61 Selma also reflects on her own relationship when thinking of the women in Sobibor who were not lucky enough to survive or did not have a male partner in the camp, which she suggests aided her own survival. As the Soviets liberate the Polish town where she and Chaim are residing in June 1944, she asks: “Has the moment come where we will be considered human beings again? It is incredible. I am sitting outside on the pasture with Chaim. We are free. The Soviets are here and so we can walk outside. Why don’t I feel more joy? I don’t know.”62 Engel’s diary thus provides insights into the limits of human resilience, whilst at the same time emphasizing the importance of healing through confronting one’s emotions and weaknesses. After the war, Selma and Chaim returned to her hometown of Zwolle in the Netherlands. It did not take long before they realized how much the situation had changed for the country’s Jews following the Holocaust, and so the couple emigrated to the United States, where they remained. Importantly, several of the female survivors also took part in the postwar trials of Sobibor’s camp personnel and were willing to provide their own testimonies. Through their contributions, the public heard about life in Sobibor and, most importantly, survivors described what existence was like for women prisoners—something which may have been overlooked otherwise. Ada Lichtman, who was living in Israel at the time, was asked to provide evidence at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She was also one of the survivors who identified the former Sobibor commandant Karl Frenzel, who was brought to trial in 1965.63 The trials of former Sobibor personnel which took place between 1965 and 1966 in Hagen, West Germany, were also based on numerous survivors’ postwar testimonies, 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 “This witness list was sent to the Israeli delegation and included the names of Lichtmann and Moshe Bahir. Both would later offer powerful testimony against Adolf Eichmann. Their testimony against former Sobibór guards proved similarly effective.” Michael Bryant, “Eichmann in Jerusalem—and in West Germany: Eichmann Trial Witnesses and the West German Prosecution of Operation Reinhard Crimes,” Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 34, nos. 3/4 (2012): 342.

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including that of Ursula Stern. And again, in the 1980s, survivors were called as witnesses. Even in the early stages of the postwar period, the female survivors all worked towards justice and restitution, activity demonstrative of their strength and desire to reclaim their histories and identities. Subsequently, all seven women went on to document or record their experiences, admittedly with great difficulty, and spoke of their time at Sobibor at both local and national levels. Clearly, they all felt a responsibility to do so, particularly as the camp faded into obscurity in Holocaust memory. Even as they entered their new lives and began families of their own, some friendships from the camp were maintained. A number of the Sobibor survivors continued to meet on the uprising anniversary and take part in commemorative events. Yet the trauma stayed with them their entire lives, as by Weiss remarked: “The memory’s always there. And if people ask, I answer them. . . . I say, life goes on, and you cannot hide it. I am angry, not depressed. You have to accept it, what you went through. Angry. Angry that it happened. The memories are constantly with you. I don’t forget it.”64

Conclusion The experiences of the women of Sobibor are of great value, both for public memory of Sobibor and for Holocaust studies more broadly. Their testimonies acted as evidence at the war criminal trials and helped to build the foundations of historical scholarship on the camp and its functions. It is clear that by listening to the voices of women in the Holocaust, one can focus on the specific female experience, as Ofer and Weitzman assert, without minimizing the horror of what the Nazis did to Jews, or other victim groups, of both genders.65 Indeed, when we analyze gender differences we better understand the complexities of the Holocaust and the impact it had on different survivor groups. Certainly, the diverse experiences of the female Sobibor survivors do not always adhere to what Waxman defines as “stories that are seen as suitable or palatable for their readers, or do not accord with women’s behavior

64 Interview with Hella Weiss, Holocaust Oral History Project, April 29, 1991, Sandra Bendayan. Transcribed by Jan Delvallee. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/ irn46024. 65 Ofer and Weitzman, introduction to Women and the Holocaust, 16.

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or preexisting narratives of survival.”66 In the case of the Sobibor survivors, this is particularly significant when considering their lives immediately after the revolt. As discussed, the more conspicuous methods of survival and acts of resistance the women described during life in the camp and after (such as nurturing, kindness, and protection) are still undeniably overshadowed by the “heroic”, “violent,” and predominately masculine memory tropes associated with the revolt. Yet, they also reveal how women directly contributed to the execution and relative success of the uprising— an important expansion of narrative. Many of the above testimonies have not been fully incorporated into academic research, but perhaps this will change as they become more widely available to the public via online platforms. It is my hope, then, that the voices of the female survivors will find their proper place in the future commemoration and representation of Sobibor and be shared as widely as the male perspectives. As Esther Raab wrote: I promised myself, whenever I’ll have the chance, I have to tell the story of Sobibór. They say, ‘never heard of it,’ and it hurted me very much, because I felt the people of Sobibór never gave up. . . . I feel they are not here to tell the story, who died for that revenge and just for that, that protection that honour of those who didn’t make it . . . so I have to do as much as I can.”67 It is now our responsibility to do the same.

66 Zoë Waxman, “Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories: The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 663. 67 Interview with Esther Raab, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 30, 1990, RG-50.030*184.

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Figure 9. Group portrait of participants in the uprising at the Sobibor death camp. Female survivors featured in the photo include Zelda Metz (third from left) and Esther Raab (second from the right). August 1944, Chelm, Poland. Photo Credit: USHMM, Courtesy of Misha Lev, Photograph Number 10625.12.

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“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot.” Jewish Women among Partisans in Lithuania, 1941–1944 Modiane Zerdoun-Daniel

Jewishness is not the only category of analysis in the scholarship on resistance and the Holocaust. The literature on Jewish women during the Second World War is growing. Many studies focus on coping mechanisms in specific contexts: women alone and isolated in hiding; life in the ghettos where communities and families might remain together; and in the camps that were mainly female-only environments.1 While the participation of men in armed resistance is a well-researched topic, featuring strongly in Israel and US work on Jewish identity, the role of Jewish women in armed resistance has received less attention.2 Judith Greenberg and Lenore Weitzman maintain that Jewish women’s involvement in the resistance has been downplayed precisely because they were women and Jewish, therefore less 1 Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Judith Tydor-Baumel, “Women’s Agency and Survival Strategies during the Holocaust,” Women’s Studies International Forum 22, no. 3 (1999): 329–347; Sarah Helm, If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown and Company, 2015). 2 Robert Rozett, “Jewish Resistance,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 341–345.

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likely to take part in what has been portrayed as the most heroic and glorious actions of armed resistance.3 Jewish women had to deal with misogynist prejudices within their own organizations, as well as from friends and family.4 Additionally, many women were responsible for their families and therefore found it harder to commit to underground activities. Resistance groups would ask new recruits to be ready to abandon everyone; therefore some girls were turned down because they could not leave a forsaken relative alone.5 Non-armed resistance was an important part of underground work. Women were often assigned to the hugely important task of rescuing Jews, especially Jewish children. They transmitted information, hid and carried weapons, bribed enemies, spied, infiltrated enemy organizations, and made false papers. Women were often used as couriers or liaison agents in the Gentile world because they looked less suspicious, were not circumcised, and were considered less threatening than men.6 Nevertheless, women also participated in fighting, although this was a less common activity because of the dominant idea that military action was (and is) a male activity. In this environment, where individuals had to constantly prove themselves worthy of belonging to the group, women’s strategies and socialization were different from those of their male counterparts. Jews from the Lithuanian ghettos were very important to the work of the country’s partisans. Among the partisans were a significant number of women, some of whom published memoirs or were interviewed after the war. Women who fought in the Lithuanian ghettos and escaped to join the forest resistance units were very likely to use armed force. However, a comprehensive study of their experiences is lacking. This article seeks to magnify these women’s voices in order to investigate their experiences as Jewish women in a predominantly male environment and contribute to the scholarship on the Holocaust in Lithuania.

3 Judith Greenberg, “Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside,” in Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); Lenore J. Weitzman, “Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing, and the Nature of Resistance,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 187–222. 4 Greenberg, “Paths of Resistance,” 133. 5 Rich Cohen, The Avengers (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 60. 6 Weitzman, “Living on the Aryan Side in Poland.”

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

Sources The main sources for my discussion are the oral interviews of Mania Glezer, Lisa Derman, Anna Dlugi, Bella Varkel, and Liba Augenfeld, and the memoirs of Sara Ginaite-Rubinson and Rachel Margolis. They were involved in armed resistance and rescue or acted as couriers or liaison agents with other groups when preparing for large operations.7 While unarmed, and extremely dangerous, tasks were often undertaken by women, they are not always recognized as resistance. I argue that the dual categories of gender and Jewishness created additional daily challenges for the women within the groups themselves and has the roles of Jewish women partisans invisible in postwar resistance narratives. The oral testimonies used in this article were collected in the 1990s by the USC Shoah Foundation and the written memoirs published in the early 2000s. As with all oral histories there is a possibility that memories have been distorted by time. Additionally, those interviewed could have chosen to amplify, minimize, or even omit certain events or details. Furthermore, intimate stories, such as sexual relationships, tend to be recounted in written testimonies rather than in the oral interviews.8 Those interviewed could also have their story as a performance, either for political reasons or in order to embellish their self-image. I have taken these issues into consideration and noted some similar patterns in the accounts. While many of the women did not know each other during the war, I did not note any major contradictions from one account to the other and historical studies generally support the content of the interviews and memoirs.

Historical Background Before the Second World War, the territory that made up Lithuania was divided. Poland controlled the most eastern part of the country, including the city of Vilnius, from the end of the First World War, with Kaunas as the capital city between 1920 and 1939. From June 1940, Lithuania was under Soviet Union governance. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 7 USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and Sara Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas 1941–1944 (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2015); Rachel Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010). 8 Cathy S. Gelbin, “Gender and Sexuality in Women Survivors’ Personal Narratives,” in Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimonies, ed. Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 183.

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June 20, 1941, it occupied Lithuania’s major cities within two days. There were approximately 160,000 Jews in Lithuania in 1940. Approximately thirty-five thousand to forty thousand Jews lived in Kaunas, making up a quarter of the local population. Another seventy thousand Jews lived in Vilnius. Their persecution began immediately and the Einsatzgruppen began massacring them in the summer of 1941. Thousands of Jews were taken to Fort IX in Kaunas or to the forest of Paneriai near Vilnius for execution. Ghettos were set up in both cities, as well as in Šiauliai, Švenčionys, Mikališkės, Salos and Kėdainiai.9 As was the case in other ghettos across Europe, the occupants of Kaunas and Vilnius soon established resistance groups. The Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization (AFO) and, later in 1943, the Yidishe Algemeyne Kamfs Organizatsye (Jewish General Fighting Organization, JFO) were established in Kaunas; the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization, FPO) was set up in Vilnius on January 21, 1942. Each group trained their members to kill, smuggled weapons, and rescue individuals from the execution squads. When an uprising took place in the ghetto of Vilnius in 1943, the resistance inside the ghettos took up arms against the Nazis, but were outnumbered and mass deportation and killings ensued. After this failed attempt to defeat the Germans, the main goal of the resistance fighters became escape to the forest to join the partisans, as they could not fight within the ghetto anymore.10 Dov Levin estimates that as many as 1,650 Jews successfully escaped from the ghettos and were integrated into fighting units led by the Soviet army.11 On May 30, 1942, the partisan movement officially became a Soviet detachment tasked with leading a guerrilla front. The partisans came from diverse backgrounds—Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. They were always in communication with Moscow, and the Red Army Central Command decided who was in charge of which brigade. The Red Army also regularly parachuted paratroopers, food, and newspapers into the forests. The number of women in fighting units varied, although in the brigades that were majority Jewish they were fifteen to twenty percent of the fighters—a higher percentage than in the traditional Soviet partisan 9 Antony Polonsky, introduction to A Partisan from Vilna, by Rachel Margolis, 18–36. 10 Ibid., 40. 11 Dov Levin, Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry’s Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941–1945, trans. Moshe Kohn and Dina Cohen (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 190.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

movement.12 Jews who escaped from the ghettos reached the partisans either by making their way to the Narocz forest (around the lake Naratch in today’s Belarus), or by getting to the Rudninkai forest, just a few kilometers south of Vilnius. The partisans chose forests like Narocz or Rudninkai because they were old-growth forests, including areas covered in swamps and therefore impracticable for the German army. Their size and density made it a suitable place to build shelters and hide. Strategically speaking, their location was also reachable on foot from the bigger cities like Vilnius, Kaunas, Lida or Minsk. The groups in both forests communicated with each other through liaison agents and some detachments from the Narocz forest joined the ranks of the brigades in the Rudninkai forest, in order to get closer to Vilnius towards the end of the war.

Misogyny In her study Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, Nechama Tec studied the so-called Bielski-otriad,13 an autonomous Jewish partisan unit created by three brothers in Belarus. She compared the status of women in this group with of women in the broader Soviet partisan movement.14 Tec concluded that the Jewish partisans were more likely to accept everyone, women included, because one of their goals was to save Jews. They would establish “family camps,” where Jewish women, children, and the elderly who had escaped from ghettos and mass killings could live protected by the partisans. This contrasted with the Soviet attitude to women, which was generally less accepting because the Soviets wanted only fighters or individuals with very specific skills. While the Soviets espoused gender equality, the few women in their groups were often assigned to typically gendered tasks like cooking, nursing, or caring, rather than fighting.15 Additionally, membership of Soviet partisan units was often based on a romantic relationship with one of the male partisans; consequently, coercive partnerships, as well as rapes, occurred. However, when speaking of the Bielski-otriad, Tec noted, the women maintained that no one was 12 Ibid., 191. 13 Otriad is a Russian word referring to a partisan detachment. 14 Most of the testimonies use the terms “Soviet,” “Pole,” “Russian,” or “Lithuanian” to describe non-Jews. 15 Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

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coerced into any kind of relationship. At the same time, Tec found that girlfriends and wives held a higher status than single women within the group. Tec also discovered that women in the Bielski-otriad group were rarely sent on dangerous missions and stayed in the “family unit” inside the camp.16 The experience of Jewish women partisans in Lithuania was slightly different from the Belarusian women Tec also discusses. The Jewish Lithuanian women demanded to be part of the fighting squads as they reached out to the pre-existing units and refused to comply with assignments only considered safe for women. One of the reasons for this might be that most of them had been part of ghetto fighting organizations and were sent out or taken out by comrades into the forest with the sole purpose of joining the partisan movement. The choice about who would leave the ghetto was made beforehand, especially among the Kaunas ghetto fighters. In the case of those from Vilnius, the failed uprising in September 1943 meant that a wave of Jews escaped the ghetto and moved into the forest. Despite the urgency of the situation, the biggest challenge for Jewish women was acceptance as a partisan. Soviet brigades tended to regard Jewish partisans as weak and self-interested, and women as a burden. Jews were criticized for their lack of military training, the fact that they had very few weapons, and the amount of women in their ranks.17 The women in this study maintained that Soviet partisans only wanted “fighters” in their brigades and automatically assumed that women could not fight. As a consequence, the number of women in these brigades was limited. Soviet brigades had a strict weapon policy. Arms brought from the ghettos were confiscated, causing much resentment.18 Weapons were then redistributed, but it was much harder for women to get one. In GinaiteRubinson’s unit, for instance, women had to be AFO fighters and needed to bring a gun or pay the equivalent price of a gun in order to have a chance of being be taken in. She remembered that when a new group of escapees from the ghetto of Kaunas arrived to join her detachment the commander Kostas Radionovas rejected them at first because they had too few weapons and too many women.19 Similarly, Augenfeld was turned down by a brigade

16 Nechama Tec, “Women among the Forest Partisans,” in Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 223–233. 17 Levin, Fighting Back, 216. 18 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 381. 19 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 139.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

because, she was told, it already had enough women.20 Jenny Misuchin, who escaped the Švenčionys ghetto and tried to join a brigade, was informed by the commander that “We already have two women.”21 She had to insist that she was not there to hide, but to fight. The presence of women, then, remained a source of tension between Soviet and Jewish partisans.22 In the fighting units, women were given guns or rifles for specific tasks, but not permitted to keep them after the mission. As an exception to the rule, Ginaite-Rubinson received a rifle as a gift on International Women’s Day on March 8, 1944, but this was already close to the end of the war.23 However, she claimed that on March 8, 1944, while still living in the forest, she was asked to give a speech about the women in her partisan unit to celebrate the International Women’s Day, a Soviet tradition. Ginaite-Rubinson was thrilled to receive a rifle as a gift for giving the speech.24 Rachel Margolis also had a gun and Dlugi took one from a Lithuanian partisan she captured25 and who was subsequently shot by Jewish partisans.26 Vitka Kempner, born in 1922, and Ruzka Korczak, born in 1921, were both very young Jewish women who were imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto where they met Abba Kovner, a man who soon became an important partisan leader. Both Kempner and Korczak carried weapons because they were among the few women who actually led a squad from time to time. Glezer owned a gun and a rifle, but at times she too had to turn her weapon in.27 Women were occasionally celebrated by the Soviet partisans. GinaiteRubinson claims that on March 8, 1944, while still living in the forest, she was asked to give a speech about the women in her partisan unit to celebrate International Women’s Day, a Soviet tradition. Ginaite-Rubinson was thrilled to receive a rifle as a gift for giving the speech.28 However, even 20 USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Liba Augenfeld, 1995. 21 Berkow, “Happy Ending,” in Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, vol. 1, ed. Isaac Kowalski (Brooklyn: Jewish Combatants Publishing House, 1985), 339. 22 Levin, Fighting Back, 221. 23 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 179. 24 Ibid. 25 Some groups of Lithuanian partisans were a threat to the Jews because of their antisemitism. Not all partisan groups had the same goals and loyalties. 26 USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Anna Dlugi, 1997. 27 Ibid., Mania Glezer, 1996. 28 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 179.

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when women had proved themselves skilled fighters, they were still made to feel very conscious that they were female. Margolis remembers being shocked at being described as “female,” rather than as a fighter, by a Polish leader.29 Kempner claimed that the treatment by their male counterparts made life difficult.30 Gender did matter. Kempner recalls an episode where, after setting bombs in Vilnius and taking shelter in a fur factory nearby, she decided it was safer for her squad (consisting of herself, another woman, and two men) to go back to the forest immediately. The men disagreed, stayed the night and were caught by the Nazis. As Kempner explained, “We made it and the boys did not, because they were tired, and we were tired too, but the women were stronger than the men.”31

Daily Life Daily life in the forest was hard. Food was limited, threats were everywhere, and diseases spread because of a lack of basic hygiene. Jewish partisans also had to deal with the psychological impact of the loss of relatives who were still in the ghettos or had already been killed. Yet despite the difficulties, life in the forest was better than life in the ghettos,32 giving more opportunities to act against the Nazis. Many operations were undertaken when people were hungry and despairing, during harsh weather, and using limited resources. Furthermore, members of the group had to adapt to a communal way of life and obey the hierarchy whilst surviving attacks from the enemy. Partisans had numerous tasks. Open battle was unusual, and women were frequently used as couriers or liaison agents in the forest. They transmitted information and often had to return to the ghetto for rescue operations. They were sent into villages to ask for or steal food and goods, placing them in danger. The women had “double duty”: they not only fought and went on dangerous missions outside the camp, but they also had to clean or cook inside the camp, unlike their male comrades. Sara Ginaite-Rubinson reported that women did “everything, from peeling potatoes to going to

29 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 459. 30 Interview provided by Great Projects Film Company, available on the website jewishpartisans.org, date unknown. 31 Cohen, The Avengers, 128. 32 Glezer, 1996.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

battle.”33 The women took care of the camp’s logistics, did secretarial work, went on night watch, cleaned weapons, and washed clothes; they had to be very resourceful with the small amounts of food available—making clothes from parachutes, for example.34 The women also took care of each other, the wounded, and the men in the camps. In short, even when the women were fighters, they were still expected to perform roles considered appropriate for their gender. Most of the women partisans who survived and testified acknowledged that they were treated differently than their male counterparts, and usually they accepted it and regretted it at the same time. Ginaite-Rubinson writes about her experience as a Jewish woman fighter and what was expected of her from day one in the forest group. Born in 1924, Ginaite-Rubinson was a member of the AFO in the Kaunas ghetto. In December 1943, she joined a partisan detachment in the forest called Mirtis Okupantams (Death to the Occupiers).35 She had been involved in armed resistance from the start of the conflict and she writes in her memoirs how countless Jewish women were willing to take up arms. When she arrived in the forest, Ginaite-Rubinson was immediately sent with other partisans on a mission to collect grain from some peasants in a village. They had to walk for a day, requisition grain from a farmhouse, and then return to the camp the following day. A few hours after the group arrived back at the camp, Ginaite-Rubinson was ordered to peel potatoes. Later that same day, she was asked to do some secretarial work and, finally, go on sentry duty for three hours.36 This was part of everyday life for female fighters. They were guards, they undertook missions to obtain food, smuggled weapons or information, and performed household tasks. Kempner, Korczak, and Kovner fled from the Vilnius ghetto to the forest together. Kovner created a partisan brigade consisting solely of Jewish fighters, split into four units called “Death to Fascism,” “Struggle,” “To Victory,” and “The Avenger.” Kovner, Kempner, and Korczak were active in the latter group. Though the leadership was male, Kempner and Korczak had significant roles within the structure. Both engaged in armed fighting 33 Interview provided by Great Projects Film Company, available at jewishpartisans.org, date unknown. 34 Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford University Press, 2014), 161. 35 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 129. 36 Ibid., 135.

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and were put in charge of risky missions such as blowing up trains, factories, or bridges, just like other male partisans. Kovner himself said that he did not see a difference between men and women when it came to resistance.37 Like the Soviets, the Germans considered it to be inappropriate for women to bear arms. According to Jack Nusan Porter, “Germans saw the enlistment of women as an outright abomination.”38 Their gender sometimes worked to their advantage because the Nazis did not always anticipate that the women they faced from time to time could be fierce, armed fighters or couriers for the partisans. By neglecting this possibility, they unwittingly gave some women the opportunity to be spared or to escape. Nevertheless, this was not always the case and many women were murdered during their underground activities. Local peasants were also surprised to see women among the partisans. While on one of her missions to confiscate food from a farmer, his wife told Ginaite-Rubinson that “war was not for women to fight.” Surprised, Ginaite-Rubinson replied, “And is the killing of women and children proper work for men?”39While all the partisans suffered hardship, women struggled with additional problems, such as menstruation. For some of the women suffering from malnutrition, menstruation ceased.40 For those in better health, menstruation caused difficulties because showering or washing clothes could not be done on a regular basis and there was no access to sanitary products. Some women used leaves instead of sanitary pads,41 others shredded sheets or rags obtained from local peasants.42 Basic hygiene was a serious problem. In Derman’s unit, women were only allowed in the camp bathhouse once a week, while the men were able to use it during the other six days.43 Women’s long hair attracted lice, and the lack of privacy made it tough for the women to wash themselves. Derman would wake up early to use cold water from a frozen pond;44 Korczak found that using ashes instead of soap was a more efficient way to get rid of the lice.45 37 Cohen, The Avengers,111; Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 157. 38 Jack Nusan Porter, “Jewish Women in the Resistance,” in Kowalski, Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, 291. 39 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 139. 40 USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Bella Varkel, 1996. 41 Ibid., Lisa Derman, 1996. 42 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 176. 43 Derman, 1996. 44 Ibid. 45 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 161.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

Antisemitism Antisemitism was far from absent among Soviet partisans. A Jewish partisan the impossible situation Jews faced: “If you were an outstanding partisan and a Jew, they envied you. They might kill you out of envy. But if you were a poor fighter and a Jew, then they would point out, ‘See, he is a coward; he has these Jewish qualities.’”46 This stigmatization and discrimination could have a terrible impact on Jewish partisans, and they assiduously avoided speaking Yiddish when fighting in a mixed unit.47 Ginaite-Rubinson writes that Jews who spoke Russian were more accepted than those who did not.48 Margolis had a bad experience with her commander who held a grudge because she spoke Polish with a friend and not Russian.49 She also notes the humiliations, insults, scare tactics, and the way Jewish partisans would often be robbed, left behind, beaten, or even killed by the others. This was why she eventually took the opportunity to move to one of the Jewish brigades, “To Victory,” led by Abba Kovner.50 Indeed, the creation of the Jewish brigades was seen as essential to overcome the antisemitism that was so prevalent. Misogyny and antisemitism created extra pressure and stress for Jewish women partisans who felt compelled to prove they were the best, most loyal, and fearless fighters.51 In her memoirs, Margolis complains about the treatment she received in her Soviet unit, especially the sexism she endured. She recalls how furious she was when asked to cook: “And we girls, including many from the ghetto battle organization, who dreamed of fighting against the Nazis, were going to bake bread? This was impossible, a mean trick!”52 Yet she understood that her position as a woman and as a Jew relegated her to the bottom of the group. “After all,” she writes, “I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot.”53 This double burden affected the lives of the women and the way they were perceived by others. Cohen and Ginaite-Rubinson record similar frustrations. In their memoirs, the women portray themselves as ready to

46 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 294. 47 Levin, Fighting Back, 210. 48 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 129. 49 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 429. 50 Ibid., 470. 51 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 157; Glezer, 1996. 52 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 384. 53 Ibid, 461.

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fight, kill, and die, but the men usually prevented them from doing so.54 Hersh Smolar, a Communist member of a Russian brigade, reports that his unit welcomed a Jewish woman who had escaped from a ghetto. She told them she wanted to avenge the death of her baby and went on to stab an SS prisoner to death.55 Misuchin was challenged to throw a hand grenade at German soldiers. Her male comrades laughed at her, telling each other that she would “pee in her pants.”56 Even if she was scared (she was only sixteen years old), she carried out the order successfully. Tania Vinisheski (or Taibe Winiski, depending on the sources), a member of a mostly Jewish detachment called “Death to the Conquerors,” decided to kill herself along with four Germans with a hand grenade rather than risk capture.57 Jewish female fighters were also perceived as disrespectful by the Soviets. As women, they were expected to obey the men’s commands, and when they did not they were also insulted for being Jews. For instance, Kempner remembers a time when she refused to drink the vodka that a Soviet soldier was trying to force upon her. As she threw away her glass, he said, “Always I’ve defended the Jews, now I know why people hate them.”58 This was clearly meant to intimidate. Kempner’s refusal to drink like a Russian was considered evidence of her inferiority. Margolis recalls a similar experience when she discreetly spilled a glass of alcohol on the ground during a social evening in an attempt to make the men believe she could drink and therefore earn their respect.59

Relationships Loneliness in the forest could be fatal. Jewish partisans developed genuine camaraderie among one another to combat the feelings of isolation. Everyone needed at least one friend for fundamental social needs, but they also had to know that someone would notice if they disappeared. Because they were distrusted by non-Jews, Jewish fighters tended to look out for each other. Ginaite-Rubinson mentions that every time new partisans 54 Cohen, The Avengers, 110; Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 175. 55 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 330–332. 56 Berkow, “Happy Ending,” 339. 57 Levin, Fighting Back, 200; Isaac Kowalski, “They Fought Back!” in Kowalski, Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, 387. 58 Cohen, The Avengers, 114. 59 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 430.

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arrived from the Kaunas ghetto, she and others would stand up for them and petition their commander to accept them into the brigade.60 Many of the testimonies examined here point to an important solidarity between women partisans. Jewish women were clearly a minority among partisans, so they often bonded with each other in something that resembled a sorority. They valued friendship and needed to be able to trust their comrades. Glezer, a member of the FPO, explained that she always sided with the girls61 in her unit.62 Margolis had a close friendship with another woman called Marysia. At one point they were the only women left in the unit. She also became fond of a Gentile woman in her unit named Tonia, who gave Margolis a lot of support; they even traded clothes. Tonia and her partner, both former prisoners of war who had escaped to the forest, were unfortunately sentenced to death for treason by the partisans in charge of the unit a few days after their arrival. Margolis, convinced that Tonia was under her boyfriend’s influence, was devastated by her death and struggled to get over it.63 Camaraderie found in romantic relationships. All the women in this study mentioned boyfriends, partners, or husbands. They usually met their partner among the partisans, in the forest, or in the ghetto. Jewish women exclusively partnered with Jewish men. Although mixed couples may have existed, they are not mentioned by the women studied here. The women asserted that life was easier in the forest under the protection of a man. Derman maintained that she felt protected because she was “Aaron’s girl.”64 But these relationships were not only about safety; some of the women also talked about true love rather than necessity. The intense experiences the women shared with their partners in the forest brought them closer to each other and, for some, this bond lasted long after the war.65 Given the urgency of the situation and the uncertainty of the future, many couples even married, despite their youth.66 Glezer recalls that her husband, Gershon, would sometimes give her his bread.67 Margolis came 60 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 139. 61 However, she did not specify if all women in her units were Jewish. 62 Glezer, 1996. 63 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 458. 64 Derman, 1996. 65 Ginaite-Rubinson, Margolis, Glezer, and Derman stayed with their husbands after the war. Varkel divorced and remarried. 66 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 175. 67 Glezer, 1996.

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from the Vilnius ghetto to the Narocz forest. In her memoirs, Margolis writes about the evolution of her relationship with another partisan called Chaim. She first refers to him as “a friend,”68 but later as “husband”69 and “beloved.”70 They tried to stay together throughout their time in the forest. When they were separated for a few months, she became desperate to find him again and very scared that he would die before she saw him again. She writes, “If only Chaim and I could stay together: if we had to die, then we would die together.”71 When they were finally reunited, she remarks that “I had the feeling that wherever Chaim was—that was our home.”72 After losing so much, relationships helped to create a sense of security and belonging. When the situation seemed desperate, relationships were placed above all else and were consoling. Although many women described their relationships, intimacy was difficult in the forest. Ginaite-Rubinson met her future husband Misha Rubinson in the AFO. They joined the same partisan detachment, but in the forest they could rarely spend time together, except at the campfire, which was the center of the camp. “We developed great respect for each other, fierce loyalty, and a deep friendship,” says Ginaite-Rubinson about Misha.73 She recalls how he once came back from a mission during the night when she was on sentry duty, and how it allowed them to have a private moment together.74 Relationships mattered to the partisans. Nighttime, or at least a moment couples could rest together, was a luxury they did not want to lose. Some commanders attempted to prevent intimate relationships. Glezer and Margolis both claimed that a new commander sent by headquarters decided to separate women and men in the bunkers where they slept. It appears that he thought it would avoid pregnancies and other problems associated with relationships. Moreover, the commander was afraid that the women would prevent their partners from going on missions for fear of losing them.75 Both Margolis and Glezer were infuriated by what they found to be a patronizing sentiment. Margolis protested and reminded everyone that the commander himself was having an affair with a married 68 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 396. 69 Ibid., 459. 70 Ibid., 472. 71 Ibid., 389. 72 Ibid., 472. 73 Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival, 138. 74 Ibid. 75 Glezer, 1996.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

woman; she was sentenced to five days confinement in the bathhouse.76 She further argued that the women were so eager to fight themselves that it was very unlikely that wives would keep their husbands from going. In fact, the commander’s belief that intimate relationships interfered with the work of the partisans was not necessarily true. Indeed, some partisans were more motivated to go on missions if they could go with their partners. Relationships, then, were usually more of an advantage than obstacle to missions. This was the case for Margolis, who desperately tried to stay with Chaim as much as she could. Glezer, on the other hand, preferred for she and her partner to go separately so that neither was distracted by fear of losing one another. Glezer adds that they would always wait for each other at the end of their respective missions.77 On many occasions, though, women were alone or paired up with another woman to accomplish their missions. There were also women who refused to engage in what they saw as “fake relationships” in order to gain protection,78 but the situation was hard for them.79 Single women had to hope their comrades would treat them well Riva Gordon, an FPO member, landed in a unit where she was the only woman among thirty Belarusian men. Nevertheless, Gordon claimed that while she did not have any real friendships, she felt respected.80 Misuchin was in a unit with approximately sixty men and was unsure of whether she could accept the little gifts she received from some of them. As a seventeen-year-old, she remained wary about their intentions: “Is it in friendship, or only a lure?”81 Misuchin’s caution was well-founded. Jewish women endured contempt and also sexual violence from their fellow partisans. According to Zvi Shefet, a Jewish partisan fighting among Russians, “[A woman] was a service giver. . . . She had to satisfy a man’s sexual need. If a woman in the forest had no male protector, she had grave problems.”82 Similarly, Eva

76 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 491. 77 Glezer, 1996. 78 While the women mentioned in this study seemed to have a genuine relationship with their partner, it was not always the case. See for example Tec, Resilience and Courage. 79 Derman, 1996. 80 USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Riva Gordon, 1996. 81 Berkow, “Happy Ending,” 340. 82 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 307.

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Kracowski, another Jewish woman fighting in the forest near Bialystok, recalls that “the Russian partisans looked on women just as sex objects.”83 Thus, women had to cope with additional stress, either because they had to submit to a man in order to be protected (especially when they were among Gentile partisans) or because they had to guard against the constant danger of sexual assault—from enemies or comrades.84 Cohen argues that Soviet partisans would rape Jewish women or try to assert their superiority.85 Nechama Tec also interviewed some women who were sexually assaulted (apparently only by Gentile partisans) during their time in the forest, and who explained how intimacy and sex were problems for them, even long after the war.86 Derman reported that she did not hear of rape during her time among partisans, but acknowledges that maybe there were cases that women remained silent about them.87 While the women in this study claimed that the perpetrators of sexual violence were non-Jewish men and that there were no coerced relationships among the Jewish groups, we cannot be sure this is true,88 as it is an underresearched topic. Female sexuality was sometimes perceived as a threat to the whole group. For instance, in 1943, Soviet partisans became convinced that Jewish women had been infected with venereal diseases by the Nazis in order to spread it in the forest and destroy the resistance.89 Derman recalls how a woman of her unit was shot for apparently having syphilis; the men in charge were scared she would infect male partisans.90 While women partisans were at risk of sexual violence, then, they could simply be accused of causing harm to the male members of their units through their existence as sexual beings. Risky pregnancies could occur as couples formed in the forest or after sexual assault. However, none of the women in this study mention a specific policy of the partisan leadership about pregnancy. Some women tried to hide their pregnancies and to keep their babies, while others decided to

83 Ibid., 309. 84 Ibid., 323. 85 Cohen, The Avengers, 115. 86 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 311. 87 Derman, 1996. 88 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 51. 89 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 321. 90 Derman, 1996.

“After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot”

end pregnancies.91 For example Varkel, still a teenager, offered clothes to the unit’s nurse to help her obtain an abortion.92

Conclusion Just a few months after the end of the war, the partisan unit led by Kovner received newspapers shipped by the Red Army. Jewish partisans—men and women—were not mentioned in the articles about the brave and heroic Soviet fighters.93 When Lithuania was liberated, Soviet partisans were able to move west to continue fighting or enjoy their hour of glory, but the moment of relief and respite was short for Jewish partisans. Most of them were exhausted and did not wish to continue with the Red Army, and many Jewish men and women no longer had a family or home to return to. Jewish women partisans have been largely erased from history. Many did not work in the same way as men—but that was because of traditional gender roles rather than their inability or unwillingness to fight. Much of the partisan leadership was male and had the power to decide whether, and how, women could participate. Jewish resistance groups were more likely to include women in conventional male activities because manpower was severely reduced due to deportation and mass murder. Another reason might be that the persecution reinforced the strength of Jewish identity and the sense of solidarity among the Jewish partisans, which prevailed over gendered considerations. In armed resistance, women bore a double burden and had to prove their efficacy as fighters. They were expected to fight and to undertake “household” tasks while at the same time understanding they were a burden to the group. Women partisans in Lithuania found ways to cope with the situation by bonding and establishing important, and often intimate, relationships. Jewish women had to overcome antisemitism and misogynistic prejudices in almost every brigade they belonged to. While this had an impact on their social interactions, their autonomy, and their self-confidence, according to the women in this study, these obstacles also increased their commitment to the fight.

91 Margolis, A Partisan from Vilna, 483. 92 Varkel, 1996. 93 Cohen, The Avengers, 136.

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Figure 10. Portrait of female partisan Sara Ginaite on the liberation of Vilna. The photograph was taken by a Jewish Soviet major who was surprised to see a female, Jewish partisan standing guard, August 1944. Photo credit: USHMM, Photograph Number 89040.

12

Listening to Women’s Voices: Jewish Rape Survivors’ Testimonies in Soviet War Crimes Trials Marta Havryshko

They ordered all five [Jewish] families to go out into the corridor. [. . .] Shevchenko beat my relative Yevheniia Moiseevna Komar who was holding her 5-month-old baby, used foul language, then hit the baby boy on the head, telling the mother to throw him out into the street. Shevchenko was abusing Yevheniia and beating her, and then raped her in front of us all.1

On October 10, 1945, Jewish Holocaust survivor Tsylia thus testified to the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) against her fellow villager Maksym Shevchenko. She described a nighttime assault in September 1941 in her native village Nei Leben near Kryvyj Rih in eastern Ukraine. Based on her recollections as well as testimonies of the rape victim herself and other Jewish eye-witnesses, Shevchenko was found guilty of serial rape and war crimes committed by him during Nazi rule, and was sentenced to twenty years in labor camp imprisonment (katorga). 1 Arkhiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy (AUSBU) u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 6. This and all following quotes have been translated by the author. I would like to thank Roman Shliakhtych for providing me with this and other archival documents regarding the Nei Leben case.

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This case, analyzed in detail later in this paper, reveals the crucial role of Jewish survivors’ testimonies in Soviet investigation of war crimes, including sex crimes committed by local Nazi collaborators. The topic of sexual violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine, in general, remains underresearched and its occurrence underestimated. Only a few studies address this issue in the broader context of everyday wartime life of Jewish women.2 Previous work on sexual violence focuses on certain periods of war, in particular during the anti-Jewish pogroms in July 1941,3 or special localities (e.g. hiding places) when and where Jewish women were at high risk of sexual assault and rape.4 Different cases of sexual offenses during the Holocaust in Ukraine are analyzed in the studies that use the Soviet Union as a case study. In terms of studies on perpetrators, the majority of them focus on the SS, the SD, police battalions, the Wehrmacht, and Hungarian and Romanian soldiers.5 There is a lack of studies that address the range of sexually violent behavior of locals towards Jewish women. This article explores wartime sexual violence committed solely by local perpetrators in Ukraine from the point of view of their immediate victims—Jewish women who survived the Holocaust and became witnesses in postwar trials. I analyze the role of rape victim/survivor testimonies in the broader context of prosecution by local Nazi collaborators in Soviet Ukraine. This study addresses the following questions: What do available rape survivors’ testimonies tell us about patterns of sexual violence perpetrated by locals against Jewish women during the Holocaust in Ukraine? 2

Anatoly Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate of Ukrainian Jewish Women under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1944,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, ed. Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 94–107; Natalia Aleksiun, “Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 27 (2014): 38–61. 3 Joan-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, nos. 2–4 (2011): 212–213. 4 Marta Havryshko, “Zhvaltuvannia u skhovkakh: seksualne nasylstvo pid chas Holokostu v Ukraini,” Holokost i Suchasnist’ 1, no. 17 (2019): 10–30. 5 Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes and Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War Two” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004); Monika Flaschka, “Race, Rape and Gender in Nazi-Occupied Territories” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 2009); Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen: Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010); Regina Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency: Nazi Sexual Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, 1942–1945,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 197–220.

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How were these testimonies used during the investigation and punishment of Nazi collaborators for sex crimes? What factors influenced the controversial treatment of women’s testimonies by Soviet justice in different cases?

Sources and Methodological Problems The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection of documents from Soviet postwar trials related to Ukraine, spanning the years 1943 to the 1980s,6 as well as documents from the regional branch offices of the former KGB archive (presently the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy, SBU), constitute the main sources for this article. They are present in both collections in the form of criminal files on both individuals and groups, and consist of investigation materials of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the NKGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the Ministry of State Security (MGB), and the Committee for State Security (KGB), as well as trial records. The majority of files include defendants’ personal data, interrogation protocols, the testimonies of victims and witnesses, records of the cross-examination of witnesses, materials from the crime scene investigation, indictments, trial transcripts, verdicts, and cassation appeals. Some files also include the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory, a government agency formed by the NKVD in 1942 to investigate and document war crimes against the Soviet Union. The use of these materials raises a series of methodological issues. First of all, Soviet war crimes trials were not only an instrument of transitional justice or public revenge, but also served as a political tool to reinstate and strengthen Soviet rule in Ukraine. This means that facts were likely manipulated with the aim of convicting people who were regarded as potential threats to the authorities. The investigative methods used, as well as the determination to get an admission from the accused, also precluded a fair and honest trial. As Alexander Viktor Prusin notes, a confession was considered to be of crucial importance for Soviet justice, and illegal brutal 6 This article was made possible by funds granted to the author through a Diane and Howard Wohl Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2019–2020). I would like to thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem for supporting my research. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume for their helpful comments and advice.

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methods for extracting confessions were standard components of the Soviet police system before, during, and after Stalin’s rule.7 Another problem with the sources is the fact that all interrogation records are solely in the investigators’ transcriptions. Only in rare cases defendants, witnesses or victims were allowed to record their testimonies in their own hand. In other words, these documents primarily shed light on an investigator’s imagination and interpretation of events, which is especially problematic in the context of rape victims’ testimonies, on which this study is focused. This prompts methodological questions, including the following: Did the victims use precisely those words that are indicated in the protocols? What parts of their narratives, considered important by them, were downplayed by the investigators and thus not included in the protocols? How did the whole procedure of documenting their testimonies prevent them from expressing their true feelings and reflections on their traumatic experiences? All the same, Soviet war crime trials are a very important source for studying sex crimes committed by local collaborators during the Holocaust, primarily due to the very fact that they do contain Jewish survivors’ testimonies. The uniqueness of these recollections is indisputable. Firstly, they provide insights into women’s traumatic experiences of sexual violence that no other sources offer. Secondly, despite the official nature of these documents, they remain valuable sources of knowledge about sexual violence during WWII and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and, in particular, in Ukraine, which must be understood first of all through women’s stories. Women recount how, where, and when they or their acquaintances fell victim to sexual violence, the consequences of this violence, and who the perpetrators were. These testimonies are especially valuable considering how difficult it presumably was for rape victims to break the silence about their traumatic experience for reasons that could include guilt, shame, selfblame, cultural taboos, traumatic memories, and attempts to protect their loved ones.8 The gender imbalance in the Soviet legal process involving collaborators is also worth taking into consideration. The interrogators, judges, 7 Alexander Victor Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 17. 8 Nena Močnik, “Narrated Silence in  Sexual Scripts of  War Rape Survivors: Hidden Transmission of Violent Sexual Patterns,” Sexuality & Culture 22 (2018): 13–62.

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prosecutors, defense attorneys, and defendants were mostly men, which could have been yet another obstacle preventing rape survivors from speaking out, as well as making the process of testifying more difficult and even harmful. The general design of investigation was also deeply challenging for women’s dignity. In particular, victims were obliged to reveal their sexual history prior to and after the rape. Indeed, close relatives and friends frequently asked about victims’ sexual histories. For instance, husbands were asked about the virginity of their brides before the marriage, which probably was considered as indirect proof of rape during war.9 This study focuses on female rape survivors’ testimonies given to the Soviet military tribunals in different localities in eastern, southern, and central Ukraine at different times—Nei Leben near Kryvyi Rih (1945–1946), Nova Pavlivka (Odesa oblast’, 1953–1954), and Bar (Vinnytsia oblast’, 1965– 1966).10 During World War II, Nova Pavlivka was a part of Transnistria under the Antonescu regime. Two other localities belonged to the Reich Commissariat Ukraine under German occupation. After the war all these territories were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet People’s Republic. Most defendants at these trials were formally affiliated with the occupying authorities; some were their relatives, friends, and acquaintances of those who collaborated with the Nazis. The Soviets accused all such defendants of war crimes, in particular that of perpetrating anti-Jewish violence.

Wartime Rapes and the Soviet Response: The Challenges of Collecting Evidence Military tribunals against collaborators in the Soviet Union began almost immediately after the liberation of Ukrainian territories in late 1943. They continued until the 1980s, though they varied in frequency and intensity. Of those accused of being “homeland traitors and accomplices,” 93,590 were arrested in the USSR between 1943 and 1953 alone.11 Sex crimes never appeared as a separate type of crime in Soviet regulatory instruments which defined the procedures for the prosecution of Nazi collaborators. Rapists fell within the category of those who “were directly 9 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 11, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 135 zv. 10 Years indicated here related to the timetable of the whole process of Soviet investigation and trials in each case. 11 Tanja Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953),” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, nos. 2–3, (2008): 342.

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involved in committing murders and violence against the population,” in line with paragraph 1 of the Resolution of the USSR Supreme Court (No. 22/М/16/U/ss) dated November 25, 1943. So far, no single Soviet war crimes trial on sexual violence alone has been uncovered. All collaborators were tried for the totality of crimes committed, which could include rape. At the same time, there were numerous cases in which sexual violence was part of an investigation’s materials but absent from the indictment or court sentence. Sometimes, sexual violence was referred to by way of euphemisms like “humiliating treatment of women.” Use of such oblique speech can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it may have been an attempt to protect the victim’s reputation, especially important during an open trial, or if the victim herself insisted on withholding this information.12 On the other hand, it could also serve as evidence that the Soviet judicial system disregarded rape of it had enough evidence of war crimes perpetrated by an individual to convict him. There were various reasons for the marginalization of sexual violence in the Soviet response to war crimes, especially in the years immediately after the war. As Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen and Alona Hagay-Frey, argue, one reason might be the lack of an appropriate legal framework and judicial practice related to sex crimes committed during World War II in both Soviet and international law. Sexual violence was excluded from Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which concerned itself only to war crimes and crimes against humanity.13 The absence of victims posed another difficulty in the investigation of sex crimes. In nearly all cases it was not the victims, but rather their relatives, friends, or acquaintances—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who testified. Not only did most rape victims not survive the Holocaust, but some rape survivors were afraid to testify, most likely due to a sense of shame and fear of social stigma. It should also be taken into consideration that some Jewish women who were not violated, but knew of the sexual assaults against Jewish women, were hardly ever willing to talk during interrogations, while Jewish men were more open.14 12 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 74, spr. 14153, t. 2, ark. 14. 13 Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen and Alona Hagay-Frey, “Silence at the Nuremberg Trials: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and Sexual Crimes against Women in the Holocaust,” Women’s Rights Law Reporter 35 (2013): 44. 14 For example, it was due to the testimonies about rapes at the forced labor camp in Bakhova Hora in Berdychiv. Known testimonies on this issue were given to the Soviets by Jewish men, while Jewish women were not willing to talk about this during

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The Soviet war crimes cases from the 1940s contain the largest number of Jewish testimonies; they are among the most valuable sources in studying sex crimes against Jewish women during World War II, even though these investigations were brief in comparison to the ones held later and could not involve a large number of witnesses. However, in the early postwar years, Jewish witnesses still had vivid memories of their persecutors, so they addressed the topic of sexual abuse even when investigators did not ask them to do so directly. Numerous previously investigated cases were reexamined in the 1960s and many new cases were opened due to the new wave of political persecution in the Soviet Union in general. The Soviet justice apparatus poured enormous human and material resources into reviewing known information, as well as searching for new evidence and witnesses. Yet, even in the thousands of written pages, there is significantly less evidence from Jewish sources about sexual violence than there is from the early postwar years, and the few mentions of such are kept very general. To some degree, this decrease in evidence may be explained by the postwar emigration of many Jews from the USSR to Poland, Israel, or other countries in the West. Therefore, non-Jewish citizens became the main witnesses in cases against collaborators, often retelling what they had heard earlier from Jewish survivors in their neighborhoods. It is also notable that the large amounts of evidence that came from non-Jews in later postwar decades resulted in the discovery of information that people who had been convicted for collaboration in the 1940s had participated in sexual violence. According to their testimonies, defendants barely touched on the topic of sexual assault during their interrogations. A few reported rapes,15 but no one revealed information about their own sex crimes unless asked directly by the investigator, who might have based suspicions on the witnesses’ accounts. The vast majority of defendants stubbornly contradicted their victims’ testimonies, even when they were confronted face-to-face. Only in some cases would men admit to their guilt without providing the motives behind their actions. It was often easier for such men to acknowledge their participation in mass shootings of Jews, rather than admit that they had questioning for reasons which may include shame (AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 7091, ark. 26; spr. 29923, ark. 30–31). The women’s choice of silence was probably deeply rooted in cultural norms and ideas about sex and sexuality as a private matter. But not all women preferred to keep silent, however. Some war crime trials contain women’s testimonies about traumatic sexual experiences during the Holocaust.  15 See more: USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 52, spr. 11259, t.1, ark.113; USHMM, RG-31.018M., reel 22, spr. 9051, ark. 106–107.

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committed rape. This may be explained by their hope they could justify themselves by claiming that they were ordered to murder Jews and would have been severely punished for any disobedience. This defense would not work in the case of sexual violence. Moreover, some collaborators, particularly policemen, asserted that the harsh discipline of their commanders forbad sexual violence.16 The following parts of this study will analyze three separate Soviet war crimes trials that include rape survivors’ testimonies.

Sexual Terror in Nei Leben: Testimonies of Tsylia, Anna, Yevheniia and Klavdiia In the case file “Korichnevye” (Brown) in autumn of 1945, KGB officers wrote: M. S. Shevchenko and P. I. Ivanov, together with a German commandant picked 19 young women and girls aged 16 to 30 out of the group of Jews sent to Kryvyi Rih to be shot. The men raped them and, following the inhuman tortures, forwarded them to Kryvyi Rih where the victims were shot.17 Pavlo Ivanov and Maksym Shevchenko, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, were arrested before the year was out; in addition, Oleksiy Komyshyn, Hryhorii Kekalo, Mykhailo Lipa, Pavlo Sekhin, Mykola Sholokh, and Natalia Sholokh were arrested. All of them were accused of collaboration with the German authorities during the Nazi occupation of Nei Leben18 and committing crimes against civilians. In particular, they were accused of breaking into and plundering Jewish houses, beating and killing Jews, and raping women and girls.19 They were acquainted with each other and committed their crimes jointly by dividing into small groups. Most of the defendants were neighbors of victimized Jews. The Soviet investigators discovered the names of several Nei Leben Jewish inhabitants who survived the Holocaust. Four women, named Tsylia, Anna, Yevheniia, and Klavdiia, were among them. They were the main victims and became the main witnesses in the case. During interrogations, the 16 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 74, spr. 14153, t.1, ark. 138. 17 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, f.1, op.1, spr.173, ark. 82. 18 Nei Leben no longer exists. The village of Novyi Shliakh, Kryvyi Rih raion, Dnipropetrovska oblast’, is now standing in its place. 19 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 286.

Listening to Women’s Voices

women were asked to describe the war atrocities (zvierstva) against Jews, although none of the direct questions addressed sexual violence exclusively. Nonetheless, all women included rape stories in their accounts. The protocols of the interrogations reveal the comparatively compassionate attitude of NKGB investigators towards the women. Some women’s stories in the criminal files contain several consecutive pages that demonstrate that testifying women were not interrupted while speaking about their wartime experiences—a rather unusual occurrence in Soviet interrogations. This strengthened the women’s agency in the legal process in general because women were allowed to describe what mattered to them personally and what events in their wartime life they saw as meaningful. The oldest woman among the rape survivors had been twenty-nine and the youngest nineteen. According to their testimonies, rapes in Nei Leben were perpetrated mostly in or near the victims’ houses or at the police station.20 Sexual violence began almost immediately after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941 and lasted more than six months until the deportation of local Jews to Kryvyi Rih. There, they were probably killed immediately in Illich mine number 5.21 Rape went hand in hand with other abuses, such as beatings, humiliation, and robbery, but sometimes men came to Jewish homes with the sole purpose of raping women.22 Rapes most often happened in full view of relatives and acquaintances. Sometimes the perpetrators would take their victims outside so that other inhabitants could hear or guess what was happening.23 The public element of rapes was an extra humiliation for both victims and their families, who felt powerless and desperate. It also undermined the masculinity of fathers, brothers, and husbands, who couldn’t protect their women. Thus, this deeply traumatic experience was described in the testimonies of victims and eyewitnesses accounts given to the Soviets.24 Rapes were serial and large groups of women were targeted. In Nei Leben, there were slightly more than one hundred Jewish women and witnesses identified at least twenty of the Jewish rape victims. They also remembered the names of the attackers, as they were often relatives, neighbors, or 20 AUSBU uDnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 1, ark. 234. 21 Roman Shliakhtych, “Uchast mistsevoi dopomizhnoi politsii u Holokosti na Kryvorizhzhi,” Holokost i Suchasnist’, no. 14 (2016), 85. 22 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t.1, ark. 247. 23 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 74. 24 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 18 .

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schoolmates. Most likely, witnesses gave the exact names of the rape victims not simply because the investigators asked them to provide detailed testimony. Giving testimonies about other women who were humiliated and killed during the Holocaust —making their names public and narrating their stories—was presumably also about bringing getting justice for them and making their suffering visible. Telling the stories of killed loved ones may also have been one of the coping strategies the women used to deal with the trauma, especially when it came to other women who, like the witnesses themselves, were subjected to rape but did not survive. Thus, another possible motivation could have been survivor guilt.25 On German orders, the remaining Jews from Nei Leben were made to register on February 6, 1942, and were then taken to Kryvyi Rih. The village head and commandant selected a group of nineteen (according to other sources, twenty-five) young women aged sixteen to thirty years old during the registration under the pretext of precuring workers.26 Tsylia, Anna, Yevheniia, and Klavdiia were among those who were chosen; their job was to provide “sexual entertainment” of local Nazi collaborators. Tsylia stated: “We were lodged in two buildings [. . .] [we] were often beaten and raped.”27 The women were kept in sexual slavery for almost a month. In March they were taken to Kryvyi Rih to be killed; only four of them managed to escape death. The case of the investigation of anti-Jewish violence in Nei Leben is unique among Soviet prosecutions against collaborators in many ways. First of all, it is one of the few known cases in which not one, but several, Jewish rape victims testified about sex crimes committed at a specific locality. Four women described their experiences very explicitly, giving the names of rapists, locations, and the circumstances of the assaults; their feelings of fear, shame, and powerlessness that they felt at that time. They also described the sexual victimization of fellow Jewish women and girls. Secondly, the Nei Leben trial files include many stories of other Jewish

25 Samuel Juni, “Survivor Guilt: A Critical Review from the Lens of the Holocaust,” International Review of Victimology 22, no. 3 (2016): 321–337; Henry Maitles, “Surviving the Holocaust: The Anger and Guilt of Primo Levi,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 2 (2005): 237–251. 26 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, f.1, op.1, spr.173, ark. 82. 27 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 9.

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survivors and non-Jewish eyewitnesses, male and female. Eventually, some of the defendants did not deny what they had done. 28 All of this contributed to the fact that the indictment from January 31, 1946 contained charges that included the “systematic” rape of Jewish women and girls among the war crimes committed by the Nei Leben defendants during the Nazi occupation. The list of rape victims included not only those four rape survivors, but their fellow women and girls. Nevertheless, the March 22, 1946 verdict against the defendants did not mention sexual slavery (rapes that occurred while the women were detained), despite the fact that the survivors clearly named their rapists, among them the defendants. This established the pattern for how the Soviet authorities would treat cases of sexual violence. Yet, despite this, rape survivors’ testimonies did play a key, if unacknowledged, role in the prosecution of local perpetrators from Nei Leben. The detailed and extensive descriptions of sexual horrors experienced by vulnerable Jewish women could not be ignored. It was another aspect of rape survivors’ testimonies that was crucial for prosecutions. During questioning, rape victims revealed facts about the political and ideological motivations of the perpetrators’ violent behavior. According to documents, many defendants expressed anti-Soviet views while assaulting Jewish women. The perpetrators accused them and their relatives of supporting Soviet rule.29 Consequently, the Soviets were especially interested in persecuting those defendants they saw as potential political threats. At the same time, female rape survivor’s testimonies revealed information about defendants who, while not actively engaged in collaboration with Germans or explicitly anti-Soviet in their views, had taken advantage of their relationships with auxiliary local authorities and engaged in anti-Jewish violence, including rape. After the war, many such individuals had continued to live peacefully at home—until Jewish survivors gave their testimonies about their crimes, that is. One of these defendants was Shevchenko, mentioned above. Before arrest he was a brigade leader at a collective farm (obschinnoe hozyaystvo, obkhoz) and a distinguished war veteran. It is possible that his military service at the end of World War II helped him to cover his criminal past for some time. But all four women’s 28 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 393. 29 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t.  2, ark.  11, 23, 71, 76. Most of the defendants were dekulakized (dispossessed) in the 1930s, and the NKVD had arrested and convicted some of their relatives.

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Jewish rape survivors give his name during Soviet interrogation while describing different forms of violence against Jews by locals. According to their testimonies he was a main offender in several episodes of rape, beating, and looting.30 He was sentenced to twenty years in a labor camp.

Facing Suspicion: Raisa’s Struggle for Justice On March 4, 1953, the Ministry of Internal  Affairs (MVD) questioned Raisa—a twenty-six-year-old Jewish survivor working as a hairdresser in Nova Pavlivka, Odesa oblast’—about the wartime activity of her school friend Yakiv Hrabovskyi, a mechanic in the village of Kostiantynivske in Mykolaiv oblast’. Raisa began her testimony by saying: “I bear a grudge against him.” She recounted that she and her parents had been arrested by the Romanian gendarmerie and added to a group of Jews who were being taken to the Bohdanivka camp, where over fifty-five thousand Jews were held and killed.31 On its way, the convoy stopped overnight in Nova Pavlivka. There they were guarded by local policemen, one of whom was Hrabovskyi. Raisa’s parents managed to escape to a local villager Lipskyi by bribing Hrabovskyi. They wanted to take their daughter with them, but Hrabovsky insisted that it would be very suspicious. He proposed that he would lead their daughter to them later in the evening. Raisa recollected: He came up to me and said he would return my parents to the convoy of Jews and we would all be shot dead unless I consent to having sex with him. I did not consent to sex, but Hrabovskyi grabbed me, dragged me into the bushes or some tall weeds, I barely remember, and raped me. Then, horrified, I went to Lipskyi’s house.32 Five months after Raisa’s testimony, Hrabovsky was arrested. He admitted that he had asked Raisa to have sex with him, but said that after her refusal he had let her go. This statement led the investigators to speak to Raisa

30 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t.  2, ark.  6–7, 14, 17–18, 20, 50, 70, 75–77, 81. 31 Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 122–123. 32 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 25, spr. 9357, ark. 163 zv.

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again.33 While looking for additional evidence, the prosecutors questioned her parents again, but they knew nothing about their daughter’s rape. Raisa reaffirmed her allegation, though, even in her assailant’s presence; and Hrabovskyi maintained his innocence.34 Eventually, he was indicted for the rape. However, the military prosecutor, the representative of a body that was supposed to support victims rather than defendants, appealed against the mention of rape in the indictment because of what he called the “insufficiency of the collected evidence.”35 As a result, Raisa was merely a witness to Hrabovskyi guarding Jews in Nova Pavlivka as a policeman and could not testify as the victim of a rape committed by him. It seems that she was summoned to the court only to confirm the fact that Hrabovskyi guarded the Jewish convoy in Nova Pavlivka as a policeman. On January 8, 1954, she repeated her story in front of a military tribunal in Odessa. Her testimony was a last attempt to persuade the Soviet courts that Hrabovskyi was a rapist. She emphasized that she was thirteen and a virgin at the time of the assault. Although the questions put to Raisa were not included in the court records, we can guess what they were from her answers: Why did she not call for help? Why did her parents not notice any signs of violence on her body? Why did she keep silent about the rape until the state investigation? Raisa’s answers reveal that she was defensive. For instance, she said: Considering the hardship I found myself in, and at the moment when Hrabovskyi raped me, anything could be done to me, as things were out of my control. I could not resist him, for my strength did not compare to his. Hrabovskyi was much stronger, and he was older than I was. My guilt is that I was too ashamed to tell anyone that Hrabovskyi raped me, not even to my father and mother. It was too embarrassing to tell my father, and the mother is my stepmother.36 Raisa’s statement most likely struck the presiding judge as suspicious. He wanted the date of the events she described. Raisa answered: “I do not remember when it happened. Everyone keeps asking me this very question.

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My answer is that I do not remember the exact time.”37 Talking to the military prosecutor, Raisa emphasized: “I did not scream, because I was afraid to. If you scream, you die.”38 Numerous studies analyze how culturally constructed notions about rape influence women’s and men’s perceptions of sexual violence in different countries and groups. These incorrect beliefs about how and why rape occurs have been termed “rape myths.”39 These myths impact not only “ordinary” people in their everyday life, but also influence justice system professionals in their decision-making.40 This was also true for the Soviet war crimes trials. In some cases, Soviet interrogators and legal actors listened carefully to rape survivors and believed them; in other cases, they question women’s testimonies according to their subjective perceptions of the events described. The latter happened even if rape survivors insisted on their version of events and tried to provide as many details and explanations as possible to clarify their points. From the available documents, it looks as though those involved in the legal process matched the stereotype of rapist and victim. Raisa’s story is particularly striking in this regard. From the available documents, it looks as though those involved in the legal process held to some rape myths. The investigators, prosecutors, and judges counted on finding witnesses who had heard Raisa screaming, as they would have taken it as read that victims cry out in distress or for help. But Raisa had to keep silent during her ordeal; if she had screamed, she would have been exposed and sent back to the convoy. They also assumed that Raisa’s parents or Lipskyi would have noticed the girl’s injuries or torn clothes, as the stereotype of the rape victim also dictates that they actively resist, even if the rapist is armed, rather 37 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 25, spr. 9357, ark. 403. 38 Ibid. 39 See, for example, Julia R. Schwendinger and Herman Schwendinger, “Rape Myths: In Legal, Theoretical, and Everyday Practice,” Crime and Social Justice 1 (1974): 18–26; Martha R. Burt, “Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 2 (1980): 217–230. 40 Kim Bitna and Hali Santiago, “Rape Myth Acceptance among Prospective Criminal Justice Professionals,” Women and Criminal Justice 30, no. 6 (2020): 462–479; Socratis Dinos, Nina Burrowes, Karen Hammond, and Christina Cunliffe, “A Systematic Review of Juries’ Assessment of Rape Victims: Do Rape Myths Impact on Juror DecisionMaking,” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43, no. 1 (2015): 36–49; Elizabeth Comack and Tracey  Peter, “How the Criminal Justice System Responds to Sexual Assault Survivors: The Slippage between ‘Responsabilization’ and ‘Blaming the Victim,’” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 17 (2005): 283–308.

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than freeze with horror. In other words, the investigators, prosecutors, and judges believed that visible signs of supposedly inevitable resistance would have been obvious. Finally, they were suspicions about Raisa’s story because they probably assumed that victims of sexual violence cannot keep silent for a long and are compelled to take their assailant to court to punish him. The prosecutor said in his closing speech that Hrabovskyi’s guilt in raping Raisa “has not been proven,” as evidence given by Raisa was “contradictory” and the circumstances under which the rape was committed “caused doubt.” He also asked to take into account the fact that Hrabovskyi became a policeman when he was seventeen and one half years old, and that his motivation to join the auxiliary police was far from ideological: Hrabovskyi planned to use his service to improve his financial situation. The trial materials show that during his service in the auxiliary police during war, he was convicted by the Romanians for the theft of Jewish property. The prosecutor also stressed that Hrabovskyi volunteered for the Red Army when the Soviets arrived, fought until the end of the war, sustained a blast injury, and received awards. Moreover, the prosecutor asked for the record to include good references from Hrabovskyi’s employers. With this, Hrabovskyi’s lawyer did not put much effort into attempting to acquit his client of rape. Instead, he drew attention to the defendant’s “humanity”: “Hrabovskyi is being accused of raping Raisa Vernyk. I can tell he let the Vernyks go. It was a noble action. The Vernyks are still alive and well.”41 Hrabovskyi was sentenced to ten years in a correctional camp as a “betrayer of the nation.” But the verdict did not contain any reference to his rape of Raisa. His sentence was rather lenient when compared to those handed down to other local Nazi collaborators. One of the main reasons for Hrabobskyi’s relatively generous treatment was due to his service in the Red Army and the absence of proof that he was directly involved in killing of Jews. Nevertheless, it is clear that the length of his sentence was also largely determined by the fact that Raisa’s testimony about her sexual assault was not taken seriously by the Soviet court. 

“I ask to sentence him to be shot”: Klara’s Story Klara, then a thirty-nine-year-old ironer in a clothes factory, was summoned to the regional district police department in her home town of Bar 41 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 25, spr. 9357, ark. 438.

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in Vinnytsia oblast’ on April 7, 1965. A KGB investigator and a military prosecutor informed her that she had been recognized as a victim of war crimes in the Bar vicinity. Her questioning was a preparatory stage to a large-scale trial against Hryhorii Andrusiv, the chief of the Bar Raion auxiliary police during the Nazi occupation. His German supervisors helped him to escape to Romania in 1944, where he changed his name to George Andrukhiv. The KGB had been looking for him since 1947, but had only managed to find him in 1962. Three years later, the Soviets started speaking to all of the Jewish survivors from Bar. Klara’s questioning lasted more than four hours that day. In particular, she was asked about Andrusiv’s participation in the mass shooting of Jews by the Nazis and their local helpers on October 15, 1942, near Bar. Klara recollected that [a] German told Andrusiv during the shooting that they needed to leave 20 young women to have some fun. [. . .] Only 16 young women and girls were picked out of the remaining group of people who had not been shot yet, including me. The 16 of us were made to get dressed again, and the policemen Brushnytskyi, Kolodii and two more I did not know took us to Bar to a two-story building near the public bank. [. . .] When they brought us to this building [. . .] a German told us to get naked. Andrusiv, Kolivepryk [the chief of Bar municipal council] and several Germans came to the house after a time. Andrusiv took me to a room and raped me on a bed. I was a virgin before that. Kolivepryk wanted to rape a 15-year-old girl named Klara in the same room on a different bed, but then he changed his mind and took her to another room.42 Klara explained that while other girls were shot dead after the assaults she had survived with the help of a police coachman who took her to the border of Transnistria, the Romanian occupation zone. Later, the Soviets took Klara to the place of the 1942 mass shootings, where she showed them the location of the graves. The investigation had a major impact on her state of mind. The Vinnytsia psychological facility’s report on Klara reads as follows: “When she talks about her experience, she gets nervous, shaking all over, stammering and

42 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 11, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 110–111.

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crying. She complains of sleep disorder and nightmares.”43 Indeed, the trauma she experienced when dredging up these events from the past was compounded when, almost a year after she spoke to the Soviets, Andrusiv was finally arrested. This meant that she had to testify a second time and would see her abuser again.44 In court, Andrusiv kept denying everything and said that Klara “was telling lies.” His defense in the first months of interrogation was based on the claim that he had not been present at the site of the shootings in October 1942; but the Soviets had testimonies, including Klara’s, which contradicted him. Later, faced with these facts, he partially confirmed Klara’s version of the events: “At the end of the shooting the Germans selected 12–15 young girls from among the Soviet people and left them for entertainment, as I learned later. They were brought to the room where the Germans were throwing a party after the shootings.45” He emphasized that the “young Jewish girls” were “terrified and some of them were wailing.”46 Convinced that all the girls were shot after the rape, Andrusiv kept denying that he had raped Klara, even when meeting her face-to-face. It is likely that he failed to recognize her, as the investigation took place more than twenty years after the events. However, he did not simply deny the accusations against him: he directed his own accusations at the German occupiers in order to put all the blame on them. He stated that a German gendarme and SD member selected the girls, and that he (Andrusiv) was only responsible for the logistics—that is, providing protection for the girls at the site of the massacre, arranging their transportation to the building that quartered the German officers and SD members who had intentionally come from Kamianets-Podilskyi for the mass shooting, and also ensuring increased security for the building on the night when “the Germans held all kinds of orgies.”47 More than ten witnesses were interrogated in Klara’s case. In addition to the various questions put to them, all of them were asked to comment on Klara’s physical and psychological condition—in particular, the moment at which she had started stammering. Witnesses testified that Klara had stammered slightly since childhood, but that after October 15, 1942, as 43 44 45 46 47

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her sister Esia stated, she “was unable to speak at all for a bit.”48 The girl’s condition did not get much better for a year after the tragic events.49 An official Soviet psychological report from 1965 affirms that her stammering and loss of twelve teeth in October 1942 “could be attributed to extreme emotional stress while waiting to be shot, witnessing people being killed or rape.”50 This emphasis on Klara’s physical and mental condition provided the strongest ground for supporting the charge of rape in the Soviet. Andrusiv’s trial was held in Bar on 18–21 October 1966. It was open to the public—but not only because the Soviets had finally caught a high-profile Nazi collaborator who had committed war crimes. His trial was also part of a Soviet campaign against Ukrainian nationalism—a charge directed at Andrusiv in addition to all the others. The Soviet prosecutors were eager to discredit the very idea of the Ukrainian nationalist project by linking it to pro-Nazi and anti-Soviet activity. A rape charge suited this goal very well, and it might well be one of the reasons that Klara’s case was investigated with such care. During the hearing, Klara was asked by the prosecutor to stress that she was in the group of Jewish girls selected for rape, what she had called in her statements as “for entertainment.” Her detailed accounts of the rapes were heard in a closed session. She finished her testimony with these words: “I ask the court to sentence Andrusiv to be shot.” On October 21, 1966, he was found guilty of complicity in the rape of sixteen Jewish girls and other war crimes, and sentenced to death. While the verdict maintained the secrecy of victims’ identity, Klara was obviously among the sixteen. The names of the other victims were not released. It is worth noting that the precise number of rape victims in this case was based exclusively on Klara’s information; Andrusiv tried to contest this number.

Conclusion It is difficult to research sexual violence during the Holocaust because many rape victims and witnesses were killed and survivors were not always ready to share their stories. Even though sexual violence was on the margins of Soviet prosecutions of war criminals, war crimes trials provided some space for Jewish women to testify about the sexual assaults that they 48 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 11, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 29. 49 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 11, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 135. 50 USHMM, RG-31.018M, reel 11, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 178.

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experienced and witnessed. These testimonies allow us to trace the sexually violent behavior of local Nazi collaborators—an underresearched area. The close analysis of the three trials discussed in this article has revealed several patterns of sexual violence by locals that we know little about. The case of Nei Leben illustrates a couple of them: sexual violence was committed at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and lasted until the extermination of the local Jewish population by the end of the year. The testimonies of the rape survivors Tsylia, Anna, Yevheniia, and Klavdiia attest to systematic and serial rapes, including gang rapes by local Nazi collaborators and their helpers among non-Jewish neighbors. Individuals or small groups of offenders broke into Jewish houses, terrorized the inhabitants, stole their property, and raped the women and girls. Sexual crimes were committed in the presence of relatives and friends who were forced to stand by helplessly. Regarding the second pattern, young Jewish women and girls were held in detention for several weeks to provide sexual services for perpetrators. Most of these rape victims were shot dead after their sexual exploitation. Klara’s testimony describes a similar form of sexual slavery, but with the one important difference in terms of perpetrators’ identity. In the case of Klara and her fellow Jewish girls, the sex offenders were both locals and their German supervisors. Members of the Nazi occupying authorities were the main instigators, organizers, and controllers of sexual violence against Jewish girls. Furthermore, according to the documents they ordered the killings of their victims in order to hide the fact that they had committed the crime of transgressing racial laws. Raisa’s story is about another pattern of rape, this time by men acting alone, which Elisabeth Wood defines as opportunistic rape motivated by “private, individual reasons, not group objectives.”51 This sexual violence was not planned, ordered, or instigated by fellow men or commanders. Indeed, ethnic hatred is not among the main motives for opportunistic rape. This means that the Jewish identity of a victim played only a very minor role. In other words, this kind of rape against Jewish women did not occur because they were Jewish, but simply because they were extremely vulnerable due to their persecution during the Holocaust.

51 For more, see Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape as a Practice of War: Toward a Typology of Political Violence,” Politics and Society 46, no. 4 (2018): 513–537.

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Not all of these types of sexual violence were properly investigated, described, and named by Soviet investigators and prosecutors. In the bestknown cases, the Soviet courts tried to specify the sexual offense of which defendants were alleged to be guilty by asking rape survivors about the time, place, circumstances, and identity of the perpetrators. Many women did not only testify about their own experiences. They wanted to tell the stories of sexual assaults suffered by their close friends, relatives, and fellow women and girls—those who remained largely invisible victims of sexual violence in the postwar period. The degree of visibility the testifying women could gain for other victims depended on the political context of each trial. In most cases that came before Soviet military tribunals, only an individual who testified about her own experience of sexual violence could be considered a victim, despite the fact that she could name other victims. Only in rare cases were raped and murdered Jewish women, whose stories were told by other women or men during Soviet investigations, given the status of victims. Nei Leben and the case of Andrusiv is an example of this, to an extent. The “reality” of sexual violence for Soviet postwar justice, then, was highly dependent not only on evidence—first and foremost rape survivors’ testimonies—but on a combination of other factors. Hence, the controversy surrounding the Soviet legal system’s investigations and prosecutions of rape. Politics was key. By this I mean the role of certain defendants in the enforcement of Nazi rule in occupied Ukraine, their motives for collaborating, and/or loyalty to the Soviet authorities during the war and after. There are reasons to assume that statements about rape committed by persons who had senior positions in the hierarchy of local auxiliary authorities in occupied Ukraine were taken more seriously. It is clear that when the two cases outlined above are compared—those of Hrabovskyi, a young man who was a policeman in the village for only a couple of months, and Andrusiv, the chief of the auxiliary police in Bar. In these two instances, rape accusations were based exclusively on the victims’ accounts, with no other witness testimonies. Both victims were children at the time of the abuse. The denial of rape accusations by defendants also connects these two cases. But, as shown above, the verdicts differ significantly. Klara became more than a lone rape victim: her testimony became the basis for the discovery of other rape victims, including the exact number in the case of Andrusiv. In contrast, Raisa’s testimony about sexual assault was downplayed by Soviet authorities. This was primarily due to the court’s tactical decision not to

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pursue the rape charges against Hrabovskyi. Because had he joined the Red Army, received a serious injury, and won medals, he was portrayed by the Soviet persecutors as someone who had joined the police simply for financial reasons, taken no part in decision-making, and not participated in the mass killing of Jews. The prosecutors highlighted that he had “deeply repented” and become a “good Soviet citizen.” Accusing Andrusiv of rape, however, was strategically useful for shaping negative public opinion in the Soviet Union against Ukrainian nationalism by painting them as brutish and “ideological Nazi collaborators.” Rape culture played a significant role in the Soviet response to wartime rape as well. By this I mean a range of perceptions, stereotypes, and myths about rape—in other words, Soviet rape culture.52 As Raisa’s case demonstrates, rape myths were behind the aggressive questioning she received during the investigation and in court (and, indeed, the entre withdrawal of the rape charge). This article is the first attempt to address the topic of the Soviet legal process regarding the rapes and sexual assaults committed by local Nazi collaborators during World War II. Further analysis of different Soviet war crimes trials which dealt with the sexual violence will enable researchers not only to get an in-depth understanding of the sexual victimization of Jewish women and girls by locals, but also to see the Soviet response in terms of legislation and legal practice in the postwar period.

52 See for more on the topic, Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).

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Figure 11. Jewish rape survivor Klara during the KGB investigation of the site of the mass killing of Jews by Nazis and local helpers near Bar, Vinnytska oblast’, Ukraine in October 1942. The photo was taken on 21 April 1965. Photo credit: Archiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 28506, t.2, ark. 194.

13

Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany1 Florian Zabransky

In a biographical-narrative interview I conducted in 2014, the Jewish Buchenwald survivor Finn Kollau discussed his homoerotic feelings towards other men while visiting the mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, in 1939.2 While remembering the visit, he reflected on his sexual identity and stated: “Although I was never, never a homosexual in my life, there was probably something there.”3 Later in the interview, he spoke about same-sex partners and sexual identities in the concentration camp:

1 This research has been made possible by the generous donors of the Clemens N. Nathan scholarship. I am also thankful to Anna Hájková, Maja Hultman, Ben Kasstan, Val Whittington, Ina Schaum, and Niklaas Bause who critically commented on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 The name Finn Kollau is a pseudonym. Due to ethical considerations in social sciences’ research and biographical-narrative interviews, it is common practice to protect the identity of interviewees, as well as—for instance—refrain from providing city names. This was agreed before the interview with the interviewee. The interview was conducted for my masters’ thesis on masculinity in concentration camps. However, Mara Keire convincingly suggests avoiding anonymization in historical research, especially when sexualized violence is involved. See Mara Keire, “All things Not Being Equal: Power, Identity, and Writing about Rape,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (forthcoming). 3 Finn Kollau in the interview with the author, translated by the author, page 46. In the following, references to the interview will be made by his name and the page number of the transcript.

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I knew homosexuals who were none, they all had their [partner] . . . alas, of course, of course. Almost everyone had, I don’t know, I believe it at least. Of course, one was not talking about it.4 These instructive quotations not only raise questions about how we can conceptualize male Jewish teenage sexuality and its memory in Nazi Germany5 and during the Holocaust, but also demonstrate the challenge for scholars to find the right terms to describe same-sex relationships in the period. In recent years, increased scholarly attention has been given to the question of gender relations and sexuality, particularly in light of queer theories that postulate sexuality as nonbinary and fluid.6 By drawing on, and adapting, the vast amount of research on women’s experiences and gender difference in the Holocaust, we can develop new critical approaches with which to assess male Jewish sexuality in the period. In the following, I also suggest a more self-critical engagement with our roles as researchers and how we situate ourselves towards questions of sexuality and gender, a task that is often still missing in the study of the Holocaust.7 As scholars have shown in different contexts, sexuality varies historically (i.e., it is not atemporal or “natural”) and needs to be understood in the context of its particular place and time;8 and this holds true, of course, for sexuality in Nazi Germany. The Nazis’ inconsistent and contradictory sexual politics has led to different views on the regime’s approach to sexuality. For instance, while early psychoanalytical research stressed the repression of sexuality in Nazi Germany,9 Dagmar Herzog has recently convincingly shown that the racial state promoted pleasure and lust in the

4 Finn Kollau, 100. 5 Throughout this paper, I follow the example of many Anglo-American researchers of the Holocaust and use the term Nazi or Nazi Germany instead of National Socialist or National Socialist Germany. 6 Anna Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” in Sexualitäten Jahrbuch, ed. Janin Afken et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). 7 Exceptions are, for example, Pascale Bos and Anna Hájková, who stress consideration of the researcher’s positionality. See Pascale Bos, “Positionality and Postmemory in Scholarship on the Holocaust,” Women in German Yearbook 19 (2003); Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen.” 8 See, for example, Daniel Boyarin’s article on the Torah and a specifically Jewish history of sexuality,” Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995). 9 See, for instance Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Souvenir Press, 2016).

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majority of the population—the members of the Volksgemeinschaft (the people’s community).10 Scholars must also consider changes in the meaning of the terms used to describe sexuality and its performativity. How sexual activities are interpreted today might differ from how they were understood in the 1930s or in the context of a concentration camp. Thus, it is also important to think about how male Jews remembered and narrated their sexuality—in other words, the form their accounts take. Thus, the split between historiography and memory raises the question of which realm the sexuality of male Jews can be assigned to.11 In addition to researching the historical context and the memory of survivors, I suggest that it is vital to explore the performative practices, such as risk or belonging, of survivors of the Holocaust, as this will aid further comprehension of the realm of historical experience as well as its memory. In doing so, I ask how male Jewish teenagers performed their sexuality in Nazi Germany. In this article, I examine how three Jewish men reflect on their sexuality in two memoirs and one oral history interview. As I will elaborate, their sexuality was strongly linked with their youth, as well as questions of belonging, risk, and identities. Sexuality did not cease to exist or lose its relevance for these three persecuted Jewish teenagers, be they in Nazi Germany, occupied France, or in a concentration camp. In fact, they regularly link youth to sexuality. In what follows I reflect on the marginalization of sexuality in Holocaust studies and argue that sexuality served as a significant factor of belonging amid Nazi strategies of exclusion. My analysis of how the teenagers in their memory associated their sexuality with risk and adventure, and finally—with particular reference to Kollau’s same-sex experiences in Buchenwald—it raises important questions about heteronormativity which may reconfigure conceptualizations of sexual identities in Holocaust studies.

The Three Biographies and Their Historical Contextualization Finn Kollau was born in 1925 and grew up in a bigger eastern German city. In 1943, the German authorities transported him to Buchenwald. Kollau’s 10 Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 10–63. 11 James E. Young, “Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor,” History and Memory 9, no. 1/2 (1997).

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mother perished in the beginning of 1945 in Ravensbrück; his father, a Hungarian citizen, was killed in Auschwitz, as was Kollau’s sister who was two years his elder. After his liberation, Kollau emigrated to the United States, but returned to Germany in the 1950s. He passed away in 2015. I also analyze Gad Beck’s An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin.12 Beck was born into an intermarried household in Berlin in 1923. He was arrested by the Gestapo during a roundup in 1943 and detained in Rosenstraße prison and released after a couple of days. Beck survived the war, hiding in Berlin, and after liberation emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. He eventually returned to Berlin in 1979, where he died in 2012. Finally, I look at the memoir Living with the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis by Freddie Knoller, who was born in Vienna in 1921.13 After the Anschluss, Knoller sought refuge in Belgium, and after the German occupation he fled to France. Arrested, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He survived the selections and death marches, and was liberated in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. As of the time of writing (August 2021), he lives in London. In order to think about male Jewish teenage sexuality, it is first necessary to sketch the conditions of everyday life during persecution, occupation, and in the camp.14 After the Nazi seizure of power, the situation increasingly worsened for Jews in Germany. Antisemitic propaganda and legislation ostracized both Jewish women and men, and stripped them of their citizenship rights. Marion Kaplan, in her groundbreaking study on German Jewry, suggests that Jews experienced a “social death” and men were no longer able to perform their expected roles—for example, being the family breadwinners.15 Between 1933 and 1935, the new regime implemented seven anti-Jewish laws.16 Of greatest interest is the Blood Protection Law (part of the Nuremberg Laws) which made (sexual) relationships 12 Gad Beck, An Underground Life: The Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 13 Freddie Knoller and John Landaw, Living with the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis (London: Metro Publishing, 2005). 14 In this, as well as some following cases, I use camp as a concept and do not refer to a specific camp. 15 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford Oxford University Press, 1998), 5, 50. 16 Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 103.

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between Jews and non-Jews illicit and decried them as Rassenschande. This law was targeted predominantly at Jewish men.17 From the outset, the Nazis enforced antisemitic legislation with mass arrests and internment in prewar concentration camps.18 Furthermore, non-Jewish inmates in the camps marginalized Jews, regarding them as at the bottom of the hierarchy and therefore with a low chance of survival.19 Although romantic or sexual relations were still possible, it is crucial to stress how daily life in the Nazi racial state constituted a threat to Jewish relationships.

The Marginalization of Sexuality in Holocaust Studies The recent increase of scholarship on sexuality and sexual relations in Holocaust studies has taken sexual violence against women, their experiences and to some extent their history of sexuality as its primary topic. This almost exclusive focus raises the question as to why the history of sexuality of men has to date been marginalized in the study of the Holocaust. It is important to state that societal norms and structural factors such as male power or the silence surrounding sexuality, for instance, determine what themes can or cannot be openly discussed in scholarship. As a result, some lines of enquiry might not be acceptable for researchers to pursue. This is particularly true for institutions such as universities.20 Upon embarking on my work, a senior member of faculty at my host university remarked: “Why sexuality? Sexuality is not something people want to talk

17 See Patricia Szobar, “Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1 (2002): 132; Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). 18 For the imprisonment of Jews in the 1930s, see Kim Wünschmann, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 19 See, for example, Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Zürich, München: Pendo, 2002), 106; Falk Pingel, “Social life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmates’ Struggle for Survival,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The new Histories, ed. Nikolaus Wachsmann and Jane Caplan (London: Routledge, 2009). 20 See Pierre Bourdieu on power, authority, recognition, and access to the field of science, in “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Social Science Information 14, no. 6 (1975).

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about.” Similarly, Joan Ringelheim lists striking reasons why studies of the Holocaust have silenced the topic: I believe we avoid listening to stories we do not want to hear. Sometimes we avoid listening because we are afraid; sometimes we avoid listening because we don’t understand the importance of what is being said. Without a place for a particular memory, without a conceptual framework, a possibly significant piece of information will not be pursued.21 While Ringelheim is referring here to sexualized violence, I suggest that this holds true for the topic of sexuality in general. Scholars, however, are often not able to explore questions of sexuality when survivors choose to keep it as what Christopher R. Browning calls a “communal memory.” This is a memory that is shared and discussed among themselves by survivors from the same towns and camps. But there is a kind of tacit consensus that these are memories of events and behaviour that outsiders might not understand and that hence dissemination could be potentially embarrassing or hurtful to certain members of the community.22 Stories of love or lust seem to contradict the narrative of pain and suffering inherent in survivor testimonies. Yet, although the violence of the Holocaust and love and sexuality seem mutually exclusive, the two were intertwined, even if violence was the more powerful force.23 The silence around sexuality was deepened by the continuing prosecution under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which forbade same-sex relations, but also homophobic attitudes held by other prisoners and survivors.24 21 Joan Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Women and the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 342. 22 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: Norton, 2010), 10. 23 See Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013). 24 The Nazis incarcerated up to fifteen thousand German men in concentration camps after they transgressed the criminal code; for instance, men kissing or touching one another. See Richard Plant, Rosa Winkel: der Krieg der Nazis gegen die Homosexuellen (Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 1991); Insa Eschebach, ed. Homophobie und Devianz: Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin:

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Although, in general, survivors’ accounts are often chronological and touch on similar themes, this is not always the case for testimonies that include sexuality. According to Jonathan Friedman, memories of sexuality in oral history interviews are less clear and often presented negatively or associated by interviewees with shame.25 This might be true in many cases, especially when sexualized violence is involved. Nevertheless, in oral history interviews, memoirs, and other testimonies, reflections on the subject frequently occur, for example in connection with a memory of first love or exciting sexual encounter. Indeed, one might ask whether “the act of remembering itself becomes erotic,”26 as John S. Garrison and Kylie Pivetti have suggested in their writing on early modern England. In my comparison of one biographical interview with two written memoirs, a methodological note is of relevance. It seems that the survivors found it easier to articulate their memory in writing than in a spoken interview. As James E. Young states: The process of remembrance, of construction, of editing, of formulating ideas, and the search for order—which remains mostly invisible in literary texts—gives the video testimonies a painful self-awareness and reflexivity missing in literary testimonies.27 For the biographical interview I conducted, I was interested in learning about constructions of masculinity in the concentration camp. Kollau linked my research area with his experience of sexuality and openly spoke about it for the first time—before, he told me, he had only talked about it with his late wife. Arguably, the open setting of the biographical-narrative interview provides the space to address topics deemed delicate and for the interviewee to narrate experiences considered to be relevant.28 Metropol, 2012); Roseanna Ramsden, “‘Something was crawling all over me’: Queer Fear in Women’s Holocaust Testimonies,” Holocaust Studies 26, no. 3 (2020). 25 Jonathan C. Friedman, Speaking the Unspeakable: Essays on Sexuality, Gender, and Holocaust Survivor Memory (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), 4–5, 88–89. 26 John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, “Introduction: The Erotics of Recollection,” in Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection, ed. John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 4. 27 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 161. 28 Gabriele Rosenthal, “. . . wenn alles in Scherben fällt . . .”: von Leben und Sinnwelt der Kriegsgeneration: Typen biographischer Wandlungen (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1987), 116–118.

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Kollau has repeatedly shared his life story—with school students and researchers, for example—and has also published a memoir, which is not part of this study as he does not refer to the topic of sexual performativity in it. To an extent, the scope of our interview echoed what he wrote about there. It is possible that he has created an overarching narrative and signaled recurring themes he would refer to. Perhaps Holocaust survivors already know before an interview, or written testimony, what they will talk about or omit. These silences, states Tony Kushner, constitute a relevant factor to be considered in scholarship.29 During the interview, Kollau spoke continually and very fluently about his experience, which suggests that he has an established narrative that he repeats. In contrast, when speaking about sexuality, he paused more frequently and at times struggled to find adequate words in his descriptions. Indeed, the eroticism of remembrance became evident during the interview. Critical reflection on the interview highlights the role of gendered hierarchies and performativity in our conversation. According to Sylka Scholz, an interview between men can be considered a “masculine game.” Men bond, but also they also differentiate between themselves and negotiate a power relationship.30 In the case of my interview with Kollau, age and difference in experience obviously created a hierarchy of knowledge. I tried to diminish this difference by referring to my reading on camp brothels, for instance; but I became tacitly complicit in our performance of masculinity and sexuality, when he asked—referring to sexual desire among youngsters—the rhetorical question, “How is it with eighteen or nineteenth years old? This is peak season.”31 By saying, “Sure!” in agreement, I enabled Kollau to not go into further details and I did not ask any follow-up questions, as we both assumed we shared possession of the same knowledge. I understood the reaffirming nature of the question and reassured him with my complicity and increased our male bond—of which I was not aware

29 Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 287. 30 Sylka Scholz, “Das narrative Interview als Ort eines ‚männlichen Spiels‘? Prozesse des Doing Gender in der Interviewinteraktion,” in Die biographische Wahrheit ist nicht zu haben Psychoanalyse und Biographieforschung, ed. Klaus-Jürgen Bruder (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2003), 141–46. 31 Finn Kollau, 48.

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at the time of the interview. In short, our performance created a space in which to talk about sexuality.32 Scholars have offered various explanations about when and how survivors of the Holocaust discuss their sexuality in testimonies or interviews. Na’ama Shik distinguishes between various cycles of memory and clusters them into the following periods: the years of 1946–1948, 1955–1969, 1970–1980, and 1980 until the present. Shik argues that early memoirs are especially important, as they do not yet refer to other published works, including both biographical works and scholarly literature.33 According to David Cesarani, while survivors referred to rape and sexuality particularly in early accounts, they did less over time.34 On the other hand, Anna Hájková contends that early memoirs describe events rather than emotions.35 Annabelle Baldwin holds that survivors spoke out about sexualized violence more frequently following the reports on sexualized violence in the contexts of conflict and genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda.36 However, I propose that the motivation of survivors to embark upon uncovering (their) sexuality is intimately entangled with their own experience and its relevance in their lives. But why is it important to consider the sexuality of the persecuted during the Holocaust? As Doris Bergen notes, the “[s]tudy of gender and perhaps particularly of sex and sexuality contributes to an integrated history by providing access to the horror via things intimate.”37 By examining the performative practices of sexuality of male Jews, I argue in what follows that sexuality served as a vehicle of belonging to Judaism. The three young 32 To be clear, I do not want to suggest a female interviewer could not have obtained the same information. Rather, I want to stress the gendered situation of an interview. An interview (depending on trust, the willingness of the interviewee to talk about sexuality, and the dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewee) might elicit different narratives. 33 Na’ama Shik, “Weibliche Erfahrungen in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Genozid und Geschlecht: Jüdische Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Lagersystem, ed. Gisela Bock (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), 104. 34 David Cesarani, Final solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (London: Macmillan, 2016), xxxviii. 35 Anna Hájková, “Strukturen weiblichen Verhaltens in Theresienstadt,” in Bock, Genozid und Geschlecht, 203. 36 Annabelle Baldwin, “Sexual Violence and the Holocaust: Reflections on Memory and Witness Testimony,” Holocaust Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 122. 37 Doris L. Bergen, “What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust,” in Different Horrors, Same Hell, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 26.

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men also associated sexuality with youthful adventures and, finally, I will demonstrate how Kollau negotiated same-sex desire in Buchenwald, reaffirming his heterosexual identity after liberation.

Belonging and Judaism in the Racial State: The Mikveh and Zionism Two of the young men I will discuss strongly linked their Judaism with a notion of belonging. Most notably, they expressed same-sex desire regarding religious practices in the mikveh38 as well as in a Zionist youth group. In 1939, accompanied by an Orthodox friend, Kollau went to the mikveh in his synagogue, which had not been destroyed in the pogrom of November 1938. He was fourteen years old and it was his first visit. He recalled: Then, for the first time, I have seen maybe around 15 naked men, that was extremely interesting. I really felt comfortable there, this has been probably an absolute sense of belonging. [. . .] I am accepted, I am welcome. [. . .] This is in-between, let’s say, accepted in a circle where I belong, and probably also connected somehow with erotic.39 Kollau went on to describe his increasing exclusion and ostracism by the majority Volksgemeinschaft. The mikveh, however, was somewhere he felt accepted and welcome, an oasis within the hostile racial state. It appears that this increased the nexus of belonging and homoerotic feelings embedded in the initiation to rituals previously unknown to him. In the course of the interview, it became apparent that Kollau was not overly religious and his religious friend had initiated the visit. Although Kollau was considered to be an adult (his bar mitzva had been the year before), the entirely male environment signified another step toward Jewish manhood. This homosocial space enabled the men to forge a masculinity predicated on a sense of belonging and—importantly—distinct from both non-Jews and, presumably, women. For Kollau himself, the mikveh and the sense of male Jewish

38 A ritual bath where women and men separately purify their body. The mikveh is only accessible to adult Jews after their bar mitzva. 39 Finn Kollau, 45–46.

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belonging he felt there, provided respite, albeit briefly, from the antisemitism he experienced in his daily life outside. This was also true for Beck, who, as he wrote in his memoir, developed a strong Jewish identity as a consequence of his increasing ostracism in everyday life and turned towards Zionism. He narrated his Zionism alongside sexual encounters with other members of the youth group he joined. He described his developing interest in Manfred, another member. In the group, they staged Schiller’s Don Carlos together, an opportunity Beck grasped to be closer to Manfred, whom he often perceived to be busy and surrounded by people. Beck recounted: “My only chance was in the play. I knew exactly what I wanted; I wanted to go to bed with him.”40 The opportunity arose as members of the youth group camped and sang on a roof top: In the end it must have sounded pretty good, because it led to success with Manfred. He told me later that I had seemed like a girl. After the music we went to bed—girls in one corner and boys in the other. I had evidently aroused Manfred with my “feminine” charm, because he took the initiative. I knew that was the only way to get him. I was capable of winning someone over and taking control, but with Manfred I played the expectant, devoted man, at least in the beginning. We were very loving with each other. Kissing was especially important to him, but he probably concentrated at first on our shared Zionist spirit, letting this common ground carry him into something physical.41 This paragraph sheds light on gendered power relations and the significance of their shared Zionism for their relationship. Beck describes himself as being “expectant, devoted,” which he associates with the female and passive. Yet he retains control of the situation, as he merely takes on a role which he is able to put aside after the encounter. Manfred and Beck continued their meetings and sexual encounters. They also celebrated Theodor Herzl’s birthday on May 2, 1941, to the dismay of Beck’s parents, as they feared potential negative consequences. In his memoir Beck clearly positions himself as gay, but Manfred, he writes, struggles to commit to their relationship. After courting each other for a couple of weeks, Beck states that Manfred confessed: “‘With you it’s ok!’ I 40 Beck, An Underground Life, 53. 41 Ibid., 54.

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can still vividly remember, it was around my birthday, at the end of June— and the best present I could imagine.”42 Afterwards, they became a couple, and in his memoir Beck continues to elaborate on his sexual identity. According to the author, the foundation of their relationship was built upon their mutual desire. The fact that Manfred was “straight,” according to Beck, did not change their attraction towards each other; and their standing within their youth group was not jeopardized by their relationship. Beck, once again, emphasizes that their feeling of Zionist belonging was a powerful shield against the oppression and persecution they faced. Although this might be an over-idealization of gay Jewish life at the time, it does indicate the strong sense of belonging it could provide.43 The relationship between Beck and Manfred was also strikingly reflected in a present Manfred gave to Beck. A small booklet I discovered in the online archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum narrates episodes of their relationship in small poems and drawings. On one page, next to the sketch of a bed, is written: “Nights exist for more than sleep which is why, my love, we stayed awake so often.”44 A couple of pages later, Manfred writes: “Then don’t lament, even though the fire torment you hear, for there is one sure support, a voice that we call friendship.”45 Their relationship came to an abrupt end when the Gestapo snatched Manfred in order to deport him in November 1942 from Berlin to Auschwitz. The two cases of Kollau and Beck reveal the gendered and sexualized practices in the mikveh as well as the Zionist group linked with belonging. Whereas Kollau associates his experience with his perception of same-sex eroticism in the mikveh, Beck claims his sexuality is bound up with his attraction to Zionism, the aim of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Many years after the events, the two men connected religious practices or Zionism with community, and, temporarily, found refuge from antisemitism. Moreover, both also coupled it with performative practices of sexuality. Whereas Kollau recalled experiences of homoerotic desire for the other men in the mikveh, Beck writes that he and Manfred developed desire, love, and friendship by building on their common belief in Zionism.

42 43 44 45

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum document 2000.416, 8. Ibid., 16.

Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany

Youthful Sexual Adventures Male Jewish teenage sexuality is also displayed in descriptions of the risk surrounding sexual adventures. In his memoir, Beck mentions sexual encounters besides the ones with Manfred. For instance, Beck also courted Martin from a Jewish orphanage, and in Berlin they publicly displayed their desire for each: Martin’s specialty was fooling around in broad daylight on the S-Bahn, the elevated suburban railroad. The train was crowded; we would stand really close together and touch each other, rubbing a bit, fumbling around and grabbing. No one around us would notice, or care to notice.46 It is not entirely clear here when this happened; it must have been 1935 or 1936, at the time when paragraph 175 in the Nazi criminal code was tightened. A denunciation might have led to severe consequences, as the two were not only engaged in homosexual activities, but were also Jews. This intersection of sexuality and race made their already precarious situation worse. However, Beck did not express any fear: We extended our little games to English class, where we sat next to each other. We would jerk each other off under the desk, and our teacher, Fräulein Goldstein, had no idea what was going on. During the phase I felt perfectly content in school.47 This is not only a story of youthful, overflowing sexuality; it also demonstrates their public libidinous lifestyle. Whether their fellow pupils realized what was going on under the desk remains unclear, but discovery by their teacher would have had consequences, albeit not as severe as legal prosecution by the racial state. It is, of course, possible that Beck is exaggerating about his sexual encounters in his memoir. Nevertheless, his account of daring sexuality is instructive and highlights his happiness in school after his unhappiness at a previous, and non-Jewish, school. The overlap between what was perceived as risky behavior and sexuality was also evident in a heteronormative setting that Kollau narrated in the interview. In the interview, he began to emphasize the chances he took at the beginning of the 1940s—for example, in visiting the opera or cinema, 46 Beck, An Underground Life, 23–24. 47 Ibid., 24.

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both of which were forbidden to him according to the Blood Protection Laws: “Yes, maybe the risk was tempting [. . .]. Today I would be really afraid to even think about it, but I did everything that was not allowed, well not everything, but let’s say a lot.”48 He recounted visiting brothels, thus demonstrating his youthful courage. However, Kollau was cautious about courting non-Jewish women because of the Nuremberg Laws. Still, he did engage with non-Jewish sex workers in a brothel for foreign forced laborers.49 Kollau told me that, in contrast to their usual “Forbidden for Jews” signs, the brothel had “Forbidden for Germans” over the door: Yes, I was there very often. It is a miracle that I was never caught, there were always raids and I was lucky. This was strictly forbidden [for Jews], also for foreigner who could go, also here, race defilement laws applied. Race defilement was everywhere.50 Kollau continued that he was not “ashamed” to visit the sex workers and also referred to the “black market” in the brothel, something else that contributed to the dangerous and illicit character of the space. Frequenting the place, then, entailed a number of risks.51 Kollau portrayed himself as a fearless young man who defied and pursued his desires in a prohibited setting. But why did he act that way? He could quite legally have interacted with Jewish women—which he also did. He was not compelled to look for sex in places that could have caused him severe consequences. As he pointed out, he was attracted to the prohibited. Another Jewish teenager, Freddie Knoller, also embarked on a dangerous journey when he decided to leave the unoccupied zone in France and travel to Paris at the end of 1940. Intriguingly, his decision to move to Paris was related to sexuality: I did not have to think about my destination; I already knew it. It was Montmartre, whose fame I knew from my schooldays, when 48 Finn Kollau, 30. 49 Around eleven million citizens from occupied European countries were used for forced labor in Nazi Germany. In order to prevent contact between foreign male forced laborers and German women, the Nazi authorities established brothels. See Silke Schneider, Verbotener Umgang: Ausländer und Deutsche im Nationalsozialismus: Diskurse um Sexualität, Moral, Wissen und Strafe, Historische Grundlagen der Moderne (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2010), 16. 50 Finn Kollau, 43. 51 Ibid., 62.

Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany

we all had talked about the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge and knew that girls danced half naked in these places. It was hard to believe that I was actually plotting my journey there, rather than just dreaming about it.52 His male gaze is accompanied in this passage by his masculine depiction of decision-making and adventures he was “plotting.” In Paris, Knoller worked as guide with a false passport and, for a commission, accompanied German soldiers to bars and brothels: I was rudderless, virtually friendless, and in constant danger of discovery, but I felt like a bird released from its cage. I had found my ingenuity and independent spirit. The boy I was, who had gone nowhere and had done nothing without his parents, had carved out for himself this undreamt-of new adventure. I should have been a college boy; instead, I was going to be a sort of pimp. Of course, apart from the fumbling experience with our maid and the disastrous one with the prostitute in Antwerp, I had enjoyed little sexual adventure. But real sexual experience, I was sure, could only be just around the corner. Now that I wore a suit it was time to abandon my knapsack, and it felt like a break with my childhood.53 For both Kollau and Knoller, sex in brothels was a way to gain sexual experience. Yet, for Knoller, it was also a way to prove his virility. He was growing up and, as a guide, or in his words “a sort of pimp,” becoming a man. His sexual experiences, however, were always overshadowed by his fear of getting caught: I always made sure the lights were out and that I had a condom with me. The condom was only partly for the usual reasons. Like the darkened room, it served to hide my circumcision, evidence of a custom which was rarely practiced outside Jewish circles in those days.54

52 Knoller and Landaw, Living with the Enemy, 87. 53 Ibid., 103. 54 Ibid., 118.

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In this regard, both survivors failed to consider the situation and plight of the sex workers who were tightly controlled in Nazi Germany.55 They visited brothels, breaking the defilement laws, and having youthful, sexual, risky adventures. At times, their stories seem exaggerated, especially the account by Beck. However, the way sexuality is portrayed and narrated courageously, the men demonstrate its relevance for the representation of virility while male Jewish masculinity was under attack.

Sexual Performativity in the Camp and Heterosexual Affirmation after Liberation Many survivor narratives dismiss the relevance of sexuality in the camp due to malnourishment and daily violence.56 Still, inmates engaged in heteroand homosexual relations, as well as masturbation.57 In the homosocial environment of the camp, however, same-sex relationships were prevalent. According to Kollau, in Buchenwald many men had same-sex encounters: In Buchenwald, it was common to have sexual intercourse. This was normal, this is everywhere with barracking. But I was never a homosexual, never. I had a young Frenchman; he was my friend. This was strictly forbidden, but everybody was doing it. We were in the ruins of the Gustloff-Company in a corner where I was working. For god’s sake, that we weren’t catched. But we briefly retrieved and were . . . quick quick quick, yes this happened.58 It seems that Kollau aimed to normalize same-sex desire and refers to other male-only confined spaces and suggested that sexualized friendships are an integral part of his and, one assumes, other men’s experiences in the camp. However, by repeating the word “never,” he stressed that although he had sex with other men, he rejects a gay identity. The risky and rushed nature of the act that is captured in the German original’s “schnell, schnell,

55 Julia Roos, “Backlash against Prostitutes’ Rights: Origins and Dynamics of Nazi Prostitution Policies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (2002): 91–92. 56 See, for example, Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust (London: Rider, 2004), 44. 57 Elizabeth D. Heineman, “Sexuality and Nazism: The Double Unspeakable?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11(1/2) (2002): 60. 58 Finn Kollau, 46.

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schnell” emphasized the degradation of the sexual act. The pair’s motivation, or what they actually felt, remained obscure, as I did not ask follow-up questions. Nevertheless, Kollau described in more detail how he masturbated another inmate but declined mutual masturbation: I even had someone lying next to me, a Jew from Vienna. He firmly wanted me to, that I masturbate, I should masturbate him. And to do him a favor, I always did it, and then he wanted to do it with me, but I didn’t fancy it. He was lying next to me; it wasn’t possible otherwise and he asked for it, alright, then I did it, but with me he tried, and I said, ‘Please don’t.’ So, he didn’t. I didn’t, I didn’t fancy him, ok. This is how it was in regard to sexuality, yes, but all did it.59 Kollau clearly found it challenging to speak about this particular memory. He struggled to find appropriate words and did not know how to address this intimate encounter. I suggest that “always” indicates that the masturbation occurred several times. Kollau also pointed to the crowded, narrow, intimate sleeping conditions in the bunks to clarify the situation in case the interviewer was not aware of it, combined with another explanation: “it wasn’t possible otherwise.” In the end, he once again insisted on the ordinariness of their sexual encounters, thereby shedding light on another aspect of camp sexuality. The Viennese Jew, he recalled, asked him for a “favor.” Kollau did not say how he actually felt about this, but he asserted his agency by denying his companion the mutual masturbation. In short, he fulfilled the desire of his bed neighbor and, perhaps, acted as a comrade in solidarity. According to Kollau, sexuality in the camp was functional. Mutual masturbation resembles an exchange, nonmaterial barter. He took pains to minimize its transgressive component—that is, he de-sexualized the act as much as possible. By using the jargon of the camp and referring to the “French” or “Viennese Jew” he de-individualized the other inmates and puts a barrier between himself and them. At the same time, of course, he also made a claim for his heterosexual identity. Although in the interview Kollau repeated that he thought he was fond of men, he asserted that he realized his heterosexual desire after his liberation 59 Ibid., 97.

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in April 1945. The American army demanded that the population of Weimar, the city in vicinity of Buchenwald, enter the camp to see the atrocities. One of them was a “nice woman.” Kollau “took her straight away” and showed her around the camp. Subsequently, they “enjoyed” themselves in an observation tower, he said. They were interrupted when other people entered and, in shock, he hurt himself, bumping his head.60 Through this act, he not only reclaimed a place of torment, but also reaffirmed his heterosexuality in a now heteronormative setting. Remembering these events, he spoke more loudly and laughed; and he vividly provided details of the encounter in contrast to the previous narrative. Kollau now presented himself as a dominant male who conquered a woman. He went on to characterize her as “nice,” a description he did not attribute to the men, about whom he provided little detail.61

The Conceptualization of Sexual Identities and Sexual Performativity These three instructive cases demonstrate how practices such as visiting the mikveh or brothels were ways to perform teenage sexuality. The three young men, in particular, link their sexuality with belonging and adventures as well as risky behavior. This does not mean that the same holds for older male Jews: it is the nexus of youth and sexuality that is emphasized in the three sources examined here. My analysis also reveals how sexual performativity and sexual identities were negotiated. While Beck identifies himself as gay, Knoller represents himself as a strict heterosexual. By contrast, in his interview Kollau insisted on his heterosexuality, even if be engaged in same-sex relations, and then asserted that later—after the liberation—he reaffirmed his heterosexuality. The fact that Beck stresses that most of the men he had sexual relations with (the ones described in this study) were not gay strongly suggests that sexual identities in Nazi Germany cannot be understood as static or fixed.62 Indeed, in this regard, Anna Hájková proposes avoiding the term “identity” and speaking rather of “subjectivity” and “practices.”63 60 Ibid., 46. 61 After the liberation, for some survivors their affirmation of heterosexuality was also associated with revenge. The early version of Elie Wiesel’s Night (1956) describes the rape of local Weimar women by other survivors of Buchenwald. See Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 6. 62 Beck, An Underground Life, 46. 63 Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” 88.

Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany

As I have shown, some male Jews wrote about their sexuality and desire in relationships without binary or otherwise strict conceptions of sexuality. Kollau talked about how he developed homoerotic desire, but distanced himself from homosexuality—without, however, disparaging it. A number of historians discuss same-sex relations in the camps using the term “surrogate homosexuality.”64 This is rather problematic, especially when survivors themselves reject these identity constructions. This reproduces a heteronormative notion of normalcy and reduces desire and sexuality to “an emergency outlet.”65 Moreover, as Regina Kunzel has shown in her work on prison sex, “surrogate homosexuality” suggests the existence of a “true” homosexuality. She contends that all sexuality is situational.66 In this regard, Hájková advocates for the introduction of the term “queer” in Holocaust studies. She convincingly argues that fixed, binary identities are not only ahistorical but also reductive. “Queer” aids our understanding of the complex context of Nazi persecution and can serve as analytical tool that goes far beyond static conceptions such as homosexuality.67 While this is true and will enrich the study of the Holocaust, in this chapter I refrain from using the concept in the case of Kollau in particular. Although his relationships could be considered “queer,” I doubt he would have assigned this label to his sexuality. Thus, I critically reproduce Kollau’s binary-static view and avoid the foregone conclusions that would result from the imposition of an analytical term on his narrative. Nevertheless, queer approaches facilitate nuanced analyses of agency, power relations, and how Jewish men narrate their experiences of sexuality. The sensitive analysis presented in this chapter has excavated gendered and sexualized notions of belonging, courage, and intimacy in the camp. It has explored performative practices of sexuality and memory and demonstrated how sexuality shaped the daily lives of male Jewish teenagers in in the 1930s and 1940s in Berlin, another major German city, under Nazi occupation in France, and in Buchenwald. Working on the history of 64 See, for instance, Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 201. 65 Vera Laska, “Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 262. 66 Regina G. Kunzel, “Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 3 (2002): 253f, 65. 67 Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” 87–88.

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sexuality during the Holocaust does not trivialize, sensationalize, or minimize its events. Rather, it demonstrates that Nazi violence and persecution not only aimed for the physical annihilation of Jews. As Dagmar Herzog’s writes, “in the assault of their sexuality, the victims were targeted in their innermost selfhood.”68 A history of sexuality during the Holocaust makes this visible. The study of sexuality and gender during the Holocaust also requires that researchers critically reflect on their assumptions about heteronormativity and sexuality more broadly. In other words, we must ask: How can researchers study sexuality during the Holocaust without an anachronistic understanding of history? Writing about memory, James E. Young poses the question: “Can we forget what we already know in order to write a past that is properly blind to its later stages?”69 Such a program requires taking intimate revelations in testimonies or oral history interviews seriously. It is important to recognize that the violence during the Holocaust profoundly affected sexuality.70 The abrupt rupture of relationships and negotiations around desire were integral to the new reality Jewish women and men faced. These hidden histories are difficult to find in historical documentation, let alone in archives, which are dominated by sources produced by the German perpetrators. When survivors make remarks on sexuality, because they deem it relevant, it should be investigated further as it is a valid area of analysis. Even the lack of work on the subject is of interest. The silence itself is eloquent, as it can help us understand what has been left unsaid and why.71 I suggest that the development of an analytical framework that can take sexuality in all its variety into account is essential—especially when it comes to the ambiguity of sex and sexual relationships. Whereas queer approaches offer insightful understandings, I argue that it is also important to examine gendered or sexualized performativities and integrate intersectional categories such as age into the analyses. Taking gender as relational, and paying more attention to men and masculinity, can only extend the 68 Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85. 69 Young, “Between History and Memory”: 53. 70 In the past, this argument was also often used to argue against the application of gender as a category of analysis in the study of the Holocaust. 71 Of course, it is not my aim to criticize survivors or scholars who decide against incorporating the topic of sexuality. The sensitivity and pain associated with it, make it indeed challenging to approach, and not only with regard to sexualized violence.

Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany

rich and insightful literature on women. Men’s specific performative practices and their (re)presentation in Holocaust memory add to our understanding about sexuality, and daily life, in this period.

Figure 12. Cover image from the book An Underground Life: Memoir of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin by Gad Beck. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2004 the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

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Contributors

Natalia Aleksiun is Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School, Touro College. She is a historian of the Holocaust and modern Jewish history in East Central Europe. She published Where To? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950 (in Polish) in 2002. She co-edited the twentieth volume of Polin (on the memory of the Holocaust) and the twenty-ninth (on writing Jewish history in Eastern Europe). Her critical edition of Gerszon Taffet’s Destruction of Żółkiew Jews was published in 2019. Her book titled Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust is forthcoming from Littman Library in 2020. Jakub Drábik is a historian mainly interested in comparative fascism studies, but covers a broad range of twentieth-century history topics in his research and teaching. He completed his doctorate at Charles University in Prague in 2014, and since 2016 has worked at the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and taught at Masaryk University in Brno. Katja Grosse-Sommer is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. She holds a master’s degree in Holocaust and Genocide studies from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the Paideia Jewish Studies Program. She has been involved in organizing various conferences, events, and exhibitions related to National Socialist persecution and its remembrance. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and commemoration, and modern Jewish history. Marta Havryshko holds a PhD in history. She is a research associate at the Department of Contemporary History at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She taught a special module on women’s experiences of war at the Ukrainian Catholic University in 2017. She is the author of a book and numerous articles on sexual violence during World War II, the Holocaust, feminism,

Contributors

and nationalism. Her research has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the DAAD, Monash University, Yahad-In Unum, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, St. Gallen University, and other funding bodies. Borbála Klacsmann received a master’s in history from Eötvös Loránd University and a master’s in comparative history with a specialization in Jewish studies from Central European University (2012). Since September 2015 she has been a doctoral student at the Department of History at the University of Szeged and a member of the Hungarian research group of Yad Vashem. Her work centers on the Holocaust and its aftermath in Hungary. Agnes Laba is currently working as postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Modern History, University of Wuppertal. Her current project is an analysis of the German occupation’s impact on the everyday life of families, the gender structure of occupied societies during World War II, and the re-negotiation of gender relations after liberation. While her research focuses on Poland and France, she considers both countries from a pan-European perspective. Anna Nedlin-Lehrer is a PhD student in history at Albert-LudwigsUniversität Freiburg. She works on the founding generation of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz) in Israel, combining research on Poland during the interwar period, the Holocaust, and the postwar period, as well as years immediately following the foundation of the State of Israel. Denisa Nešťáková holds a PhD in history. Her main interest is on the history of the Holocaust and gender studies in East-Central Europe. She is an external researcher at Comenius University, Bratislava, where she is working on her postdoctoral project “Women and Men in the Labor Camp Sereď, Slovakia.” As a research associate at the Herder Institute, she focuses on the history of family planning in Czechoslovakia. Dalia Ofer is the Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust and East European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (emerita). Her main research areas are the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, with emphasis on family and gender issues, memory of the Holocaust, and immigration to Palestine and the state of Israel.

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Andrea Pető is a professor at the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She has written six monographs, edited thirty-one volumes, and her works on gender, politics, Holocaust and war have been translated into twenty-three languages. In 2018, she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. Joanna Sliwa is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). Her research focuses on the Holocaust in Poland. Her current projects explore daily life and ethnic relations in Cracow through the lens of Jewish children; and rescue, relief, and resistance in Lublin from a woman’s perspective. Eva Škorvanková is an assistant professor in the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. She lecturers on modern and contemporary political and social history. Her research focuses on women’s history and gender studies, mainly on women’s education within social and political context of Slovak society in the twentieth century and population politics, birth rate control as well as abortion legalization in Central Europe. Laurien Vastenhout works as a project coordinator and researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She also teaches various courses on Contemporary European History and Genocide Studies at the University of Utrecht. Her research interests include the history of the Holocaust in Western Europe, specifically the history of the Jewish Councils, and photography during the Second World War. Hannah Wilson is a graduate of the Weiss-Livnat International MA program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa (Israel). In 2016, she began her PhD research on the material memory of Sobibor death camp at the Department of History, Nottingham Trent University. From 2014 onwards, she has participated as a research student at the archaeological excavations at Sobibor and Treblinka camp sites in Poland.

Contributors

Florian Zabransky is a doctoral researcher at The Weidenfeld Institute– Centre for German-Jewish Studies at University of Sussex. He was awarded the Clemens N. Nathan Scholarship for his dissertation on male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust. His research interest focuses on the history of sexuality and emotions, gender and the Holocaust, and critical men’s studies. Marína Zavacká works as a senior researcher at the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. She focuses on history of propaganda and building of regime loyalties in the twentieth century. As an external lecturer she also reads related courses for departments of History and of Russian and East European studies at Comenius University in Bratislava. Modiane Zerdoun-Daniel is a master’s student in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, at the Uppsala University. She is currently preparing her master’s thesis about Jewish women in Lithuania. Her main interest is the intersection between Holocaust and gender studies, specifically within the partisan movement; as well as general Jewish history in Central Europe.

267

Index A

Adler, Eliyana R., 36 Aleksiun, Natalia, xvi, 167n11 Amsterdam, 142, 143n2, 148–49, 151, 155, 160 Antignac, Joseph, 153 Antwerp, 146, 257 Artstein, Zecharia, 132 Auerbakh, Rokhl, 6 Augenfeld, Liba, 203, 206 Auschwitz, 13–14, 18, 33n58, 84n4, 91, 138, 164, 171, 173, 185, 188n21, 246, 254 Auxerre, 61

B

Bar, 225, 235–36, 238, 240, 242 Bartov, Omer, 26–28 Baumel-Schwartz, Judith, 24n15, 31, 39 Bauer, Ernst, 195 Bauer, Yehuda, 25, 133n43, 183n5 Bauman, Berson, 9–10, 17 Beck, Gad, 246, 253–55, 258, 260, 263 Belarus, 204–5 Bełżec , 23, 137n65, 189 Bender, Sara, 24 Berlin, 28, 195, 246, 254–55, 261 Bergen, Doris, 251 Bergen-Belsen, 157, 159, 246 Białystok, 23–24, 216 Birkenau, 32, 91, 185, 246 Bochnia, 163, 175 Boder, David, 18 Bohemia, 52, 54, 57n42 Bosnia, 251 Braude Heller, Anna, 9–11, 17–19 Bratislava, 65, 89, 103, 105–6, 110 Bridenthal, Renate, 31 Browning, Christopher, 26–27, 248 Bruttmann, Tal, 40 Buchenwald, 243, 245, 252, 258, 260–61 Buczacz, 27–29 Byten, 127

C

Calin (Cohen), Professor, 142 Čapková, Kateřina, 36

Cesarani, David, 251 Chełm, 195 Cohen, David, 154 Cohen, Sophie, 146 Cracow, xviii, 37, 163–65, 168, 170–72, 174–77, 179–80 Cushman, Sarah, 32 Czajka, Maria, 178 Czechoslovakia, 65, 67n20, 72n55, 73n66, 79, 90, 95 Czerniaków, 135

D

Datner, Szymon, 23 Dekel, Mikhal, 29 Denmark, 52 Derman, Lisa, 203, 210, 213, 216 Anna Dlugi, 203, 207 Dreifuss, Havi, 34 Dudziak, Tekla, 178–79 Dzierwa, Bronislawa, 177–78

E

Ebenstein, Jakob, 28 Eichmann, Adolf, 197–98 Engel, Alida, 186 Engel-Wijnberg, Selma, 186–192, 194, 196–97 Engelking, Barbara, 37 Esscher (Asscher), David, 142, 143n2, 155, 158

F

Fesenko, Serafina, 163–64 Filkorn, Eugen, 64 Fischer, Joseph, 152–53, 157 Fleischmann, Gisi, 65 Flemming, Michael, 184, 189, 190, 193 Folman-Raban, Havka, xvii, 124–25, 134, 141 Foucault, Michel, 63 France, , xvii, 50–52, 57n42, 61, 142, 144–47, 149–151, 158–59, 245–46, 256, 261 Frank, Hans, 175 Frenzel, Karl, 197

Index

Friedman, Ellen G., 29 Friedman, Jonathan, 249 Friedman, Philip, 20, 22 Frydel, Tomasz, 37

G

Gabis, Rita, 30 Gál-Podďumbiersky, Ján, 102 Gamzon, Denise, 149 Gamzon, Robert, 159n78 Garczyński, Karol, 178–79 Garrison, John S., 249 Geneva, 128, 139 Germany, xiii, xviii, 14, 33, 51, 57, 84, 88, 95n42, 100, 102n7, 103, 147–48, 150, 154, 158, 189, 197, 203, 243–246, 256n49, 258, 260 Getting, Joséphine, 152 Ginaite-Rubinson, Sara, 203, 206–212, 214, 218 Glezer, Mania, 203, 207, 213–15 Gokkes, Catharina, 187 Goldberg, Myrna, 185, 189 Gordon, Riva, 215 Greenberg, Judith, 201 Grossmann, Atina, 31 Gruca, Maria, 172 Gutfreund, Sabina, 175 Gutterman, Bella, 128, 131, 132n36–73

H

Hagen, 190, 197 Hájková, Anna, xiii, 97n47, 244n7, 251, 260–61 Hauer, Waldemar Sylvain, 146 Hannel, Salomea, 187 Hansen, Imke, 32 Havryshko, Marta, xviii Herzl, Theodor, 148, 254 Herzog, Dagmar, 244 Hitler, Adolf, xiv, 68n28, 149 Hnatiuk, Olga, 30 Horowitz, Sara, x Hungary, xvi, xix, 14, 90n28, 106–7, 109n36

I

Ilava, xvii, 101–118 Israel, 16, 127–28, 152, 184, 195, 197, 201, 227

J

Janšáková, Mária, 101–3, 105–119 Jerusalem, 143n2, 197 Juny, Adam, 164–65

K

Kałucka, Maria, 175 Kaplan, Marion, 31, 33, 246 Kardisz, Roman, 178 Kasticher Hirt, Lili, 13, 16–18 Kaufman, Ala, 171–72, 174 Kaunas, 30, 203–6, 209, 213 Kėdainiai forest, 204 Kempner, Vitka, 207–9, 212 Khaitman, Denise Schorr, 152 Knoller, Freddie, 246, 256–57, 260 Kollau, Finn, 243, 245–46, 249–50, 252, 254–61 Korczak, Janusz, 13 Korczak, Ruzka, 207–210 Kot, Maria, 175 Kovner, Abba, 37, 183n5, 207, 211 Kozioł, Maria, 174 Kracowski, Eva, 216 Kremer, Lillian, 185 Krystian, Katarzyna, 176 Kryvyi Rih, 221, 225, 228–30 Kunzel, Regina, 261 Kursk, 117

L

Laba, Agnes, xvii Lanzmann, Claude, 183, 190 László, Ernest, 95 Leo XIII, 66 Levin, Dov, 204 Leydesdorff, Selma, 186 Lichtman, Ada, 187, 189–91, 193, 195, 197 Lieberfreund, Rozalia, 164 Lithuania, xviii, 30, 201–7, 217 Łódź , 11 London, 149, 246 Lower, Wendy, 28–29 Lubetkin, Zivia, xvii, 123–41 Lviv, 30, 171

M

Majdanek, 91, 182n4 Marlow, Jennifer, 38 Margolis, Rachel, 203, 207–8, 211–15 Maurer, Trude, 95 Medem, Vladimir, 12 Melchior, Małgorzata, 37 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 29 Metz, Zelda, 187, 189, 195, 200 Michlic, Joanna B., 35 Mikališkės, 204 Mincz, Alexander, 12

269

270

Index

Mincz, Henryk, 12 Mincz, Tala, 11–12, 17–18 Minsk, 28, 205 Miropol, 29 Misuchin, Jenny, 207, 212, 215 Moravia, 52, 54, 57n42

N

Narocz forest, 214 Nedlin-Lehrer, Anna, xvii Nei Leben, 221, 225, 228–31, 240 Netherlands, xvii, 52, 142, 144n6, 145–50, 156, 158, 189, 196–97 Nešťáková, Denisa, xvii Niepołomice, 168 Nitra, 107 Norway, 52, 55 Nova Pavlivka, 225, 232–33 Nováky, 89, 103 Novi Sad, 13 Novitch, Miriam, 184, 187 Nowak, Łucja, 175

O

Odessa, 233 Ofer, Dalia, xvi, 31, 92, 184, 198 Ofer, Miriam, 34 Olczak-Ronikier, Joanna, 29 Ostrów, 169

P

Palestine, 16, 133, 138, 148–50, 157, 246, 254 Paneriai, 204 Pawlak, Lucyna, 170 Pechersky, Aleksander, 182, 192–194, 196 Perlstein, Lea, 131 Pius XI, 66 Pivetti, Kylie, 249 Płotnicka, Frumka, 128, 131, 133n42 Poland, xvi, xx, 9, 22, 25, 33, 37–38, 49, 51–52, 56, 58, 91, 125–129, 130n28, 133, 135, 139–40, 163, 165–66, 167n12, 174, 181, 192, 195, 203–4, 227 Porter, Jack Nusan, 210 Prądnik Czerwony, 171, 173 Prais, Lea, 33 Prusin, Alexander Viktor, 223 Ptrovoselo, 13

Q R

Raab, Esther, 187–192, 195, 199–200 Raban, Folman Havka, xvii, 124–25, 134, 141

Radionovas, Kostas, 207 Rajec, 117 Redlich, Shimon, 30 Reik, Chaviva, 85 Reisner, Laja, 187 Richmond, Theo, 29 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 21, 137n63, 181 Ringelheim, Joan, xiii, 97n47, 248 Rochelson, Eli G., 30 Rochelson, Meri-Jane, 30 Rostov-on-Don, 30 Russia, 204 Rwanda, 251

S

Salos, 204 Šándor, Elo, 102 Sarlouis, Dr., 142 Scheid-Haas, Lucienne, 146 Schlechtriemen, Tobias, 124, 137n63 Schiller, Friedrich, 253 Schneiderman, Tema, 130, 138 Scott, Joan, ix Sereď, xvii, 83–100, 103 Shabes, Oyneg, 6, 21, 181 Shefet, Zvi, 215 Shik, Na’ama, 251 Šiauliai, 204 Sivák, Josef, 64 Škorvánková, Eva, xvii, 85 Słapakowa, Cecylia, 21 Slepak, Cecylia, 6–9, 18 Sliwa, Joanna, xviii Slovakia, xvi, xix, 62, 65, 67, 68n28, 72, 84–85, 86n13, 87n14, 88–90, 92n31, 101, 103–4, 106, 118 Smolar, Hersh, 212 Sobibor, xviii, 91, 137n65, 181–200 Soviet Union, 51, 57, 117, 130, 194, 203, 222–25, 227, 239, 241 Stalingrad, 117 Steffen, Katrin, 31 Stern, Juliette, xvii, 142, 146–59 Stern, Ursula, 187, 189, 195, 198 Stoeger, Helena, 171, 173–74 Stockholm, 11 Stremer, Danuta, 177 Sudetenland, 15 Švenčionys, 30, 204, 207 Switzerland, 129, 152 Sznajderman, Monika, 29 Sztro, Nana, (Strok, Jenta), 168–69 Szwajger, Adina, 10–11

Index

T

Taffet, Gerszon, 23 Tarnów, 163, 177 Tauber, Joachim, 32 Tec, Nechama, 205–6, 216 Tijn, Gertrude van, xvii, 142–59 Tiso, Jozef, 64–65, 68n28, 69, 72, 88 Tisová, Terézia, 77 Transnistria, 225, 236 Treblinka, 6, 11–13, 17, 130, 137, 266 Tuková, Božena, 77

U

Ukraine, 29, 36, 204, 221–25, 240, 242 United States, 150, 186, 196–97, 223, 246, 254 USSR, 225–27

V

Varkel, Bella, 203, 213n65, 217 Vastenhout, Laurien, xvii Verderber, Krystyna, 172, 177 Verderber, Rachel, 176 Vienna, 28, 246, 259 Vilna. See Vilnius Vilnius, 37, 130, 203–9, 214, 218 Vinisheski, Tania (Taibe Winiski), 212 Vinnytsia, 225, 236 Volanská, Hela, 102 Vrzgulová, Monika, 85, 86n13 Vyhne, 89

W

Warsaw, passim

Wasserstein, Bernard, 143n2, 154, 156 Waxman, Zoë, xiii, 22, 185, 198 Weil, Laure, 146 Weiss, Hella, 187–89, 195–96, 198 Weitzman, Lenore, 31, 135n50, 136n62, 184, 198, 201 Wieringen, 148, 155 Wierzbnik, 27 Wilczyńska, Stefania (Stefa), 13 Wilno. See Vilnius Wilson, Hannah, xviii Wood, Elisabeth, 239

X Y

Young, James E., 249, 262 Yugoslavia, 13

Z

Zabransky, Florian, xviii Zalc, Claire, 40 Zavacká, Marína, xvii Żbikowski, Andrzej, 37 Zegarlińska, Rozalia, 177 Žeimelis, 30 Zerdoun-Daniel, Modiane, xviii Zielinski, Regina, 187–89, 193, 195 Zigelboym, Artur, 13 Zigelboym, Manie, 13 Žilina, 65n12, 117 Żółkiew, 23 Zuckerman, Yitzchak, 129, 135, 141

271