Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust

Experience and Expression

WOMEN, THE NAZIS, AND THE HOLOCAUST

EDITED BY

ELIZABETH R. BAER

AND

MYRNA GOLDENBERG

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

Copyright 2003 © by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights are reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3063-0 ISBN-10: 0-8143-3063-0 (pbk.)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Experience and expression : women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust / edited by Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 0-8143-3062-2 (cloth : alk paper)—ISBN 0-8143-3063-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Jewish women in the Holocaust. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Personal narratives—History and criticism. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. I. Baer, Elizabeth Roberts. II. Goldenberg, Myrna.

D804.47.E86 2003

940.53'18'082—dc21

2002008514

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Mary Dickey Masterton Fund for financial assistance in the publication of this volume.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3886-5 (e-book)

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

Thank you, Sybil.

Along the stations toward extinction . . . each gender lived its own journey.

MARY FELSTINER, To Paint Her Life:

Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era

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

EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM,

Diary and Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg

Chronology

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

Part I. Proposing a Theoretical Framework

ONE. Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust

John K. Roth

TWO. Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference

Pascale Rachel Bos

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

THREE. Hidden Lives: Sinti and Roma Women

Sybil Milton

FOUR. Involuntary Abortions for Polish Forced Laborers

Anna Rosmus

FIVE. Caring While Killing: Nursing in the Euthanasia Centers

Susan Benedict

SIX. The Nurses’ Trial at Hadamar and the Ethical Implications of Health Care Values

Mary D. Lagerwey

Part III. Gender and Memory: The Uses of Memoirs

SEVEN. Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside

Judith Greenberg

EIGHT. Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps

Myrna Goldenberg

NINE. Ruptured Lives and Shattered Beliefs: A Feminist Analysis of Tikkun Atzmi in Holocaust Literature

Susan Nowak

TEN. Anne Frank: The Cultivation of the Inspirational Victim

Catherine A. Bernard

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

ELEVEN. Jewish Women in Time: The Challenge of Feminist Artistic Installations about the Holocaust

Stephen C. Feinstein

TWELVE. Women in the Holocaust: Representation of Gendered Suffering and Coping Strategies in American Fiction

S. Lillian Kremer

THIRTEEN. The Uses of Memory and Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Film, Fiction, and Memoir

Rebecca Scherr

Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This anthology grew out of a hallway conversation at the 1997 Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. The conference that year featured two panels on the topic of women and the Holocaust, an amount of attention to the topic that was unprecedented at an American Holocaust conference. We believed that the time had come for an anthology on the topic to appear and began soliciting essays. Now, almost five years later, we look back upon a partnership that has included, and been enriched by, many of life’s significant events: children’s engagements and marriages, the arrival of a grandchild, the loss of a parent, changes in careers, serious illness, surviving a tornado, traveling together to present papers at other conferences, and constant communication. We would thus like to begin by thanking each other for a collaboration that has been marked by patience, persistence, teaching and learning, laughter and deep friendship.

We would also like to thank Franklin and Marcie Littell for their long-standing work on the Annual Scholars’ Conference, where this book was conceived, and Carol Rittner and John Roth, who not only loaned us their gender-conscious chronology but encouraged us at every step of the way. Other consultants and advisers have included Joan Ringelheim, Oral History Division, and Leslie Swift and Judy Cohen, Photo Archives, and the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Hester Baer, assistant professor of German at the University of Oklahoma, Lisa Disch and Stephen Feinstein at the University of Minnesota, who collaborated with Elizabeth on the first national scholarly conference devoted to women and the Holocaust—entitled Departures, in April, 2001—allowing us to work through several of our ideas; and Lenore Weitzman, George Mason University. To all of them, we extend our special thanks.

Arthur Evans, director of the Wayne State University Press, has been an advocate for the manuscript from our first communication with him and has demonstrated confidence in it at each stage of development. We thank him for his superb suggestions for revision and expansion, for his always prompt and courteous correspondence, and for his commitment to the topic of gender and the Holocaust. We thank also the anonymous external readers and the board reader who provided valuable advice through the manuscript review process. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to Adela Garcia, manuscript editor, for her careful attention to our work.

Elizabeth would like to express particular gratitude to Clint, who brings coffee, asks hard questions, and bears absences and five a.m. wake-ups. Thanks also to Janine Genelin and Jean Heidcamp for their clerical support at several stages. The staff of the Folke Bernadotte Library at Gustavus Adolphus College has been unfailingly helpful. President Axel Steuer provided a sabbatical that afforded time for significant work on the manuscript. During that sabbatical, an appointment as visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota furnished space and access to a research collection. Special thanks also to Dr. Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, for an invitation to teach a course on gender and the Holocaust in the fall of 2000.

Myrna extends deepest thanks to Neal for his unwavering support from the start, decades ago, and tireless patience, good humor, and loving energetic criticism. No small measure of gratitude goes to Liz, David, Eve, and Michel for their willingness to listen to my ideas and wait for my undivided attention. My colleagues—faculty, administrators, and staff—at Montgomery College and its foundation deserve my appreciation for their very generous support and constant encouragement. Finally, special thanks to my friends in the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium at Wroxton College whose questions and responses sharpened my thinking and strengthened my confidence in this work.

INTRODUCTION

Experience and Expression: Women and the Holocaust

Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg

If you are sisterless, you do not have the pressure, the absolute responsibility to end the day alive.¹ Isabella Leitner’s eloquent declaration provides a clue for contemporary scholars who undertake a gendered study of the Holocaust. In her provocative memoir, Leitner reveals the consciousness of women during the Holocaust to nurture and be nurtured by other women—natural or surrogate sisters, mothers, or daughters. In the poetic narrative None of Us Will Return, Charlotte Delbo also acknowledges the women prisoners’ mutual dependence. She describes her sister prisoners trying to keep warm during roll call in Birkenau: Each places her hands under the arms of the one in front of her. Since they cannot do it in the first row, we rotate. Back to chests, we stand pressed against each other, yet, as we establish a single circulatory system, we remain frozen through and through. . . . When they [SS women officers] have passed by, each one of us places her hands back in another’s armpits. Later, when Delbo is forced to dig a ditch alone, separated from her friends, she despairs: Now that they have left I am desperate. I cannot believe I will ever return when I am alone. . . . No one believes she will return when she is alone.² In both physical and emotional ways, the women need one another to survive.

In a related way, Giuliana Tedeschi uses knitting, a traditionally female activity, as a metaphor to describe the importance of bonding as a factor in survival: Prison life is like a piece of knitting whose stitches are strong as long as they remain woven together; but if the woolen strand breaks, the invisible stitch that comes undone slips off among the others and is lost.³ Here Tedeschi demonstrates gender difference not only as a difference of experience, as Leitner and Delbo explain, but also as a difference in the expressions of that experience. That is, Tedeschi points out that even as women experienced imprisonment differently than men, they also remembered the experience differently and expressed their memories by evoking experiences that are traditionally gendered. Her choice of metaphor strongly suggests that being female influenced behavior as well as reflection about behavior before, during, and after the Holocaust. That is, gender-based experience before the rise of Hitler conspicuously shaped women’s responses to the Holocaust; moreover, gender-based experience influenced the way women survivors interpreted and transmitted their experiences.

Scope and Aim of This Study

Experience and Expression grew out of the conviction that the insights expressed by Leitner, Tedeschi, and other survivors about being female during the Nazi period are significant and demand scholarly investigation. We have undertaken this task in a variety of ways: by including essays which study particular women, particular texts, particular gender-based roles, and ethnically defined groups of women. We have also included essays on post-Holocaust representations of women as well as new efforts at theorizing gender in the context of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Additionally, this introduction provides a historiography of gendered approaches to the Holocaust to date. With such content, we transgress some of the givens and the constructs of the field of Holocaust Studies.

First, as a scholarly field now more than twenty-five years old, Holocaust Studies is firmly rooted in the discipline of history. At a major conference held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in December 1999, with the goal of looking at future directions for the field in the approaching millennium, participants discussed the fact that while historians continue to have hegemony in Holocaust Studies, literature, philosophy, and religion are areas of rapid development; participants also commented on the curious lack of scholarly work on the Holocaust in the social sciences, especially sociology. Given the profound significance of the Holocaust for the future of humanity and for moral and ethical issues, historical understanding and accuracy is obviously critically important. However, we believe that the expansion of the field into interdisciplinary studies is a significant and welcome evolution and one that will ineluctably yield new insights and enriched understanding. This volume contributes to such an expansion.

Another area of controversy—the one between scholars who do history and those who do theory—is a fervently and hotly contested one in Holocaust Studies, and it surfaces at virtually every Holocaust conference. Those who study representation in the field fall somewhere in the middle of the split, but the belief continues on the part of many—especially historians—that such studies are and must remain subordinate to the study of what really happened. Although historians increasingly recognize their own work as a construct, a representation, the sacral nature of the history of the Holocaust has served as a barrier to recognition of this linguistic turn in the field. Indeed, as Pascale Bos points out in her essay, until recently the memoirs of survivors were read and used as unalloyed truth, with little recognition of the impact of the shaping (or lapsing) of memory. In any event, we believe that the effort to theorize gender and the Holocaust, and to explore representations of women’s experiences, is rooted in history and is a central goal of this anthology.

Yet another highly sensitive area in Holocaust Studies is the place of the non-Jewish victim. The fate of Europe’s Jewish population at the hands of the Nazis has been the central focus of the field since its inception. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been paid to the fate of the Roma and Sinti, the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally and physically disabled, the slave laborers, those involved in various non-Jewish resistance groups, and others.⁴ This broadened perspective is reflected in our table of contents and raises yet another issue: the charged nature of the word Holocaust and the current debate over its definition.⁵ We wish to ally ourselves with those who reserve the term for Jewish victims and survivors. Fraught though it has become with issues of misplaced martyrdom as well as dilution to designate an uneven battle, Holocaust is nevertheless a well-recognized word that means the destruction of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews.

Thus, our effort in this anthology has been to create an interdisciplinary set of original essays which address the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish women; to include studies of particular women who, to date, have been little studied in English language publications, with attention to the roles (both helpful and harmful) of German nurses, the experiences of Roma and Sinti women, and the fate of non-Jewish female forced labors; and to suggest innovative theoretical approaches to the study of gender and the Holocaust.

We have entitled the anthology Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust to reflect the inclusion of non-Jews and, in so doing, indicate the broader boundaries of Hitler’s war. We also intend to signal that we have chosen an emphasis on the social construction of women and on women’s construction of their own memories and experiences through various forms of representation. There is no hierarchy of oppression, said the African American lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, and indeed we do not wish to measure or compare suffering or victimhood. Joan Ringelheim’s simple eloquent statement that oppression does not make people better; oppression makes people oppressed⁶ puts to rest the valorization of oppression, regardless of its gendered, cultural, or political causes and effects. By the same token, we do not wish to engage in essentialist sorting, attributing to one gender immutable essences not found in the other. Anyone who has done work in Holocaust Studies knows the risks of sweeping generalization, of claims of always or never.

Instead, we have sought contributors who could enhance our understanding of difference, as this is the best route to enhancing our understanding of that most compelling and intractable topic, the Holocaust. As Myrna Goldenberg has stated elsewhere:

We study each concentration camp as a separate entity because each differed from the next; we track the experiences of Jews according to their country of origin. . . . We examine the behavior and attitudes of religious and secular Jews, of urban and rural Jews, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, and of Jews and non-Jews. In the same way, we are obligated to examine, separately, the lives of women and of men to determine the differences and the similarities in the way they were treated as well as in the way they responded.⁷

We believe the essays in this volume make a substantial contribution to this goal.

What our volume does not intend or attempt to do is provide a comprehensive overview of the history of women in the Holocaust. Such a volume remains to be written and would provide substantial material from which to gain a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of this period. But several strong steps toward such a history have already been taken, and these texts are delineated below. We are pleased to include here, with the permission of its creators, Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, the excellent chronology which appeared in their 1993 Different Voices. It will provide a helpful reference to events, dates, and women during the period 1933–1946 for our readers.

Historiography of Gendered Approaches to the Holocaust

In the early 1980s, the subject of women and the Holocaust attracted those feminist scholars, primarily but not exclusively scholars of German history and culture, whose intellectual interests led them to investigate the daily lives of women during the Holocaust. The transformation of the subject from an intellectual inquiry into a scholarly area of research in both feminist and Holocaust Studies began in 1983, when Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz convened a two-day conference on women and the Holocaust. That the time was ripe for such a conference is demonstrated by the fact that it drew about 400 women each day. Ringelheim’s rationale was direct and clear: we need to study the lives of women because they comprised approximately half the Jewish population that experienced the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews.⁸ As Alice Eckardt, professor of religion at Lehigh University and chair of the first conference session stated, the mission of the conference was, first of all, to add to the general knowledge about both the Holocaust and women’s experiences during the period; and, second, to identify and understand the response of Jewish women to this catastrophe, their coping strategies, if any, and their specific vulnerabilities as women.

Rather than generalize from the male experience, Ringelheim and other feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines challenged the received body of knowledge about the Holocaust, which, they quickly discovered, was as male-centered as the body of knowledge in history and other subjects and disciplines. Thus, in the United States, by focusing on recovering the narratives of Jewish women in ghettos, camps, and in hiding, the study of women and the Holocaust followed the course of traditional feminist scholarship.

The 1983 conference was extraordinary in several ways. Among the hundreds of participants and attendees were survivors, scholars, and interested people who came to learn and perhaps to try to begin to understand what happened in those terrible twelve years. The dialogue that ensued crossed the boundaries of survivorship, age, profession, and class. Further, the conference set the parameters for the study of Jewish women in the Holocaust for the next several decades: women’s daily lives, their particular vulnerabilities, and their ways of succumbing to or coping with Nazi oppression. In Ringelheim’s words, What was it that women did to get through the day? From the first, scholarship and testimony focused on women as victims, or more precisely as intended victims, although a small but emerging body of literature dealt with the experiences of women who actively fought Nazi oppression individually, and, less often, as acknowledged but lesser members of resistance groups.⁹ Women as victims and as resistance fighters are topics that still inform the research on women in the Holocaust, for new information is uncovered continuously, particularly from the documents that the Russians captured in 1944 and 1945, which were not shared with the West until after the end of the cold war in 1989.

The 1983 conference is the wellspring that shaped the field and established the parameters, almost presciently. It uncovered the seeds of resentment evoked by a gendered study, for such an approach inevitably invites comparison and then judgment. Did men or women have a harder time? Did men or women cope better and have more resources? Who was stronger? And so on. In raising such questions, the conference unwittingly anticipated the controversy centered in essentialism, which remains one of the current scholarly challenges not only to the subject of women and the Holocaust but also to feminist theory itself. In 1983 survivors and a relatively small group of feminist scholars, rather than journalists and academics as was the case in the 1990s, questioned the legitimacy of a gendered perspective.

Moreover, while the conference unearthed the difficulties that some women survivors have in speaking about their experiences from a woman’s perspective, the introduction of the subject of lesbians generated tensions that reflected moral judgments against certain victims.¹⁰ Homophobic reactions surfaced then and persist today, sometimes expressed by aggregating lesbians with homosexual men, as if the Nazis proscribed both male and female homosexuality. The reluctance to discuss lesbians, instances of indifference, or even cruelty among the women in ghettos and camps—in other words, the unwillingness to demythologize Jewish women’s behavior—foreshadowed the later sacralization of the Holocaust and the tensions between scholarly and experiential interpretations. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these tensions escalated into debates among the academic disciplines and between theoretical and content-based approaches.

Vera Laska, a survivor, was motivated by a passion to inform the public about the role of women in the cataclysm of World War II. When she was liberated in April 1945, Laska faced GIs who were surprised to hear that women had also been in concentration camps, and equally incredulous to find out that women were also in the resistance, facing the same dangers, torture, execution or gas chambers as men. Laska calls herself not an interpreter, or a psychologist, or a philosopher but a gatherer of memories.¹¹ Her book, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, a trailblazer in this field, was published by Greenwood Press in its Women’s Studies, not its Holocaust Studies, series. Laska recovered unknown and unheard voices and established—as fact—the bravery, resourcefulness, and endurance of Jewish and non-Jewish women in resistance groups and concentration camps. She also introduced the subject of lesbianism or same sex relationships. While her language is not quite neutral, neither is it as pejorative as that of some writers and memoirists. In addition, she provides a bibliography that includes many listings of women’s memoirs, enumerating the handful of unique memoirs published from 1945 to 1948.¹²

Another collection, Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiographies Since 1933—a compilation of unpublished personal narratives written by Jewish women who fled Nazi Germany after 1933—is often overlooked. Andreas Lixl-Purcell, the editor, was driven to his research by his conviction that the Nazi regime used Jewish women as instruments to carry out their policies:

After the pogrom [Kristallnacht], married women were singled out and targeted as mediators of Nazi policies in order to enforce the departure of all Jews from Germany. Within days . . . the wives of prisoners were informed that their husbands would not be released from the camps unless they could produce emigration papers. The subsequent efforts of these women to obtain valid exit visas saved a large number of men and led to a mass exodus of married couples from Germany shortly before the outbreak of the war.¹³

On the other hand, we know that from 1933 to 1939 more Jewish men left Germany than women, leaving a ratio of 136 Jewish women to every 100 Jewish men.¹⁴ That gender was a complex and often subtle issue in Nazi Germany is made very clear in Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann’s discussion of life immediately after Kristallnacht:

The Jewish women in my environment allowed and encouraged their male partners, fathers of their children, to leave the country—especially after the 11–10–38 incarceration—when exit visas and booked passage to a new homeland was the only condition for release from the concentration camps Dachau, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. These women remained behind, often destitute, until the final phase of the mass killing apparatus was activated.¹⁵

German Jewish women were isolated and thus later became more vulnerable to deportation than men.

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

Recent books on women and fascism address the subtle complexities of state policy toward all women, irrespective of religion or race, in an era of nationalism, militarism, and technology.¹⁷ Social histories of the Nazi era examine the lives of non-Jewish women and the impact of fascism on daily life, especially as political policy shaped women’s participation in the economy. Richard Grunberger points out the subtle effects of material and technical change and the erosion of women’s real status: the persistence of the ‘Gretchen image’ of womanhood in Germany: while more and more women lived physically in the shadow of sewing (and other) machines, they were mentally still regarded as plying the spinning wheel.¹⁸ The effects of World War I—namely, "drastic economic deterioration [which] made the three K’s Kinder, Kirche, Küche . . . attractive—helped Hitler convince women that inequality between the sexes [was] as immutable as that between the races. . . . Anti-feminism served as a non-lethal variant of antisemitism.¹⁹ As a case in point, in 1936, Gertrud Scholz-Klink, Reich Leader of the German Women, delivered a tirade against Bolshevism and its exploitation of women. Hitler exhorted the same audience to stand by the movement steadfastly with all their heart and be loyal to me for ever and consider, just as he did, that German children belonged just as much to their mothers as to me."²⁰ Wartime necessities eventually led to official accommodations of women’s roles, and the home expanded to include the Third Reich, but women, regardless of their professional roles, were relegated to women’s spheres. Their influence diminished and their major role became clearly a biological, in contrast to a sexual, one.²¹ In fact, their participation in the labor force was a source of tensions among Nazi bureaucrats. The ideal of the home-centered woman had a practical and a threatening impact on the building of a wartime labor force.

Thus, the study of women and the Holocaust must be expanded to include the role of women as perpetrators—whether actively as guards, nurses, and other functionaries—or as passive bystanders and the range of behavior between these two extremes. From ancient times until the twentieth century, which witnessed the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge, instances of women as perpetrators are rare, and even in these two modern genocides, women perpetrators were subordinate to their male superiors. However, as Roger Smith explains, although patriarchy and its sexist underpinning reinforce the role of women as victims, the image of woman as the provider of life and man as the taker of life has been shattered by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.²² Alison Owings’s remarkable book about unremarkable German women during the Nazi era reveals the persistence among them of a deep-seated reverence for Hitler—a father figure for a generation that had lost its own fathers in World War I—as well as their discomfort or embarrassment in recalling Nazi treatment of Jews while simultaneously condemning Jews as having brought their troubles on themselves, their remembered fear of dissent as a justification of their passivity, and their susceptibility to Goebbels’ ubiquitous propaganda. Owings is saddened that German women, represented by those she interviewed, faced an enormous test of morality and courage and intelligence, and for the most part failed it.²³

In 1988, Claudia Koonz, also a historian of modern Germany, examined women’s daily lives through both historical and feminist lenses, categorizing women primarily by religion and moral resistance rather than by chronology. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics follows the scholarly standards set by her predecessors. In her chapter on Jewish women, Koonz suggests that Jewish women, while ignored by Nazi thugs and virtually safe from physical attack until 1941, felt the sting of antisemitism before their husbands and fathers because gossip, schoolchildren’s insults, neighbors’ indifference, friends’ aloofness, community excommunication—all made life wretched for Jewish women as their husbands’ earnings began to diminish. Koonz recounts the energy and resourcefulness of Jewish women who tried to emigrate; their preferred reading, she says, quoting a German Jewish émigré, was the Manhattan phone book. We spent many hours, days looking for Jewish-sounding names and writing letters. It was our only chance. And many, many answered back. But not enough.²⁴

In the face of antisemitism, German Christian women’s groups were silent and passive, unsupportive of Jewish women’s groups with whom they had worked before the Nazi rise to power.²⁵ This apparent inconsistency between moral and political responsibility is also evident in the interviews of the wives of the leaders of the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler. Most of the eleven widows reveal a belated awareness of the effects of Nazi antisemitism. Their attention was fixed on Hitler’s attack on religious and political freedom; only in reflection, decades later, do they acknowledge their failure to reach out to Jewish women.²⁶

Feminist German scholars contributed to Elaine Martin’s Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, which was based on a 1987 conference on German literature about the Nazi era. This book approaches the relationship of non-Jewish German women to Nazism through analyses of autobiographies, poetry, short stories, and novels written by German feminists. The contributors face the difficult issues of German guilt and responsibility and the more complex matter of honest writing about such culpability, of the connections between fascism and sexuality and fascism to German myth, and of the persistence of fascism into the twenty-first century.²⁷ In a valuable historiographical essay, Ann Taylor Allen examines the assumptions of modernity that ignored gender and the practical implications of Nazi policy on German women’s lives and the ways in which German women interpreted their moral responsibility.²⁸

Marion Kaplan studied the lives of German Jews who did not leave Germany in 1933. In Between Dignity and Despair, she traces the life of the German Jew who remained after 1933: Well before the physical death of German Jews, the German racial community;—the man and woman on the street, the real ‘ordinary Germans’—made Jews suffer social death every day. This social death was the prerequisite for deportation and genocide. Examining women’s daily lives through feminist eyes, Kaplan argues that the two-fifths of German Jewry that remained after November 1938 were neither passive nor patriotic. They were trapped and tried to adapt to the brutality they faced. Women carried the bulk of this burden as they maintained, insofar as it was possible, the normality of everyday life, including caring for the young and the old, both of whom suffered disproportionately under the Nazis. Furthermore, both Nazi policy toward the Jews and Jewish reactions to that policy differed by gender and in response to the progressive stages of Nazi oppression.²⁹

As noted above, historical approaches have dominated Holocaust Studies, including those limited to women. Marking a shift, Marlene Heinemann’s Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (1986) focuses on literary texts. Her title echoes When Biology Became Destiny, and she is the first to use both feminist and literary theory in analyzing theme, characterization, and intimate relations in Holocaust memoirs and fiction. Like Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan’s work, Heinemann’s holds Holocaust memoirs and novels to high standards of literary criteria and analysis. She identifies recurrent gender specific themes in women’s memoirs and novels, namely, menstruation, rape and the fear of it, verbal and physical sexual abuse and humiliation, and, of course, childbirth. In a groundbreaking discussion, Heinemann explores gender and memory, particularly as women recall the value of friendship and relationships in the camps much more than men. These memories and autobiographical stories emphasize emotional ties built on repeated instances of mutual help and sustained conversation, reflecting less anger and depression than those authored by men.³⁰

Related subjects surface between sessions at Holocaust conferences: the relative value of early and later written memoirs, between written memoirs and oral histories, and—probably most controversial of all—between memoirs, however literary, and fiction. The last point is complicated by the propensity of women survivors to write memoirs rather than structured novels. However, most of the controversy arises from claims made for the value of Holocaust fiction as a reliable source of historical information.

As a subject, women and the Holocaust poses a challenge to traditional definitions of heroism and resistance. One of the rare Sonderkommando manuscripts, found in the ashes of the crematoria shortly after liberation, relates the words of an eight-year-old girl who protected her younger brother as they stood in the anteroom of the gas chamber. Her words are sobering and force us to rethink the definition of a hero. She shouted at the Sonderkommando who was ordered to help her undress her brother and thus speed up the killing process: Go away, you Jewish murderer! Don’t put your hand covered in Jewish blood on my sweet brother. I am his good mother now, and he will die in my arms.³¹

Resistance traditionally denotes two extremes: the use of weapons and the strategy of passivity. Lenore Weitzman argues that resistance in the Holocaust included passing or living on the Aryan side, which was a safer strategy for Jewish women than for Jewish men, as well as rescue activities, generally of children. She challenges the prevailing practice of defining resistance in terms of organized, armed, male-based activities. Many women, she found, were engaged in individual acts of rescue, which were most often secretly executed and not publicized after the war.³² The category of resistance must also be expanded to include the Rosenstrasse Frauen, the non-Jewish women who in February 1943 gathered in front of 2 Rosenstrasse to demand the return of their Jewish husbands who were picked up as part of Goebbel’s obsession to make Berlin Judenfrei. Their one-week demonstration attracted thousands of others, and their husbands were returned—even those who had already been deported to Auschwitz.³³ If we encourage the development of a society infused with the ethic of caring, despite the ubiquity of the urge to power, are we not compelled to redefine the concepts of heroism and resistance? Can we classify the Rosenstrasse Frauen, Rose Meth and the other women who provided the powder to fuel the October 7, 1944, revolt in Birkenau, and Mala Zimetbaum, who manipulated the camp system to help women in Birkenau survive, as anything less than heroic? Their names have begun to be included in the pantheon of Holocaust heroes and resisters, but they have not yet had the recognition that Warsaw ghetto fighters and other traditional resisters have.

In retrospect, scholarly books about women and the Holocaust generally fall into two categories. In the first category are anthologies of memoirs or oral histories compiled by researchers whose purpose is largely the recovery of narratives/women’s lives within a thematic pattern. For the most part, the editors of these anthologies resist evaluation of the memoirs, although clearly the selection of texts proves the editors’ hypotheses. Works in this category include those of Laska, Shelley, Lixl-Purcell, Gurewitsch, Ritvo and Plotkin, and Miller.³⁴ The second category emerged largely in the middle and late 90s, which saw an outburst of feminist interpretation of women’s Holocaust experience, both in anthologies and individually authored works that have comprised the body of scholarly interpretation on the subject of women and the Holocaust.³⁵

The first and still influential book in this group is Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, which took first steps to repair the neglect of women.³⁶ If it can be said that a book legitimizes a field, then Different Voices established the academic study of women and the Holocaust and set the boundaries of such courses. Organized in three parts, it includes a section on personal narrative, a section on historical interpretation, and a final section on poetic and philosophical reflection. Rittner and Roth’s brilliant prologue and epilogue and Joan Ringelheim’s piercing essay are analytical classics. Rittner and Roth’s woman-centered chronology (reprinted here following the introduction) is the keystone of further study.

Half a decade later, Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman edited Women in the Holocaust, a chronologically organized anthology of original essays by scholar and survivor contributors that is more social science than humanities; the focus of this book is almost exclusively the experiences of Jewish women during and immediately before and after the Holocaust. The dominant approach in Ofer and Weitzman is historical, and many of its essays contextualize first-person accounts in memoirs and oral histories. This volume has sold extremely well, attracting a large number of positive reviews that reflect the current status and acceptance of gendered studies of the Holocaust. Shelley Baranowski describes the value of the anthology thus: "Women in the Holocaust emphasizes the agency of Jewish women that Holocaust narratives, most of them produced by male survivors, have underplayed. . . . [I]n highlighting the gender-specific aspects of Nazi persecution on the one hand and the gendered upbringing of Jewish women on the other, [the essays] elevate the complexity of women’s lives during the Holocaust above obvious observations as to their victimization."³⁷ A dissenting voice was that of Gabriel Schoenfeld, in his June 1998 essay in Commentary, adapted to appear in the Wall Street Journal, where he describes feminist scholarship on the Holocaust as serving the purposes of consciousness raising. Letters to the editor of the Journal by some of the scholars whom he had impugned, including Ofer and Weitzman, took issue with Schoenfeld’s political attack on their work.

Esther Fuchs’s Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation is also an anthology of essays, loosely structured to include such varied topics as lesbians, Edith Stein, Israeli daughters of survivors, and the poet Nelly Sachs, as well as excerpts from testimony and two book reviews. Judith Baumel’s Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust is a collection of her own writings, most of which have been previously published; together with Bonnie Gurewitsch’s collection of personal narratives, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women who Survived the Holocaust, Baumel’s book constitutes the only scholarly work available in English on Orthodox Jewish women’s experiences.³⁸ Baumel’s introductory chapters contain useful summaries of scholarly work done thus far on the topic of women and the Holocaust; she also traces her own and others’ work on family and children during this period. Lillian Kremer’s Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination is a pioneering