Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

2010

Introduction

SONJA M. HEDGEPETH AND ROCHELLE G. SAIDEL

This is the first English-language book to address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust, a virtually unexplored subject. John K. Roth has suggested that the study of events that are utterly particular but charged with intensity can lead to understanding wider historical perspectives.¹ In this spirit of scholarly inquiry, this volume, by broadening and deepening the comprehension of Jewish women's experiences of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the Holocaust, will enrich understanding and provoke continued study of this subject.

The archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem include eyewitness accounts that speak to the fact of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust. Their Web sites acknowledge the sexual violation of Jewish women.² The catalogue for a temporary exhibit at Yad Vashem includes information about a survivor who testified in postwar Germany about a Nazi who had raped her in Kowel, Poland.³ The recently accessible archives of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, hold Nazi documentation about forced prostitution and other atrocities that corroborates claims about the punitive use of women's bodies during World War II.⁴ Sexual violence began to be mentioned in some memoirs, documentary films, literature, and reports right after the Holocaust. In addition, more than five hundred testimonies housed in the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education mention rape.⁵ These references include rape by Germans and their Nazi collaborators, as well as by other Jews, in ghettos and in hiding; by Germans and collaborators, and by Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners, in camps; and by liberators. In addition to rape, there is another index term for coerced sexual activities, which brings the number of citations of sexual violence (including rape) to more than a thousand.

As suggested by these sources, a majority of evidence is found in survivors’ testimonies, of one kind or another, rather than in statistical data. By its very nature, and throughout history, sexual violation has not been accompanied by official documentation. During wartime, when laws governing civil societies fall by the wayside, such documentation is especially rare.

Although the Nazis kept meticulous records, there is virtually no official Nazi documentation of rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women. (Accounts were kept for authorized brothels, but they did not knowingly employ Jewish sex slaves.) There is no such thing as a rape certificate; in fact, rape victims were often murdered. Even when survivors disclose sexual violation in their memoirs, such allusions are often covert and offered without detail, echoing their modesty or shame. Because of the supposed lack of reliable hard evidence, it has been too easy for some Holocaust historians to discount and discredit allegations of rape and other forms of sexual violence against Jewish women.⁶

Nevertheless, there is a solid core of testimonies and memoirs by victims and witnesses that serves as evidence. In the absence of official documents, we must accept that a large number of testimonies by victims and witnesses do constitute documentation and proof, however subjective or personal they may be. We must treat them seriously as historical documentation, buttressed by women's experiences not only during the Holocaust but also in war. Rape has always been part of the violence of enemy combatants; this was no less true for Jewish women during the Holocaust. Our aim in this volume is to demonstrate the reality of this claim through careful examination of the sources that do exist. The authors included here comprise an interdisciplinary group of scholars with a wide range of methodologies. They examine testimonies, documents, memoirs, literature, and film. All take seriously the mission of building on earlier studies of women and the Holocaust. Together, they bring a new level of inquiry to this topic.

Although there has been an impressive proliferation of Holocaust memorials and museums since the late 1970s, sexual abuse has hardly been acknowledged as a theme, much less a central topic, worthy of investigation. For example, in the Auschwitz memorial in Poland, guides are trained to discuss mass genocide, but block 24a, the official camp brothel, is not mentioned. Nor has Yad Vashem (the official Israeli Holocaust memorial established in 1953) dealt openly with sexual abuse.⁷ There is little about women's experiences as women in the new permanent exhibit, and a temporary exhibit about women, Spots of Light: To Be a Woman in the Holocaust, which opened in 2007, mentioned but did not emphasize the question of sexual abuse.⁸ As Andrea Dworkin wrote: If the forced prostitution of Jewish women had been documented and understood, why the erasure from the contemporary collective knowledge—and all the museums and monuments? In fact, every act of prostitution in the camps—Jewish, German, Russian, Polish, etc.—was rape; why isn't a raped woman the symbol of the Holocaust—and why isn't rape part of all the exhibits in all the museums and all the memorials?⁹

When in the 1980s some feminist Holocaust scholars began to suggest that women suffered differently (but not more or less severely) than men during the Holocaust, most mainstream scholars either ignored or criticized their research.¹⁰ Holocaust scholars in the United States and Israel generally kept gender and sexual abuse questions out of the discourse. The first public event that addressed women, gender, and the Holocaust took place in March 1983, when Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim organized the groundbreaking Conference on Women Surviving the Holocaust at Stern College in New York. The 1983 conference is the wellspring that shaped the field and established the parameters, almost presciently, according to Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg; it uncovered the seeds of resentment evoked by a gendered study, for such an approach inevitably invites comparison and then judgment.¹¹ The conference raised ire among some of its participants; Rochelle Saidel observed that some Holocaust survivors became enraged when an audience member asked about sexual experiences in concentration camps.

Yet Ringelheim pressed on, writing in 1990 of the need to reveal the ignored and complex relationship between anti-Semitism (as a form of racism against Jews) and sexism prior to and during the Holocaust. She added: While it appears that anti-Semitism contains a monolithic view of Jews, in fact it looks at and treats Jews who are male and female differently. Our ignorance of these differences creates blind spots in the memories and reconstructions of the Holocaust.¹² Sadly, most Holocaust historians never gave Ringelheim's work serious consideration.

In 1993 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth co-edited the anthology Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, which strove to answer two questions: Where were the women during the Holocaust; and how do the particularities of women's experiences in that event compare and contrast with those of men? Rittner and Roth believed that [a] lot of significant detail has gone unmentioned if not unnoticed and sought to expose some of the particularities of women's experiences and reflections [that] have been submerged and ignored.¹³ Two years later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dalia Ofer, an Israeli professor of history and Holocaust studies, and Lenore Weitzman, an American sociology professor, organized a seminar on women and the Holocaust, with the papers later published as Women in the Holocaust.¹⁴ Ofer and Weitzman began the introduction to their 1998 book by asking: Why women? Should a book on the Holocaust—which targeted all Jews for annihilation irrespective of their sex or age or any other social characteristic—focus on women?¹⁵ They took up the topic of the resistance to research on gender in Holocaust studies, which helped to trigger Gabriel Schoenfeld's vituperative 1998 response in Commentary.¹⁶ Five years later, Baer and Goldenberg still felt the need to offer an explanation for focusing on women in their work Experience and Expression: Women, Nazis, and the Holocaust. To bolster their case, they quoted Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem, a highly respected Holocaust historian, who wrote: And if all human experience has a gender-related agenda, as women's studies tells us, the Holocaust can be no exception.¹⁷

Despite resistance, these and other Holocaust scholars have succeeded in the past decade in bringing gender into discussions of the Holocaust. In 1999, the then twenty-nine-year-old Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches presented Women's Holocaust History: Books in Print, its first plenary session on women and the Holocaust.¹⁸ The existence of a core set of books documenting research undertaken on women and the Holocaust made such a session possible.¹⁹ Since 1999, several other books have been published,²⁰ and workshops, plenaries, and panels about women and the Holocaust have taken place at the Scholars’ Conference, Lessons and Legacies conferences, the educators’ conferences at Yad Vashem, and the Association of Holocaust Organizations conferences. Since 2001, a conference devoted to women and the Holocaust has taken place biennially at Beit Berl College, Beit Terezin, and Beit Lohamei Haghettaot in Israel. A biennial conference on the Holocaust held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, chose women (but not sexual violence) as its theme in 2005. At all of these events, some individual papers addressed sexual abuse; none, however, featured discussions of sexual violence against women, a topic seemingly even more untouchable and likely to cause rancor than the (less controversial and more generic) discussions of women and the Holocaust.

A conference in 2007 about forced prostitution and war in the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, held at the Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial in Germany, offered scholarly work pertinent to women and the Holocaust. However, the first conference sessions completely devoted to the topic of the sexual violation of women during the Holocaust were organized by the editors of this volume, first at Middle Tennessee State University in 2007, then in Jerusalem at the 15th World Congress of Jewish Studies in 2009. In 2010, we believe we no longer have to justify scholarly interest in this subject.

By focusing on the sexual abuse of women, this volume goes beyond previous studies of women's experiences during the Holocaust. As with most innovative work, we know this book will have its critics and may be controversial. Nonetheless, we believe that what John K. Roth wrote regarding the study of women during the Holocaust in general also applies to the more specific investigation of the sexual violation of women: Far from reducing the Holocaust to an example of sexism, let alone making the Holocaust prone to some alleged hijacking by gender studies, an emphasis on what happened to women during the Holocaust reveals what otherwise would remain hidden: a fuller picture of the unprecedented and unrelenting killing that was the Final Solution.²¹

This volume's sixteen essays written by historians, social scientists, psychologists, literary critics, a film scholar, a human rights attorney, and a professor of nursing offer that fuller picture. Contributors come from Austria, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Ukraine, and the United States—diverse nations that approach Holocaust history differently. Grappling with the complexities of a difficult subject, members of this interdisciplinary and international group sometimes use the same sources but interpret them differently. One author's historical approach substantiates another's literary analysis; a psychological study may reinforce a film analysis. In this way, the essays reverberate, providing a pioneering overview of this topic, and will generate new discussions about women and the Holocaust.

Readers will see the terms sexual abuse, sexual violation, sexual violence, and sexualized violence used throughout the volume. Although essayists sometimes use different terms to signify the specific abuse under scrutiny, in all cases these terms denote forced sexual contact. Part 1, Aspects of Sexual Abuse, explores the different types of sexual violation to which Jewish women were subjected. In Death and the Maidens: ‘Prostitution,’ Rape, and Sexual Slavery during World War II, Nomi Levenkron outlines the scope of crimes that range from sexual humiliation to sexual slavery, from bartering sex for food to rape. Brigitte Halbmayr, in her essay, Sexualized Violence against Women during Nazi ‘Racial’ Persecution, suggests a new conceptual framework for more accurately describing women's experiences to include indirect expressions of assault, such as imposed public nakedness or humiliating methods of physical examination. Robert Sommer's chapter, Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels, uses Nazi documentation to analyze official Nazi-run brothels for privileged prisoners and the SS. In Schillinger and the Dancer: Representing Agency and Sexual Violence in Holocaust Testimonies, Kirsty Chatwood explores the term agency and its relationship to sexual abuse in Holocaust testimonies. Sometimes a woman tried to use sexuality to outwit her tormentors and save her life.

Part 2, Rape of Jewish Women, focuses specifically on rape as a form of aggression.²² In ‘Only Pretty Women Were Raped:’ The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in the Concentration Camps, Monika J. Flaschka uses survivor testimonies to analyze the effect of rape on women's images of themselves. She found a pattern of survivor statements that make the case that attractive women were more often targeted. Anatoly Podolsky draws on hitherto unexamined Ukrainian and Russian data for his richly conceived The Tragic Fate of Ukrainian Jewish Women under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1944. His access to newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union enables him to provide material generally unavailable to English-language readers. Helene J. Sinnreich gives a more generalized overview in The Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust, even naming some Nazi perpetrators as well as a Jewish leader who committed rape in the Lodz ghetto. In Rape and Sexual Abuse in Hiding, Zoë Waxman focuses on the subject of rape in hiding and points to the difficulties women have had in describing this ordeal. Her essay demonstrates that sometimes so-called righteous people who hid Jews from Nazis took advantage of the situation and sexually assaulted those they were supposed to be protecting. Each of the essays in this section draws attention to the additional connotations that the term rape—forced unlawful sexual intercourse against a person's will—signifies in the context of the Holocaust. If a woman allowed herself to be sexually violated by her so-called protector in order to stay alive, she still experienced a form of rape.

As part 3, Assaults on Motherhood, shows, forced sterilization and forced abortion also constituted sexual abuse of women. In Reproduction under the Swastika: The Other Side of the Glorification of Motherhood, Helga Amesberger documents how Nazi control of persecuted women's sexuality impacted pregnancy and motherhood. In Forced Sterilization and Abortion as Sexual Abuse, Ellen Ben-Sefer argues that in Nazi Germany, forced sterilization was directed at those deemed unworthy to procreate. The procedure, originally part of the eugenics movement (racial hygiene), was later incorporated into medical experiments and used as an instrument of annihilation in the camps.

Literature and cinema make important contributions to our understanding of women's fate during the Holocaust, lending the women voices and faces that we can recognize. In the introduction to her book on Holocaust fiction, Sara R. Horowitz wrote that her study presumes fiction as a serious vehicle for thinking about the Holocaust.²³ Like Horowitz and others, we believe that an examination of literary and film depictions of the Holocaust can be of great use. In fact, Holocaust literature and films may help to ensure the preservation of memory about historical events and even spark curiosity about the past; these media are the means by which most young people first learn about the Holocaust. According to Daniel R. Schwarz, As the historical period of the Shoah recedes, imaginative literature will help keep those events alive. Do we not know more about the War of the Roses and the history of Britain from Shakespeare than from Holinshed's chronicles?²⁴

Part 4, Sexual Violence in Literature and Cinema, examines how sexual abuse of women during the Holocaust has been addressed in literature and film, especially in the United States and Israel. In Sexual Abuse in Holocaust Literature: Memoir and Fiction, S. Lillian Kremer suggests a reciprocal relationship between the two genres, demonstrating how survivors’ first-hand knowledge of sexual assault found in memoirs is reworked in novels and a screenplay. Miryam Sivan analyzes the controversy that continues to surround Holocaust novels by an underappreciated Israeli author in "‘Stoning the Messenger’: Yehiel Dinur's House of Dolls and Piepel. In Nava Semel's And the Rat Laughed: A Tale of Sexual Violence, Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel discuss Semel's Holocaust novel based on the memories of hidden children who were molested by their supposed protectors. In ‘Public Property’: Sexual Abuse of Women and Girls in Cinematic Memory," Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan shows how women's experience of sexual abuse in documentaries and feature films is often obfuscated by the camera lens or director's point of view.

The volume closes with part 5, The Violated Self, offering two essays with psychological perspectives drawn from Holocaust testimonies and interviews. These add an important dimension to understanding the trauma of sexual abuse, as survivors may choose to reveal, distort, or leave hidden parts of their experience in order to develop strategies for living normal lives. Eva Fogelman provides an analysis of three different accounts of sexual abuse in Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women during and after the Holocaust: A Psychological Perspective. In The Shame Is Always There, Esther Dror and Ruth Linn present cases of Israeli survivors. These final essays also reveal some of the scholarly and emotional challenges of working directly with survivors and survivor testimony.

While we were preparing this book, we spoke with Judy Weiszenberg Cohen of Toronto, who has developed an important resource for scholars and students of women and the Holocaust. Originally from Debrecen, Hungary, and herself a survivor of Auschwitz, Cohen has created and maintains the Web site Women and the Holocaust: A Cyberspace of Their Own.²⁵ Cohen shared with us her insights about sexual violence against women, reiterating from her own experience some of the truths that this book brings to light.²⁶ She told us there was indescribable, hopeless hunger in Auschwitz, and that the fear of rape was omnipresent. She said that when women had sexual relations in exchange for food or shelter, or to save their children, these sexual relations, though seemingly consensual, were nonetheless rape in a moral and ethical sense.

Cohen provided testimony that rape and other sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women during the Holocaust caused traumas that were slow or impossible to heal. She spoke forcefully of the humiliation of the survivors: The taboo in those days was so strong, she said. Women, of course, [wouldn't] talk about it. I know someone who was working very closely with the aged Holocaust survivors before they died at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. I can tell you she was like the ‘mother confessor.’ [The survivors] would tell her before they died, ‘I was raped.’ These were grandmothers and great-grandmothers. They added, ‘but please don't tell my family.’

To explain this long-term shame, Cohen said, I think that the way we were conditioned, it was always the women's fault. You did something, you were provocative… there were certain things that happened that after the war were shameful to admit. Cohen is a strong advocate for this volume; she believes that it will complete the picture by showing how Jewish women experienced all the regular horrors of being abused from A to Z, a range that, for women, often included sexual violence.

With humility and compassion, we present this book as a challenge to claims that Jewish women were not raped or sexually violated during the Holocaust. This collection of essays expands our understanding of women's experiences by including in Holocaust history the sexual abuses they endured. We acknowledge that this book is only a beginning, intended to encourage dialogue and studies by other scholars.

Notes

1.   John K. Roth, Equality, Neutrality, Particularity, in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 14.

2.   For references to rape on the Web site of the United States Holocaust Museum, see, for example, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005176 and http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005176&MediaId=1118; for Yad Vashem, see, for example, http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/women-eng/womanhood.html (accessed December 17, 2009).

3.   Nina Rusman testified in Germany in 1964 at a trial against Manthay, a commander of the German gendarmerie, that he had raped her, she had become pregnant, and she was later unable to conceive because of a forced abortion. See Yehudit Inbar, ed., Spots of Light: To Be a Woman in the Holocaust (catalogue) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2007), 77–78.

4.   For example, see chapter 3 by Robert Sommer in this volume.

5.   Chapter 5 by Monika J. Flashka, chapter 7 by Helene Sinnreich, and chapter 15 by Eva Fogelman in this volume use testimonies from this archive. No other known oral history project specifically asked survivors to talk about rape.

6.   Nazi laws against Rassenschande (sexual relations between Aryans and non- Aryans) have prompted some historians to conclude that Jewish women were not raped, faulty reasoning that does not account for the persistence of rape in countries that have laws against it. Nazi guards could rape with impunity: if accused of Rassenschande, they could simply deny their actions.

7.   For decades, the history museum has exhibited a photograph of women stripped naked and about to be shot by the Nazis and their collaborators in Latvia. This display of nudity was criticized by ultra-Orthodox Jews in 1995. Ten years later, when Yad Vashem installed a new permanent exhibit in an updated museum, there were again demands by ultra-Orthodox critics for removal of this photograph, which does not show violation beyond forced nakedness.

8.   Inbar, Spots of Light, 67.

9.   Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 315.

10. For a historiography of gendered approaches to the Holocaust, see Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), xvii—xxvii.

11. Ibid., xviii.

12. Joan Ringelheim, Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust, in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottleib (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 145.

13. Carol Ann Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1993), xi.

14. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

15. Ibid., 1.

16. See Gabriel Schoenfeld, Auschwitz and the Professors, Commentary 105/6 (June 1998): 42–45; see also the response, Controversy: Holocaust Studies: Gabriel Schoenfeld and Critics, Commentary 106/2 (August 1998): 14–25. Schoenfeld accused researchers on women, gender, and the Holocaust of having counseled, nudged, prodded, and rebuked survivors until they believed that gender issues were important in concentration camps, adding that we will sever Jewish women, in their own minds, from their families as well as from the larger community.

17. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 167, quoted in Baer and Goldenberg, Experience and Expression, xxvii.

18. Myrna Goldenberg and Rochelle G. Saidel co-chaired this session. Goldenberg has continued to be at the forefront of efforts to put issues regarding women, including sexual abuse, into Holocaust studies discourse. With Elizabeth Baer, she co-edited Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Saidel, co-editor of this volume, wrote The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

19. Books on women and the Holocaust published from 1998 to 1999 included Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998); S. Lillian Kremer, Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Esther Fuchs, ed., Women and the Holocaust (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: University Press of America,