Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on September 28, 2015

Holocaust

Virtually unexplored until recently, sexualized violence in the Holocaust took many forms, faces, and insidious paths. Among the more than 6 million Jews killed were an unknown number of women, probably thousands, who were rapedin camps, in hiding, in ghettos. The perpetrators were Nazis, fellow Jews, and those who hid Jews. There are few records of this particular form of suffering for many reasons, including no records being kept of rape, that few women survived, and that Nazis were specifically forbidden from sexually touching Jewish women because of race defilement laws called Rassenchandehence, some scholars have been loath to believe sexualized violence was extensive.

But individuals didnt always follow the higher ranks, secretly raping Jewish women against policyin camps, in private slavery in their homes, and in brothels set up for fellow prisoners. And we know this form of violence was rampant from testimonies of survivors and their relatives, as told in the 2010 book Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (referred to below as Sexual Violence).

With the launch of their book, Hedgepeth and Saidel experienced much pushback from scholars. As in any other conflict, survivors of sexualized violence and their family members often experience shame, keeping their stories with them to the grave. Faced with horrors on a scale not experienced by humanity before, Holocaust rape survivors have specifically said they felt that what theyd suffered was too small to mention in that context.

Some of the inmates at the Ravensbrck concentration camp for women in Germany.

Its not just the women who downplayed their sexual exploitationscholars have often relegated these stories to footnotes, choosing to tone down these experiences, whether because of shame that their mothers, grandmothers, or whoever close to them were raped, or because they chose instead to focus on stories of triumph and hope. Some scholars have been reluctant to use victim testimonies in their construction of Holocaust history, favoring official documents. This is problematic because Nazi documentation on rape is scarce or nonexistent. Also, the shame of Jews raping Jewish women in the camps or ghettos may have been a difficult truth to accept within the community.

Another way that women suffering sexualized violence during the Holocaust has been erased is through a heroic retelling of events: Historians have been eager to emphasize the ways in which women resisted rape and held onto their dignityexhibiting moral, heroic, or noble behavior. Survivors may feel pressured to present their experiences through the lens of heroism.

With the information gleaned from thousands of testimonies from the Shoah Foundation and elsewhere of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors in one book, the evidence is clear: As in nearly all conflicts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, women suffered sexualized violence in horrific, complex ways in the Holocaust.

Unlike in other genocides in the 20th century, sexualized violence was not used during the Holocaust as a sanctioned strategy from above. It was, however, employed deliberately and haphazardly, with horrendous results.

To subjugate: In their quest to annihilate the Jewish people, Nazis subjugated them through starvation and slave labor. But Jewish women were subjugated on a sexually violent level as well: raped, sexually humiliated, and destroyed bodily.

For ethnic cleansing: The U.N. defines ethnic cleansing as a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. The Holocaust was an effort to completely annihilate the Jewish people. We are using the term ethnic cleansing here to denote that sexualized violence was used to prevent the propagation of Jews and other groups of people. Ethnic cleansing not only makes women subject to outright murder, but also controls the threat of their bodies as the means of reproduction. For instance, women have been raped in order to occupy "inferior" wombs with "superior" sperm, or forced to have abortions or sterilizations (as have men of "inferior" groups) in order to end future reproduction. In some conflicts, women are also subject to the sex-specific political torture of forcing them to bear the child of their torturer in order to break their will. In the Holocaust, forced sterilizations and abortions, as well as heinous "medical" experiments, prevented Jews and Sinti-Roma (or Gypsies) from later having children.

To wield power: Some women were forced to accept rape as payment for receiving food or shelter, or to save their children, in the camps and ghettos under Nazi control. This was also used as a tool when women were in hiding to bring silence through humiliation and fear. Nazis; their collaborators; Kapos (prisoners in charge of prisoners); male prisoners (Jewish and non-Jewish) who had more food or privileges than the women; members of a Judenrat (Nazi-appointed council that governed a ghetto) all wielded power over women through various forms of sexualized violence.

To humiliate: Women were forced to strip in front of soldiers, stand naked for hours, even days, or wait naked in lines for disinfection, or were whipped naked or made to dance naked. One of the biggest humiliations for a woman was having her hair shaved, not only from her head but from all over her body. Rape sometimes took place in front of relatives in forced home invasions, or fellow camp prisoners. In one "show" in Auschwitz-Birkenau, German soldiers raped 20 Jewish women in front of a labor group, who were supposed to stand and applaud, writes Helene Sinnreich in Sexual Violence. According to the testimony of one witness survivor, one of the women who were raped was from his hometown; she later committed suicide.

Despite the many testimonies from Jewish and non-Jewish survivors that mention the prevalence of rape and the threat of sexualized violence, it is likely impossible to come up with any plausible numbers. The scale of the Holocaust was so immense, and the atrocities so widespread, that we can only recount individual acts and statements like this one, in Sexual Violence, from a Warsaw doctor: One continually hears of the raping of Jewish girls in Warsaw. Continual, terrifying, and obliteratingsexualized violence must be recognized as a tornado force in the Holocaust without quantification.

Women were expected to prevent rape; hence they were often blamed for what happened to them. It was considered their fault. They were thought of as loose, immoral. This is yet another reason for the decades of silence.

Families and/or societies ostracized or stigmatized victims of sexualized violence after the Holocaust, as after many conflicts in which women's bodies have been part of the battleground. So-called pretty women who survived were suspected of having done so by granting sexual favors, and sometimes were stigmatized even though they were not victims of sexualized violence. Sometimes people or even communities tried to identify ways in which a woman's actions contributed to her own sexual assault, rather than offering to help rebuild her life. Some raped women felt they couldn't marry; others were shunned.

This testimony from survivor Sara M. comes from the USC Shoah Foundation (interview 29016). Sara M. was raped at the Ravensbrck concentration camp. A woman took her from her barracks, gave her candy, and left her in a room:

Much of the sexualized violence during the Holocaust was committed outside the camps. The following is a testimony from survivor Golda Wasserman, who witnessed girls being raped and sent back to the Tulchin ghetto in the Ukraine, in 1942, from Holocaust in the Ukraine, edited by Boris Zabarko:

"Selection was carried out every 15 to 20 days. It is impossible to describe what was happening in the ghettothe desperate screams of the girls, the pleas of their parents. Some girls tried to run away along the road. The Fascists shot them in the back. Only a few managed to hide in the villages, pretending to be locals, or were saved by the partisans after long wanderings in the forests. I belonged to the latter group. Among 25 other girls, I was picked to be sent to 'work.'"

Although no official precedents were set at the 1945-1946 trials at Nuremberg--its charter did not explicitly refer to rape or sexualized violence--the possibility of prosecuting sexual violence as a war crime was present, argues Anne-Marie de Brouwer, the author of Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence. She writes that sexual violence could have been prosecuted under other inhumane acts and other headings already recognized by international law.

(Lauren Wolfe/published on February 8, 2012)

More here:
Holocaust | Women Under Siege Project

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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