Women Of Auschwitz Memories of Surviving Jewish Women Inside the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Struggling with Racism and Sexism

By Jim Colajuta

Over a million Auschwitz dead were Jews, and more than half of them were women. The Auschwitz concentration camp was one of the most horrific places ever conceived of by man, a place of constant torture. The experience was uniquely terrible for women, who were forced into some of the most unimaginable circumstances. Even years later, the mothers who survived couldn't escape the memory.

This book examines eleven memoirs authored by female Jewish Auschwitz survivors to show how complex their experiences in the camp were. Though identical to men's, only women dealt with sex-specific concerns such as pregnancy, infertility, or amenorrhea. Other experiences, such as shaving their heads, had a different effect on women than on males. Sixty years after their liberation, these women's experiences in Auschwitz live on through their memoirs, even if the authors have long perished. Individuals who were not in the camps can gain an understanding of what daily life was like for Jewish women through the lens of these testimonies. Each of these people had a one-of-a-kind experience that needs to be remembered and commemorated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Apr 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201094294

Book preview

Chapter One

Introduction

During the Second World War, Jewish women suffered racism and sexism in German-controlled territory. While the Nazi state promoted the qualities of kinder, küche, kirche for Aryan women, Jewish women were reviled as racial degenerates. Adolf Hitler warned his supporters about the perils of mingling Jewish and Aryan blood in Mein Kampf as early as 1924. He expresses his concern

look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood. Bear in mind the fact that this poisonous contamination can be eliminated from the national body only after centuries, or perhaps never. Think further of how the process of racial decomposition is debasing and, in some cases, even destroying the fundamental Aryan qualities of our German people so that our cultural creativeness is gradually becoming impotent.

Hitler saw Jewish women in particular as particularly dangerous because of their propensity to bear new generations of considered enemies of the Reich. To avoid this, Nazi propaganda painted Jewish women using their sexual cunning to lure Aryan men to their demise. The Nazis pushed vehemently that Jewish motherhood is extinguished forever. Following Hitler's ascension to power, rules governing Jewish women's abortion and pregnancy rights were implemented. With the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became unlawful for Jews to engage in sexual relationships with Aryans. Policies aimed at Jewish women, particularly mothers, were expanded in the death camps, particularly Auschwitz. Before entering the camp, passing the initial examination was especially difficult for Jewish women. The majority of women arriving on the transports were pregnant, had children under the age of fourteen, or were over forty-five and deemed too elderly to work by the SS, so they were promptly taken to the death chambers. Males were less likely to be sent to their deaths when they arrived at Auschwitz since the Nazis required healthy men to work as slave laborers. Women hired as laborers were often in their twenties and had no children. According to camp statistics, just 130,000 of the 400,000 prisoners held at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 were women. The problem with using these records is that they only include individuals who entered Auschwitz as employees. Those who were chosen for execution upon arrival were never counted, providing historians with an incomplete picture of the total number of people who died there. According to records, just 16,577 female detainees remained for the final roll call on January 17, 1945. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz 10 days later, nearly four thousand of the seven thousand prisoners who had not been compelled to leave by the SS in forced evacuations were women. Despite being on the verge of death, these people had not succumbed to Hitler's so-called Final Solution, which sought to destroy all European Jews. These women had lived despite all odds.

But what exactly is a Holocaust survivor? A survivor is more than just someone who lived through WWII under the Nazi government. Members of towns that were left intact and persons who remained to live in their own homes throughout the conflict are not included in the definition. On the other hand, a survivor is someone who lived through the Nazi labor/concentration camps, one of the few people who managed to escape from the camps, and the men and women who were in hiding throughout the entirety of the war. In other words, to be a Holocaust survivor, a person must have been a victim of Nazi persecution. Only 1% of the roughly 1.6 million people who were deported to Auschwitz are known to have survived and decided to write about their experiences. This is problematic since the experiences of men and women in Auschwitz were not identical. Women and men were frequently subjected to various horrors within the same hell. Only women had to deal with sex-specific issues like amenorrhea, rape, pregnancy, abortions, and invasive gynecological exams performed by enthusiastic SS doctors' and Kapos seeking valuables. Historians unknowingly continue to silence women by continuing to accept male opinions as typical of the experience of all Holocaust victims. Though male Auschwitz survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi are great writers, historians should not consider their memoirs to represent 'the' Jewish Holocaust experience. There will never be a realistic representation of women's daily existence in Auschwitz until women's voices are heard. When reading memoirs, remember that similar experiences are not the same. The eleven memoirs reviewed in this book do not and cannot cover every aspect of every woman's Auschwitz experience. Even though liberation occurred over seventy years ago, many survivors appear to feel an urgency to share their experiences in Auschwitz. Many of these ladies have rushed to publish in the last 10 years because they fear that if the last survivor dies, society will forget the crimes that transpired at Auschwitz. With so few survivors still alive and knowing that their own death is impending, these women think that by writing and reminding people of the atrocities of Auschwitz, they will prevent another Holocaust of that size from occurring. Another reason these women may have felt compelled to write memoirs is that they recognized most people only knew the accounts of notable males in Auschwitz, such as Borowski or Levi. Although both of these men mention women in their memoirs, albeit briefly, they cannot provide an accurate account of women's lives in the camps. While the images depicted are not necessarily wrong, they simply represent one aspect of women's lives.

This book aims to add to the field of women in Holocaust literature. Though there have been books written on Holocaust literature by and about women, none have focused solely on memoirs written by Jewish female Auschwitz survivors. Indeed, many of these works appear to put all female Holocaust survivors together, as if there was a single universal female Holocaust experience. While numerous men's experiences are documented, the study of women and the Holocaust appears to focus solely on three women: Anne Frank, Charlotte Delbo, and Gerda Klein. While studying their stories is crucial, it is only by comprehending the multiplicity of the victims and the complexities of their lives that the Holocaust's lessons may be completely absorbed into history.

Chapter two

The Leading Ladies

The memoirs were chosen based on numerous factors, including the authors' gender, Jewishness, and time spent in Auschwitz. Aside from that, their life stories were diverse; some were married, while the majority were not. One had children, another was pregnant, while the others had no children. Their experiences in the camps continued to diverge. Some were fortunate enough to work in positions of affluence, while others were forced to undertake manual labor. Some stayed with family members during their imprisonment, while others were the only survivors.

Rena Kornreich Gelissen. Gelissen,