Abstract
‘The road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as women.’1 Yet, the subject of gender is a relative newcorner in the wider field of Holocaust studies.2 It is only in the last twenty years that this area has been explored. Before this time, the subject was barely touched for a number of reasons. First, the field of Holocaust studies itself was quite limited in its scope and development from the immediate post-war years until the 1960s and 1970s.3 Only as certain other issues and areas were researched did questions about women and the family come onto the agenda for research. Second, questions pertaining to gender simply were not asked. It took until the era of ‘second-wave feminism’ in the 1970s, with new developments and trends in historical awareness about the history of women and rendering them ‘visible’, for these issues to be raised. As a result of feminist scholarship, the concept of gender as an analytical tool developed. Third, the state of the available sources was not conducive to advancing research in this area. It took until the 1970s for a proliferation of survivors’ memoirs to appear, as well as collected testimonies, which became an important source for researchers in this field. Gender studies of the Holocaust, therefore, appeared only once the field had developed to a certain point. They emerged as a response to existing research and available sources within the wider field of Holocaust studies, and indeed women’s studies.
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Notes
R. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (London: Lime Tree, 1993), p. 126.
On this, see J.T. Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), pp. 39–52.
On this, see R. Hilberg, ‘Developments in the Historiography of the Holocaust’, in Comprehending the Holocaust: Historical and Literary Research, eds. A. Cohen, J. Gelber and C. Wardi (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1988), pp. 21ff.
J. Ringelheim, ‘The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust’, Simon Wiesenthal CenterAnnual, 1 (1984), 69.
Ibid., p. 73.
C. Delbo, Auschwitz and After (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
S. Milton, ‘Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. R. Bridenthal, A. Grossmann and M. Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), p. 311.
H. Schramm, Menschen in Gurs: Erinnerungen an ein franzosischen Internierungslager, 1940–1941 (Worms: Heintz, 1977), p. 88.
L. Weitzman and D. Ofer, ‘The Role of Gender in the Holocaust’, in Women in the Holocaust, ed. D. Ofer and L. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 1.
On this, see M. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 59–62.
M. Kaplan, ‘Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany’, in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, p. 43.
On this see M. Kaplan, ‘Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles, 1933–1939’, Feminist Studies 16 (1990), 579–606.
M. Goldenberg, ‘From a World Beyond: Women and the Holocaust’, Feminist Studies 22 (1996), 667–87.
Ibid., p. 204. On Jews living outside the ghettos, see also G. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), and I. Fink, The Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
L. Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (London: Robson, 1996), pp. 98–100.
S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 18.
J.T. Baumel, ‘Social Interaction among Jewish Women in Crisis during the Holocaust: A Case Study’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), 65.
On this, see M. Goldenberg, ‘Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust’, in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. R. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 150–66. The very useful anthology, C. Rittner and J. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993), is also aimed at achieving a better understanding of women’s experiences of the Holocaust.
L. Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), p. 165.
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G. Schoenfeld, ‘Auschwitz and the Professors’, Commentary, 105, 6(1998), 42–6.
S. Horowitz, ‘Women in Holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory’, in Women in theHolocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, p. 375.
Ibid., p. 376.
A. Hardman, ‘Women and the Holocaust’, Holocaust Educational Trust, Research Papers, 1, 3 (2000), 6.
Ibid., 11.
B. Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).
S. Horowitz, ‘Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Germany’, in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. J. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), p. 265.
Z. Waxman, ‘Unheard Stories: Reading Women’s Holocaust Testimonies’, The Jewish Quarterly, 177 (2000), 53.
Ibid., 57–8.
N. Stargardt, ‘German Childhoods: The Making of a Historiography’, German History, 16 (1998), 1–15. On children’s perspectives of the Holocaust, see S. Vice, ‘The Holocaust “From Below”: Child’s-eye Perspectives’, The Jewish Quarterly, 182 (2001), 38–42.
On children in the ghetto, see B. Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, trans. M.G. Levine (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997).
Y. Inbar, ed., ‘No Child’s Play’: Children in the Holocaust- Creativity and Play (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), p. 1.
G. Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 6.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 106.
L. Pine, ‘German Jews and Nazi Family Policy’, Holocaust Educational Tmst, Research Papers, 1, 6 (2000).
Ibid., 17–18.
Ibid., 18.
L. Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), p. 178.
D. Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 261.
I. Rewald, Berliners who helped us to Survive the Hitler Dictatorship (Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 1990), p. 4.
E. Freund, cited in Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries, ed. M. Richarz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 421.
H. Levy-Hass, Inside Belsen (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 30.
B. Bettelheim, Surviving the Holocaust (London: Fontana, 1986), p. 36.
J. Ringelheim, ‘Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10 (1985), 747.
R. Ritvo and D. Plotkin, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station, TX: A & M University Press, 1998), p. 252.
G. Perl, I was a Doctor at Auschwitz (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1992), pp. 80–4.
M. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
R.R. Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).
V. Laska, ed., Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); M.L. Rossiter, Women in the Resistance (New York: Praeger, 1986).
R. Poznanski, ‘Women in the French-Jewish Underground: Shield-Bearers of the Resistance?’, in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, pp. 234–52.
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See also B. Distel, ed., Frauen im Holocaust (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 2001), pp. 245–328.
G. Tillion and A. Postel-Vinay, Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbruck (Liineberg: zu Klampen, 1998); R. Schwertfeger, Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp (Oxford: Berg, 1989) offers a cogent description of everyday life in Theresienstadt and the fate of its inmates, interwoven with a collection of women’s writings from that camp.
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Pine, L. (2004). Gender and the Family. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_17
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