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Each Woman Dies Her Death a Thousand Times EACH WOMAN DIES HER DEATH A THOUSAND TIMES VOICES OF FEMALE EXPERIENCE IN THE HOLOCAUST by Michelle Johnston A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in History Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2018 © Michelle Johnston 2018 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract While the experiences of Holocaust victims are well studied in history, the nuances of female-centric elements of these experiences have been under-represented in Holocaust historiography until relatively recently. While there is no single, “typical” female experience in the Holocaust, a woman’s path, as well as elements of her suffering, were significantly shaped by her gender in unique ways. Utilizing female authored memoirs, this thesis examines experience and memory to illuminate unique elements of how the Holocaust was experienced by female victims. The ways in which gender influenced Holocaust experiences in the pre-WWII era, the era of deportations, and in camp confinement are explored, along with unique and significant examples of female-centric means of resistance. Issues such as menstruation, lesbianism, sexuality, hair loss, beauty standards, childbirth, fetishization of the female body and grief are explored in order to contribute to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of how women experienced the Holocaust. iii Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Gary Bruce for his help, advice and encouragement throughout the process of writing this thesis. Thank you to my husband, Michael, for his love, support and proofreading help! Thank you to my friends and family, who uplift me every day and make my success their own -- this is for us! iv Dedication For my Mum, Janet, and all of the mothers lost in the Holocaust. v Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Style of Writing ......................................................................................................................................... 7 Author Backgrounds ............................................................................................................................... 14 Chapter 1: Life at Home .............................................................................................................................. 16 Gendered Danger .................................................................................................................................... 18 Familial Relationships ............................................................................................................................. 24 Romantic Relationships........................................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 2: Deportation and Separation ..................................................................................................... 43 Deportation Experiences ........................................................................................................................ 45 Chapter 3: Women in Confinement ............................................................................................................ 53 Camp Arrival, Selection and Registration Process .................................................................................. 56 Hair Loss .................................................................................................................................................. 62 Gendered Camp Hierarchy & Deviations from Gendered Norms .......................................................... 68 Female Bodies in Confinement ............................................................................................................... 74 Sex ........................................................................................................................................................... 83 Chapter 4: Sexual Victimization .................................................................................................................. 94 Pregnancy................................................................................................................................................ 96 Menstruation ........................................................................................................................................ 104 Lesbianism ............................................................................................................................................. 109 Rape ...................................................................................................................................................... 114 Chapter 5: Female Resistance and Empowerment ................................................................................... 117 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 127 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 130 vi Introduction Happy are you who cannot see what they have done to your women. - Charlotte Delbo1 In life, women assume a number of roles. Daughter, sister, friend, lover, wife, mother, caregiver, grandmother and matriarch, among others. These roles are defined variously through self- identification, and through the relationships which women have with the people in their lives. Female identity is therefore various, heterogeneous, and hard to pin down to a single tangible identity. Equally, while laymen sometimes view the Holocaust as a single event, it is actually a conglomeration of many different events, experienced by many people in many geographically diverse places.2 Therefore, it is an especially difficult task to set about defining female experience in the Holocaust. While there are certain universal experiences, by and large female experience is individual experience. An archetypal image of the Holocaust is the musselman, a slang-term used in Auschwitz, brought to public consciousness by Primo Levi in If This is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz) to describe the starving, emaciated concentration camp prisoner whose suffering has been so profound that they have given up any will to live. In Levi’s words, they are “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection”.3 In most visual representations of the Holocaust, these musselmen feature prominently – usually in photos of those who managed to survive until their camp’s liberation and were photographed or filmed by liberating armies. They have become an enduring, profound visual representation of the horror of the camps and of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. An important feature of the musselmen is 1 Delbo, Charlotte, None of us Will Return, (Boston, NE: Beacon Press, 1978), 122. 2 Waxman, Zoe Vania, Writing The Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2. 3 Levi, Primo, If This is a Man, (London, UK: Abacus, 1987), 94. 1 that they are usually male. Many photos show these musselmen in the nude, their bodies rendered sexless through the grotesqueness of their suffering; however, even in states of extreme starvation and sickness, they are distinctly male. These powerful and enduring images ask an important question, articulated first by John Roth and Carol Rittner in their edited volume Different Voices: “where are the women”?4 Through the power of this iconography and male-centric historiography, Holocaust victims have been widely conceptualized without gendered nuance in academia and popular culture; this exemplifies, in the words of historian Sara Horowitz, “the marginality of women’s experience in constructing a master narrative of the Nazi genocide”.5 Consequently, the gendered facets of Holocaust experiences have remained under-explored until recently. Some female survivors and historians alike, such as Ruth Bondy, 6 Helen Fagin and Cynthia Ozick,7 have leveled a criticism at a female-centric focus that by studying the Holocaust through a gendered framework, certain suffering, in this instance female, is elevated over others. Of course it is integral to Holocaust scholarship that victims are equally represented in both academic discourse and memory. This is a myopic argument which effects the same outcome that it is critical of by ignoring certain experiences and realities, thereby diminishing the suffering of certain (female) victims. As such, female experience is one of the most understudied aspects of the most studied period in history. In discussing female-centric suffering, this work does not seek to minimize the suffering of men and children. In fact, by acknowledging the nuance of female experience in the Holocaust, a certain 4 Rittner, Carol, and Roth, John K., (eds.), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. (New York: Paragon, 1993), xi. 5 Horowitz, Sara, “Women in Holocaust Literature”, in Women in the Holocaust, Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (eds.), (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 367. 6 Ofer, Dalia, and Weitzman, Lenore (eds.), Women in the Holocaust, (New Haven, CT: Yale University
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