The Duality of the Women Within the Holocaust
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 9-2020 The Women that No One Wanted to See: The Duality of the Women within the Holocaust Valerie Cabezas-Iacono The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4040 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE WOMEN THAT NO ONE WANTED TO SEE: THE DUALITY OF THE WOMEN WITHIN THE HOLOCAUST by VALERIE CABEZAS-IACONO A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York 2020 i © 2020 VALERIE CABEZAS-IACONO All Rights Reserved ii The Women No One Wanted To See: The Women Within The Holocaust by Valerie Cabezas-Iacono This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. Date Elissa Bemporad Thesis Advisor Date Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis Executive Officer Execytive Officer E xecutive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Women No One Wanted To See: The Women Within The Holocaust by Valerie Cabezas-Iacono Advisor: Elissa Bemporad This paper is a brief historiography of the complexities of unraveling how gender constructs inform how society perceives both female perpetrators of the Third Reich and victims of sexual assault during the Holocaust. The women within these categories experienced vastly different power dynamics from 1939-1945 with the implementation of anti-Semitic ideology that would go on to forge the genocidal policies of the Nazi State. Seemingly, Aryan and Jewish women had no traits that linked them besides their biological sex, and this one factor determined how their experiences would translate within the male-centered discourse of the Holocaust. The framework of Holocaust studies has failed to address how to incorporate women without seeking to further align them into a separate sphere of the female-gendered perspective, which has chosen to view the role of women through the lens of victimhood regardless of whether they were Aryan or Jew. The failure to incorporate gender analysis as a necessary means of analysis has also served to sever the ways in which sexual violence during the Holocaust was an incomparable commonality that affected both men and women, yet relegated them to separate spheres of silence and visibility. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, Professor Elissa Bemporad, for her encouragement and for sharing her extensive knowledge and feedback during my writing process. When I started this paper, I wanted to address the horrors of one of the most shameful times in history and to understand the ways that a mass genocide can occur. I questioned the ways in which people justified themselves, either as bystanders or participants or both. During that time, George Floyd was murdered by the police in broad daylight and sparked visceral outrage across the nation. The world watched as global protests erupted. Families and friends had uncomfortable and serious discussions of the systemic racism that is deeply entrenched within the United States of America. I wondered how united we are when the treatment of people of color has been an issue since the inception of this nation. I remember a class in German History that I took as an undergrad student in which the discussion one day was centered on bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust. One student stated that he would never have gone along with the murderous policies of the Nazi Regime, to which my professor answered, “Yes, you would have; that is the magnitude of fear and oppression within a totalitarian regime.” I often think about that day in class and wonder whether my professor were right. It is possible that under certain conditions, people can become versions of themselves that they would otherwise loathe? The murder of six million innocent men, women, and children tells us that it was. But watching so many of today’s youth get as involved as they have with such passion makes me feel optimistic, and when I wonder if I have done my part, I think of my daughter, Kalista, and how my husband and I have tried to install important values in her. I do not take v credit for how she expresses herself so thoughtfully with issues regarding race and gender or for how she understands her place of privilege when doing so, but I would like to think that I have contributed as a sounding board to her thoughts and ideas. I would like to end this by thanking my family. First, to my husband, Mark, whom I would not let watch any television or even speak while I was writing and who so patiently acquiesced to these demands. His patience and support have helped me feel grounded while pursuing my education. To my mother who is forever a woman that I strive to be like. She is my best friend and truest confidant, and it is without a doubt, through her love and support, that I was able to get through all these years in pursuing my degree. And last, but not possibly least, I would like to thank my beautiful daughter, Kali. She is everything I hope to be when I grow up. Her intelligence, thoughtfulness, and bravado have me in constant awe. I have never met anyone like her and know that I never will. Thank you for listening to countless versions of this paper, helping me make notes, doing it in fancy calligraphy for my viewing pleasure, and for encouraging me every step of the way. I hope I make you proud. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. v TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................. vii LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter One: The Miseducation of Biology ................................................................................. 12 Chapter Two: A Return to Kinder, Kuche, Kirche ....................................................................... 15 Chapter Three: Wife and Citizen .................................................................................................. 18 Chapter Four: The Feminine and the Formal Collide ................................................................... 21 Chapter Six: The Women Who Pled the Fifth and How Their Victims Saw Them ..................... 31 Chapter Seven: The Unique Assault of the Female Body under Nazi Occupation ...................... 42 Chapter Eight: For the Men That We Refused to See and the Methodology That Went into Hiding Them ................................................................................................................................. 50 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 61 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 64 vii LITERATURE REVIEW Gender expression is a social construct informed through implicit bias. In 1945, despite surviving Holocaust atrocities during which all sense of identity had been vanquished, men and women liberated from concentration camps felt that to regain a sense of normalcy, they needed to re-establish their identities by returning to a socially conformative construction of masculinity and femininity. So, through such a cultural and social lens most scholars have based their analysis of how gender played a role in the experiences and choices of both perpetrators and victims. In this review, I use the word “gender” to specify the role of women because heterosexual men are the standard protagonists within most historical narratives. It was not until the 1970s that women became visible within the mainstream narrative of the Holocaust; comparative studies then emerged among female scholars advocating for equal visibility of women in the Shoah. Some historians took issue with focusing on the differences between men and women as victims and highlighting their different survival tactics, believing that this ultimately detracted from the fact that both genders were equally persecuted for belonging to the same ethnoreligious group, but they did not respond with the same argument when comparing culpability and agency among female perpetrators in comparison to men. The fact that this became a contentious debate among historians about how to place women within the context of a genocidal apparatus demonstrates how women are viewed as peripheral actors within a social schematic construct that dictates how they should be portrayed within their own narrative. Historian Joan Ringelheim sums this up precisely when she states, “The Nazis' intentionality, if not all their actions, made clear that all Jews—young or old, male or female, it made