Teaching Sexualized Violence Against Jewish Women during the Shoah: New Perspectives through Visual, Spatial, and Testimonial Analysis
Marianne Hughes
Submitted 9 May 2019
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Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...... 3 Abstract ...... 4 Introduction ...... 5 Existing Historiography on Gender and the Holocaust ...... 11 Testimonial Analysis ...... 18 Current State of Curricula ...... 32 Educational Tool ...... 41 Conclusion ...... 45 Bibliography ...... 47 Primary Sources ...... 47 Secondary Sources ...... 52 Appendix (Digital Tool Text and Images) ...... 56
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Acknowledgements I would like to thank my parents, Rodney and Deanna Hughes, first and foremost, for everything. Mom and Dad, without your constant belief in me I would not have believed in myself. To my brother, Tobias Hughes, you have known that I could do this since graduate school was but a twinkle in my eye. Thank you for being here to continue to tell me so.
The History Department gave me the tools that I needed to succeed and allowed me the space to use them. I would like to thank Patty Ca as for always being there to listen and to give advice. Thank you Dr. Jill Watts for “throwing us out of the plane” when we needed that little push and for constantly telling me that I had it all under control even when I did not believe it.
Thank you Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall for letting me into your Women and Jewish History class five years ago so that I could discover my own potential, and for being my mentor thereafter. You have set me up for success. Thank you Dr. Jeffrey Charles for teaching all of us how to re-conceptualize the way we “do history.” Thank you Dr. Katherine Hijar for making me feel welcomed and seen on my first day at this school and for introducing me to the vibrancy of women’s history. Because of all of you, I have created something I am truly proud of.
Thank you Emilee Ramirez, the other half of the Dream Team—we started together and now we have finished together. Your friendship kept me sane and I am indescribably grateful for it. Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my boyfriend, Devon Truchsess. You brought me through this and your support allowed it all to be possible. Thank you for always seeing the best version of me—the version of me who could do this. The road to this thesis has been paved with challenges. The only way it was produced was through the grace and support of my family, friends, and colleagues. I could not have reached this point without any one of you.
Thank you,
Marianne Hughes
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Abstract
The study of sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust (Shoah) is well-documented, thorough, and accessible to the public. However, this subject is absent from many high school and college curricular resources available to educators. To bridge the gap between what historians know and educators teach, this thesis presents an overview of existing scholarship and curricular resources on sexual violence during the Shoah. It also provides a GIS- based digital tool to facilitate discussion in high school and college classrooms. It can be accessed at this link. This tool draws upon resources in the University of Southern California
Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The research presented here offers a more detailed analysis of particular testimonies than has been done in existing scholarship. The digital project that composes one component of this thesis is a map tool that helps the user visualize the scale of sexual assault against Jewish women during the Shoah, while also bringing users to the precise point in each testimony where each woman shares her experience with sexual violence. In mapping incidents of sexual violence, the map identifies certain patterns of sexual violence during the Shoah. These include acts of sexual violence in ghettos, on transportation, in hiding, and in concentration camps. In addition, it calls attention to the widespread prevalence of sexual assault by Soviet forces during liberation. Teaching students about sexualized violence during the Shoah at appropriate grade levels will work towards breaking the silences that exist both in the classroom and in the archive.
Keywords: sexualized violence, sexual violence, Shoah, Holocaust education, sexual assault, women in the Holocaust
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Teaching Sexualized Violence Against Jewish Women during the Shoah: New Perspectives through Visual, Spatial, and Testimonial Analysis
Introduction
Sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust is well-documented, thoroughly studied, and accessible to the public. Since 1993, historians have not only acknowledged the difference between men’s and women’s experiences during the Shoah but revealed the presence of sexual violence at every stage of the genocide. In every book or article that discusses sexual violence during the Shoah,1 the author sees their work as the impetus for further research. Yet in most curricular resources and online educational tools designed for upper-level high school and lower-division college classrooms, sexual violence is a footnote to other important topics and experiences.
Many, if not all, scholars who study sexual violence in conflict zones advocate for historical analysis and education as a way to battle human rights violations in current and future conflict. Yet, the subject continues to be taboo in Western culture even while public awareness of rape and assault continues to grow. Teacher and student alike may understand the importance of education in the prevention of sexual violence, but neither may know where to start. The purpose of this thesis is to present a clear review of existing historical literature and curricular resources on sexual violence during the Shoah, and to facilitate an easier way for students and teachers to talk about it at the appropriate levels in high school and early college, through the creation of an educational tool generated in historical Geographic Information Systems, using the
University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive as a framework.
1 Shoah translates to “calamity” in Hebrew. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem advocates for its use in reference to the murder and persecution of European Jewry in this time period as opposed to Holocaust, which translates to “sacrifice.”
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The testimonial research presented here will enhance previous research that has been done, and provide a more precise analysis of selected testimonies suitable for classroom use and streamlined into a tool that is easy to use and to understand. The combination of testimonial research and spatial analysis adds new perspectives to existing research. In mapping incidents of sexual violence, the map identifies certain patterns of sexual violence during the Holocaust.
These include acts of sexual violence in ghettos, on transports, in hiding, and in concentration camps. In addition, I call attention to the often-forgotten prevalence of sexual assault by Soviet forces during liberation.
The digital project that composes one component of this thesis is a map tool that helps the user visualize the scale of sexual assault against Jewish women during the Shoah, bringing them to the precise point in each testimony where each woman shares her story. It also prompts spatial analysis of certain patterns of assault between specific categories that I identified,2 and it illuminates the power dynamics that caused both the assaults and the silences that follow them.
The format, ArcGIS Story Maps, allows for the map to be accessible through the Environmental
Systems Research Institute (ESRI) platform and to the public through any device that is connected to the internet. Its value lies in its ease of use, which allows educators to bring it into any Shoah unit according to the themes they want to address, if they choose to include sexualized violence into the narrative.
The onslaught of sexual assault stories that flooded American media beginning in
October of 2017, otherwise known as the “#MeToo Movement,” drove teachers from both public and private institutions to have more open discussions with their students about sexual assault and human rights. Some high school teachers adapted their curriculum to include related
2 These categories are explained later in the thesis.
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literature, panel discussions, or professional guest speakers such as lawyers and social workers.3
The pattern among these ideas was teachers’ attempts to create an atmosphere of empathy among
students in order to address issues of sexual abuse in the news, at school, and at home. Parents
and districts began to advocate for lessons on sexual assault prevention as early as 2016,4 as a way to protect all students. Education on sexual violence during the Shoah would potentially be an extension of this push for prevention during a Holocaust unit in a high school World History class or college World History survey, a women’s unit in a Holocaust and Genocide studies class, or a Holocaust and Genocide unit in a women’s studies class.
The passing of Holocaust survivors creates a pressing need for their stories to be told, but the subject matter of this project would not be appropriate before high school and should be used with the utmost discretion. If educators choose to utilize this tool, the stories can connect students directly to survivors and promote empathy in the humanities classroom, no matter the subject.5 Every teacher may not feel that the subject matter is right for their classroom or their pre-established curricula, but this thesis and its accompanying tool will make it easier to do so for those who want to make room for it.
3 Michel Martin, “Teaching High School Students About Sexual Assault Through Literature,” September 30, 2018, in All Things Considered, produced by Carline Watson, podcast, MP3 audio, https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/653160035/teaching-high-school-students-about-sexual-assault-through- literature. 4 Moriah Balingit, “In the fight against sexual assault, this school district is teaching about consent,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-the- fight-against-sexual-assault-this-school-district-is-teaching-about-consent/2016/06/20/21158ed4-330f- 11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html?utm_term=.49e4d707a7c9. 5 “Our Impact,” Facing History and Ourselves, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.facinghistory.org/our-impact.
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One of several teaching guidelines set out by the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in their resources for educators is to “translate statistics into people.”6 Sexual violence
literature echoes this principle. In their 2010 anthology, Feminism, Literature, and Rape
Narratives: Violence and Violation, Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson argue that
making space for narratives of this nature is profoundly important because the alternative is
survivor silence and unchecked perpetrator violence.7 Because so few of these narratives have weathered the test of time and exist only through witness and survivor testimony, it is important to highlight those that are shared publicly. There is no way to know the true number of women that were violated during various stages of the Shoah, but it is imperative that their experiences are used in the classroom so that students can absorb its reality.
The number of women who have shared their stories and the stories of others is significant in its value, but ultimately there are not enough of them. There are inherent silences in the archives that are produced by the evident power dynamic of the event. Millions of women were murdered and still others cannot bear to tell. Survivors who experienced the horror of this type of assault “hide,”8 out of aversion to the stigma or the stress of reliving the trauma.
Because sexuality can be considered taboo, especially in its most violent forms, sexual violence
in the context of genocide has an air of “unthinkability,” to borrow a phrase from Michel-Rolph
Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. Trouillot wrote that the Haitian Revolution, “entered history with
the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened,”9 which resonates with the
6 “Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed October 20, 2018, https://www.ushmm.org/educators/teaching-about-the-holocaust/general- teaching-guidelines. 7 Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson, Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16. 8 Ibid. 9 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 73.
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initial academic response to sexual violence during the Shoah. Feelings of discomfort and shame
about sexuality and especially sexual assault that permeate culture both inside and outside of
male-dominated scholarship ensured that the idea of sexual violence against Jewish women
during the Shoah was both rejected and ignored. Continuing to tell the stories of survivors and
share survivor testimony--especially with students--unravels the doubt and skepticism with
which many approach the subject of sexual violence. It is this truth that will combat the denial
of sexual violence at large.
In order to spread the truths that can be found in testimony, the USC Shoah Foundation
Visual History Archive has made public nearly three thousand of the fifty-one thousand
testimonies created by the institution since 1994. Of the nearly two thousand testimonies that
mention sexual violence in the digital archive, most are from Jewish survivors.10 Over one thousand of these Jewish survivors are women, nearly half of whom gave testimony in English.
Fifty-four are readily available for public viewing. Although the two to three percent ratio of
English-speaking sexual assault survivors to English speaking testimonies in the archives may seem small, the availability of these stories is remarkable. Many women were raped before being brutally murdered, others did not wish to share or relive the experience, and Nazi and
Soviet documentation shows little to no evidence of any sexual violence.11 Many of the testimonies presented in this thesis are told by witnesses rather than the victims of the violence themselves, which highlights the ferocity with which this violence was carried out. Because it is impossible to know or even estimate the percentage of women who faced this violence, the
10 The real numbers are: 1,744 sexual violence testimonies, 1,713 sexual violence testimonies by Jewish survivors, 1,259 sexual violence testimonies by Jewish women, 514 sexual violence testimonies by Jewish women who speak English. 11 Nomi Levenkron, “Death and the Maidens: ‘Prostitution,’ Rape, and Sexual Slavery During WWII,” in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, eds. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 16.
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testimonies available are valuable to anyone who wishes to teach or learn about the subject, and ultimately to the world at large.
The testimonies and background information needed to teach about sexual violence during the Shoah are readily available, but the resources that compile them for classroom use are few in number. There is an array of scholarly work accessible to both teachers and historians that discuss not only sexual violence against Jewish women during the Shoah, but the subject of women in the Shoah more generally. When scholars first began to compile writing specifically about women, the goal was to let as many survivors tell their stories in their own ways as possible. The first wave of books in the 1990’s and early 2000’s gave both survivors and scholars room to write poetry and prose, critique film, and analyze testimony. Beginning with
Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel’s Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, a more focused field of Holocaust study emerged from the detailed and thorough analysis of existing testimony.
Because the study of sexualized violence during the Shoah is relatively new, certain subjects can be overlooked. This thesis contributes to the growth of the field by emphasizing testimonies given by Jewish women who survived or witnessed Soviet rape. As a significant aspect of the Jewish woman’s experience during the Shoah, Soviet rape is a necessary subject for analysis. Historians must ask their students: what did it mean to be a Jewish and a woman? The study of this subject continues to grow as historians discover new patterns of abuse and create new modes of analysis to answer this question.
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Existing Historiography on Gender and the Holocaust
Women’s Holocaust history has comprised a notable portion of Holocaust and Genocide
Studies for nearly thirty years. Though this focus was contested at first, researchers have come
to realize that gender as an interpretative lens does not negate the experience of one gender or
the other, but rather provides a deeper understanding of all survivor stories. The acceptance of
this emphasis allowed the study of Holocaust sexual violence to emerge.
In 1993, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Carol Rittner and professor of
philosophy of religion John K. Roth published Different Voices, the first book to focus solely on
the experiences of women during the Shoah. They describe the relationship between men’s and
women’s experiences as “devastatingly alike,” but fundamentally different.12 Nazis were intent
on exploiting and ultimately exterminating all Jews, but they were also aware of the power they
could wield by using gender to further divide the persecuted. In this context, sexualized
violence13 was another way to attack the Jewish population, and more directly to attack Jewish
women. 14 There is no “calculus of cruelty”15 that places the experience of either gender above the other on a pain scale. Every victim’s experience was unique, but certain patterns of violence can be distinguished in the Nazis’ attempt to dehumanize and destroy an entire generation of people. One of these patterns of violence was the sexual assault of Jewish women.
Rittner and Roth’s collection of works touches on several aspects of sexual violence in the context of describing women’s experiences as a whole. Women were assaulted in one or
12 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 1993), 3. 13 Brigitte Halbmyer, “Sexualized Violence against Women during Nazi ‘Racial’ Persecution,” in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, 29. 14 The assault of men is documented even less than sexual violence against women. Men often exchanged sex for food or simply targeted because of their vulnerability. The pattern of violence, however, does not mirror that which occurred against women. 15 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 3.
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both of two variations of attacks on the Jewish body. The first was an attack on the woman as a
mother or woman as a woman through forced sterilization and abortion, or prostitution. Nazis
perpetrated this violence in order to relegate Jewish women to the lowest level of service to the
Nazi regime--through the prevention of Jewish birth and then through turning the female Jewish
body into nothing but a commodity. The second assault was the attack on the woman as an
object over which a man in authority had power. The first type is more accessible for historical
discussion, as it was actively documented for administrative reasons and therefore, Rittner and
Roth discussed it--albeit briefly--in Different Voices.
At the time Different Voices was written, it was revolutionary in making a space for female survivors to tell their stories and to focus on the parts of their stories that were unique to women. Because it was the first of its kind, the work’s significance came from its representation of women’s testimony and the analysis of the parts that made each testimony gendered. Women discussed motherhood, family, loss of hair and clothing as a loss of femininity, menstruation or lack thereof in the camps, sterilization, witness or experience of pregnancy and childbirth, and relationships with other women. The scope of the work was wide enough to include all women, but large sections focused on the Jewish woman’s experience.
Taking cues from Different Voices, Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman continued to historicize the women’s Holocaust narrative in their 1998 book Women in the Holocaust. The authors made sure to include full testimonies from survivors, citing the need to save as much first-hand information as possible, due to the fact that they were members of the last generation that would hear these accounts from the survivors themselves. Ofer and Weitzman used the testimonies as evidence for greater historical arguments about how the socialization of Jewish and Eastern European women made their victimization different from men. Authors of the
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book’s chapters cited motherhood, participation in the public sphere, and labor as some factors of
this difference.
Ofer and Weitzman considered rape to be a rare occurrence in the testimonies that they
analyzed,16 despite the fact that multiple women mentioned it. By 1998, historians believed that
Jewish women endured forced attacks on reproduction and spirit such as forced sterilization,
forced abortion through Nazi cruelty or a need for survival, and forced prostitution. However,
the diaries and written testimonies that were frequently analyzed by historians often only hinted
at rumors of rape and assault that caused women to take certain precautions such as walking in
groups at night. To the editors and authors of this work, the fear of rape was a part of what made
women’s experience different from men’s rather than the reality of rape.
The various authors of the essays in Women in the Holocaust discuss rape in a few
scattered places throughout the book. The essayists echo Ofer and Weitzman’s focus on Jewish
women’s constant fear of rape. It is clear that no matter what choice a woman made, rape was
always a significant possibility. If a Jewish woman escaped Nazi persecution by retreating to the
forests in what is now Belarus, she “knew that the possibility of rape and murder was real,”17 but chose to endure the fear of Russian partisans for a better chance of survival. Women in Nazi transports would share their fear of further assault with one another after being humiliated by full-body searches from unrelenting orderlies.18 Professor of Holocaust and gender studies
Myrna Goldenberg cited a specific testimony in which the survivor stated that her fear of rape
was greater than her fear of death, and at one point she wished to poison herself alongside her
16 Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 6. 17 Nechama Tec, “Women Among the Forest Partisans,” in Women in the Holocaust, 226. 18 Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors,” in Women in the Holocaust, 333.
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female family members to avoid assault.19 However, even in stories like these, there was only a hint that sexual assault was a pattern rather than a rarity whose likelihood was exaggerated by mass fear.
An awareness of the reality of sexual violence during the Shoah slowly became a small part of the academic conversation toward the end of the twentieth century. Joan Ringelheim, the current Director of Oral History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote that one of the factors that drove her to collect oral testimony was the insistence of her colleagues at a
1979 conference that the fear of survivors’ children that their mothers had been raped was based on a fantasy “induced by the media’s sexualization of the Holocaust.”20 There was no research or documentation to support these claims, and the discussion very quickly ended. She attributed this lack of discussion to the tendency of humanity to “avoid listening to stories we do not want to hear.”21 She went on to insist that these stories exist and need to be told. It is no surprise, then, that oral testimony came to the forefront of the conversation twelve years later.
As the study of women in the Shoah evolved, scholars have focused more acutely on issues like sexual violence. In their 2010 book, Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel argue that there is a “solid core”22 of evidence on the subject and that the study of this evidence creates a much fuller picture of the suffering endured during the Shoah. This book was the first to come up against assertions--such as those made by Joan Ringelheim’s colleagues--that occurrences of rape and assault were isolated incidents that are now made irrelevant by the sheer existence of hundreds upon
19 Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors,” 336. 20 Joan Ringelheim, “The Split Between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust, 340. 21 Ibid. 22 Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, 2.
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thousands of testimonies that mention the witness or survival of sexual assault.23 The collective goal of the essayists and editors of the book was to take stories and studies that existed at the fringes of their fields, such as reproduction under the Nazi regime, rape and sexual abuse in hiding, or cinematic representations of assault, and bring them to the center of the conversation, using the multitude of testimonies that were available to them.
Many authors in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust laid the conceptual groundwork from which researchers could build more precise and detailed analyses, much like this thesis. For instance, Brigitte Halbmayr introduced the concept of “sexualized violence,” which she prefers over “sexual violence,” to portray the way that assaults on women were a symptom of Nazi racial persecution. Kirsty Chatwood urged historians to consider the agency of women when analyzing their testimonies. Psychologist Eva Fogleman suggested that perhaps “the therapeutic community failed the women survivors in general, and particularly those who were raped,”24 to help historians and others to better understand absences that exist in the archives due to trauma-related silence. No matter the scope or theme, the essays in this book lifted the voices of survivors in a way that reconceptualized the experiences of Jewish women for the scholarly community.
Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust became a groundbreaking work in women’s Holocaust history by opening up a discussion that desperately needed to begin and continues to be relevant to modern issues. Although it came up against critics who denied that its contents were representative of the majority of victims, it has spurred deeper study of the
23 Jessica Ravitz, “Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust,” CNN, June 28, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/24/holocaust.rape/index.html. 24 Eva Fogleman, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women during and after the Holocaust: A Psychological Perspective,” in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, 250.
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subject. The book is comprehensive, but Hedgepeth and Saidel insisted that much more
scholarship must be done and that their book is “only the beginning.”25
Significant resistance continues to exist against the study of sexual violence against
Jewish women in the Shoah, according to Zoe Waxman’s 2017 book, Women in the Holocaust:
A Feminist History. Waxman insists that historiography of the Holocaust still offers a “relatively male narrative.”26 As a feminist history, her book sets out to reveal the gendered hierarchies that existed in all forms of persecution during the Shoah. Waxman’s analysis is centered upon
Jewish women, but she makes a much broader argument about the effectiveness of a feminist approach to discussions of war and genocide and the patriarchal hierarchy of the Nazi regime that would have spurred Nazis in all ranks to take advantage of not only Jewish women but all women. She argues that gender is “a system that operates to subordinate women,”27 which echoes earlier scholarship that has addressed the fact that male hierarchy and authority in conflict zones have victimized women for millennia.28 Men in power target and assault women physically and mentally, using them as a tool to dominate the larger ethnic group. Most importantly, Waxman’s goal is to increase the visibility of these experiences. She does this to prove her argument about gender, but also simply to tell stories that needed to be told.
A great deal of research on sexual violence during the Shoah remains to be done, but the existing research described here can be of great value to those who wish to spread knowledge on the topic. Raising awareness of sexual violence during the Shoah can only help to bolster the
25 Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, xx. 26 Zoe Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8. 27 Ibid, 7. 28 Rhonda Copelon in Elizabeth D. Heineman, ed., Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 232- 233.
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work of the historians who have written about it thus far. Through thoughtful conversation and reflection about how women are treated during times of conflict, teachers can encourage their students to think critically about issues that continue to plague our world.
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Testimonial Analysis The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is an excellent resource from which
one can extract data and discern patterns in Holocaust testimony, especially for educational
purposes. The archive contains testimony from sixty-two countries in forty-one languages,
which makes it the largest digital collection of its kind.29 Despite the substantial number of
testimonies from Jewish women housed digitally within the archive, there has not yet been a
comprehensive analysis of all of them. The diversity of survivors’ nationalities is broad; the
majority were not native English speakers growing up in Eastern Europe and instead learned
English upon migrating to the United Kingdom, Australia, or the United States. This vast but
complex selection provides a representative demonstration of what happened to women in
ghettos, camps, and liberation.
In Judith Baumel’s words, the difference between written and spoken testimony can be
“pivotal” for anyone who chooses to listen.30 All testimonies used in this project were captured on video, illuminating the individuality and uniqueness of each story and drawing attention to each survivor’s deliberate use of certain words and phrases to describe their experiences.31
While visual testimony brings historical truths to light for researchers, it can also be of great use in the classroom. I have identified the testimonies in this section as individual stories within larger patterns of assault, which I am able to describe in greater detail so that any educator who wishes to use the research presented here to inform their lesson will be able to identify certain patterns to their students. The educational tool that accompanies this written piece links
29 “The Archive,” USC Shoah Foundation, accessed March 10, 2018, http://vhaonline.usc.edu/about/archive. 30 Judith Tydor Baumel, “You Said the Words You Wanted Me to Hear but I Heard the Words You Couldn’t Bring Yourself to Say”: Women’s First Person Accounts of the Holocaust,” The Oral History Review 27, no. 1 (2000): 17. 31 Ibid, 19.
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the user to the exact point in each testimony at which each survivor32 shares her assault story. A
short description of each video is also attached to each entry so that the user can pre-determine
whether the video may be too intense or triggering, or if it even relates to their reason for using
the tool. Some of the testimonies described in this section appear in the tool, but because the tool
is geographically-based and each survivor was not able to share the location of her assault at the
time of her interview, not all testimonies in the written portion appear on the digital tool, and
vice versa.
The public testimonies at the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive are sorted
for secondary educational suitability; one of the foundation’s primary focuses is education. Some
historians have begun to draw on the archive’s testimonies from Jewish women to supplement
their arguments about certain patterns of abuse among victims of sexual assault during the
Shoah, but not for educational purposes. In Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the
Holocaust, Hedgepeth and Saidel mention the archive several times. They use it as a testament
to their assertion that the subject was “virtually unexplored” yet well-documented.33 In the same book, Monika J. Flaschka examines thirteen Shoah Foundation testimonies and addresses the perception that women with markedly feminine characteristics were often chosen by SS to be sexually abused. Helene J. Sinnreich, applied fifteen of the testimonies to argue that despite the
Nazi concept of Rassenschande,34 “rape...did occur.” This thesis enhances and compliments
research such as this that came before it, and adds precision to the testimonial analysis that
32 Some testimonies are only available through the Visual History Archive website. In those cases, I direct the user to the archive’s registration page where they can set up an account and easily find the testimony and segment using the specific information I give for each entry. 33 Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, 1-2. 34 According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Rassenschande is a Nazi concept that classified relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans as “race defilement” to “protect German blood and German honor.” https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007902.
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already exists by targeting a specific selection of testimonies that the archivists themselves
filtered for educational use. The educational tool that accompanies the written portion of this
thesis heightens the visibility of these testimonies and divides them into individual, absorbable
categories.
According to my own analysis of the public testimonies in the archive, “pretty”35 women
were said by some survivors to be the preferred victims of the guards’ appetites, but every
woman was at risk of being abused and assaulted because of the nature of the violence. Some
women attributed their assault to their appearance but others chalked it up to their youth or
simply state, “we had to worry about rape because that’s what they did.”36 Shari Braun (17)37 was a Hungarian survivor who endured the Augsburg concentration camp. She shared that when she was a young girl, she was on her way to the lavatory when an older German man “grabbed
[her] in front.” To indicate her young age and non-feminine appearance, she stated, “I [did not have anything yet].”38 Although the man did not rape her, this assault exemplifies the pattern of
abuse of authority by which male officers and standers-by demoralized and stripped women of
their humanity. There is certainly some evidence that may make a case for the disproportional
victimization of “pretty” or feminine women to non-feminine women. Some survivors expressed
that they believed that their looks were to blame for their assaults, but Shari Braun’s testimony
proves that even the youngest women--those who had not grown into their bodies yet--were
preyed upon for the same reasons and in the same forms. Regardless of its state or age, any
35 Flaschka and many survivors use term “pretty” to characterize the relative attractiveness of the women they describe to the social context within which they lived. It is not a judgement on their appearance, but rather an identifier of a particular pattern. 36 Edith Bushell, Interview 105, Visual History Archive (Los Angeles: USC Shoah Foundation, 1994), Tape 2, 15:57. Henceforth, Visual History Archive will be VHA. 37 This is the number that corresponds to the survivor’s entry in the digital tool. It will be included next to all names of the survivors in this section that also appear in the tool. 38 Shari Braun, 1249, VHA (1995), Tape 3, 8:34.
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Jewish woman’s body was a target for a Nazi, as if it was another battleground on which to fight
the war.
Although sexualized violence was a tool of the Nazis, it was in no way an organized
system of oppression. Perpetrators did not record any type of sexual assault aside from forced
prostitution at concentration camp brothels,39 and even there non-Jewish German women were
“encouraged” to engage in sex work so that soldiers would avoid “impure contact.”40 The hierarchy of men in power does not seem to have planned out mass defilement of these women; rather, the evidence suggests that sexual violence was a form of oppression. Brigitte Halbmayr writes that sexualized violence during the Shoah is a product of the patriarchal and racist ideology of Nazism41 rather than an officially executed aspect of extermination.
There are several public testimonies in the Visual History Archive which demonstrates the random and arbitrary nature of sexualized violence in camps and ghettos. Austrian survivor
Erica Betts, who spent the entirety of her Shoah experience in Dachau after her deportation from her home city, Vienna, recalled, “there was sex from morning ‘til night...and you couldn’t do anything about it.”42 Officers would enter the barracks, rape all the women in the cell, then leave. She explicitly mentioned that there was “no organization” to the assaults that she witnessed and survived.43 A similar story came from Yugoslavian survivor Zora Goldberger
(15) who witnessed assault at the Kruscica concentration camp. She described how officers at her barracks “took the young girls and in front of everybody they raped them, and we heard them
39 Julia Roos, “Backlash Against Prostitutes’ Rights: Origins and Dynamics of Nazi Prostitution Policy,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1 (2002): 67. 40 Beverly Chalmers, “Sexual Villainy in the Holocaust,” Women and the Holocaust (2011), accessed January 28, 2019, www.theverylongview.com/WATH/. 41 Brigitte Halbmayr, “Sexualized Violence and Forced Prostitution in National Socialism,” Women and the Holocaust (2004), accessed January 28, 2019, http://theverylongview.com/WATH/. 42 Erica Betts, 20825, VHA (1996), 13:50. 43 Ibid, 14:40.
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crying.”44 There was no way to predict when this would happen, or how it would happen, but the women knew that it would.
A pattern of assault that is easily discernible in an array of testimonies in the Visual
History Archive is assault during transition or selection. These assaults ranged in levels of brutality. For instance, German survivor Marion Horn witnessed a multiple-perpetrator rape while being forcibly transported to a concentration camp in or near Sarajevo. She recalled being forced to watch alongside a Serb partisan whose wife was the victim. A guard called it a
“lesson” that she and the other prisoners could learn.45 She described the experience as unreal and mentioned that it haunted her nightmares for decades. “Then,” she said, “we went on. The train went on.”46 Polish survivor Lusia Haberfeld (8) witnessed mass rape at the
Umschlagplatz47 in Warsaw while she waited to be deported to the Majdanek concentration
camps. She described it as the “biggest hell on earth.”48 Ghetto guards would beat anyone for
any reason, and raped women at random. The torture caused two women to throw themselves
out of a window in front of the survivor. The nature of the brutality of these incidences of
violence is evident in the fact that they are told by those who witnessed them rather than those
who experienced them.
For those who had not yet come to experience sexualized violence in ghettos or
deportation, selection at the camps was particularly jarring. Hungarian survivor Maria Scheffer
(22) described her experience after selection:
44 Zora Goldberger, 9471, VHA (1995), Tape 2, 13:20. 45 Marion Horn, 6763, VHA (1995), Tape 2, 25:20. 46 Ibid, 28:18. 47 Umschlagplatz refers to the station in Warsaw where Jews were forced to wait before deportation. 48 Luisa Haberfeld, 20848, VHA (1996), Tape 3, 15:14.
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We were told to strip. We said, ‘Strip? But there are people!’ And of course, the answer to that would have been a huge whack on the head or whatever, so we had to strip. I was unfortunate enough to be immediately sexually assaulted. When I say sexually assaulted… [there was no intercourse] ...I was assaulted by hand. And again, I have never ever forgotten the feeling of this person touching me. In the end that wasn’t the most important. That somehow went into the background. The other things that happened had taken over.49
All three women in this sample who were assaulted during transition describe their experiences
within the context of the suffering that happened around them. For Marion Horn, it was one stop
on a train ride to an unknown destination. For Lusia Haberfeld, it was part of what made the
Umschlagplatz hellishly horrific. For Marion Scheffer, it was the first of many “important”
things that happened to her. Each chose to talk about what happened because it was fundamental
to their story as a whole.
Even though women were stripped of nearly all of their agency, one way that they could
navigate their mostly choiceless landscape was to use sex as a bargaining tool for their own or
their loved ones’ survival. In the Pabianice ghetto, Polish survivor Rita Hilton (5) described
being “molested” by a non-Jewish man that she knew50 after asking for milk to take back to her grandmother. She shared that she was unaware up until the point of the interaction that allowing the man to touch her was “the only way to get favors from him.”51 Erika Gold (27), a German
survivor who was sent to the Rivesaltes internment camp in Vichy France, told a story of
heroism in which she attempted to deliver food to her mother in the camp prison. She begged
the guard to allow her to bring bread and water to her starving mother, who told her she could
and immediately began to molest her. She was “too young to even understand”52 what
49 Maria Scheffer, 4187, VHA (1995), Tape 4, 1:22. 50 Rita Hilton, 30717, VHA (1997), Tape 2, 14:04. 51 Ibid, 14:14. 52 Erika Gold, 21372, VHA (1996), Tape 2, 23:51.
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happened, and came back every day to take care of her mother until she was allowed out of the
prison. In the words of Lawrence Langer from his 1982 book, Versions of Survival: The
Holocaust and the Human Spirit, each situation in this case exemplifies a “choiceless choice,”53
that placed the woman between allowing a loved one to suffer or doing whatever she could for
survival. Another example of this would have been voluntary abortions in the camps, acts which
destroyed life to preserve life.54 It is important to note that these choices tended to occur in
ghettos or prison camps rather than death camps.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing versions of the abuse of male authority is Laura
Hillman’s story. When Laura (23) was nineteen years old at the Krasnik concentration camp in
Poland, a junior SS officer convinced her that he could help her to get out of the camp. Hopeful,
Laura believed him and got a permit to leave the camp under the guise of bookwork. “No sooner
did he have me outside,” she shared, “he took me up to a room and brutalized and raped me...he
was called away by a telephone call otherwise I might never have gotten out of there.”55 Laura
was likely correct about the telephone call; the murder of Jewish women following their rape is a
factor in the lack of first-hand testimony available to historians now.
Assault on Jewish reproductive rights was foundational to the way that Nazis operated, so
it is unsurprising that their hatred manifested in ways that were brutal and intentional. Hitler
popularized the idea of the “licentious Jew”56 in Mein Kampf, which formed the basis of Nazi
ideology. The portrayal of Jews as financially manipulative and vile made it easy for anti-
Semitic circles to unilaterally propagate the idea that Jewish men wanted to corrupt German
53 Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 72. 54 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 104. 55 Laura Hillman, 1208, VHA (1995), Tape 1, 27:12. 56 Chalmers, “Sexual Villainy in the Holocaust.”
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women, which bled into Nazis’ treatment of Jewish women. In her 2015 article, Robin May
Schott explains that genocide is ultimately an attack on the vulnerabilities of a given population,
and sexual intimacy and reproduction are part of those vulnerabilities.57 Sexualized violence is a
way to disrupt the conditions that allow for the existence of the group while separately
destroying everything that the group holds dear, like community and a sense of home. Nazis’
attempts to disrupt Jewish conditions of reproduction included attacks on pregnancy itself. For
example, Beverly Chalmers found that during mass murders in towns and villages,
Einsatzgruppen would shoot pregnant women twice--once in the heart and once in the womb.
They would often also tear breasts from the bodies of any woman, alive or dead, pregnant or not.
To the Nazis, “no violent act against Jews was problematic.”58 The female body became only a
vehicle for the survival of European Jewry, and Nazis were determined to symbolically and
physically eliminate it.
Several of the women who shared their testimonies publicly in the archive spoke of
women they knew who became pregnant by Nazi officials, who then were subsequently sent to
be killed in the gas chambers. Yolan Frank survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where she and
others knew of several women who had physical relationships with the guards. Some of these
women became pregnant and were immediately sent to be murdered.59 Polish survivor Rachel
Drabkin (20) knew a woman who became the focus of one German’s affection at Riga-
Kaiserwald in Latvia. The officer gave the woman “everything,”60 especially during her
57 Robin May Schott, “‘What Is the Sex Doing in the Genocide?’ A Feminist Philosophical Response,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 397-411. 58 Myrna Goldenberg, “Sex, Rape, and Survival: Jewish Women and the Holocaust,” Women and the Holocaust, accessed January 28, 2019, http://www.theverylongview.com/WATH//essays/sexrapesurvival.htm. 59 Yolan Frank, 35354, VHA (1997), Tape 10, 11:58. 60 Rachel Drabkin, 18294, VHA (1996), Tapes 2 and 3, 2:21.
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pregnancy. After she gave birth, however, she was killed. Rachel did not share what happened
to the child. Although there were strict laws that governed Nazis’ actions in terms of
Rassenschande and reproduction, it is clear that individual men applied the concept differently
depending on their level of authority and the situation at hand. Stacy Banwell argues that
sexualized violence was a way to destroy the reproductive capabilities of Jewish women. When
these women inevitably became pregnant, sterilization, abortion, and murder were then forms of
Rassenschande.61
Women in hiding often suffered the same reproductive torture as those in the camps.
Mary Stolar (34) concealed her identity in the Brandenburg region of Germany where she at one point worked as a waitress at a canteen for Nazi soldiers. After work one day, she was trying to transition into her everyday clothes when two Nazi soldiers grabbed her from behind and raped her. She became pregnant and immediately sought an abortion, which was illegal for German women under Nazi law. In order to protect her identity, she found a doctor62 who agreed to
perform the abortion if she bartered with supplies like cigarettes and wine. When the procedure
was over, she experienced a significant amount of pain and realized she had been involuntarily
sterilized. She was not able to conceive children for the rest of her life.63 Although there is no way to know whether the abortionist was aware of her identity, this is yet another example of sexualized violence as genocide.
61 Stacy Banwell, “Rassenschande, Genocide and the Reproductive Jewish Body: Examining the Use of Rape and Sexualized Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15, no. 2 (2016): 208-227. 62 She calls him a doctor, but due to her complications from the procedure, it is hard to deny that the abortion was back-alley. 63 Mary Stolar, 3933, VHA (1995), Tape 4, 14:58.
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Other women who went into hiding suffered abuse by the hands of those who came to their aid. The power dynamic in these relationships often led to molestation by both adults and fellow children. A clear pattern in these testimonies is the fear of telling anyone. Joan DaSilva
(37) was able to hide in her home town of Przemysl, Poland, which “turned into a living hell,”64 for her. At five or six years old, she “dreaded every day,”65 because a ten-year-old boy molested
her regularly. She lamented, “I couldn’t go to anybody because he threatened that if I ever told
anybody, he would tell everybody what I let him do. So...I kept my mouth shut.”66 Both sexual taboos and fear of capture were at play in these situations. Several women throughout the archive shared that there were certain topics that “you don’t talk about, even if it happened to you,”67 or that the guilt or shame was so heavy that they never told their families.
When liberation finally came to the places these women were being tortured, many had to face “another nightmare”68 when Soviet forces came through. The Russians had a reputation for
liberating Eastern European towns and raping their women. At least twenty percent of the public
testimonies in the Visual History Archive that include a discussion of sexual violence mention
rumors or fear of rape by Soviet soldiers. German survivor Thea Aschkenase was wary of
hitchhiking back to her home in Munich because she knew the Russians would rape unmarried
women, and described them as “woman-starved.”69 Czechoslovakian survivor Alice Kraus (61)
described an exchange she had with a Russian soldier while she was locked in a room during
liberation,
64 Joan DaSilva, 49009, VHA (1998), Tape 3, 17:06. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid, 19:34. 67 Esia Shor, 41035, VHA (1998), Tape 4, 7:24. 68 Henia Goldman, 7094, VHA (1995), Tape 4, 8:20. 69 Thea Aschkenase, 38084, VHA (1998), Tape 5, 3:27.
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So he said, ‘How many girls are you there?’ I said, ‘Four.’ He said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I don’t know if I should mention it or not but in the evening he came to the house with three other soldiers. He said, ‘We need women. We didn’t have no women the whole time and you should be grateful to us that we liberated you.’ So naturally, there was nothing more on our mind than to have men, you know? So we just refused and we started screaming and we started yelling and I remember the commandant spit in one of the girls’ faces and then left and that’s all we had to do with them.70
Alice and her companions were fortunate to avoid Soviet assault, but their story is representative
of a good number of liberation sexual assault testimonies.
Soviet rapes, including the fear and witness of, are extremely common among the public
sexual violence testimonies in the Visual History Archive. Scholars of sexual violence during the
Shoah express that Soviets were “known for” raping millions of women to celebrate liberation,71
but these rapes are not often emphasized in existing literature when the subject is specific to
Jewish women. Gizel Berman, a Czechoslovakian survivor of Auschwitz, said that the Soviets
raped the women, “just like wiping your shoe.”72 The prevalence of these stories in comparison
to stories of rape by Germans can be explained by a combination of factors; the number of Soviet
soldiers who raped women was high, the Soviets did not apply the concept of Rassenschande at
an official level, and although the goal of the Soviets was to destroy the enemy within and
without, they did not have a “Final Solution” in mind. Many Shoah survivors who endured rape
by the Soviets were able to live to tell the tale, as opposed to the victims of German rape.
However, Soviet rape was so brutal that there were also many who died at the hands of their
liberators. Witnesses helped their stories to live on.
The nonchalance of Soviet soldiers as they took and abused women in various situations
is jarring, and the terror and exhaustion of Soviet liberation that it sparked in Jewish women are
70 Alice Kraus, 31916, VHA (1997), Tape 3, 8:12. 71 Eva Fogelman, Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 258. 72 Gizel Berman, 6845, VHA (1995), 23:20.
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clearly illustrated in the testimonies. For many women, their first priority of survival was to
avoid rape by the Soviets, above even eating or sleeping.73 Soviet soldiers would violently assault any woman, no matter their age, weight, relative level of attractiveness, or ethnicity. In order to protect themselves, survivors later reported that women would put on disguises,74 trick
soldiers into doing something else as they ran away,75 or even fashion protective clothing like boxer shorts tied tight around the waist.76 Some women were able to evade rape by befriending
Jewish soldiers77 or letting their male companions such as fathers, brothers, or fellow survivors
protect them.78 The drive to survive their “second nightmare” was strong.
Other women could not get away from the Russians in time. Irene Frank, a German survivor who made it through Auschwitz II-Birkenau, witnessed mass Soviet rape while she was staying with a group of four hundred women who had survived with her. Two women were choked to death in front of her. The idea that women who endured the concentration camp died by way of Soviet rape severely affected her.79 Eda Klepfisz (57), a Polish survivor of Gleiwitz
II, told the Soviet soldiers who pushed her onto a bed with bayonets to shoot her rather than rape her. She said, “You can kill me but you’re not going to touch me. Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!”80 Auschwitz survivor Doris Martin (65) best described the universal sentiment of shock and
exhaustion during Soviet liberation when she concluded, “you would think, what we went
through, it’s gonna be the end of it. It wasn’t the end of it.”81
73 Goldenberg, “Sex, Rape, and Survival.” 74 Agnes Sereni, 6111, VHA (1995), Tape 3, 18:15. 75 Betty Dickman, 28331, VHA (1997), Tape 5, 13:57. 76 Dina Gottliebova, 46122, VHA (1998), Tape 12, 2:34. 77 Ruth Foster, 9538, VHA (1996), Tape 4, 19:00. 78 Gabriella Karin, 48680, VHA (1998), Tape 4, 10:00. 79 Irene Frank, 1517, VHA (1995), Tape 3, 18:29. 80 Eda Klepfisz, 14938, VHA (1996), Tape 4, 9:30. 81 Doris Martin, 29765, VHA (1997), Tape 9, 8:01.
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Some women, of course, not only escaped Soviet assault but actively fought back.
Jewish women had stared death in the face and were therefore unafraid to stare down the barrel of a gun--or to use one. Magda Klein and her sister, both Hungarian survivors of Auschwitz II-
Birkenau, avoided Soviet rape during their entire journey home to Mandok. When they reached their home train station, both exhausted, a soldier grabbed Magda’s sister, forced her to lay down, and tried to rape her. She recounted, “I [got] so angry, I don’t know where I [got] my nerve. I pushed him off, and I said to my sister, ‘You stupid--you get up and jump up! What are you sitting there for? What are you waiting for?’”82 Then, she slapped the soldier, who turned
around and put a gun to her head. She dared him to shoot her, after all that they had been
through. He put the gun down and shook her hand. When liberation reached German survivor
Renata Adler (46) near Theresienstadt, she knew she would have to “fight [the Soviets] off.”83
One soldier “got a little too close”84 to her, so she shot him dead and covered it up by telling a commander that there was a dead Russian in the street. To close her description of her experience, she stated, “It’s my life or your life...sorry it’s yours.”85
Jewish women experienced the “same hell” as all other Shoah victims, but with “different horrors,”86 and it is imperative that their stories are included in the classroom Holocaust narrative so that the historical truth of the event is both communicated and understood. Scholars continue to build the historiography of sexualized violence during the Shoah, and the testimonial evidence is accessible. Although the weight of the topic is heavy, students and teachers would benefit
82 Magda Klein, 17001, VHA (1996), Tape 8, 26:00. 83 Renata Adler, 12684, VHA (1996), Tape 6, 11:36 84 Ibid, 12:05. 85 Ibid, 12:26. 86 Myrna Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro, Different Horrors, Same Hell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).
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from being able to discuss these difficult subjects with each other, using patterns such as those
that have been highlighted here.
The teachers who choose to use this digital tool to show visual testimony to their students
will give them a real connection with human beings who chose to share their hardship for
education and research. The Shoah Foundation advocates for the use of visual testimony in the
classroom to “provide a human face to the past,” inspire critical thinking about themes of
tolerance and diversity, and to expose students to different types of primary sources.87 Stories that involve more complex themes such as wartime sexual violence and reproductive racism such as Rassenschande will deepen students’ compassion and empathy while sensitizing them to aspects of history that have become silenced through years of educational taboo and bureaucracy, which is the primary purpose of this thesis. It is ultimately up to the educator which themes the students should pull out of testimony in their limited amount of class time, but the patterns that are illuminated in this thesis can be used as guidance.
87 “Guidelines for Using Visual History Testimony in the Classroom,” USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (Los Angeles: USC Shoah Foundation, 2015), 1.
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Current State of Curricula
Many educators are teaching their students about the Shoah at all levels, and Holocaust museums and remembrance groups provide resources in order to help. The context for sexual violence exists in many upper-level high school and lower-division college syllabi. Enlightening students about wartime sexual violence would certainly not be appropriate before high school, and the gravity of the subject would be better absorbed by more mature minds. The primary and secondary sources for the topic are accessible for anyone who wants to learn, but there are few resources that put them together in a way that allows both high school and college educators to easily take what they may need.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides teachers with organized guides and resources on a great deal of Shoah themes. The museum provides an overview and a timeline of the Shoah as well as organized resources on themes such as immigration, anti-
Semitism, leadership, ethics, education, collaboration, complicity, propaganda, and American involvement. Despite the usefulness of these resources and their inclusion of women’s history in their structure, sexual violence is not addressed explicitly. The Nuremberg Laws, a feature of any Shoah timeline, were by all means an aspect of reproductive assault on Jewish women. Not only did the laws directly affect Jewish women’s sexuality by limiting their allowed choices, but they caused many women to be forcibly sterilized and to seek abortions that were often mandated by the Nazi state. However, the educator who wants students to finish the class equipped with knowledge of sexual violence may need to venture one step further to incorporate visual testimony in order to deepen students’ understanding of the laws with primary sources that come from the women that were affected by them.
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Similarly, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem provides variety in their resources but no guide to teaching sexual violence for educators. Yad Vashem is slightly different from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum but similar to the Shoah
Foundation in that it provides public testimony for anyone to use. It incorporates the testimonies into individual modules and lesson plans for teachers at K-12 levels, yet despite its thorough resource organization, it lacks the mention of sexual violence.
The Yad Vashem website features an online exhibition that can combine sexual violence education with technological literacy at high school or college levels. Yad Vashem’s “Spots of
Light - Women in the Holocaust” exhibition provides an overview of the way that women experienced the Shoah. It highlights specific women as well as themes like hair,88 love, and
marriage. The online resources explain how women’s experiences were different, including the
Nazi regime’s attack on Jewish reproduction. It addresses sterilization, abortion, objectification
of the female Jewish body, and briefly explains why Nazi soldiers would want to rape Jewish
women despite the laws and taboos against relations with Jews. Nonetheless, the information
available is limited and there is no visual testimony attached to the online exhibition. The
resource would unquestionably be useful in any Holocaust unit, but educators who desire more
depth may need to make additions to the lessons provided in order to engage students
completely.
There is one online resource for students and teachers that combines visual testimony
with known historical trends. The Shoah Foundation’s iWitness tool, which launched in 2012
and is free to the public, contains various collections of public testimonies from the Visual
88 The removal of body hair in the camps was a significant and brutal part of women’s experiences. It was as if their hair was a symbol of their femininity, and it was stripped away as soon as they came to the camp.
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History Archive. The tool sorts testimonies according to different themes and presents them
alongside lesson plans and activities to go along with the testimonies. The tool includes three
sexual violence components that are created for English speakers. Two of the three are
individual activities that cover sexual violence during the Nanjing and Armenian genocides, and
the third is a broader piece that covers sexual violence during genocide in a general sense. The
broader piece, of course, includes the Shoah.
The purpose of the general “Sexual Violence During Genocide” activity on iWitness is to
“consider the role”89 of sexual violence during genocide. It includes one testimony from the
Rwandan genocide and three testimonies from the Shoah. The Shoah testimonies belong to
Gizel Berman, Brigitte Altman, and Sonia Bielski, whose assaults occurred during liberation, in
hiding, and among partisans, respectively. Presumably, the creators of the unit want students to
understand that sexualized violence during genocide happens when abusers of power want to
further weaken the vulnerable. The activity very clearly and thoroughly demonstrates the idea
that sexualized violence is a manifestation of the violence that sits at the core of genocide, but it
somehow evades the same abuse of power that occurred in ghettos and camps. If an educator
decided to use the tool, it would be valuable for students to learn about ghetto and camp abuse
alongside the abuse in the testimonies that iWitness provides.
My educational tool puts sexual violence during the Shoah at the center of the classroom
conversation, which makes it the simplest version of all the other guides presented here. Ideally,
it would be used alongside other tools that cover the Shoah more generally in order to
complement what students are learning already. The way that the tool functions makes it so that
89 “Sexual Violence during Genocide: Requirements,” iWitness (Los Angeles: USC Shoah Foundation, 2017), accessed February 28, 2019, https://iwitness.usc.edu/sfi/Activity/Detail.aspx?activityID=2490&retainFilter=true.
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teachers can easily access and use specific information that may be relevant to their classroom’s
student learning outcomes as well as state and federal learning outcomes.
Most states across the United States mandate that the Holocaust is taught in high school,
but it tends to be a footnote to World War II, tucked away as a small part of another large-scale
event. Given the length and detail of state standards for American public schools, it is
understandable that many American educators would not consider including sexual violence
during the Shoah in their typical Holocaust unit. High school World History syllabi cover basics
of Holocaust studies; if there is any mention at all of the Holocaust, teachers include topics such
as anti-Semitism, Nazism, ghettos, camps, and mass murder. It is clear that teachers are utilizing
the best of the resources available to them, but it would benefit their students to be able to study
a more complete picture of the Shoah that addresses its “different horrors.”90
In high school, the Holocaust is generally taught alongside World War II History in a tenth or eleventh-grade World History class. In these classes, a sexual violence module would be relatively small but could help enhance student learning outcomes. Some teachers dedicate an entire unit of World History to genocide, in which case the topic of sexual violence can be given more attention. If a teacher wants students to leave the classroom understanding genocide more deeply, an understanding of sexual violence as a facet of it is invaluable. It may not be the imperative of every teacher to make room in their pre-established curricula for the subject, but this thesis will make it easier to do so.
Those who study sexual violence prevention at the academic level strongly encourage the inclusion of sexual violence education into any curriculum. In order for students to “unlearn”91
90 Goldenberg and Shapiro, Different Horrors, Same Hell. 91 Keith Edwards, Heather Shea, and Amanda-Rae Barboza Barela, “Comprehensive Sexual Violence Prevention Education,” New Directions for Student Services 2018 (161): 47.
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the social norms that make sexual violence so prevalent, especially on college campuses, they
must understand the conditions under which sexual violence occurs. Incorporating sexual
violence education into a history class provides context for the power dynamics that “place some
identities in positions of dominance over others.”92 It may be easy for students to recognize the more general power dynamics that existed during the Shoah due to any previous exposure they may have had to the event. Their familiarity will make it easier for them to conceptualize the idea that these unevenly distributed concentrations of authority and control still exist in the world around them.
Unlearning must also happen with students’ prior knowledge of the Holocaust, to a certain extent. Many students come into class having watched a few Shoah films and having heard the same, “Never Forget,” rhetoric over and over again which leads to a certain level of cognitive dissonance and dissociation93 that prevents them from truly understanding what it means. This is particularly true in the case of Jewish women in the Holocaust. Likely, the thought of the “Nazi war against Jewish women”94 is not at the forefront of students’ knowledge
of the Holocaust when they enter the classroom, if it is there at all. If educators choose to
include sexual violence in their Holocaust curriculum, the basic question that is asked of students
will reach wider than: what did it mean to be Jewish?95 Teachers can complicate the question by also asking: what did it mean to be Jewish and a woman?
92 Edwards, Shea, and Barboza Barela, “Comprehensive Sexual Violence Prevention Education,” 50. 93 Howard B. Tinberg, Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust: An Integrative Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 4. 94 Ibid, 38. 95 Lucy Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 1.
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Some high schools offer Holocaust and Genocide Studies classes as elective options for advanced or honors-track students who desire a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of genocide than their classmates may desire. These classes delve into the historical factors that drove mass murders such as the Armenian, Cambodian, and Rwandan Genocides and insist that students leave the course thinking critically about human behavior, good versus evil, the consequences of bigotry, causes of genocide, and ethics.96 Although suggested resources such as
Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking will spur students to think about sexual violence in the context
of genocide, a comprehensive resource would be valuable to include as well. Sexualized
violence is part of women’s experience in the context of any war, and especially in the context of
genocide. Avoiding the topic due to its ugliness would be a denial of the full story. Women have
told their stories, and many high school students want to hear them.
The complexity of college World History courses over high school World History
courses is obvious and this thesis does not argue that the same content should be taught at both
levels. Rather, sexual violence against Jewish women during the Shoah can be taught as part of
the general college World History survey and treated as basic historical knowledge, if the
educator wants to. Each educator knows the level at which their class thinks and will use their
own discretion where necessary. Because the bureaucracy of colleges and universities is not
nearly as restrictive as the American public school system, the content of their World History
syllabi can be more flexible. However, the limitations of a fifteen-week survey that must cover
over five centuries of human history leave the college educator in a predicament wherein they
must cover some important events while discarding others.
96 Judith Rattner, Patricia Qualshie, and Laurie Scott, “Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum Guide,” Governor Livingston High School Social Studies Department, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, October 20, 2011, 6. https://www.bhpsnj.org/cms/lib5/NJ01001806/Centricity/ModuleInstance/852/HolocGenocide%2011.pdf.
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If a college World History instructor decides to include the Shoah in their limited syllabus, it is usually covered over two days at maximum. In these two days or less, a professor understandably tends to cover the same aspects of the event that a more focused high school genocide class would give to the event. Students are encouraged to think critically about genocide in ways that they likely have not been asked before, occasionally through texts like Elie
Wiesel’s Night or through living survivors who come to class to tell their stories themselves. In these classes, a tool that organizes sexual violence testimony in an accessible format could benefit both the instructor and the students in order to paint a more complete picture without adding yet another item for the professor to compress into the World War II unit. Educators could enrich their students’ understanding of the Shoah by referring them to the educational tool that I have created.
When certain students arrive in college classrooms, many will be eager to have discussions about topics that they have not yet been able to broach with their peers. A case can be made for the inclusion of sexualized violence during the Shoah in a World History classroom, but it is understandably difficult for a history professor to make room for the topic amongst the countless important historical turning points that must be touched on over the course of the topic.
If one considers the goal of World History to reflect “not just a wide range of facts, but in some sense an overall development [of] the human past,”97 then students must learn not only the
inspiring feats of the few but also the ugly, painful truths of the many. If students do not
understand the archaic brutality of atrocities that occurred not even one century ago, then they
will be blind to what is happening now.
97 Marshall G.S. Hodgson, “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History,” in Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward, eds., The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 97.
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There is no doubt that material that involves sexual violence would not be appropriate for certain vulnerable students at any level, and may even be triggering to some. In some classrooms, teachers likely avoid these topics for a number of factors ranging from immature student minds to the safety of the educator. In other classrooms, there may be a risk of causing mental and emotional harm to students that have endured the trauma of sexual assault in their own lives. In classrooms filled with consenting, older, mature, high-level thinkers, the topic could be both accepted and engaged with critically.
Although many teachers may not think it appropriate to include sexual violence during the Shoah in their classrooms, there are some aspects of the topic that can provide students with important connections. The organization Facing History and Ourselves advocates for the study of genocides such as the Holocaust so that “students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.”98 Many students can understand
what is happening in the world around them and ask questions as to what, where, why, and how
their surroundings came to be. Socially-aware students who grew up surrounded by media
which broadcasts sexual assault allegations, some of which are directed at the leaders in their
government, could improve their critical thinking and social engagement skills in spaces that
safely allow them to talk to each other about what this means for them and for other members of
their community. Students should not be forced to go to or wait until college to only hope to
have these discussions with their peers, and those who choose college should be allowed the
space to grapple with the topics safely.
Educators are teaching the Shoah to the best of their ability with the resources that exist,
but some of the connections for which organizations such as Facing History and Ourselves
98 “About Us,” Facing History and Ourselves, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.facinghistory.org/about-us.
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advocate, are not happening in classrooms where students might academically and socially benefit from them. Accessible digital tools facilitate discussions that help students to put human faces to a problem that the world has faced as long as wars have been waged. The resources are out there if educators want to use them, and this thesis simplifies some of these resources in a way that is manageable and accessible to incorporate into any Holocaust unit at the appropriate level.
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Educational Tool
The purpose of the digital tool that comprises one component of this thesis is to increase
the visibility of sexual violence testimony by providing educators with a streamlined tool that
makes it easier to teach and talk about the topic. Not only does the tool highlight specific
testimonies from women who experienced assault, but it brings the user to the exact point in each
testimony at which the survivor shares her experience. It also makes the type of assault99 and the location of the assault more visible so that students can understand that sexual assault can happen anywhere and did happen everywhere. and teachers can decide what themes they would like to pull out. The format of the tool makes teaching the topic easier in a way that does not place all of the mental, emotional, and academic work of finding testimonies and figuring out what to show students, onto the teacher. Instead, the tool presents the information to the user and lets the educator decide what their students need to learn from it.
It is often difficult for students to visualize the concurrency and scope of all aspects of the
Shoah. The Shoah was a “profoundly geographical phenomenon,”100 as is any historical event
that forces mass migrations of people from their homes into the unknown. As Albert Giordano,
Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole argue in their 2014 book, Geographies of the Holocaust,
geographical analysis of the Shoah makes the victimization that is fundamental to the event
“more visible.”101 It also intrinsically increases the visibility of the sexual violence that took
place. Visualizations of the geographic points of occurrences of rape and sexual assault enhance
99 The testimonies are divided into four categories based on the situations in which assaults occurred: in ghettos and transportation to and from the ghettos, in camps, in hiding or capture by partisans associated with either Allied or Axis forces, and during liberation. 100 Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1. 101 Ibid, 2.
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the truth of the testimonies studied here. The “where” that can be found within these testimonies
affected the choices that the women who shared them were able to make. My tool uses
geography to provide some important context so that teachers can prompt their students to form
deeper understandings of individual stories.102
Students who are not constantly steeped in genocide studies often do not see the scale or the wide reach of the Shoah. Spatial analysis of sexual violence testimonies is a way for them to see the intricacies of both the mechanisms of genocide and the ways that it affected the daily lives of Jewish women. The map reveals the prevalence of sexual violence in the more organized locations of the Shoah such as concentration camps, ghettos, and trains, but it also illuminates the sites where anti-Semitism and violent sexism were prevalent outside of organized genocide such as places of hiding and points on some liberation journeys. It will help students to understand that the Shoah occurred everywhere--not just in the more infamous locations like Auschwitz II-
Birkenau and ghettos in Berlin. This means that a student who had no idea that women were raped during the Shoah can see that there were several women who experienced or witnessed rape at Auschwitz. A student who did not know that Soviet liberators were extraordinarily sexually violent can hear the harrowing testimonies of women who watched it happen in places they thought they would be free. Students who have trouble grasping the reach of the Shoah or the dispersion of European Jewry or anti-Semitism can see it at a small but detailed and consumable scale.
Educators who use the digital tool can choose to follow the path that I have laid out in the map, or they can use the information available to plot their own. The testimonies in this project can be sorted into four different categories based on patterns of assault that I have clearly labeled
102 Giordano et al., Geographies of the Holocaust, 151.
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on the map. The sequence by which the testimonies are ordered begins with women who were assaulted in ghettos and around modes of transportation to and from the ghettos. The next group of testimonies includes assaults that happened in camps. The sequence progresses to testimonies by women who were assaulted in hiding or during capture by partisans, then to stories from
Soviet liberation. These categories are determined through analysis of the power dynamics in each instance of sexual violence. In ghettos and on transportation, loosely-organized authority figures assaulted terrified and confused women. The structured organization in the camp made it so that women were assaulted as a group or individually in secret. In the confined situations of hiding and capture, women were manipulated or tortured in individual settings. The chaos and relentlessness of Soviet assaults differentiate them from all of these situations. This organization will help educators to decide which testimonies to share and gives more visibility to different stages and components of the Shoah.
There are several ways that teachers can encourage their students to analyze the map, other than the face-value concepts to which students will be exposed simply by looking at it.
Students can learn which camps had more clear and concentrated sexual violence--possibly even which women might have shared similar experiences in similar places. They can also examine rates of sexual violence among the different categories that I delineated in the tool. Teachers can reveal the geography of Russian liberation to students while identifying where the liberation assaults are located on the map; there is even a clear line of points that indicate a visible push westward by the Russians. Because the Nazis and the Russians assaulted women without any attention to things like socio-economic status, there is no pattern that is visible here that would reveal class differences to students, but in certain cases students can examine what each woman’s nationality may have had to do with her assault.
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A lesson that incorporates this tool should work towards interdisciplinary student learning outcomes that combine history with sexual violence prevention education, amplifying the tragedy of the event while also providing students with documented examples of sexualized violence. After using this tool, students should be able to identify the “societal roots”103 of sexual violence by examining them in the context of the Shoah. Students will understand power dynamics not only between the Nazi regime and European Jewry, but between men and women and explain the vulnerabilities that these power dynamics cause. They will examine the role that sexual violence plays in the conditions of genocide by using their existing skills of historical analysis. This lesson will enhance their primary source analysis skills and geographic understanding by examining patterns of assault among the testimonies in the tool.
This tool will help students to think more critically about women and other oppressed groups in zones of conflict. They will be able to see that sexualized violence can occur anywhere there is an imbalance of power and some level of vulnerability, thus increasing the visibility of not only victims of sexualized violence during the Shoah, but all victims of sexual violence. The public history component of this project works to create a bridge between what educators teach and what historians know.
103 Edwards, Shea, and Barboza Barela, “Comprehensive Sexual Violence Prevention Education,” 48.
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Conclusion
The fundamental aspect of sexualized violence that separates it from the other, equally
horrific types of violence that all victims of the Shoah experienced is the individualized, intimate
silence that is connected to it.104 There is a clear sense of loneliness that is at the core of all of the stories told by the survivors in the Visual History Archive. Taboo and shame have prevented survivors from sharing their stories with one another for decades, isolating them from the only people who could understand their personal trauma. To share their stories with students who are willing to listen is to return part of the agency that was stripped from them.
World History attempts to fuse individual events into a global context, and sexual violence during the Shoah easily fits into a global narrative. Students will likely arrive in a
World History class with a small amount of prior knowledge of the Shoah and the opportunity to expand that knowledge to include the intricacies of individual experience cannot be disregarded.
Although the basis of anti-Semitism may differ from other genocides in terms of semantics, the idea that sexualized violence will always occur in instances of vulnerability can be applied universally. Technology allows for students to encounter the historical truths of a world that feels larger yet more accessible than the world of their parents, and a “bigger world require[s] a bigger world history.”105
Michel-Rolph Trouillot emphasizes lifting the silences that naturally occur in history books and classrooms, and the use of Shoah sexual violence testimonies in the classroom will help lift these silences. What Trouillot calls the “histories that no history book can tell,”106 are
told outside of the classroom, at home, in literature, or during family gatherings. The USC
104 Goldenberg, “Sex, Rape, and Survival.” 105 Dunn et al., The New World History, 2. 106 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 71.
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Shoah Foundation sought and visually recorded survivors who were willing to tell their stories in
their own homes, exactly as they remembered it, in order to fill testimonial silences. Although
the stories of those who could not escape will forever leave a silence, those who witnessed it
lived on to share it with the world.
For fifty years, historians failed victims of sexualized violence in the Shoah, but teaching
students about it at the appropriate levels in high school and college will work towards breaking
the silences that resulted. Fostering empathy and reflection in the classroom and causing
students to think about the darker aspects of human history has been proven to improve students’
academic performance, reinvigorate teachers, and build safe and inclusive schools.107 Educators can facilitate discussions in a space where students can question the world they have come to know and visualize the world they wish to see in their lifetimes. Historical thinking skills will help students to be more critical of the power structures that they observe in the past and in their daily lives.
It is impossible to transmit everything that has been discovered about important topics like the Shoah to students in high school or college history classes--there are simply too many subjects to impart. However, historians have the resources and knowledge to create, use, and critique tools that will help educators to facilitate these discussions in the classroom. It took decades of “hiding” for the survivors whose testimonies were analyzed in this thesis to break through the taboos that held them back, and there are likely thousands of stories that are now lost because of that shame. Historians and educators can work together to create a world where survivors of sexual violence can share their stories, be believed, and change the narrative.
107 “Our Work,” Facing History, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.facinghistory.org/our- work.
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Appendix (Digital Tool Text and Images) This is the website link
1) Introduction
This Story Map is one part of a two-part thesis for the Master of Arts in History at California State University: San Marcos. The purpose of this thesis is to facilitate an easier way for students and teachers to talk about sexual violence against Jewish women during the Shoah (Holocaust) at the appropriate levels in high school and early college. This map is an educational tool that summarizes and displays individual testimonies given by Jewish women who experienced sexual violence during the Shoah. All testimonies have been made public by the University of California Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives.
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2) Why use this tool in the classroom?
Visual testimony helps students to connect with survivors of genocide who chose to share their hardship for education and research. It provides a human face to the past, inspires critical thinking about themes of tolerance and diversity, and exposes students to different types of primary sources. Stories that involve complex themes like wartime sexual violence and reproductive racism (Rassenschande, in this context) will deepen students’ compassion and empathy while sensitizing them to aspects of history that have become silenced through years of educational taboo and bureaucracy. This tool exists to contribute to an ultimate goal that historians and educators can work together to create a world where survivors of sexual violence can share their stories, be believed, and change the narrative.
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3) Map Legend and Organization
The testimonies in this project can be sorted into four different categories based on patterns of assault. The icons for the testimonies of women who spoke of assault in ghettos and around modes of transportation to and from the ghettos are in red. Icons for testimonies of assaults that happened in the camps (labor, concentration, death, etc.) are in blue. Icons for testimonies from women who hid and/or were captured by partisans are in green. Lastly, icons for testimonies from women who spoke of assault during liberation are in purple. Additionally, all are in numbered order according to the category under which they fall. The order is as follows: ghettos and transportation, camps, hiding a capture, then liberation.
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4) Rose Schwartz
Rose had two encounters with sexual assault. The first time she mentioned it was while describing her living situations in Glowen. She said that German men would come and pick women up and do whatever they wanted to them. The second assault she mentioned involved Soviet soldiers. There was a Soviet soldier who was helping her refugee group to stay safe. One day, he had to leave the group, but before he left he told the younger kids to leave out the window. She would find out the reason very soon. When other, more malicious Soviet soldiers came to the house, an older woman told the men that the children were sleeping. One younger woman was left behind because she could not get out of the window. The next morning, they had to take her to the hospital because she had been brutalized and raped. She died in the hospital. (Link to liberation story: https://youtu.be/SWcp5XuDk1k?t=1090) (Interview 10119, 12/15/1995, Tapes 3 and 4 of 5, Segments 79 and 104)
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5) Rita Hilton (1)
(Note: Rita's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: http://vhaonline.usc.edu/register) In the Pabianice ghetto, Rita went to see someone she knew who was selling items on the black market. Before the Shoah began, she knew his wife and his son, so she went to him to get some milk for her grandmother. She says, "he started molesting me" (14:07), and "I didn't know anything about it." The other girls made fun of her because she did not know that this was what she had to do to get what she needed from him. (Interview 30717, 7/02/1997, Tape 2 of 7, Segment 14, 14:05)
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6) Rachel Drabkin (1)
Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish soldiers would man the trains that deported Jews. According to Rachel, they would go around asking if women were married, and if the women were not, the soldiers would rape them--right there on the train in front of everyone. Rachel feels lucky because she "wasn't such a nice looking one." (17:43). Many of these women died on the train. (Interview 18294, 8/5/1996, Tape 2 of 5, Segment 11, 16:47)
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7) Mila Bachner
When Mila was in Potsdam, she wanted bread from a German soldier, and he told her he would give her the bread if she slept with him. She said that her "strong sense of morality," (6:20) made her protest very adamantly against it. She said, "you would like to sleep with a filthy pig Jew?...isn't it enough that you're slaughtering my family?... My whole family is dead...from your hands...slaughtered...now you want me, a filthy pig that has lice on her body and that is sick, sleep with me?...you try to touch me...and you are dead" (7:03). She said that her strength came from God. The soldier did not rape her. She claimed that she had been afraid of telling the story because people would judge her for refusing food when she was sick. (Interview 4345, 7/25/1995, Tape 4 of 6, Segment 96, 6:00)
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8) Lusia Haberfeld
Polish survivor Lusia Haberfeld witnessed mass rape at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw while she waited to be deported to the Majdanek concentration camps. She described it as the “biggest hell on earth.” Ghetto guards would beat anyone for any reason, and raped women at random. The torture caused two women to throw themselves out of a window in front of the Luisa. (Interview 20848, 10/13/1996, Tape 3 of 7, Segment 21, 15:14)
Hughes 64
9) Anna Weiss
(Note: Anna's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Anna cites Rassenschande (Nazi concept of "race defilement") as the reason she did not get raped--but she almost did. She was seventeen, in the ghetto, when she was ordered to undress by an officer. The assailant heard someone coming and stopped because he did not want to be seen with a Jew. (Interview 7132, 12/12/1995, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 39, 8:00)
Hughes 65
10) Edith Cimmer
Edith saw a lot of violence in the Berezne ghetto. She spoke of sexual assault fears during mass killings. She said that rape was just one of the things she feared. (Interview 25381, 1/26/1997, Tape 2 of 6, Segment 50, 19:10)
Hughes 66
11) Erna Hilfstein
During a mass execution, Erna said, "They shot the girl but in such a way that she was not dead yet, and then they raped her." As she witnessed it, she wondered why did not she bring poison with her so that she did not have to endure the same. (Interview 9995, 12/12/1995, 3 of 5, Segment 84, 23:25)
Hughes 67
12) Esia Shor
In the Nowogrodek ghetto, a German man that Esia worked for tried to rape her. She did not remember exactly what happened because she blacked out (6:33). She said, "I can't recall that vividly what happened but I was very scared...we were brought up that there were certain things you don't talk about, even if it happened to you." She tried to evade the interviewer's question about her assault several times. (Interview 41035, 4/26/1998, Tape 4 of 10, Segment 96, 6:05)
Hughes 68
13) Freda Rosenblatt
Freda was in the ghetto when the Soviets were liberating Eastern Europe. The Germans were going around the area and shooting everyone while the Russians were on their way. She prefaced her story by saying, "at the time I didn't know what was rape what was sex. I was a young child" (5:00). There were two girls (ages fifteen and sixteen) in the room where she was staying. When the Germans came around they would "slide down on the floor and take the younger children to sit on top of them. I didn't know why but later I found out that they were afraid that they would be raped" (5:09). This happened for 6 weeks. (Interview 523, 1/10/1995, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 36, 4:56)
Hughes 69
14) Helen Rieder
(Note: Helen's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Helen said that every day in the ghetto, people were "taken out." Sometimes they were taken out to die, and sometimes to get raped. The Hungarians would take girls from their families and rape them in view of the parents. She particularly remembers the screaming. The girls would be brought back instead of murdered, probably so that they could rape them again. (Interview 7026, 9/21/1995, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 80, 18:55)
Hughes 70
15) Zora Goldberger
Zora witnessed assault at the Kruscica concentration camp. She expressed that officers at her barracks “took the young girls and in front of everybody they raped them, and we heard them crying.” There was no way to predict when this would happen, or how it would happen, but the women knew that it would. (Interview 9471, 12/1/1995, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 43, 13:44)
Hughes 71
16) Yolan Frank
In the death camp, Yolan and others knew of women who had relationships with guards. She talked about women who were impregnated by guards then were sent straight to the gas chambers. The women who became pregnant were generally "chosen" to be forcibly raped by the guards. She said, "it suited you not to believe" (13:02) that this was happening. (Interview 35354, 8/14/1997, Tape 10 of 15, Segment 281, 11:58)
Hughes 72
17) Shari Braun
Shari shared that when she was a young girl in Augsburg, she was on her way to the lavatory when an older German man “grabbed [her] in front.” To indicate her young age and non- feminine appearance, she stated, “I [did not have anything yet].” Although the man did not rape her, this assault exemplifies the pattern of abuse of authority by which male officers and standers-by demoralized and stripped women of their humanity. She said, "I understand women who get raped." (Interview 1249, 3/22/1995, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 71, 8:15)
Hughes 73
18) Rita Hilton (2)
(Note: Rita's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: http://vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Rita talks about a prisoner functionary that was known as a "boob grabber." He is part of a bigger story she tells about making a mistake as a prisoner in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She said that people used to call him "half human," but with her he was human (8:25), because he did not execute her for the mistake. (Interview 30717, 7/2/1997, Tape 6 of 8, Segment 45, 7:39)
Hughes 74
19) Rachel Hanan
Rachel witnessed horror, as all did, at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. She said, "There were very huge dogs. We were afraid of those dogs more than the Germans." She explained that the Germans would train dogs to rape Jewish girls. She spoke of a time when they forced the dogs upon a 16-year-old French girl who died during the assault. The girl's mother was forced to watch and killed herself immediately afterward. This was all within the context of a segment about punishment in the camps. (Interview 13096, 4/6/1996, Tape 3 of 7, Segment 86, 27:11)
Hughes 75
20) Rachel Drabkin (2)
Rachel knew one woman who was pregnant in the concentration camp. A German fell in love with her and she became pregnant with his child. She had "everything" during the pregnancy, but after she gave birth she was immediately killed. (Interview 18294, 8/5/1996, Tape 2 of 5, Segment 11, 18:12)
Hughes 76
21) Rachel Drabkin (3)
A Kapo at Riga-Strasdenhof told Rachel and a group of other women to undress completely. He checked every woman's vagina for lice, and he would take them "aside" if they did not. She implied that he raped these women. They came back afterward. (Interview 18294, 8/5/1996, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 14, 2:21)
Hughes 77
22) Maria Scheffer
For those who had not yet come to experience sexualized violence in ghettos or deportation, selection at the camps was particularly jarring. Maria described her experience after selection: "We were told to strip. We said, ‘Strip? But there are people!’ And of course, the answer to that would have been a huge whack on the head or whatever, so we had to strip. I was unfortunate enough to be immediately sexually assaulted. When I say sexually assaulted… [there was no intercourse] ...I was assaulted by hand. And again, I have never ever forgotten the feeling of this person touching me. In the end that wasn’t the most important. That somehow went into the background. The other things that happened had taken over." (Interview 4187, 7/21/1995, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 73, 1:15)
Hughes 78
23) Laura Hillman
At nineteen years old at the Krasnik concentration camp in Poland, Laura Hillman was convinced by a junior SS officer that he could help her to get out of the camp. Hopeful, Laura believed him and got a permit to leave the camp under the guise of bookwork. “No sooner did he have me outside,” she shared, “he took me up to a room and brutalized and raped me...he was called away by a telephone call otherwise I might never have gotten out of there.” Laura was likely correct about the telephone call; the murder of Jewish women following their rape is a factor in the lack of first-hand testimony available to historians now. (Interview 1208, 3/17/1995, Tape 1 of 4, Segment 28, 27:12)
Hughes 79
24) Ida Russ
Ida described two incidences of sexual violence at Bergen-Belsen. She talked about an old man with a gun who would watch her and other women taking showers. She also discussed a time during which she was scared that the person in charge of her barracks would "fancy" her because she was pretty. She knew other women who decided to engage with him sexually, possibly to get supplies. (Interview 35966, 12/02/1997, Tape 3 of 7, Segment 79, 18:45)
Hughes 80
25) Miriam Stillman
(Note: Miriam's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) At Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Miriam was "given" to a Polish non-Jew who had his eye on her. The person who "gave" her to the man had been giving her food and betrayed her. Her hair had grown out, which she shared made her look more like a human again. She ran from him and he did not rape her, but she had to start from the bottom occupationally afterward. (Interview 11546, 1/29/1996, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 73, 14:26)
Hughes 81
26) Bluma Samuels
(Note: Bluma's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: (vhaonline.usc.edu/register) At the Salzwedel concentration camp, Bluma said, "They used to choose the girls. What they did with them...they did very bad things." She talked about how the Germans would use the girls for sex then kill them. She said, "A lot of girls lost their minds" (13:30). She did not see everything that happened to the girls. She compares her living conditions to living like a dog. (Interview 832, 2/09/1995, Tape 2 of 3, Segment 43, 13:03)
Hughes 82
27) Erika Gold
(Note: Erika's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Erika was given food by the Spanish people around the camp. She came into the camp with it and a guard harangued her about it. She would not tell where it came from. Her mother did not know what had happened, but was arrested soon after for it and was put in solitary confinement. The Spanish gave Erika more food, which she hid on her body. She begged the guard to let her bring food to her mother, and she shared, "While he said he would do it, he touched my breast...I developed into breasts...and he touched me and it was hell but he didn't rape me. He just touched and played with me. I was too young to even understand what happened to my body, what happened to him. And I did this probably for the ten days she was there." In the end, she was more wracked by guilt about what happened to her mother than what happened to her. She never told her mother what happened. (Interview 21372,11/06/1996, Tape 4 of 7, Segment 31, 9:37)
Hughes 83
28) Zuzana Adam
Zuzana was put in prison by Arrow Cross. She concealed her identity. A guard came to her cell, opened her blouse, and touched her breast. There was a photo of her mother in her pocket, and the guard asked her who it was. She told him, and he left. Zuzana believes that her mother saved her from being rape, in some way. (Interview 14708, 4/30/1996, Tape 2 of 3, Segment 46, 13:30)
Hughes 84
29) Zelda-Rivka Hait
Zelda was captured by Perkonkrusts (Latvian Thundercross Party--nationalist and anti-Semitic) while she was in hiding. After spending a while in captivity, she was taken upstairs to an officer's office. He raped her, tortured her sexually, and humiliated her. She thought she was going to die. She cried, wept, and asked for mercy. When she went back downstairs from the office, she said it looked like similar things had happened to the people with whom she had been captured. She was let go soon after. (Interview 26792, 2/25/1997, Tape 3 of 8, Segment 67, 3:14)
Hughes 85
30) Sonia Bielski
Sonia was married to one of the leaders of a group of partisans who fought against German occupiers and their collaborators in Belarus. Her husband sent for her to be taken into hiding from the ghetto. She and some others were in the forest, avoiding the Germans. Someone with whom she was on the rescue trip touched her breast while she was sleeping. (Interview 23579, 11/6/1996, Segment 14, Tape 3 of 7, 12:31)
Hughes 86
31) Sara Shapiro
Sarah was not assaulted, but a girl with whom she became associated was brutally raped. The girl came to the house at which Sarah was staying, asking for help, and was turned away. Later, Sarah found out the girl had been raped and killed. She heard some Ukranians who were laughing and talking about what they did to her. Sarah did not understand what they were saying until much later. She was very young when it happened, so the details of what happened are very vague in the testimony. (Interview 52105, 9/30/2012, Tape 1 of 1, Segment 54, 53:18)
Hughes 87
32) Sabina Wagschal
Sabina talked about how she used to get rashes because she would wet herself from the trauma and could not control it, nor did she tend to have the resources to clean it. A young boy who lived where she was hiding said he could help. He took her to the bathroom and sat on the toilet with her legs spread on either side of his thighs. He told her to cover her eyes while he molested her. One day she looked, saw what he was doing, and put an end to it. She said, "I was not devastated from it. I was not traumatized from it because he was gentle, but I could analyze it as something, again, I had no control over. It was just part of a situation that arose because of the environment that was created and that a boy of 12 had to go somehow and pick on a person who had a problem and saw it as something he could take advantage of. To help himself." (3:40) She never told anyone, except for her mother many years after it happened. (Interview 1965, 03/03/1995, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 34, 2:29)
Hughes 88
33) Renata Skotnicka-Zajdman
Renata was able to evade being put in a concentration camp by going into hiding. While doing so, she slept in a barn. Partisans were not far from there. She was "molested" by them, with no place to escape. She said, "don't ask me how I survived," (17:18) and not much else. (Interview 37068, 10/23/1997, Tape 5 of 9, Segment 139, 17:05)
Hughes 89
34) Mary Stolar
Mary Stolar concealed her identity in the Brandenburg region of Germany where she at one point worked as a waitress at a canteen for Nazi soldiers. After work one day, she was trying to transition into her everyday clothes and two Nazi soldiers grabbed her from behind and raped her. She became pregnant and immediately sought an abortion, which was illegal for German women under Nazi law. In order to protect her identity, she found a doctor who agreed to perform the abortion if she bartered with supplies like cigarettes and wine. When the procedure was over, she experienced a significant amount of pain and realized she had been involuntarily sterilized. She was not able to conceive children for the rest of her life. (Interview 3933 7/13/1995, Tape 4 of 6, Segment 105, 14:58)
Hughes 90
35) Marcia Spies
When Marcia was fourteen, she began menstruation in hiding and was embarrassed about it among the chaos. She spoke of someone's brother who was nearby all the time. She said, "I remember that he was...fondling me" (28:33) and touched her breast and vagina. He would tell her not to tell anyone, and say, "let me feel you" when no one was watching (29:10). She said it made her feel abused, but "excited" (29:30) because she did not really understand that it was bad. She was not afraid of it but did avoid him. No one ever knew. (Interview 4693, 7/31/1995, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 23, 27:45)
Hughes 91
36) Lucyna Goldberg
Toward the end of the war (1944), hiding in Warsaw, Lucyna wanted to go to Germany for work. A Polish man identified her as a Jew and said, "Maybe you're not, or maybe you are. You have blue eyes, you are blonde, but who can be desperate like you?" He was referring to her appearance. He "used terrible force" to rape her. She resisted and kicked him, and when she ran away she saw him with his head in his hands saying, "why, why, why." She ran far away. (Interview 37179, 12/23/1997, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 78, 17:15)
Hughes 92
37) Joan DaSilva
Joan was in hiding in Przemysl, which she shared "turned into a living hell for [her]." She dreaded every day because a 10-year-old boy molested her regularly She was 5 or 6. She said, "he was obsessed with [her]"(17:43), and would torment her. He would also bother the little boy that was hiding with them. He told her that he knew about sex because his mother took a lot of lovers and one of them was molesting him. He told Joan that he was able to do it because her parents were not there. He said that he could not do it to other girls. She said, "I couldn't go to anybody because he threatened that if I ever told anybody, he would tell everybody what I let him do. So, um...I kept my mouth shut" (19:34). (Interview 29009, 12/12/1998, Tape 3 of 7, Segment 78, 17:06)
Hughes 93
38) Irene Binzer
Irene's story is intense, and she tells it very clearly herself. The transcript is here: "They put me in solitary confinement, separated from my mother for one purpose only: with the door closed so that the head of the Chetnichi group could come and rape me. He had a key and was the only one who had a key to that solitary confinement. That was at the level of...probably the first floor of the building. My mother, they took to another room and somebody else raped her, and she stayed there. Some food was brought to me, but I was in the room sitting and sitting, and crying my eyes out, 'What has come to me? What has happened to me?' When he came into the room before he raped me, he said, 'I have the gun here and it's loaded,' and he put it right next to me. 'If you scream, I'll use it on you.' And that's how he raped me. And that's how he raped me over and over and over and over and over while I was there. The devastating part was that every single day they would put prisoners on a long table in the courtyard and one of the Germans or Chetniks were out there because they were collaborating together, would take a big stick and hit them 25 times and 25 times I heard them scream and cry. Every single day [sobbing]. And that was my morning. That was my morning. And I was kept a year in that prison and abused sexually." Interviewer: "How often?" Irene: "Probably once a day." Interviewer: "Always by the same man?" Irene: "Always by the same man. He was the top. He was the head of Chetniks. He was ugly. He was tall, and skinny. He had a red beard and red hair and I couldn't stand him." Interviewer: "Do you know his name?" Irene: "No. I brushed it off. I brushed it off from my head. And so I was there one year, living in agony and fear and fear and fear. And they finally transferred us to the Germans." Irene never became pregnant and never contracted a sexually transmitted infection. (Interview 28053, 4/8/1997, Tape 3 and 4 of 5, Segment 75, 77, 81, 91, 13:45; 0:00, respectively)
Hughes 94
39) Irene Binzer (continued)
See Entry No. 40
Hughes 95
40) Rachael Rubin
While Rachael hid in Korzec, she knew of partisans who would bang on doors, looking for girls. The partisans fought against the Germans, but still raped Jewish women. (Interview 14142, 2/12/1996, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 77, 18:03)
Hughes 96
41) Eva Slonim
(Note: Eva's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: https://vhaonline.usc.edu/register) (Warning: Very violent testimony) While Eva was hiding in Nitra, she concealed her Jewish identity. A man accused her of being a Jew. He "grabbed [her] by [her] shoulder and he had a knuckle duster on." He asked her if she was Jewish and hit her on the head repeatedly. She repeatedly denied, so he ordered the dog to get her but she evaded it. He then pulled her pants down with other soldiers in the room and hit her repeatedly on the bottom and behind the knees, pushed her up against the wall and pinched her breasts and her stomach, each time demanding that she confess. He pulled a revolver to her head, but did not shoot her. He finished by pushing her down the stairs. (Interview 33024, 7/24/1997, Segment 23, 19:07)
Hughes 97
42) Tikva Slomovic
(Note: Tikva's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Tikva talked about not knowing who to trust. Of the Soviet soldiers, she said, "some of them raped a lot of young girls" (24:22). She did not see it happen, but heard of it from others. She considered herself lucky. (Interview 3551, 6/27/1995, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 19, 24:30)
Hughes 98
43) Sandra Segal
Sandra was liberated by the Soviets. A group of soldiers came to the house where she and other survivors were staying. They raped the grandmother, the mother, and the 16-year-old girl who lived on the bottom floor of the house. Then, they came upstairs to where Sandra and her family were staying. A soldier grabbed her mother by the waist and said, "the Germans we take by force, and the Jews we take with love." (26:34). Her mother screamed, "Typhoid!" and the Russians ran down the stairs, afraid of getting typhoid. (Interview 12612, 2/29/1996, Tape 1 of 3, Segment 27, 26:11)
Hughes 99
44) Ruth Krol
During liberation, a group of Soviet soldiers came to the door of where Ruth was staying. Thinking that the Russians would not hurt her, she opened her door to them. A Mongolian man stood outside and immediately stuck his pistol to her breast, pushing her down to the cellar of the house. She kicked him in the groin. She immediately thought she would be shot and when she realized she was not yet dead, she ran upstairs, hoping that the other Russians would help her. They sent her to hide in a wardrobe while they brought the aggressive soldier away so that she would not be attacked. (Interview 7273, 9/29/1995, Tape 5 of 6, Segment 128, 1:20)
Hughes 100
45) Ruth Foster
Ruth talked about hiding from the Russians because they were "raping Jewish women [as well]." The one Russian she did encounter was Jewish, and he took her to a hospital where her Typhoid fever could be cured. (Interview 9538, 2/13/1996, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 106, 19:00)
Hughes 101
46) Renata Adler
Renata's story is one of resistance. Of the Soviet soldiers, she said, "they tried to rape and this and that and the other, and... you had to fight them off." One soldier “got a little too close” to her, so she shot him and covered it up by telling a commander that there was a dead Russian in the street. To close her description of her experience, she stated, “It’s my life or your life...sorry it’s yours.” (Interview 12684, 3/3/1996, Tape 6 of 6, Segment 161, 11:36)
Hughes 102
47) Regina Weber
Regina experienced liberation under the Soviets. They would come to look at the female survivors through the window of the home at which she stayed during liberation. Regina and a female friend became frightened that the Soviets would rape them, so she dressed as a boy to avoid it. They hid "everywhere"(14:49). Eventually, a Russian soldier attempted to rape her sister, and an older woman saved her by volunteering to take her place. Some young soldiers would stay with them and protect them at times as well. (Interview 1530, 3/10/1995, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 77, 14:23)
Hughes 103
48) Olga Lengyel
During liberation, Olga found herself stuck in a house that happened to be in the middle of a battle between the Soviets and the Germans. One Soviet soldier was tasked with "watching" her. He beat her, tore her clothes off, and eventually she let out "an animal shriek" that others heard (13:45). She jumped out of the house and ran away from him. She did not indicate whether the soldier penetrated or not. (Interview 46138, 8/28/1998, Tape 8 of 11, Segment 38, 13:00)
Hughes 104
49) Miriam Moskowitz
Miriam and a friend hid in an attic for fear of being raped by the Soviets for two entire weeks. (Interview 27443, 3/21/1997, Tape 4 of 6, Segment 104, 18:06)
Hughes 105
50) Matilda Klein (1)
During liberation, Matilda asked for directions from a Russian soldier, and she said he "almost raped [her]" (28:15). She fainted in order to escape. After that, she did not give much detail about the assault. (Interview 6525, 9/06/1995, Tape 3 of 5, Segment 90, 28:01)
Hughes 106
51) Matilda Klein (2)
[See Matilda Klein (1)] A different Soviet soldier offered to take Matilda into Prague after the first attempted assault. He said he did not care that she was a Jew, and told her "if you don't shut up I'll shoot you" (3:20). She fainted again. (Interview 6525, 9/06/1995, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 95, 2:10)
Hughes 107
52) Marta Wise
(Note: Marta's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: http://vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Marta was liberated by Soviets at Auschwitz II- Birkenau. She said, "children were well treated, and some of the adults were raped. Many of the young women were raped by the Russian soldiers, even then"(3:36). Her sister was told to hide and pretend to be an old woman to avoid being raped. Both avoided it in the end. (Interview 23196, 11/19/1996, Tape 6 of 7, Segment 154, 3:36)
Hughes 108
53) Lilly Wolf
During liberation, Lilly was trying to get back to her grandmother, aunt, and cousin, and found herself in a situation where three Soviet soldiers took her up to an unfamiliar apartment and gang-raped her. She had been fed something that stopped her from menstruating and at the time she had finally menstruated again and it was a brownish color. She was covered in lice and had been wearing the same clothes for months. In the interview, she seemed ashamed of it, but she shared that she was not very affected by it. She said that she never had any problems in relationships or in sexual encounters after the Shoah, even though she contracted gonorrhea from the assault. She does not assign that much blame to them either, because she claims that she understood why they were doing it. (Interview 1363, 3/15/1995, Tape 4 of 5, Segments 100, 101, and 107, 8:00)
Hughes 109
54) Jutta Rose
During liberation, Algerian soldiers grabbed the woman who had saved Jutta and raped her in front of her. She was "furious." American forces arrived in the area, and she told them what had happened (along with the information that her uncle was very influential in New York City). The military official to whom she spoke said he would put her in front of the troops so that she could identify the perpetrator. She found the man and pointed him out, and assured he was punished. The retribution made her say, "And then we could breathe again, for the first time after so many years. It was a strange feeling, to be free again, I can't tell you what it meant to be a free human being" (17:12). She said she is lucky that she was never physically attacked. (Interview 39775, 3/26/1998, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 102, 14:26)
Hughes 110
55) Jana Gottshall
(Note: Jana's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Jana was saved from Soviet rape by an "older" (forty-year- old) woman who knew that the Soviet soldiers were afraid of typhoid fever, called out that she had it while the soldiers were milling around. Jana woke up the next morning to learn that many of her fellow liberated prisoners had been raped by the Soviets who had "helped" them just the day before. (Interview 1089, 2/21/1995, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 47, 12:29)
Hughes 111
56) Irene Voros
During liberation, Soviets came to the place that Irene and her family had been hiding. They wanted to rape a teenage girl that was also staying there, who her mother was "supposed to protect." Her mother stood up for the girl and "drew attention to herself" in doing so. She told Irene to hide under the covers of a bed so that she would not see. Irene kept asking her mother what the soldier was doing. For years she thought her mother was saying "He's talking German to me," but her mother was actually saying "He thinks I'm his bride." Irene thought it was an example of woman's inhumanity to woman rather than man's inhumanity to woman, because no one helped her mother in her time of need. From then on, the group would intentionally protect her mother every time the Soviets came around. (Interview 16473, 6/25/1996, Tape 2 of 4, Segments 52 and 54, 22:06)
Hughes 112
57) Eda Klepfisz
(Note: Eda's testimony can only be used through the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) During liberation, Soviet soldiers came to the town through which Eda was escaping. They came into the place she was staying, and pushed her with bayonets onto a bed. To evade rape, she kept screaming, "You can kill me but you're not going to touch me. Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!" The soldiers insisted that she "gave it" to the Germans, implying that they should have the same. (Interview 14938, 05/05/1996, Tape 4 of 4, Segment 102, 9:30)
Hughes 113
58) Edith Carr
(Note: Edith's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Edith concealed her identity during the Shoah. During liberation, she would hide every time the Russians came around. She said, "We heard the Russians raped."(Interview 9340, 11/29/1995, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 72, 11:20)
Hughes 114
59) Edith Bushell
(Note: Edith's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) During liberation, Edith and her fellow liberated survivors would blockade their rooms from the Soviet soldiers because "that's what they did." (Interview 105, 9/22/1994, Tape 2 of 3, Segment 48, 15:57)
Hughes 115
60) Magda Marx
Magda shared two stories from liberation in Budakeszi. She spoke of hiding from a Soviet soldier who peered through the window. She also heard a story of a sixteen-year-old girl being raped by a "group of Russian soldiers," further stoking her fear and cautiousness. (Interview 3757, 7/7/1995, Tape 4 of 6, Segment 99, 12:48)
Hughes 116
61) Alice Kraus
(Note: Alice's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archive website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) During liberation, Alice had an encounter with a Soviet soldier: "He said, 'How many girls are you there?' I said four. he said 'I'll see what I can do.' I don't know if I should mention it or not but in the evening he came to the house with three other soldiers. He said, "We need women. We didn't have no women the whole time and you should be grateful to us that we liberated you.' So naturally there was nothing more on our mind than to have men, you know? So we just refused and we started screaming and we started yelling and I remember the commandant spit in one of the girls' faces and then left and that's all we had to do with them." (Interview 31916, 7/27/1997, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 67, 8:12)
Hughes 117
62) Agnes Sereni
(Note: Agnes' testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Agnes hid from the Soviets with her mother during liberation. The Soviets were "looking for Jewish girls," so her mother made herself look older to avoid being raped. (Interview 6111, 8/31/1995, Tape 3 of 4, Segment 77, 18:15)
Hughes 118
63) Brigitte Medvin
Upon liberation, a Soviet soldier attempted to rape Brigitte's mother. She also noted that Soviets would repeatedly rape women outside their kitchen window. She considered it strange that no one came to rape her. (Interview 162, 8/19/1994, Tape 2 of 4, Segment 48, 15:52)
Hughes 119
64) Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt
During liberation, Dina wore boxer shorts tied tight around her waist to prevent rape. She says that they saved her from rape. One day, a Soviet orderly went with her to get some food, threw her into a ditch, jumped on top of her and tried to rape her. She yelled at him but he did not get off of her until he got to her boxer shorts. Dina also spoke about guards who were put in front of women's rooms "so that [they] wouldn't get raped" (9:59). She said, "a lot of girls did get raped [that night] because the Russians just came and they just..." Another time, Dina was stopped by a Russian officer on the way to buy chickens with a friend (10:56). He motioned the friend to go on but told a Polish peasant to "hold [her] by the hand," presumably to rape her. She eventually got to a point where she did not care what happened to her because of all she had been through. She walked away unscathed and escaped with friends. (Interview 46122, 9/26/1998, Tape 12 of 13, Segment 68, 2:34)
Hughes 120
65) Doris Martin
As Doris talked about Soviet assault during liberation she said, "You would think, what we went through, it's gonna be the end of it. It wasn't the end of it." She did not say much else. (Interview 29765, 6/17/1997, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 99, 8:01)
Hughes 121
66) Erika Jacoby
Erika was in Langenbielau when the Soviets liberated it. She said, "sure enough, it was evening and the Russian soldiers came back for the girls." She remembered jumping from one bunk bed to the other in order to not be caught by the men. (Interview 8, 7/11/1994, Tape 1 of 5, Segment 78, 8:19)
Hughes 122
67) Evy Woods
Evy spoke about witnessing Soviet soldiers grabbing a sixteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year- old boy, and they never saw them again. The soldiers grabbed her mother in her night clothes from her bed. She shared, "My mind wasn't adult enough to know anything about say rape...all I know is my mother was gone" (12:10). Women around her were praying, hoping she would come back. She came back the next evening but never talked about it again. According to Evy, the assault was due to a direct Stalin order: "if they speak German, treat them like Germans." It is worth noting that in the middle of this story, Evy paused because someone was milling around in the background. She waited to continue until he was out of the room. (Interview 14251, 4/16/1996, Tape 5 of 7, Segment 134, 10:40)
Hughes 123
68) Gabriella Karin
Gabriella shared that there were soldiers all over the place during liberation, who "always wanted women." Her father and uncles were able to fend off the soldiers. (Interview 48680, 10/18/1998, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 100, 10:00)
Hughes 124
69) Hana Newman
(Note: Hana's testimony can only be viewed using the Visual History Archives website: vhaonline.usc.edu/register) Hana and some other survivors were staying at a college during liberation. Some Soviets broke into their room and raped a couple of the girls. Hana said, however, that the Russians were kind to her. (Interview 44109, 8/12/1998, Tape 5 of 7, Segment 27, 7:08)
Hughes 125
70) Harriet Solz
Harriet said of the Soviets: "they were raping women right and left," regardless of disease or physical condition. (Interview 1491, 3/14/1995, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 92, 2:09)
Hughes 126
71) Gizel Berman
The first night of liberation at Stutthof, the Russians came into the bunk where Gizel and other survivors were sleeping. They raped the women "just like wiping your shoe." Gizel did not get raped because she was covered in boils and she used that to drive away the perpetrators. She said it to many, many soldiers over the course of liberation. She had friends who died of rape. She said that it is incredible that she was not raped because she knew so many women who were raped. (Interview 6845, 9/15/1995, Tape 4 of 5, Segment 115, 23:20)