Understanding Representations of Ethos and Self in Women's

Identity and Resistance: Understanding Representations of Ethos and Self in Women's

Holocaust Texts

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial

fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Alexis M. Baker

August 2016

Except for previously published materials

Dissertation Written by

Alexis M. Baker

B.A., The Ohio State University, 1998

M.A., Miami University (Ohio), 2001

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2016

Approved by

____Sara Newman______, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

____Keith Lloyd______, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

____Babacar M’Baye______

____Susan Roxburgh______

____Richard Steigmann-Gall______

Accepted by

Robert Trogdon, Chair, Department of English______

James Blank, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences______

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………………….iii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………………… .vi

LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………………….. .ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………….....x

CHAPTERS

I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..1

Situation of the Problem……………………………………………………………………..7

Historical and Scholarly Background………………………………………………………10

Literature Review…………………………………………………………………………...15

Trauma, Disability, and Narrative …………………………………………………………26

II. Methods and Methodology…………………………………………………………………32

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………32

On Naming………………………………………………………………………………….34

The Data…………………………………………………………………………………….37

Coding Methods…………………………………………………………………………….41

Coding for Themes…………………………………………………………………………42

Coding for Topoi……………………………………………………………………………46

Amplification……………………………………………………………………………….47

Synecdoche…………………………………………………………………………………49

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….49

III. Results………………………………………………………………………………………51

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………51

Thematic Codes…………………………………………………………………………….52

The Topoi…………………………………………………………………………………...63

iii

Amplification……………………………………………………………………………….63

Synecdoche…………………………………………………………………………………69

IV. Discussion and Analysis of the Art…………………………………………………………71

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………71

A Word on Organization……………………………………………………………………74

The Self, Survivance, and the Topoi………………………………………………………..76

Representations of Women vs. Representations of Men…………………………………...76

Alternative Narratives: Amplification……………………………………………………...78

Amplification: Motherhood………………………………………………………………...79

Amplification: Women’s Communities Within Camps…………………………………….82

Amplification: Images of Isolation…………………………………………………………85

Alternative Narratives: Synecdoche………………………………………………………..90

Synecdoche: Motherhood and Fissure……………………………………………………...91

Synecdoche: Women’s Communities Within Camps………………………………………94

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………....97

V. Conclusions and Limitations……………………………………………………………….99

Alternative Texts………………………………………………………………………….100

Research Questions……………………………………………………………………….103

Contributions to the Field ………………………………………………………………...106

Limitations………………………………………………………………………………...109

A Final Thought…………………………………………………………………………..112

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………………...113

APPENDICES

A. Art from Primary Data Set……………………………………………..…………………...120

B. Art from Secondary Data Set……………………………………………………………….129

C. Examples of Representations of Men in Blatter and Milton’s (1982) Art of the

Holocaust……………………………………………………………………………………133

D. Tables……………………………………………………………………………………….136

LIST OF FIGURES

Art from Primary Data Set

Figure 1. Weissova-Hoskova, Helga. Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport from the Terezin

Ghetto. 1963. Medium unknown. Ghetto Fighters House Archives…………………………………….120

Figure 2. Olomucki, Halina. Untitled. Warsaw, 1945. Pastel and charcoal. Ghetto Fighters house, Israel.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………120

Figure 3. Liberman, Judith. Women in the Holocaust. 1996. Acrylic. Center for Holocaust and Genocide

Studies, Minneapolis, MN. ……………………………………………………………………………...121

Figure 4. Kathe Kollwitz. Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled. 1942. Lithograph. Galerie St. Etienne,

NY. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………121

Figure 5. Lea Grundig. Imprisoned. 1936. Copper Engraving. Landengalerie, Berlin………………….122

Figure 6. Halina Olomucki. In the Ghetto. 1943. Charcoal and ink. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel. ….122

Figure 7. Charlotte Buresova. Mother and Child. 1944. Monotype. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel…..123

Figure 8. Charlotte Buresova. Despair. 1944. Monotype. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel……………...123

Figure 9. Malvina Schalkova. Elderly Deportee. 1943. Soft pencil. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel……124

Figure 10. Mabull. Three Women in Front of Barracks. 1940. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House,

Israel……………………………………………………………………………………………………...124

Figure 11. Jadwiga Tereszczenko. Roll Call. 1941. Pencil. Warsaw……………………………………125

Figure 12. Ro Mogendorf. Aged Woman Arrested. 1944. Charcoal. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel…...125

Figure 13. Maja Berezowska. Distribution of Soup. 1944. Pencil and watercolor. Warsaw……………126

Figure 14. France Audoul. Shorn. 1944-45. Ink. Paris…………………………………………………..126

Figure 15 Halina Olomucki. Self-Portrait After Four Selections. 1943. Pencil. Holon, Israel………….127

Figure 16. France Audoul. The Hell for Women. Undated. Oil on wood. Paris…………………………127

Figure 17. Helga Weissova-Hoskova. Suicide on the Wire. 1945. Ink and ink wash. Prague…………...128

Art from the Secondary Data Set

Figure 18. Lea Grundig. Gestapo in the House. 1934. Copper engraving. Landengalerie, Berlin………129

Figure 19. Esther Lurie. In the Ghetto. 1942. Pen. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel……………………...129

Figure 20. Malvina Schalkova. Sleeping Quarters. 1944. Soft pencil. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel…130

Figure 21. Malvina Schalkova. Arrival in the Ghetto. 1943. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House,

Israel……………………………………………………………………………………………………...130

Figure 22. Malvina Schalkova. Forced Labor. 1943. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel……..131

Figure 23. Maria Hiszpanska-Neumann. Stone Carriers. 1944. Crayon. National Museum, Warsaw…131

Figure 24. Nina Jirsikova. Scene in Camp Ravensbruck. Undated. Ink and crayon. Terezin memorial...132

Figure 25. Halina Olomucki. Women Crouching in the Extermination Camp. 1950. Gouache, watercolor, and chalk. MDGM, Paris………………………………………………………………………………...132

Examples of Men’s Holocaust Art

Figure 26. Auguste Favier. Medical Examination. 1944. Ink. Villeurbanne, France. …………………..133

Figure 27. George Grosz. After the Interrogation. 1935. Watercolor. Princeton, New Jersey. …………133

Figure 28. Zoran Music. Dachau. 1945. Ink and rust. MDGM, Paris. ………………………………….134

vii

Figure 29. Waldemar Nowakowski. The Jew’s Last Road. 1943 Watercolor. Warsaw. ………………..135

Figure 30. Felix Nussbaum. Deathdance. 1943-44. Oil on canvas. Osnabruck, FRG………………….135

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Informational Breakdown of the Artwork……………………………………………………...136

Table 2. Conceptual Thematic Codes for Primary and Secondary Data Sets……………………………138

Table 3. Data Set Representing the Relationship Between the Art of the Primary Data Set and the Topoi of Amplification and Synecdoche………………………………………………………………………..139

Table 4. Explanation of Different Versions of the Alternative Narratives of Amplification and

Synecdoche……………………………………………………………………………………...... 140

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks goes first to Sara Newman, my wonderfully wise advisor, who answered every question, explained the unexplainable, and inspired me with her wit and patience. You set the tone for this project and saw its value from day one. There are no words big enough to express my gratitude for your guidance and friendship.

Special thanks also goes to the other members of my committee. Keith Lloyd always “got” this project and my deep connection to it. Thank you for your fine attention to detail and for pushing me to think harder. Babacar M’Baye brought incredible optimism and joy to the project. Your reading suggestions enabled me to make important connections that helped me tie it all together. To Susan Roxburgh and

Richard Steigmann-Gall, thank you both for your unique perspectives and willingness to support my scholarship.

I could not have completed this project without the love and support of Keith, my incredible husband.

You were the ultimate cheering section. Thank you for believing, sometimes more than I did, that I could do this. This has been your journey as much as mine. Without you, I never would have taken the first step.

Finally, this project is dedicated to the survivors of the Shoah and the more than six million people who did not survive. Special dedication goes to all the artists represented in this project. Your creativity gave me insight into your lives and experiences. I feel as if I know you personally, as if you have shown me your heart. I hope this work honors your courage, creativity, and perseverance.

Chapter One: Introduction

This project began in the summer of 2013, when I visited the Maltz Museum of Jewish History in

Beachwood, Ohio to see the special exhibit, “Women in the Holocaust”. The exhibit featured artifacts representing women’s experiences during the Nazi Holocaust. As I toured the gallery looking at the photos, letters, and artifacts, I came across a handmade bra that had been sewn by a woman in one of the camps. It was made from scraps of material collected and hidden away over time. No matter that it was piecemeal and primitive, it was a beautiful thing. I marveled at the woman’s handiwork and industry at being able to obtain the material and at her ability to engineer such a complex garment. The narrative that accompanied the bra explained that she made it in an attempt to maintain some level of the modesty she was used to having before the camps. She went on to explain that when other women found out that she had a bra, they begged her to make one for them as well, all of them wishing for this small reminder of their lives as women before the Holocaust.

From this point on, I began to understand that the women who went through the Holocaust were not a homogenous group with one grand narrative of experience, but rather they were individuals who experienced an event in unique and complex ways. It was also the first time I realized that women and men experienced the Holocaust in markedly different ways. Waxman (2006) and Saidel (2009) both explain how conditions in women’s camps, such as Ravensbruck, were structured to victimize women in particularly gendered ways. Upon arrival in the camps, women’s hair was shorn and other indicators of gender and cultural identity, such as head scarves, were confiscated. Pregnant women and infants were immediately murdered. Sadly, the common narrative of the Holocaust often glosses over or leaves out entirely accounts of gender specific victimization, Realizing the gender specific ways in which women

were victimized made me want to understand explore how women who experienced the Holocaust might position themselves in terms of gender identity.

Before continuing, I wish to explain how I use the term, “grand narrative”. By this, I mean the sense that there is one story shared by every person who experienced the Holocaust. In many ways, the grand narrative that I refer to throughout this project is born, in the United States at least, in public K-12 education. School districts often confine Holocaust narratives to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and

Elie Wiesel’s Night. While both narratives are certainly valuable and offer students an introduction to

Holocaust testimony, sadly, these two pieces are often the first and last narratives that most of the public will read unless they seek out other voices for themselves. Such limited exposure to Holocaust narratives means that many people read these two accounts and believe that they understand the Holocaust and the experiences of those who lived it. As former high school English teacher who taught Anne Frank’s diary,

I saw students struggle to understand that Frank did not survive the Holocaust; she died at 15 in Bergen-

Belsen in 1945. I was also encouraged, by the numerous teacher guides on the book, to foster discussions of how Frank was a hero. Such limited views and confining discussions do little to expose the public to other narratives and immediately set up any discussion of Holocaust narratives as always already about heroism.

Given this, I wanted to create a space that attempts not to pass judgement, but rather to look for themes that appear in the non-discursive narratives of female Holocaust victims. As such, my study focuses on themes of survival and resistance, and examines how metaphors of motherhood, community, and isolation function within the art. I view those themes as indicative of the women’s perceptions about their own identity as survivors and victims and as women who were enculturated to behave in specific ways. Throughout the project, I assume that since Waxman (2006), Saidel (2009), and many other

Holocaust scholars explain that women were treated very differently from men and victimized in specifically gendered ways, that women’s Holocaust experiences are necessarily different from those of men. This is not an attempt to essentialize women or men, it is an acknowledgement of difference that

comes not only from recognizing that the Nazi’s treated women and men in distinct ways, but also, as

Lloyd (2005) argues, from the fact that due to enculturation, the women may have had similarities in their thought processes, perceptions and interactions with others (p. 317). It is therefore possible to understand the visual representations of their experiences as indicative of this enculturation.

Following David Birdsell and Leo Groarke (2004), I hold that words are no more or less effective than visuals at making arguments, although they are clearly based on different conventions. Words are arbitrary and associated with particular cultures. Visuals may be linked to a specific culture, but their forms are more universally recognized (hence, international symbols are used where words would confuse, such as using an X to indicate that something is prohibited). Because of these differences,

Birdsell and Groarke (2004) note that it is especially important to understand visual arguments, with as many subtleties as possible, in context. “‘Context’ can involve a wide range of cultural assumptions, situational cures, time-sensitive information, and/or knowledge of a specific interlocutor” (p. 314). Like most composition scholars, my definition of text extends beyond the written word to include oral artifacts, visual compositions and material objects; however, I began where most of us do, with written narratives, in order to create a framework for my later investigation of other kinds of texts. As my familiarity and understanding of the oral and written narratives increased, I became more interested in the visual and material artifacts the women left behind and eventually focused my study on women’s artistic representations of the Holocaust’s physical realities and psychological effects. Given the nature of visual rhetoric and metaphors, the art added another facet to the way survivors represent their experiences and how students of the Holocaust understand them. The art fills a void that written and spoken language leaves empty. The art fills a lexical void that written and spoken language leave empty. As Bernard -

Donals (2001) explains, there are events and emotions that words cannot capture and we must often rely on representations to understand what is unspeakable.

We are at a kairotic moment in terms of Holocaust survivors and their stories. We are losing survivors at an alarming rate and very soon, no one will be left to give first-person accounts. Further, as

we lose survivors, we are in danger of losing the ability to understand their multi-variant experiences and risk constructing the Holocaust as a one-dimensional event, experienced by each person in that same way.

This is partially due to the fact that published Holocaust accounts frequently uphold familiar narratives of heroism or perseverance. As a result, the public thinks it knows what it means to be a survivor and that the experience of one survivor is representative of all other survivors. This is one reason why my visit to the exhibit was so eye-opening. I had no idea of the depth of experience and perspectives, or that there is such a great need for the public to be made aware that there are so many stories to be told.

The stories of female survivors are especially precious. The women’s narratives that get published tend to frame women as self-sacrificing wives and mothers. While there certainly are women who embodied these qualities, there are many others whose experiences deviate greatly from this grand narrative. People who were imprisoned in the concentration camps and ghettos found themselves in a situation far outside the realm of what most people are able to conceptualize and therefore reacted in ways that went against constructs of normalcy and even morality. The Nazis created an environment of physical and psychological torture that is unimaginable. Fear and desperation caused many people to behave in ways that were inconceivable in their previous lives. According to Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton’s Art of the Holocaust (1982), rations in the transit camp, Gurs, consisted of 800 calories a day for adults doing hard labor. The camp flooded every time it rained, the prisoners were constantly exposed to the elements, dirt and disease. The conditions were so harsh that in one winter, around 1,000 people died from illness, starvation or suicide (p. 20). It is difficult to say how any of us would react to such a situation; such circumstances do not translate well into the comfort of our daily existence.

From this vantage point, it is easy to believe that our morality would persevere, that our love and respect for our family would override fear and hunger, but example after example shows that, when placed into such impossible circumstances, morality and respect, even self-sacrificing parental love, can erode away under the drive to survive. An excerpt from Tadeusz Borowski’s (1967) This Way for the

Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen shows an example of how even a mother might reject her child in an effort to save herself:

Here is a woman – she walk quickly, but tries to appear calm. A small child with a pink cherub’s

face runs after her and, unable to keep up, stretches out his little arms and cries:

‘Mama! Mama!’

‘Pick up your child, woman!’

‘It’s not mine, sir, not mine!’ she shouts hysterically and runs on, covering her face with her

hands. She wants to hide, she wants to reach those who will not ride the trucks [to the gas

chambers], whose who will go on foot, those who will stay alive. She is young, healthy, good

looking, she wants to live. (p. 143-144)

Obviously, this story flips the framework of motherhood. In this instance, the young woman acts in a completely self-preserving way, an incident that most likely would never happen if she was not in such an impossible situation. Zoe Vania Waxman (2006) refers to situations like this as “the choiceless choice”

(p. 144). It gets played out over and over in narratives of mothers killing their unborn or newly born babies, women hording food for themselves while their children and husbands starve, or harming other

Jewish women and men in order to survive. Blatter and Milton (1982) recount stories of “children leaving their parents to die, of fatal fights over scraps of bread, of victims looting their friend’s corpses. The need to live became contradictory to the victim’s very idea of life, to [their] human identity – but it was the need to live the most often won” (p. 23).

These choiceless choices became part of the psychological torture, forcing people to behave in a way that is incongruous with what they recognize themselves to be and in ways that go against the values that form the foundation of religious life and culture. Judith Baskin (1994) explains the roles of Jewish women throughout history:

Wherever Jews have lived, wives have assumed domestic nurturing roles, providing for the daily

needs of their husbands and children, and overseeing the early educations of their

offspring…some undertook business activities [to support their families] so that husbands could

devote themselves to learning. As the Talmud put it, a meritorious woman enabled her husband

and sons to study. (p. 357)

Traditional Jewish women are raised to sacrifice for others, especially for their husbands and family. The practice of self-sacrifice, present in the tradition of mitzvoth1 and in other aspects of life, is critical to

Jewish identity. We will see later that one survivor describes a “bad place” as one without mitzot. When the Nazi’s designed the camps to be places where people had to make the awful choice between giving to others and sustaining their own strength, they designed an environment that annihilated the core of identity for many of the prisoners, particularly women. It became another kind of torture.

Rav Shimshon Dovid Pincus (2011) explains that the role of the Jewish woman includes being a mother, “whose main task and part in the partnership of marriage is the rearing of the children…Her whole life [is dedicated] to rearing her children and shaping the Jewish home” (p. 4). In normal situations, choosing self over child would have been inconceivable because the role of mother and wife is so integral to the traditional Jewish female identity. There are several works of art that demonstrate mothers’ willingness to put themselves in harm’s way to protect her children. (See Appendix A). However, because they reflect behavior we expect, narratives of women making choices that run counter to the sacrificial mother are often left out of Holocaust narratives, but must be recognized in order to gain a fuller picture of women’s Holocaust experiences.

I bring up these alternative narratives because they are indicative of the fact that the breadth and depth of the female Holocaust experience remains very much unexplored. As previously stated, women’s

Holocaust narratives are precious and we must begin to pay closer attention to them for several reasons.

1 Commandments and the doing of good works

First, we begin to construct the Holocaust as not merely a happening of history, but as an event that was experienced by individuals in unique and profound ways. Second, As Royster and Kirsch (2012) argue, it is time that we begin to rescue and recover the work of female rhetors and then move beyond rescue towards an ethics of care.

Situation of the Problem

This project is a rhetorical analysis of women’s Holocaust art, specifically, art by professional female artists representing women in concentration camps, ghettos, on transports and in other situations of the genocide. My project looks at the art in a rhetorical way, that is, it identifies structures in the visual topoi/reasoning patterns (see Chapter Two) in the way women represent themselves and their bodies as extensions of the “self”. Throughout this project, “self” and “identity” are positioned as separate, but related terms. Self refers to the definition outlined by Ochs and Capps (1996) in “Narrating the Self” as

“an unfolding reflective awareness of being-in-the-world, including a sense of one’s past and future”

(p. 20). Identity is defined as the ability to represent that self. Thus, self is internal, dealing with personal conscious recognition, while identity is the external performance of that self. In this case, what has physically occurred to the women’s bodies informs much of how they represent their being-in-the world.

I am interested in how these women represent their experiences through their art, and how the women create visual lines of argument to describe their Holocaust experiences. The rhetorical patterns in the art are linked to issues of selfhood, identity, and resistance. The project examines those patterns and the rhetorical choices the women make to represent their sense of self. I am most interested in examining how the visuals function as arguments about identity, and survival, and as a means of resistance against

Nazi oppression. For example, as we shall see, when a work of art depicts a woman’s pregnant body, it constructs a metaphor that compares the healthy woman, capable of sustaining pregnancy, with the woman in the camp, who would not be likely to sustain pregnancy, and represents her as healthy, thus making the argument that on, some level, she is unchanged by her location and circumstance. My hypothesis is that the women’s sense of self can be revealed in their rhetorical choices, and making those

choices can function as a means of resistance against oppression and annihilation. My intention is to examine how the self is represented in women’s Holocaust art.

I do not wish to use this study to make claims about how any of the women felt or feel about their experiences, only to look for patterns of representation that also function as means of resistance and survival. It is beyond the scope of this project to be able to seek an answer as to why this happens, assuming such an answer is possible. Rather, my intention is to simply acknowledge that it does happen and to examine the rhetorical patterns among the visual and textual choices the women make.

In this project, I use the word “narrative” specifically to mean the stories recounted by women who experienced the Holocaust. These may be either oral or written retellings, but I also believe that the artwork is visual narrative that represents their experiences. In all cases, I look specifically at the examples of narrative structure. Walter Fisher, in Human Communication as Narration (1987), reminds us that, as a species, we are Homo Narrans, and that all forms of human communication can be seen as stories because they are symbolic interpretations of the world and our experiences within that world. He goes on to define narration as a sequences of words or deeds with a sequence and meaning for those who live, create and interpret them.

This is where the crux of my argument lies and my study shows that there are patterns and sequences, within the art that are meaningful to both the artists and the audience and make it possible for their stories to be told. Specifically, the artists’ use amplification and synecdoche to create particular arguments about the women’s sense of self. In terms of amplification, some images that use amplification to make their arguments offer unrealistic portrayals of the women in terms of their physical or emotional health, but in so doing, make the argument that women are able to use their strength to survive and persevere. In other images, amplification argues that the woman’s self is not intact. Regardless of the argument, images with amplification focus on the individual woman’s identity and whether or not she is able to sustain an intact sense of self. In contrast, images that use synecdoche focus on collective communities of women, as a result, the images never depict intact selves; rather they show simple part-to-

whole reasoning where women sacrifice individual identity in an attempt to save the group. In other images, they offer complex arguments about fissures in the communal relationship between mothers and their children. As such, amplification and synecdoche push back against the grand narrative of the

Holocaust that Waxman takes issue with by create two alternative narratives of women’s Holocaust perspectives. These alternative narratives offer more complex perspectives on the women and work to recover the stories of women whose experiences do not align with more comfortable familiar narratives.

For this reason, I situate my study of women’s Holocaust narratives and art within current trauma theory and feminist rhetorical theory. I use these frameworks simultaneously to provide a lens through which we might begin to re-situate the narratives as unique stories of survival and resistance that expand the homogeneous grand narrative to which we are commonly exposed in school and in popular media.

Through this lens I hope to complicate our understanding of what it means to have experienced the

Holocaust. This project is specifically a feminist rhetorical study in several ways. First, it seeks to create a space where female Holocaust survivors may choose how to represent their experiences via rhetorical choices. This connects back to how Foss, Foss, and Griffin (2006) envision feminism in Feminist

Rhetorical Theories when they write, “the very nature of feminism [is] rooted in choice and self- determination (p. 3). Combine this with Tonkin’s (1992) belief that rhetorical agency equals self- determination and you have the foundations for this project, which seeks mostly to read female Holocaust narratives through the lens of feminist theory in order to show that the re-telling of their narratives is an act of selfhood which simultaneously offers a more multi-faceted understanding of the female Holocaust experience than what we have been previously shown.

We know from Foss, Foss and Trapp (2002) that control over word choice equals control over our lives and that symbols, such as artwork or other texts, function in the same way. This makes a compelling argument that the depictions of women in Holocaust art and other texts is no accident. In fact, it would seem to be a blatant statement of identity. This is how the women chose to represent themselves to the world and to themselves. It is how they situate themselves within the context of having experienced the

Holocaust as well as how they move through the trauma. As David Frank (2007) argues in “A Traumatic

Reading of Twentieth Century Rhetorical Theory: The Belgian Holocaust, Malines, Perelman, and de

Man”, trauma is the result of loss and we may use rhetoric to move through and situate our lives within the event (p. 312). I argue that rhetorical choices also give us the means to speak back against oppressive forces.

Studying narratives that have traditionally been left out of public memory creates a new space to understand the complexity of Holocaust experiences; I have no qualms about recognizing that this project very much serves to honor and preserve the stories of women who are typically forgotten or whose stories are ignored. I agree with Waxman’s (2006) claim that we need to broaden our comprehension of the

Holocaust to acknowledge all types of experiences, including those that “stand outside traditional narratives” (p. 140). I hope to offer a more complicated and multi-faceted understanding of women’s

Holocaust narratives in part by framing them as narratives of survival and resistance.

Historical and Scholarly Background

Although this is not an art historical project, some explanation of the historical context for the art is necessary in order to understand the perspective from which the artists worked. Janet Blatter’s (1982) informative introduction to Art of the Holocaust explains that the art in the corpus falls within the early mid twentieth-century tradition and comes out of formalism, which emphasized the aesthetics of color, line, composition, texture, etc., over all else. In the 1930s and 40s artists begin to pull away from formalism and move toward abstract art, which enabled them to express emotion and engage in social critique. In general, the Nazi’s despised modern art; they declared it un-German, preferring instead sentimentalized landscapes and portraits of soldiers2. Blatter explains, “There was no place for the private citizen, no place for art that served the private self or expressed the artist's inner passions” (p. 23). In stark

2 Ironically, Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, was known to be an admirer of Expressionism. He was especially fond of Emil Nolde, one of the first Expressionists and an early supporter of the Nazi movement.

contrast, the art used to represent the experiences of Holocaust survivors and victims explores the dark places of the psyche, those possibly inaccessible through words.

Within abstract art, expressionism, surrealism and caricature are important movements, movements which are evident in the corpus. Expressionism, as its name suggests, uses broad brush strokes and color to convey emotions, particularly anxiety and inner longings. It was especially popular in

Germany and was used by many artists as an outlet for their fears about the rise in Nazi power. Kathe

Kollwitz, although a printmaker, is often categorized as an Expressionist because of her bold brush strokes and emphasis on emotion (See Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled, 27). Blatter and Milton

(1982) explain that while she was not Jewish, she is typically included in collections of Holocaust art because her anti-fascist, pacifist politics made her the target of Nazi surveillance and caused soldiers to ransack her studio (p. 253). Her art, and that of her peers, clearly engages in social critique and exploration of the self.

Surrealism was an important movement during this time. This movement is characterized, again as its name suggests, by art that taps the parts of the mind and world which allude to rational expressions, and is most well known in the work of Salvador Dali. The female artists in this study tend to borrow elements of surrealism rather than work exclusively within it. However, evidence of its influence exists in works such as Lea Grundig’s Imprisoned (33). Surrealism focuses on psychological reality rather than on physical or historical accuracy. It celebrates verisimilitude and the anti-rational over uni-vocal “Truth.”

Thus, we see in Imprisoned (33) that while the woman’s actual physical prison most likely included only one set of bars, the multiple, almost infinite rows of bars represent psychological reality of her captivity.

Finally, caricature emerges as a clandestine form of art used in this forms characteristic manner to subtly push back against Nazi oppression. Caricature was not new, it had been in use since at least the seventeenth-century, but the artist made new use of it here by finding ways to lampoon their captors.

Maja Berezowska’s Distribution of Soup (224) is an example of caricature. The drawing amplifies the

physical features of the serving women, thus making them more monstrous, but also finding a way to poke fun at the oppressors.

All of the art, regardless of the movement, functions as a type of what Scott (1990) calls “hidden transcript” of resistance. Scott explains that hidden transcripts include “discourse that takes place offstage, beyond direct observation by powerholders” (p. 4). These transcripts may take the form of speeches, gestures, and other practices that are produced for an audience other than the oppressor (p.5). In this study, I include the art that was produced during the Holocaust, because it is an example of artists using their available means as a way of pushing back against power. Their efforts left a trail, evidence that the women had existed, that they could connect to their lives before the camps, and that they had made the conscious decision to leave behind narratives of their experiences for future generations. As such, these hidden transcripts function as a means of resistance and survivance.

These hidden transcripts also offer multi-variant ways of understanding what it meant to be a woman in the Holocaust, thus expanding the grand narrative. Because there were a disproportionate number of women who died during the Holocaust, there are relatively few female survivor stories. As a result, the corpus of female survivor narratives is small and the diversity of women’s Holocaust experiences largely missing from public memory. Jessica Enoch explains the importance of hearing

“histories that recover the work of female rhetors and rhetoricians” (p. 58). The work of female rhetors shapes how women’s experiences are told and held in the public’s memory. Enoch (2013) argues that rhetorical work also shapes group identity, that “there are dominant public memories that fortify the status quo, and there are counter-public memories that disrupt visions of life as it was, is, and will be” (p. 62).

One example of this is when Yitzhak Buxbaum (2002) suggests that Jewish women use narrative to demonstrate their belief in the teaching that the soul, not the body, is the foundation of identity. For example, Rebbetzin Devorah Cohen recounts her remembrances of Auschwitz, where she lost her parents and sisters to the gas chambers and was herself the subject of experiments performed by the notorious Dr.

Mengele:

On that first night in Auschwitz, a veteran inmate had pointed to the smoke issuing out of the

chimney of the crematoria and told her, “That’s your parents.” Nevertheless, she asserted,

“Auschwitz was not a bad place…there was a group of religious Hungarian girls. We stuck

together. And all the mitzvot3 we could do, we did do…. A bad place is a place where Jew can do

mitzvoth but don’t do them. (p.39)

The story shows that the body’s physical condition and location do not determine a person’s identity. The physical space that the women in Cohen’s narrative occupy has no apparent bearing on their understanding of themselves as Jewish women. Location and other physical realities are not the locus of their identities. Their bodies are almost inconsequential, and Holocaust art depicting women reflects that strong sense of self. Cohen’s narrative does not deny fear or rage; it simply demonstrates what is often true in traumatic situations; people seek out normalcy as much as possible. Mitzvot are a normal and familiar aspect of traditional Judaism. It is possible that seeking out ways to do good works in a place where life was nothing but agony and fear was a coping device. It can also be read as a way of resisting the evil all around them. It sends the message that one can push back by maintaining a higher moral code.

We see this notion in the response to the terrorist attacks happening in our current day. So often, in response to these attacks, the US and its allies claim higher moral authority by referencing our rejection of torture and tactics similar to those of terrorist cells. We’ve seen it throughout history in the actions of

Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; respond to violence with peace and love. It can be argued that the women’s dedication to mitzvot serves a similar purpose.

This concept of normalcy underscores much of what I argue in this project. It was, after all, a woman’s quest for normalcy which led her to sew that bra. It is also reflected in artwork that depicts women’s bodies as normal, even though they would have been malnourished, shaved heads, dressed in rags, etc. It is as if the representations of women’s bodies argue that something about these women

remains unchanged, regardless of their physical condition. In this way, the art functions as resistance, a declaration of on-going life and identity.

Many people are familiar with images of the horrific state of the concentration camps, particularly the emaciated bodies of those who occupied them. Food was scarce and sanitation deplorable.

These deprivations quickly took their toll on prisoners. Even the most robust suffered. According to

Rochelle Saidel’s (2016) “Ravensbruck Women’s Concentration Camps” (jwa.com) conditions were especially poor in the camps designed for women, such as Ravensbruck, which stood about fifty miles outside of Berlin. Rations were low and women and their children, including newborn infants, starved and died at astounding rates. The conditions worsened over the years as the population of the camp swelled

(Saidel, 2016). In 1944, for instance, thousands of Hungarian women arrived at the already bursting camp. To “house” the overflow, a small tent was erected. Food supplies did not increase and over three thousand women died from starvation, exposure to the freezing temperatures and disease.

Interestingly, some women eased their suffering by composing recipe books based on their lives before the Holocaust (Saidel, 2016). Clearly, “this was a form of resistance unique to women because it enabled them to use their homemakers’ skills to cook in words and remember better times at home”

(Saidel, 2016). Two such cookbooks survive. In them, the women used food as a remembrance of safer, healthier, happier times. Their ability to “cook with words” enabled them to locate themselves, however briefly, outside of the realities of Ravensbruck and in an imaginative realm. Narrative representation of food and cooking become a way of preserving identity.

In a similar way, the art shows women’s ability to nourish the self via art through frequent depictions of women as healthy and well-fed. As Blatter and Milton (1982) explain, art was used to connect back to the past and to help mitigate the present, thus we see a lot of art that doesn’t necessarily

“accurately” depict the physical suffering. Blatter and Milton understand this move as one of resistance, of the prisoners placing themselves in a physical state of health as a way of fighting back against physical reality. Despite the conditions in the camps, women in Holocaust art are often represented with full hips

and breasts or as pregnant or nursing mothers. Thus, it’s clear that art and its representation of identity is not shaped only by reality but by a quest to retain a self that is connected to a past, recognizes the present and feels hope for a future. Blatter and Milton also suggest that selfhood also resides in the ability to make conscious moral or intellectual choices about the present (p. 23). It is this deep connection to the self that helps explain why some women are shown as able to continue performing the roles they have always held within their community. They were seeking a way to maintain that bridge between the past, present and future. The resulting argument is that their cultural and spiritual identities continue to thrive, even as their bodies starve, because the soul transcends physical hunger and presents their ethoi not as victims but as strong Jewish women.

Literature Review

As we begin to recognize the individual woman behind each story, we will come to see the telling, through words, texts, images, etc., as an act of what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance, survival + resistance. The women’s narratives and art may be read as powerful tools against the Nazi’s plan to annihilate the Jews because the texts create spaces where their voices may be heard and where the women may choose how to represent themselves, thus actively composing a sort of push back against the destruction of their bodies, identities, and culture. In her 2011 article, “Literacy Stewardship: Dakelh

Women Composing Culture” Alanna Frost uses the concept of survivance to describe this type of agency against an oppressor. Survivance, as first explained by Gerald Vizenor, is the combination of survival and resistance. The power of survivance is that it “subtly reduces the power of the destroyer” (p. 63).

Frost’s work situates survivance in the work of Native North American women who work to protect their culture’s traditional literacies, but the theory of survivance can be applied to the rhetorical choices of other highly marginalized or oppressed people. Like the women in Frost’s article, the female Holocaust survivors in my project: Produce texts and materials reflective of their culture [and experiences] in an environment shaped by a history of violence against their community and against the very culture about which they [compose]… and they conduct activist work required to fight for those spaces and audiences

to engage with those texts. Their wring occurs in spite of […] violence located at the scene of writing.

They work against [a] kind of cultural erasure… (p. 55).

Blatter and Milton (1982) describe the act of creating art as a form of blatant and clandestine resistance. Artist prisoners were frequently singled out by Nazi guards to create art for propaganda purposes, as gifts for dignitaries, and as decorations for guard’s homes and offices. To refuse meant certain death, but the artists often found ways to incorporate subtle signs of rebellion in their work. For example, on the infamous, Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Liberates”) sign looming on the gates of Auschwitz, the B is deliberately turned upside down. Blatter and Milton (1982) explain that this was a “small act of defiance against the creators of a world cruelly turned upside down” and was obvious to the inmates, but the guards never caught it (p. 26). This small rebellion leaves a trace of humanity, of individual identity that the Nazi’s tried to stamp out.

Narrative theorists such as Toolan (2001), Fisher (1985), and others tell us that story-telling is a way to make sense of and contextualize our worlds. Survivance enhances this by affording a way for narratives to become tools of self-declaration and spaces of active resistance to oppression. In short, survivance gives the women power to use their texts to declare, “I am still here” as well as a move to preserve some piece of identity and establish ethos via lived experience. Great care must be given to receive each story, whether manifested in words or image, without judging any woman on false constructions of heroism or morality. We must welcome each woman as she has chosen to represent herself and receive her story of identity as she wishes to tell it.

A disproportionate number of women to men died during the Holocaust because they were subjected to unique and brutal gendered abuse. Pregnant women were often automatically deemed unable to work and so were marked for death. As a result, relatively few female survivor stories have been published, the corpus of female survivor stories is small and the diversity of women’s Holocaust experiences largely missing from public memory (Waxman, 2006). Moreover, the vast majority of narratives which have been published frame women as heroic, self-sacrificing wives and mothers. This is

problematic because not only are alternative narratives not as widely published, but because it frames all

Holocaust narratives in a myopic way, limiting our construction of the Holocaust to this grand narrative.

Narratives exist showing that some female survivors chose self-preservation over self-sacrifice.

As Zoe Vania Waxman argues in Writing the Holocaust, these narratives challenge the comfortable and relatively uncomplicated grand narrative of the Holocaust and its framing of the female Holocaust experience. Waxman explains that publishers frequently passed over these narratives in favor of stories that mesh with familiar concepts of femininity and motherhood (p.29). These alternative narratives and approaches are critical to broadening and complicating our understanding of the Holocaust; these women with narratives which break from the grand narrative also need to be invited to share those stories in public discourse (Waxman, 2006).

Waxman argues that the majority of published women’s Holocaust narratives uphold gendered approaches to the texts by celebrating women who nobly maintain their roles as wives and mothers during internment. Waxman notes that “assumptions about appropriate gender behavior obscure the diversity of women’s Holocaust experiences” (p. 124). She contends, however, that focusing solely on noble representations simplifies and misrepresents female Holocaust experiences. Privileging the perspective of the noble woman also strips the power from those who actually went through the trauma by re- appropriating their stories to make them easier for audiences to digest.

Waxman also comments that outside forces influenced how women of the Holocaust used narratives to represent their ethoi in ways that depart from the physical realities of their bodies. Waxman cites Sara Zyskind’s Stolen Years as an example. Zyskind describes just how deplorable the situation was, especially in terms of food and nourishment: “In the ghetto we had no need for a calendar. Our lives were divided into periods based on the distribution of food: bread every eighth day, the ration once a month.

Each day fell into two parts: before and after we received our soup. In this way the time passed” (The

United Sates Holocaust Memorial Museum). But, instead of the problems with food, the publisher re- appropriates her experiences and focuses on aspects of “love and courage” (p. 129). Waxman suggests

that the publisher is playing to the value the public places on positive narratives, narratives that sometimes even erase suffering. My analysis depends on and expands Waxman’s perspective of the grand narrative of the female Holocaust experience.

I heartily agree with Waxman that it is dangerous and disrespectful to reduce complex narratives down to heroic tales that serve to build up and perpetuate a myth about the heroic actions of people who experienced the Holocaust. One way to do this is to not dismiss such narratives and examine their complexities in terms of what they might reveal about the women’s sense of identity and power. We must recognize that for some traditional Jewish women, actions of “love and courage” are not simply dustjacket snippets, but shorthand for a code of behavior deeply grounded in faith. I want to make it very clear, that this statement is in no way intended to essentialize the women. Rather, I wish to observe these narratives and work out how they might reveal the enculturation these women experienced. In certain cases, the art reveals that maintaining dignity and the tenants of faith, where possible, invested some women with a foundation that enabled them to survive and even resist such incredible circumstances.

However, this observation is not meant to imply that these women are any more or less heroic than women who made different choices or represented themselves as unable to connect back to a cultural identity.

It is worth pausing here to explain why I avoid labeling any women in this project as heroic. The word typically implies the ability to rise above extenuating circumstances and behave in a self-sacrificing manner to save others. As such, the word can connote that a heroic person has a higher moral character and is perhaps more noteworthy, or even more valuable than someone with a different experience. Such a connotation perpetuates the uni-vocal grand narrative that I find so problematic and does little in terms of understanding how women shape arguments about their experiences. Therefore, I do my best to avoid it and similar terms.

It is critical that we remember that Holocaust survivor stories, like all narratives, are social activities, and that we must value each individual narrative as a unique and complex experience, rather

than framing them within a palatable, homogeneous grand narrative, or passing judgement on which narratives are heroic. Equally critical is the need to complicate history by including narratives that challenge socially constructed gender roles imposed by these grand narratives. In “Releasing Hold:

Feminist Historiography without the Tradition,” Jessica Enoch (2013) explains the importance of hearing

“histories that recover the work of female rhetors and rhetoricians” (p. 58) because the work of female rhetors shapes how women’s experiences are told, and framed in the public’s memory, and influence individual and group identity.

In Feminist Rhetorical Practices (2012), Royster and Kirsch argue that feminist rhetoricians seek to rescue, reclaim, and recover women’s texts and move towards “ethics of care” in order to understand a scene, not to prove a hypothesis. This is important for two reasons. First, because it reflects their theory that rhetoric is a social practice that is multi-variant and polylogical (p. 90). Second, it situates the project firmly within the feminist idea that persuasion is not always the goal of rhetoric and that it can even be seen as damaging.

Sally Miller Gearhart’s “The Womanization of Rhetoric”, in chapter four of Feminism and

Composition (Kirsch, Maor, et. al, 2003) argues specifically against rhetoric’s purpose of persuasion, calling the intent to persuade “an act of violence”, arguing that the male “conquest/convert mentality” is culturally damaging. Persuasion is thus aligned with trauma because it seeks to violate the integrity of another person’s experiences and reality. According to Gearhart, the real violence lies in the seeming integrity that often lies behind the intent to change. Since ethos rests in the supposed character of the speaker, which then creates the authority to speak/persuade, there is an assumption that the speaker is intrinsically good. Gearhart challenges this notion by claiming that conversion via persuasion is especially insidious because it has the sound of integrity; the speaker is merely giving the audience what they want, i.e. to be conquered/persuaded. To me, this almost smacks of the often heard defense of acquaintance rape, “she wanted it.” While Gearhart doesn’t make this connection, the point here is that persuasion is about power dynamics that are unbalanced to the point of becoming violent.

Gearhart views feminism as a rejection of the conquest/convert model of rhetoric. It is an ideology of change rising out of the experiences of women, our bodies, our experiences, and our condition as individuals throughout the centuries. She suggests a change from speaker/conqueror to an interest in listening and receiving, a collective rather than combative mode. Such a change moves away from violence towards peace and acceptance.

Gearhart’s theory is important to this project because the conquest model is reminiscent of the propaganda used by the Nazi’s to justify the extermination of the Jews and other groups. They convinced the German public that it was an act of benevolence and good citizenship, that the Holocaust was what was needed and wanted by good Germans (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Under the powerful propaganda machine, millions of German people were converted to following Hitler’s hatred and participating, directly or indirectly in the death of millions. In this way, it was also an act of violence towards the German citizenry because it, under the auspices of integrity, altered their environment and implicated them in the act of extermination.

Gearhart also links up with Waxman’s point that the requirement to adhere to some grand narrative is damaging. So many women were silenced because their actions during the Holocaust do not fit in with expectations for women’s behavior during the Holocaust. Requiring women (or any person) to persuade a listener that her actions were justified, excusable, etc. during such extreme conditions reifies the violence. Gearhart’s request that rhetoric create an atmosphere for listening and receiving opens up the space Waxman seeks for alternative, perhaps uncomfortable Holocaust narratives. A space where people may simply tell and be heard rather than be judged, with no burden of persuasion placed upon them. While I do not wish to categorize all forms of persuasion as necessarily violent, because persuasion often works for good, I embrace Gearhart’s insistence on the necessity of judgement free environments, especially for rhetors who have suffered such extreme trauma. While this project in some ways commemorates the victims and survivors, it is not my intention to privilege any specific representations

or experience over another. My coding process recognizes themes and the use of topoi in an attempt to refrain from subjective judgments about morality or heroism.

This articulation of resistance and existence despite experiencing one of history’s greatest atrocities paves a new way for us to think about ethos and how we are granted the authority to speak.

Typically, ethos refers to the moral character of a speaker, or perhaps the representation of morality and the right to speak and the ability to persuade and audience. Feminist rhetoricians have begun to tug at this definition a bit by claiming that lived experience is a facet of ethos that more traditional conception of rhetoric ignores. This is especially important for female rhetors who lack the automatic ethos of men

(Wagner in Reclaiming Rhetorica). The female body, always already othered, creates suspect texts, thus women’s authority and right to speak is traditionally compromised. Royster (2012), Flynn (2012), Foss

(2006), and other feminist rhetoricians claim that lived experiences grants the authority to speak.

Ritchie/Ronald argue in their introduction to Available Means that when we explore the rhetoric of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, we need to move away from idea of decorum and find the available means to speak because ethos does necessarily mean elegant and vice-versa. Rhetoric can be messy because human experiences are messy. This articulation of resistance and existence despite experiencing one of history’s greatest atrocities offers a new way for us to think about ethos and how we are granted the authority to speak. Typically, ethos refers to the moral character of a speaker, or perhaps the representation of morality and the right to speak and the ability to persuade and audience. Feminist rhetoricians have begun to tug at this definition a bit by claiming that lived experience is a facet of ethos that more traditional conception of rhetoric ignores. This is especially important for female rhetors who lack the automatic ethos of men (Lunsford, 1995). The female body, always already othered, creates suspect texts, thus women’s authority and right to speak is traditionally compromised. Royster (2012),

Flynn (2012), Foss (2006), and other feminist rhetoricians claim that lived experiences grants the authority to speak. Ritchie and Ronald (2001) argue in their introduction to Available Means that when we explore the rhetoric of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, we need to move away

from idea of decorum and find the available means to speak because ethos does necessarily mean elegant and vice-versa. Rhetoric can be messy because human experiences are messy. Rhetoric is a tool to help us make sense of the mess; rhetoric, as human behavior and communication, does not have to be elegant in order to be valuable.

Nor does rhetoric need to be confrontational or rely upon absolute, uni-vocal “Truth”. Some feminist rhetoricians view “Truth” as a false construct set up in traditional patriarchal forms of rhetoric that emphasize persuasion as winning. There are situations where persuasion is necessary, for example in arguments for social justice; however, feminist rhetoricians are wary of creating “either/or” dichotomies that silence subjective reality and discount diverse experiences and voices. The feminist push back against

“Truth is not meant to imply that certain historical events, like the Holocaust, did not happen; instead, these scholars are concerned about the practice of privileging one form of experience over another, or negating the importance of subjective reality. Accordingly, these scholars seek to create a more invitational, “both/and” perspective and to shift our definition of argument in general. Keith Lloyd’s

(2005) work reminds us that, for some time, feminist rhetoricians have begun to question the common agonistic (from the Greek, agon, or “struggle”) confrontational model of argument and offered instead, a more visual model where the intent is “to make clear” (pp. 317-318). Under this perception, argument moves away from being necessarily logical, combative, and impersonal towards valuing polylogical, multi-variant, and personal subjective realties. Given this shift, ethos no longer springs only from logical claims and warrants, but can now be found in the realm of personal experiences and perceptions. Foss,

Foss and Griffin (2006) as well as Royster and Kirsch (2012) see experience as responsible for giving rhetors ethos and call for a movement towards an invitational notion of rhetoric as well as acceptance of multiple perspectives. Lloyd (2005) asserts that our perceptions are always colored by our personal experience and enculturation (p. 318). When we begin to value experience as a source of rhetorical authority, then, our understanding of rhetorical purpose can shift from logical, linear proof to focus on understanding and flexible perceptions.

This shift is absolutely necessary when focusing on sensitive often painful reconstructions of experiences, such as Holocaust narratives, where perspective is multivariate. In their introduction to The

Holocaust and the Text, Leak and Praizis (2000) state that the “[real and imaginary] imply each other” partially because historical Holocaust narratives use literary devices in a process of “literary narrativization” (p. 7). These literary elements do not make the narratives any less real, even though

Holocaust artists are uniquely subject to guidelines of authenticity. This is partially true because most attempts to represent the Holocaust, be it in art or oral testimony, aspire to the conditions of history.

Audiences are always moved to ask “was this how it really was” and thus make artists who represent the

Holocaust vulnerable to notions of betrayal. Leak and Praizis (2000) turn to Lawrence Langer to explicate this quandary:

When the Holocaust is the theme, history imposes limitations on the supposed flexibility of

artistic license…instead of Holocaust fictions liberating the facts and expanding that range of

their implications, Holocaust facts enclose the fictions, [creating a space] where history and art

stand guard over their respective territories. (p. 10)

The problem here is that Holocaust themed narratives deal with traumas that lie outside of typical human experience, and this gets truer the further removed we get from the actual events. This is so for most trauma narratives, including narratives of disability. Bernard-Donals (2001) explains that discourse cannot represent what has been seen or experienced, it can only indicate the effect on the witness, since writing is an indication, not a reproduction, and thus, writing has a limit in regards to its connection to knowledge.

It is not so for visual narratives, as these texts work specifically with representation and are, thus in some ways, able to cross Langer’s boundaries between fact and fiction and accuracy and artistic license. Artistic representation can simultaneously represent what has happened and represent the effects on the witness. However, this does not erase the fact that there are still social expectations that traumatized and disabled people be wrong in the right way (Waxman, 2006). Audiences still want

transcendent Holocaust stories, still want to be able to say that everything ended up better in the end. This is where audiences manipulate language to make it fit our desired reality, we call someone a Holocaust survivor, not a victim, regardless of the fact that they were victimized, however, Mairs (2001) reminds us that calling something or someone one thing or another doesn’t change the condition or experience (p.

458). Mairs embraces the word “cripple” in order to claim her loss, as a way of asserting “I am.” This not only creates a way for her to assert her disability, but also rejects the social requirements of how to be a good, attractive disabled person with a transcendent narrative that makes everyone around her feel better about her disability. “Cripple” makes people as uncomfortable as seeing her disabled body and, thus, allows her to have control over her language in a way that she cannot control her body. Mairs shapes her identity by reclaiming “cripple”. In the same vein, it may very well be that someone may choose to refer to herself as a Holocaust victim in an attempt to identify with their experience and, in some ways, claim it for themselves.

In a similar move, feminist rhetorical theory extends narrative theory by asserting that narrative shapes identity (Ochs, 1997 and Ochs and Capps, 1996). The feminist understanding of self, used by

Ochs and Capps and others, supports the notion that the definition of ethos may be expanded to include authority via experience, rather than by clinging to one uni-vocal perspective. Ochs and Capps (1996) understand narrative and the self as always already intertwined. Their definition of self as a connection to one’s past, awareness of the present, and the ability to conceptualize the future meshes well with their view that narrative helps us impose order on disconnected or confusing events and connect to past, present, and future or imagined worlds by creating stories around our experiences.

Narrative also intersects with the self and social expectations and is a critical resource for socializing emotions, attitudes and identities. The way we tell about and represent our experiences makes assertions about who we are, even those aspects of our selves that may be unconscious. Essentially, narrative brings our partial selves to life (Ochs and Capps, 1996). Connection to the self is what ultimately grants viability to the concept of authority gained via experience. Understanding one’s self as

connected to a past and participating in a future enables the individual to compose a life narrative of verisimilitude, where validation of experience is not continent upon “Truth,” but rather by the fact that narration is a bid for power over one’s own life (Toolan, 2001). Toolan does not dispute that there are historical facts; rather, he recognizes that individuals understand and process events differently based upon enculturation and varied life experiences. Being able to represent these experiences in narrative empowers the teller and expands public understanding of the event.

Elizabeth Tonkin (1992) supports these claims in Narrating Our Pasts, by reminding us that narrative is a social activity where tellers claim authority to speak and where “the act of authoring is a claim to authority” (p. 8). Experiences grant speakers authority because narrating the past is an attempt to represent it to ourselves and others and to situate ourselves within that past in an act of self-discovery.

Our lived experiences are integral parts of our selves and grant us the authority to speak so that we may understand how experience shapes our lives and the society in which we live. In, Women of the Word:

Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, Judith Baskin (1994) explains that what we often refer to as “voice” is really an author’s/rhetor’s work revealing a “literary discovery of the self and forgings of identity”

(p.19). For some female Holocaust victims, this discovery coincides with acts of rhetorical resistance. The act of recounting their experiences is an assertion of survival, a declaration of their past, present and future. As such, Holocaust narratives enable survivors to transcend the Nazi’s attempt at annihilation. As explained at the beginning of this chapter, I consider the creation of art to have potential narrative and rhetorical qualities. Stories may be discursive, text based, or more abstract. Regardless of the mode, telling stories allow humans the potential to connect to the self by asserting that we have a past, exist in the present, and will continue to thrive in the future.

Given my conception of narrative and rhetoric, this project examines the ways in which the chosen visual narratives from Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton’s The Art of the Holocaust (1982) work rhetorically to make arguments about the selfhood of women who experienced the Holocaust. One way that it does that is by recognizing the fact that in women artists often represent women in ways that are

not in line with the realities of the camps, ghettos, etc. In this way, the visual narratives may seem fragmented or fractured because they do not fit with common understanding of the conditions in the camp. Audiences expect to see art depicting malnourished, bald, skeletal women, piles of bodies and images of crematoria, yet are presented with women who can still carry and care for their children, appear physically strong, and still determined to and capable of carrying out their roles in Jewish society. In the entire book, there is not one representation of an identifiable female dead body, not one (See Chapter

Four). The representations break from what some audiences consider to be an “accurate” representation of the Holocaust experience, and in doing so become rhetorical acts of resistance not only against Nazi cruelty, but against a society that insists on hearing a homogeneous narrative told in a comfortable and recognizable way.

Trauma, Disability, and Narrative

Arthur Frank’s (2013) The Wounded Storyteller explains that trauma narratives are often difficult to read because they lack recognizable narrative structures and patterns. Traumatized storytellers often have sequential breaks, may interrupt themselves or leave out necessary details. These breaks push against dominate concepts of storytelling patterns and language and perhaps making audiences uncomfortable in ways that non-disabled people might be when encountering a disabled person’s body.

Nirmala Erevelles calls disabled and traumatized bodies, “deviances”, sites where the micro politics of power are disrupted and sites where unanticipated meanings and understanding may be born out (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson 2001, p. 94). The same may be said of narratives of trauma. Fragmented survivor stories deviate from social constructions of narrative and require that audiences hear and acknowledge the differences in narrative structure, pushing those of us who are not trauma survivors out of our comfortable conceptions of narrative and forcing us to recognize that trauma can manifest even in narrative patterns and other ways of representation.

James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2001) argue that disability has a sociopolitical significance and that it is always imbued with meaning (p. 2). Thus, we have social constructions of

normalcy, both physical and mental from which we are then able to exclude those who do not fit. Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson explain that the “natural” view of disability is tied to language and the body because language functions performativity by interpellating dualities of normalcy and deviance into circulation. We use language to categorize people in terms of normalcy. The very word disability, its prefix dis comes from the Latin for apart, sets up a duality of normalcy that favors the abled. They point out that becoming a rhetor can potentially “counter culturally disabling narratives” that resist social constructions of ability and normalcy (p. 12).

The fractured narratives of trauma survivors are also subject to normalizing language conventions. Since they often lack familiar, chronological patterns and contain omissions and interruptions, survivor narratives are vulnerable to accusations of inaccuracy and dismissal in the same way as fractured bodies are dismissed. Requiring trauma narratives to fit into these artificial language constructs reifies the trauma because it requires to survivors to “be wrong in the right way” to have their story accepted by a non-traumatized audience. It forces them to bend to our needs, rather than to tell their story as it makes sense for them. The ability to tell disjointed narratives empowers the tellers, and forces others to hear their story their way. In a way, it is a moment of universal narrative design, a recognition that access to narrative must be granted to all, not merely to the abled few. In short, the telling of fragmented stores is an act of resistance, because it “resists the residual and continuing effects of common negative cultural construction” that the only narratives that are valuable are the ones the follow typical patterns (Wilson and Lewiecki Wilson, 2001, p. 12). Further, the telling is an act of resistance because it speaks truth to power by declaring “this happened to me and I shall tell it my way”. Such an assertion reinforces the necessity of adopting an invitational understanding of argument, one that celebrates multiple experiences. Again, let me stress that I am not suggesting that there are not specific historical facts and events; I am explaining that each person perceives such events in a unique and personal way and that the telling of those narratives, be it through discourse or visual representation, complicates the public understanding of the Holocaust. Inviting multiple perspectives does much to push back against the

temptation to classify some women’s narratives as heroic while discounting others. This project seeks simply to observe the different ways the women represent their experiences as mothers and members of a community, not at all to categorize them as heroic or not.

Not only would judgements about heroism be inappropriate, they would negate the women’s right to control their own narrative representations and could potentially victimize the artists and other survivors. The ability to maintain control over narrative structure is especially important for Holocaust survivors, who have already been severely victimized. It broadens the modes that narrative may take.

This dissertation positions art as narratives that are capable of telling stories of lived experience. The non- linear and non-chronological patterns commonly found in survivor narrative expand the concept of what counts as narrative and demonstrates that lived experiences influence our ways of telling. Finally, allowing survivors of trauma to tell narratives in ways that are antithetical to typical social constructions of narrative grants them a space to tell their stories without being held up to constricting patterns, thus acknowledging their agency as tellers and survivors. It does away with the requirement that they be

“wrong in the right way”, thus their rhetorical choices may become social activities. The fractured narratives that survivors create reflect their fractured and dismantled lives and perhaps such narratives better represent the reality of their experiences than any neat, linear narrative ever could.

On this point, I return to Mair’s (2001) insistence on calling herself a cripple, which shows the limits of the intersections between language and reality, calling something one thing or another doesn’t change the condition of the thing. In the same vein, adherence to specific narrative structure doesn’t change the trauma of an event. While Mair’s ontological argument that we are not our experiences is true, our experiences can shape our ways of telling stories and representing ourselves.

It is important to acknowledge the link between trauma and disability because of the dialectic between the traumatized/disabled body and identity. We tend to think of disability only in terms of outward atypical physical or mental difference rather than in terms of life trauma. We easily categorize a man with a prosthetic hand or a woman with schizophrenia as disabled, but not the person who survived

genocide. We tend to think that since they survived that they are as good as or better than they were before, in fact, we insist upon it as evidenced by the popularity of Holocaust narratives with uplifting or inspirational endings. We forget that their bodies suffered physical and mental trauma and even if there are no physical scars the body, as a rhetorical space, represents those traumas through narrative.

Therefore, if trauma is a type of disability, then Holocaust survivor stories are narratives of disability and are subjected to the same social constructions as other narratives. They are accepted, or not, based upon how well they fulfill the familiar conventions of the “survivor narrative” genre. Sadly, this means that those narratives that cannot adhere to these constraints of narrative plot or structure are marked as deviant, in a reiteration of the trauma the survivors suffered.

Just as narrative pattern is a social convention, so too is memory. Waxman (2006) writes that survivor memories are expected to adhere to our collective memory of the Holocaust and it is not always the case that survivor’s memories reflect the collective memory. She points out that people’s Holocaust experiences are multifaceted and that many memories and experiences, such as those of the Jewish

Kapos, do not fit the accepted concept of the Holocaust and as a result of their deviance, are less palatable and devalued.

Of course, rejecting these narratives places survivors at risk on two levels. First they homogenize and normalize the Holocaust experience. Second, they all survivors witness in the same way and in doing so adopt a universal survivor identity. Both of these things disenfranchise and disable some survivor stories, thus traumatizing the survivors once again. Waxman (2006) insists that survivor testimonies should not be mediated only by the concerns of collective memory, but also by the concerns of each individual survivor (p. 158). This applies not only to what survivors tell, but the ways in which they tell. I have already addressed the fact that since Holocaust narratives are narratives of disability and trauma, audiences must expect alternative narrative constructions, it is also critical that we accept that the telling of impossible circumstances has many possible forms, including both discursive and non-discursive modes. With Waxman, I believe that there should be no requirement of the survivor to tell a comfortable

narrative in a comfortable way. Trauma narratives reject the notion that there is one correct kind of body and Holocaust narratives extend this by revealing that there is no one way to be a survivor or to tell the survival story.

This dissertation hinges upon the idea that the different ways of telling reveal much about the way people resist and survive not only the trauma itself, but the social constructions placed upon traumatized people and their bodies. My two research questions for this project are:

1. How does the women’s artwork constitute an alternative ways of telling?

2. How do the women use the topoi of amplification and synecdoche to create lines of

reasoning about women’s Holocaust experiences?

These questions broaden the work done by Holocaust scholars, disability theorists, and feminist rhetoricians by merging the concerns of those three fields in order to examine the specific ways in which non-discursive, non-verbal narratives contribute to and complicate the broader understanding of the

Holocaust and its survivors. Positioning Holocaust survivors as traumatized/disabled tellers is in no way meant to marginalize them further, it is meant to lay the foundation for the argument that their experiences require different ways of telling and new ways of understanding from their audiences. It is also meant to acknowledge the power their narratives can wield in terms of pushing back against efforts to homogenize their stories or to define a “typical” Holocaust experience.

In Chapter Two, I outline my methods concerning the collection of data and describe how and why feminist methodology and rhetorical practice are especially appropriate to this dissertation. I define and give examples for how I use the terms topoi, feminist rhetoric, disability, trauma, telling and narrative. In Chapter Three, I discuss how I coded the art in relation to those definitions and my research questions. Chapter Four contains discussion and analysis of the art in terms of the results of my coding. I answer my research questions in this chapter and explain how I arrived at my conclusions. Even though it is the shortest, Chapter Five is, to me, the most important chapter because it describes not only my

findings and the limitations of the study, but what my work will contribute to the fields of Rhetoric,

Disability, and Holocaust Studies. It is deeply important to me to acknowledge the various modes that narrative may take for survivors and all traumatized people so that they are not perpetually marginalized, or worse, re-traumatized by the audience’s desire for comfortable familiar sanitized narratives. It is my hope that this dissertation creates a space where alternative narrative modes and structures are valued and legitimized.

Chapter Two: Methodology and Methods

Introduction

This dissertation is an exploration of visual representation in artwork created by professional female artists who experienced the Holocaust. To that end, my overall methodology is feminist and influenced by Disability Studies (DS), including work in narrative and trauma theory. As this chapter details, to engage with the texts, I support my feminist approach with concepts from DS and rhetorical feminist theory. To pursue that engagement, I code my data inductively and analyze it rhetorically.

As discussed in Chapter One, following Birdsell and Groarke (2004), my project hinges on the assumption that the images function as narratives about the women’s’ experiences and that the subtleties of context, revealed through careful examination of the topoi, challenge the grand narrative of the

Holocaust by offering more complex perspectives. In this analysis, I consider the art in terms of visual amplification and synecdoche; I also consider how the topoi make specific arguments about Jewish female identity. Through observation, I found a number of topoi that frame artwork representing the female Holocaust experience involving amplification/litotes and synecdoche, as well as comparison, definitions, and past facts. In this dissertation, I focus specifically on examples of visual amplification/litotes and synecdoche because they appear most frequently in the art and, thus, show a repeated line of reasoning throughout the corpus. I identify images with visual amplification as having physical aspects of women’s bodies or environments that are enlarged, or, in instances of litotes, deemphasized.

Within the art, amplification creates a pattern of reasoning that emphasizes elements of women’s

Holocaust experiences by visibly highlighting or amplifying physical or emotional aspects evident in the women represented. For example, the visual amplification of the pregnant woman’s stomach in Women

and Children Being Sent on a Transport (1) creates a line of reasoning about motherhood within the context of the Holocaust by emphasizing the woman’s pregnancy. Her stomach is amplified and occupies significant space within the image. Litotes, minimization or understatement, is a reversed form of amplification; as such, litotes serves the same rhetorical function as amplification, but works in the opposite direction. The two women in the background of The Hell for Women (354) are litotes when viewed in relation to the enlarged figure of the woman in the foreground and the walls of the prison camp that rise up above them.

Synecdoche sets up a line of reasoning which allows the rhetor/artists to argue that one person or a few individuals may represent an entire group, intuition, or social apparatus. I identify visual synecdoche as images where two figures are physically connected in some way, for example, in Mother and Child (70), the woman and her child appear to share shoulders and a torso. Visual synecdoche is also identified in images where groups of individual women consolidate into one, as in Roll Call (159), where the women stand close enough to each other so that they merge into a collective whole. Thus, the figure visibly offers a line of reasoning which connects individuals and the groups with which they identify.

In keeping with current feminist rhetorical theory, my study focuses on images and not participants, but positions the images as artifacts of the lived experiences and the bodies of real women.

My data set also examines art that represents women’s bodies, rather than landscapes or images of buildings and objects. Moreover, I view the art as a venue through which the women explore and present their knowledge and experiences of the Holocaust. Thus framed, my study considers how bodies form lines of argument about experience and identity. Therefore, my methodology must respect the women who created the art. Specifically, my data collection methods adhere to feminist methodology and intersect with tenants of trauma theory and DS’s views on the role of the body as a source of knowledge and as a vehicle for narrative.

Feminist and DS research practices call upon researchers to examine their scholarly positions and address them in honest and reflective ways. Margaret Price’s (2012) “Disability Studies Methodology:

Explaining Ourselves to Ourselves” addresses the need for disability researchers to “discuss their own positions, identifications, or other alliances with respect to the topic they research. DS research must make more space for explicit identification by researchers” (p. 171). Because my study involves one of the most horrific examples of trauma in modern memory; I also turn to trauma theory.

On Naming

Feminist researchers recognize lived experiences as sources of “legitimate knowledge” and are mindful of the hierarchies of power within the research process (Hesse-Biber, 2012). Even without direct, living participants, my study requires this type of mindfulness. As I stated earlier, it is not in any way my wish to speak for women who experienced the Holocaust. However, my role as the researcher inevitably empowers me to pick the pieces that are subject to my gaze. Ultimately, I am a judge, regardless of my best intentions. As I move through this project, therefore, I must be aware of the potential to victimize the artists and any Holocaust survivor by my choices, interpretations, and by the mere undertaking this project. To this end, I follow the feminist researchers who have come before me and work with what

Jacqueline Royster (Royster and Kirsch, 2012) calls an “ethic of care” as I gather and interpret data. In this particular case, I proceed with both care and honor towards the experiences of not only the people represented here but also all who suffered.

Feminist theorists, as well as those in DS, warn of the dangers of defining people by their bodies and experiences, and consequently, champion the right of the disabled to define themselves. Nowhere in this project do I speak for anyone who was victimized by the Nazi regime, even the use of that word, victimized, can reproduce oppression by labeling those who experienced the Holocaust. Wilson and

Lewiecki-Wilson (2001) remind us of Judith Butler’s point that “language functions performatively” in an attempt to categorize people relation to socially constructed notions of “normalcy” (p. 2). Words such as

“victim” quite literally label a person as outside the tenants of normalcy, which is itself a social construction. In this dissertation, my use of terms like victim, victimization, trauma, etc. in no way intend to define, essentialize, or reify the women’s bodies or experiences. Instead, I use those terms to speak of

anyone who was subjected to any aspect of the Holocaust, whether they were in the camps, murdered, confined to ghettos, lost loved ones, etc. Sadly, the limits of language create spaces where unintentional victimization happens. I work very hard, throughout this dissertation, to recognize this effect and avoid causing further pain.

The primary tenants of DS and feminist theory also require that I avoid creating a situation where

I objectify the victims and survivors. To that end, I must account for my own position within this project.

I am neither Jewish, or of Jewish heritage. As such, there are those who will question my motivations for engaging in this project, perhaps even find my interest offensive. My response is two-fold. First, identification is not a prerequisite for scholarship. It is well within the scope of feminist research practices and DS to find interest in locations with which we do not personally identify. Scholarship that explores cultures and identities outside of our own erodes dichotomies and challenges researchers to avoid normalizing their own identities. Second, genocide sadly remains a relevant and immediate issue in which academics should be engaged. Although the Holocaust occurred over seventy years ago, our world is not yet immune to the same plagues of racism, fear, and scapegoating that led the Nazis to systematically murder over six million people. From the current exodus of refugees from Syria, to the ethnic cleansings in Yugoslavia, and genocides in Africa, we are not yet free from ideologies of hatred.

The academic community must make this a topic of concern, activism, and action.

The urgency for academic action requires careful reflection on the part of researchers. In DS, a slippery slope exists between speaking for the disabled and traumatized in an empowering way and not speaking for them in a way that dehumanizes. Reflective representation acknowledges the messy line between “researcher and research (or self-other)” Price (2012). explains that “speaking for” can mean creating a venue for speaking and telling; because that is my goal, I am admittedly anxious about interpretations and analysis that may unintentionally misrepresent the women’s experiences or cause further pain (p.175) . In DS, “speaking for” may take the shape of facilitated communication where a trained facilitator helps a person who lacks speech communicate with others. In the case of my study,

“speaking for” is trickier and falls more along the lines of creating spaces where all voices and stories may be shared and valued without pressure to persuade or conform to comfortable assumptions about women and Holocaust trauma.

In this way, “speaking for” becomes a form of activism, which Price also argues belongs to DS research and to other fields that focus on identity, representation, issues of oppression, etc. Price (2012) makes a wonderful move by arguing that other disciplines with “socially progressive methodologies” (and here I specifically point to feminist rhetorical theory) need to take notice of DS because they grapple

“with similar questions, but from interesting and previously unnoticed standpoints” (p. 168). In fact,

Price’s own questions about emancipatory scholarship intersect with my study. She wonders how individual stories and narratives should be collected and represented, and what narrative means when it comes from those who cannot speak (p. 169). I have grappled with similar questions in terms of collecting and analyzing the art. Many of the artists have passed away and their artwork represents female suffering and death in the camps; at what point do my intellectual pursuits intersect (or collide) with their right to their freedom from my interpretation of them? In my view, the activism of this project lays in the fact that

I seek to create another space, one of many, where the women’s stories may be known; but, as a reflective researcher, I recognize that the validity of their experiences is not dependent upon that space I create.

As such, I find myself walking a fine line between practicing the art of rhetorical analysis, with the required interpretations and deductions about texts, and honoring the fact that these particular texts are the products of human beings who experienced an event that was horrific beyond words, almost beyond imagination. This knowledge demands that their voices take precedence over mine. True, this first foray into professional scholarship requires that I demonstrate my authority and establish my ethos within the field; however, I situate myself within feminist rhetorical practices that value the voices and lives and honor the memory of the six million people who died under Hitler and his monstrous forces. My feminism sparked this project and guides its completion. Beyond the required coding, beyond the definitions and descriptions of data, beyond attaining a degree, beyond establishing myself as a scholar

within the field, this project’s importance rests on the memory of the real people who lived and died in the

Holocaust. It rests in the women and men who suffered unimaginable fear and pain, those who died and those who survived to relive it for the rest of their lives. I sincerely hope this project does them honor.

The Data

In order to analyze the artwork, I needed to select a workable corpus of art out of the hundreds of images available to me via books, websites, archives, etc. I ultimately decided upon Janet Blatter and

Sybil Milton’s Art of the Holocaust (1982) because the collection is comprised of over 300 drawings, sketches, paintings, etc. created by professional artists who directly experienced the Holocaust. Blatter and Milton not only provide a large, convenient, easily accessible corpus of artwork, much of which is archived throughout the world, it also contains excellent historical context for the art and biographical information about the artists that significantly aided this project.

Although this is not a study of human participants, it is a study that involves human meaning- making; therefore, I loosely employed principals of observational research methods to narrow down a corpus of art from Blatter and Milton. I started by simply becoming familiar with the different types of

Holocaust art. Some of it was created in ghettos and concentration camps. Others were “commissioned” by the Nazi propaganda machine as a way to assure the world that the conditions within the camps were healthy and safe. Still others were created well after liberation, as a form of memorial or remembrance. I had decided in earlier coursework, as a result of reading Waxman’s work and long before the project began, that I was interested in examining women’s narratives. Given those prior interests, I felt comfortable transferring that focus to the art; after all, this project positions art as an alternate and rhetorical form of narrative. As scholars in Rhetorical Studies now more or less agree, images belong within a rhetorical study that focuses on specific arguments made in specific situations. According to

Birdsell and Groarke (1996), “when we incorporate conventionalized, situation-specific meanings within the process of interpreting visual arguments, we effectively extend the traditional verbal enthymeme” (p.

315). Moreover, Gross and Keith (1997) argue that moving from the parameters of the project to

particular themes is entirely consistent with the manner in which rhetoric, an approach based in human thought and action and, therefore, in informal forms of reasoning, operates. Thoughtful coding enabled me to move as transparently as possible through the data and, thereby, compile a corpus which is consistent with and extends my interests. My explanation of how I ultimately chose my corpus appears below.

I began to notice that women and men were depicted in very different ways in the art. Images of men tended to show realistic depictions of emaciated bodies, death, torture and degradation (see Chapter

Four). In contrast, women are depicted as mothers, with healthier bodies than their male counterparts, and almost never under the duress of torture. Compared to the art showing men, there are few female nudes and almost no images of dead women. These differences sparked my interest in how the artists present the female body. Therefore, I decided that given my interested in the representation of the female body, a woman or women had to be the focus of the image, even if a man or men were also present.

I also realized that I am interested in situational pieces as well as portraits, a portrait being an image where the emphasis is on the figure, while a situational piece places emphasis on the story. Rather than portraiture for its own sake, pieces, like Olomucki’s Untitled (2) and Buresova’s Mother and Child

(70), focus on the face, yet represent more than physical aspects or personality of the subject. In both images, the women appear to be looking at something outside of the frame giving a sense of the situational. They do not simply gaze back at the viewer; they possess an awareness, even a wariness, of the world beyond the frame. It is as if they were painted in the act of observation, rather than painted to be observed. This gaze is common in artworks throughout the era in which these artists worked and were trained. Second, portraits often contain one person, but these particular examples have two people in them, a mother and her child; and in both cases, the mother looks away, outside of the frame, while the child looks directly at the viewer. These gazes again suggest that there is an environment beyond the frame that has warranted I discuss below.

Second, since discussions of representation hinge, to a certain extent, upon authorial intent, I began to narrow down by looking only at work that was created by professional artists. Professional artists have a certain amount of expertise in making deliberate compositional choices. Their training gives them access to knowledge of artistic tropes and traditions. In short, they may be able to account for their compositional/rhetorical choices more readily than amateur artists. This in no way means that the work of amateur artists is not valuable; it simply means that they are not appropriate for my particular project. As the project evolved, it became clear to me that my interests involved how the art provides narratives of female Holocaust experiences. Accordingly, I added the criterion that the art should not just depict women, but also be created by women who survived the Holocaust in concentration camps, ghettos, or other first-hand experiences4. This criterion stems from the belief that women can more accurately represent their own experiences, or, in keeping with the tenants of DS, speak for other women who have been silenced.

It was also helpful to specify a start date for the works I selected. I decided to use pieces that were created no earlier than 1933; this was the year in which Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and the year that the Nazis opened the first concentration camps and began spreading propaganda and imprisoning their opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others viewed as dangerous to the regime (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Though the vast majority of the art in my data set was made in the 1930’s and 1940’s, two pieces were created much later. Halina Olomucki’s Women and

Children in the Extermination Camp (346) was created in 1950, while Helga Weissova –Hoskova’s

Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport from the Terezin Ghetto (1), from 1963, is the latest piece. The dates for three pieces, France Audoul’s The Hell for Women (354), Nina Jirsikova’s Scene in

Camp Ravensbruck (225), and Halina Olomucki’s Untitled (2) are unknown. I purposefully did not set an

4 For example, Kathe Kollwitz was never in a concentration camp. Kollwitz was a non-Jew whose pacifist, anti- fascist, and other “un-German” beliefs made her the target of Nazi threats and harassment. Her politics and the subsequent harassment, combined with her subject matter, necessarily mean that her work is often included in collections and discussions of Holocaust art.

end date for the pieces because of the nature of artistic creation; the artists may choose to represent their experiences at any given time and there is no closing date to survival. The decisions outlined here allowed me to arrive at a workable corpus.

As I conducted the analysis, I established two coding systems, one to explore the conceptual themes in the art (motherhood, imprisonment, etc.) and the second to understand how these themes (or topoi as I name them), function within the artwork. Through the coding, I was able to establish primary and secondary data sets. The primary data set includes images that represent the female Holocaust experience as outlined previously and detailed subsequently. These images must also display specific thematic elements (see below). First, I coded the images within the primary data sat for conceptual themes, then, I linked the themes by examining them as topoi, or lines of reasoning; in particular, I focused on two particular figures, amplification and synecdoche. Images became part of the secondary data set if they displayed the necessary conceptual thematic elements, but represented different topoi, such as comparison or past/future fact, etc. rather than amplification or synecdoche. Both sets are included in Chapter Four, where I focus on the primary data and use the secondary data to provide transparency about my coding process and add additional context when necessary.

My primary data set is comprised of sixteen paintings, drawings, and sketches. Thirteen of the pieces were chosen from Blatter and Milton. The remaining three pieces, Helga Weissova-Hoskova’s

Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport (2) Halina Olomucki’s, Untitled, and Judith Liberman’s

Women in the Holocaust come from other sources. Weissova-Hoskova’s and Olomucki’s drawings were found on the Ghetto Fighters House Archives website. Liberman’s piece comes from the website of the

University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I included these three and others because I was familiar with them from other studies; they clearly had value to this project, and were consistent with my goals and criteria.

Table 1 charts the titles, artists, dates (if known), for 24 of the 26 pieces of which the primary and secondary data are comprised, the reference number assigned to the piece in Blatter and Milton (1982).

To the three pieces not included in Blatter and Milton, I assigned the reference numbers 1, 2, and 3, respective to the order in which I first encountered them. Weissova- Hoskova is 1, Olomucki is 2, and

Liberman is 3. The entire corpus is arranged in alphabetical order by the artist’s last name. In cases where there is more than one work by the same author, the works are arranged alphabetically by title. The sixteen images that make up the primary data set are marked with a P and shaded in blue; the nine supplemental data images are marked with an S and unshaded. As previously described, the primary data set is comprised of data which I analyzed, and the secondary data provided comparative material by providing context and triangulation.

Coding for amplification and synecdoche enabled me to once again pair down the corpus and establish a primary and secondary data set. If there was no evidence of amplification or synecdoche, but other topoi appeared, the piece was removed from my primary data set and placed in secondary data to be used during the analysis phase of this project. As a result, my final, primary data set is comprised of sixteen images. The chart in Table 3 outlines the primary data set’s use of amplification and synecdoche.

Intent also limits my project; I have no way of confirming what a particular artist meant or intended in any specific work. It is impossible for me to verify that any piece was created as an act of resistance or that any woman represented felt especially connected to particular aspects or her religion and culture. However, rhetoricians find meaning in patterns and the art reveals consistencies in rhetorical patterns, consistencies that may be used as the basis for continuing discussion and understanding of the female Holocaust experience.

Coding Methods

My project does not strictly follow the Grounded Theory process of collecting and openly coding data, etc. However, my study is grounded in data that has been coded for patterns in themes and topoi; to the best extent possible, this coding has been inductive and guided by the Feminist and DS theories

mentioned above5. Once I put my corpus together, I began to read and code them, a process from which emerged two parts; initial coding for themes and, second, examining the codes as they present lines of argument. More specifically, I began by working inductively, in two coding passes, to develop codes from the observation and constant comparison of the data, looking for thematic patterns within the art.

On my first pass, I coded for all the themes that I could identify. On the second pass, I condensed and collapsed the themes into each other, which coalesced, in doing so, gained a more nuanced view of the way the themes functioned within the art. I tried to notice themes that directly related to the female

Holocaust experience and appeared repeatedly.

Feminist theory and DS have introduced new ways of thinking about the themes surrounding women’s trauma, in this case, women’s Holocaust experiences. Victoria Aarons describes typical themes in Holocaust narratives to include catastrophe, lamentation, deprivation, loss of humanity, etc. (Adams,

2014). In this dissertation, I consider those and offer a new set of themes, suggested by careful coding, around which to frame Holocaust narratives and refine my data set, including community, physical strength, and motherhood. Applying these themes to women’s Holocaust experiences, frames survivor narratives in a new way, and complicates and pushes back against the typical, homogenized view of the

Shoah.

Coding for Themes

When I examined the entire corpus of data, both the primary and secondary data sets, ten specific conceptual representational themes of representation emerged. From these observed themes, I developed ten codes that would help me move toward interpretation: The Gaze (GZ), Mother-Child Pose (M-CP),

Imprisonment (PR), Victimization (VIC), Groupings of Women (GOW), Star of David (SOD),

Motherhood (MH), Arrangement with a Defined Location (LocD), Arrangement with an Undefined

5Since this project is a rhetorical analysis and my methods are based in rhetoric, this coding process is appropriate. The project did not require any kind of interrater reliability testing, randomization, or other sorts of quantitative checking.

Location (LocU), and Healthy Bodies (HB). What follows is an explanation of these codes. What follows is a breakdown of those themes by each piece of art. All images, both primary and secondary data, are included in Table 2, Conceptual Thematic Codes for Primary and Secondary Data Sets.

The first code, The Gaze, refers to any instance when a subject of the art appears to be aware of being observed, of being an object of observation. In my corpus of art, this code is evidenced by a

“looking out” or “looking back” at the viewers. These works, moreover, lack any sense that the subjects are in some way making us the object of their observation, as in a sort of “caught you looking” moment.

When this code appears, the work implicates the viewer as aware of the circumstances of the people represented in the art. For example, in, Malvina Schalkova’s Elderly Deportee (73), the woman looks out of the frame, directing her gaze towards the viewer. She almost seems to be watching us look at her in her moment of supreme helplessness. Her gaze is direct, but her body’s slumped, listless posture indicates surrender to the situation and to our gaze.

The second code, the Mother-Child Pose (M-CP) refers specifically to any piece where a mother and her child are represented in the classic pose, that is, where the mother holds the child close to her.

This pose is common within the canon of classical, particularly Renaissance art. Although the pose typically depicts the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, professionally trained artists would be familiar with the posture and so it seems logical that it would appear in their work. Charlotte Buresova’s Mother and Child (70) is an example.

The third code, Imprisonment (PR), may seem overtly obvious because any art depicting the camps depicts situations of imprisonment; but this code focuses on art with visible bars, wires, or other structures of confinement, this code may also refer to situations where guards or dogs are present, as they are symbols of the concentration camps. France Audoul’s The Hell for Women (354) is an example of artwork that falls under this code, but instead of bars, it depicts the striped uniform and the dogs indicate the woman’s location. Lea Grundig’s Imprisoned (33), with its multiple layers of bars, represents a more classic example.

Like Imprisonment (PR), the next code, Victimization (VIC), may seem obvious in a project about the Holocaust; however, as I surveyed the data, I noticed that there were pieces where the women were directly threatened by violence visible to the viewer within the image; in others, the actual threat was subtler, outside of what is visible to the viewer in the image. Though the code overlaps with

Imprisonment, this one categorizes art where a direct and immediate threat of violence is observable in the frame of the picture. This threat can take the shape of guards, dogs, crematoria, etc. France Audoul’s

The Hell for Women (354), depicts a woman being bitten by a guard dog. The barbed walls of the camp and the smokestack of the crematorium loom behind her. Works categorized under this code also depict less direct threats as well as those indicated by titles. Lea Grundig’s Gestapo in the House (36) shows a group of people hiding behind doors. The Gestapo are not present in the drawing, only the title alerts us of their presence “in the house” and, therefore, of the direct threat they pose to the family. In sum, this code indicates immediate threats of violence that are visible to the audience.

Groups of Women (GOW) indicates drawings or painting where women are depicted interacting with each other in a group or experiencing something as a collective group. The code is also meant to differentiate groups comprised solely of adult women rather than groups of women and children together.

Malvina Schalkova’s Forced Labor (77) is an example. In essence, I am coding for images that offer metaphors of community among women.

It may also seem odd to establish a code for datum that appears only three times in the corpus, in

Weissova-Hoskova’s Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport (1), Lurie’s In the Ghetto (45) and in Mogendorf’s Aged Woman Arrested (165). Because the absence of particular elements is striking, coding for its infrequency is important. In both cases, the Star of David appears on the clothing of a person in the drawing, thus establishing the code SOD. In the Lurie (45), the star marks the back of a woman seated at a table and in Weissova-Hoskova’s work (1), the child wears a star on the front of her dress, as does the woman in the Mogendorf piece (165).

The next code, Motherhood (MH), establishes the many images of mothers and motherhood. My concern was not so much whether or not the women in the drawings were actually mothers or the mothers of the children with whom they are pictured. Rather, my interest was in clear evidence of maternity and maternal behavior, including, but not limited to nurturing and protection of children, pregnancy, and the presence of children. Malvina Schalkova’s Arrival in the Ghetto (74) depicts motherhood through the metaphor of the family unit. Without delving too far into interpretation at this point, the triangulation of the man, woman and child indicates that they are a family unit. The woman’s position next to the man and her grief at his illness (or perhaps at his death) suggests that he is her husband and, thus, the child is their son; therefore, we have a depiction of motherhood as a result of the implied family structure. Women

Crouching (346), by Halina Olomucki, is a more traditional depiction of motherhood because the woman on the left cradles an infant in her arms in a classic position of care and protection. Images of maternal protection are so prevalent in the data set that it formed a sub-set of the Motherhood code (see Table 2).

Throughout this project, I refer to Jewish scholars and rabbis who stress the importance of the role of motherhood for traditional Jewish women. Accordingly, it is natural that women’s care and concern for children, regardless of proof of their actual family relationship, should become an important focus of the study. As such, this category also overlaps with the Mother-child pose code.

The next two codes, Arrangement with a Defined Location (LocD) and Arrangement with an

Undefined Location (LocU) refer to arrangement, or how the figures are organized in relation to the background of the picture. In many of the pieces, the actual location is unobservable; frequently, the location is suggested by swirls or shaded space with no indicators of environment, for Olomucki’s In the

Ghetto (53) if it were not for the title, we would not know at all where the figures are because the background is nothing but heavy black shading. In contrast are pieces like Schalkova’s Forced Labor

(77), where the environment is clearly articulated; there are tables and chairs, light from the windows, lamps, etc. These works offer metonymy and synecdoche, parts of places which stand in for whole institutions or experiences.

My final thematic code is Healthy Body (HB). This code refers to the appearance, despite the conditions in ghettos and camps, of physical strength or health. This may include, but is not limited to fullness of the face (Untitled (2)), strong limbs (Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled (27)), or even indications of relative health such as pregnancy (Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1)). I did not include images that were too vague, sketchy, or where the majority of the body is hidden otherwise concealed, for example, Gestapo in the House (36) and Women Crouching (346), in this code.

Table 2 displays the codes and artwork in which they occur.

Coding for Topoi

As I moved through the works examining the themes, I observed that these conceptual themes linked with particular visual patterns from which topoi, or lines of argument, emerged. Aristotle conceptualized topoi as a metaphorical place to locate general kinds of arguments that could be applied to a given subject, depending on the context; thus, these topics are available for rhetors to debate or reason about within the chosen subject matter. In Classical rhetoric, topoi refers to stock patterns rhetors use to structure reasoned arguments. That is, a rhetor may talk about how two or more things compare, discuss how likely it is or is not that a thing will occur, debate the definition of a term, etc. Some common patterns of argument are: possible/impossible, greater or lesser, past fact, future fact, comparisons, cause/effect, amplification, arguments of definition, etc. We find topoi throughout our daily lives, framing issues and assisting in us their exploration. For example, in the current presidential campaign, there are lines of argumentation forming around what the definition of a “progressive” candidate. In this example, the pattern depends on conventional thinking about the term “progressive”; accordingly, the arguments differ depending on whether the rhetor considers herself progressive or now.

J.M. Balkin (1996) explains that the study of topics is really the study of the shared social practice of argumentation and, thus, the study of a shared form of social life. That perspective is applied in two ways to this study. First, I connect the themes and topoi with the grand narrative of the Holocaust.

Even though the Holocaust was a specific event experienced by a specific number of people, it has

become a part of the shared narrative of Western history, bringing with it connotations and language that belong to the common Western experience. We use the Holocaust to give scale and meaning to other tragic global events. We might hear someone say something like, “not since the Holocaust has there been such a travesty” etc. So, social constructions of the Holocaust itself can frame arguments about extreme tragedy, loss of humanity, cruelty, etc.

Because of this shared use of language, the Holocaust has come to be, in some ways, a shared social event. Indeed, much continues to be said about the Holocaust, by actual survivors and by the media which perpetuates a cultural fascination for it. As such, one may read a few survivor narratives and see a few documentaries or visit a museum and claim to “understand” the Holocaust. In part, the artists in my corpus are creating particular lines of argumentation about the Holocaust via visual representation. By observing lines of argument that were shared by the artists, we discover what their lived experiences meant to them. These lines of argumentation push back against and extend our understanding of the

Holocaust experience in important ways. Some of their arguments challenge the common social experience of it. We can make these perspectives part of our shared language. This dissertation views the topoi of amplification and synecdoche as lines of argumentation set forth about the female Holocaust experiences represented in the art. Viewing the Holocaust through the heuristic of these topoi offers a new social understanding about the Holocaust.

Amplification

As indicated, moving from the themes, I found them offering the topoi of amplification and synecdoche. I began to notice that the ways the artists emphasize physical features or environmental details. These patterns constitute amplification. Amplification enables visual artists to create lines of argumentation by stylistically emphasizing their subject’s features (Fahnestock, 2011). In this project, amplification means that either physical or environmental features are emphasized through enlargement, as in Distribution of Soup (224) where the serving women are giants hovering over the prisoners.

Imprisoned (33) exemplifies amplified environmental features. The prison bars take up the majority of the

frame are repeated over and over. Amplification can also refer to a human figure that fills the space of the drawing, as in Despair (71), where the woman’s body is the largest, most defined thing in the room and fills the space. There are also certain examples where emotions are emphasized through body language, as in Suicide on the Wire (355). The woman throws herself backwards as she collapses and dies from the electric shock.

Although there are several types of amplification, this project deals with exaggeration.

Exaggeration deals with a stylistic arrangement where the details of the image are highlighted or enlarged; in the case of the art in this study that means that a woman’s physical features, such as height, proportion of her limbs, or facial features, may be made larger or more pronounced in some way. For example, in Self-portrait After Four Selections (301), the woman’s eyes are drawn in heavy, black lines which contrast to the lighter outlines of the rest of her face and hands, thus, emphasizing that part of her face. Hyperbole may also mean that the arrangement causes an emphasis on emotion. In Suicide on the

Wire (355), the arrangement of the woman’s body, with her hands and head thrown back in agony as she dies, create a dramatic representation of her emotional and physical pain.

Amplification may also mean that the scale of the image is exaggerated within the frame. For example, in Despair (71) the woman’s body fills the tiny space of her cell. Although she is seated, her head almost touches the ceiling and it seems that if she were to stand, she would hit her head. Her body fills the space of the image and is the only feature within the frame to have a clear, well-defined shape.

Thus, this image may be said to employ hyperbole. In either case, amplification is when an image has stylistic prominence and, thus, conceptual significance.

As a form of amplification, litotes is also important to this study because it creates lines of argument via reverse amplification. Underemphasizing a figure, physical attribute or environmental feature creates the same sort of conceptual significance as hyperbole. Both devices rely on perspective and on what the audience recognizes as appropriate scale (Fahnestock, 2011, p. 117). Given this undersized figures are meaningful within the art because they usually work in correlation to another

feature that is amplified in the traditional way, thus bringing significance to it. To further explain the example from The Hell of Women (354), the two women in the background are minimized, thus highlighting the size of both the woman in the foreground and the height of the camp walls that surround them all. As such, the use of litotes emphasizes the hopeless of the situation. Regardless of its use, amplification is a prominent source of reasoning within the corpus.

Synecdoche

In addition to visual arguments which depended upon amplification, another line of reasoning appears frequently. Synecdoche enables artists to form an argument, because it is form of symbolism.

Fahnestock reminds us that Quintilian described synecdoche as able to make the audience realize “many things from one, the part from the whole, the genus from the species” (101). Along with part for the whole is the more common form of synecdoche that involves singulars and plurals. For example, saying

“Hitler invaded Poland” replaces the entire Nazi army with its leader, and speaks of the actions of both the individual and the many soldiers who carried out his will.

In my corpus, art works consistently made arguments demonstrating significant ways in which entire communities and institutions represented by means of the individuals within them. For example, in

Roll Call (159) the one Nazi guard in the drawing represents the power of the entire regime, thus allowing the artist to make an argument about how one individual may stand in for and wield the power of an institution, thus acting as that institution. Table 3 represents the relationship between the images in the primary data set and the topoi of amplification and synecdoche.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, through the data collection and coding processes discussed above, I established a core data set out of the hundreds of images available. Employing feminist methodologies not only helped me to choose my data set but also helped me navigate through critical issues ethics about observation and interpretation. My methods and methodologies of data collection and coding were conducted, first and

foremost, with thought to respecting not only the lives of the artists, but with knowledge of my responsibility to not recreate their trauma, but rather respect and honor their experiences.

The methods I employed also enabled me to establish a clear and linear quantification of the thematic patterns within the art, and from there, move on to identifying and quantifying the topoi that are significant to the project. This part of the process further enabled me to establish the primary and secondary data sets from which to draw my analysis in the upcoming chapter. Working in this careful way ultimately helped me to find workable parameters within very large corpus while remaining true to the spirit of the project in terms of focusing on art made of women, by women who experienced the

Holocaust. Having presented my methodology, data set, and methods of analysis, I next present the results at which I have arrived.

Chapter Three: Results Introduction Having discussed my methods and methodology, I now begin my presentation of the data and results. As indicated in the previous chapter, I consider the ways in which artists use topoi to frame their arguments within the art. These topoi catalog how these female artists document and argue their experiences. To arrive at these arguments, I first examined the data set for recurring visual patterns, such as prison bars, groups of women, mothers, etc. From these patterns emerged consistent, conceptual codes such as imprisonment, community, motherhood, etc. (See Table 2). Out of these codes, I recognized two classical figures, amplification and synecdoche. Specifically, in this chapter, I explain how I arrived at the conceptual codes, how many of each I found, and how from those codes emerged topoi which revealed lines of argumentation. Then, in the following chapter, I analyze how those conceptual codes unpin arguments by linking the visual and conceptual codes into lines of reasoning that help shape alternative narratives about women’s Holocaust experiences.

First, however, I want to reiterate my discomfort with patriarchal, aggressive binaries created by words such as argument and argumentation. I use these words because they are commonly understood and accepted in rhetorical scholarship and, as such, necessary in discussions about topoi. But, I do not use them to suggest in any way that there is only one lens through which to view the Holocaust, its art, or any woman’s experiences of it. Nor do I wish to place any survivor in the position of having to persuade an audience about her experiences or justify her narrative to another survivor. So, it is with reluctance that I use these terms and do the best I can to apply more fitting terminology such as framework, reasoning, viewpoints, perspective, intention, etc.

Thematic Codes

When I examined the corpus of data certain visual patterns emerged in the compositions; from these ten specific conceptual codes of representation emerged. What follows is an explanation of the conceptual, representational codes. The first code, the Gaze (GZ) appears seven times within the corpus of the art, in numbers 1, 2, 53, 70, 73, 165, and 223. In my methods chapter, I defined the Gaze as any instance when a subject of the piece appears to be aware of being observed, evidenced by “looking out” of the frame at the audience, without interacting with them. In a sense, these pieces exhibit a sort of simultaneous looking at and looked-at-ness.

I divided this category into three subsets, the Gaze of women only (GZ-1), the Gaze of children only (GZ-2), and images where both women and children gaze at the audience (GZ-3). Number 73, 165, and 223 constitute the subset Gaze of women only (GZ-1). For example, Schalkova’s Elderly Deportee

(73), shows and old women looking back at the viewer from her bed. Her listless pose and sorrowful, deep-set eyes make her appear exhausted and unwell. In contrast, number 165, Mogendorf’s Aged Woman

Arrested, simply portrays a large bodied woman surrounded by a few belongings; she gazes out of the picture without expression. Unlike the previous two images, which were of only one woman, the last image, Hiszpanska-Neumann’s Stone Carriers (223), shows three women. The two women in the background walk with their heads bowed, but the woman in the forefront holds her head up and directs her gaze towards the audience.

The subset GZ-2 includes two images of children who gaze outside the paintings’ frame, towards the audience. Olomucki’s Untitled (2) and Buresova’s Mother and Child (70) comprise this group. The pictures are incredibly similar; the mothers hold small children who nestle close and face forward, as if looking out of the frame. In both cases, the mothers look beyond the frame to the right, but the child looks out at the audience as if they are aware of their presence. This is in contrast to the mothers who appear unaware of the presence of an audience (see Chapter 4 on these two paintings).

The final subset of the Gaze, GZ-3, is comprised of two drawing in which both a woman and a child look forward, out of the frame, towards the audience. Weissova-Hoskova’s Women and Children

Being Sent on a Transport… (1) and Olomucki’s In the Ghetto (53) are again very similar images. Both show a woman, presumably a mother, leading a child or groups of children to the left. Both women appear to be pregnant. In Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), the mother and the child whose hand she holds, look sorrowful. In In the Ghetto (53), the mother looks out, as does the young girl in the background, but the other child looks down, he is the only recognizable male in this category.

The second code, Mother-Child Pose (M-CP) appears four times, in numbers 2, 27, 70, and 346.

Mother-Child pose refers to the configuration, found in much Classical art, of Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary, where Christ is cradled in Mary’s arms. In this instance, I am not concerned with any religious meaning but rather with the use of a well-known motif to positon bodies, the protective mother shielding her vulnerable child. It goes without saying that the pieces which fall in this code all have the women using their bodies to shield or cradle vulnerable children.

This Mother-Child Pose (M-CP) has three iterations, M-CP1, M-CP2, and M-CP3. M-CP1 refers to drawings that closely reflects the way the Mother-Child pose appears in Classical art. Olomucki’s

Women Crouching in the Extermination Camp (346) is an example. In the piece, the seated mother cradles the child in her arms while crouching over her. Their entire bodies are visible and the woman’s face expresses sorrow. Her child lies supine in her arms; it is impossible to tell if the baby is alive or dead.

For these reasons, the image aligns with the familiar image of Jesus and Mary after the crucifixion.

Olomucki’s Untitled (2), and Buresova’s Mother and Child (70), make up code M-CP2. In this classification, mothers and children are physically close; some mothers cradle their children to their breasts, as seen in Classical mother-child images. However, in these examples the focus is on the upper bodies and faces of the subjects, the rest of their bodies remain invisible so it is hard to tell if the mother embraces her child or not, as in Mother and Child (70). There is no defined background in either image; instead of looking at their children, both women gaze beyond the frame of the piece to the right, while the

children look directly at the viewer. In this respect, Untitled (2) and Mother and Child (70) are nearly the same image, the Buresova shows the figures more and defines the outlines, but the images are stunning in their similarities.

Kollwitz’s Grain for Sowing Shall Not be Milled (27) also varies the code of the classical Mother-

Child pose and therefore falls under the classification M-CP3. First, the woman protects several children instead of one. The code of protection and shielding appears, rather than cradling them close to her chest.

However, in the case, the mother looms large over the children; she encompasses them in an extremely protective posture. In this image, none of the subjects look at the viewer, instead, each directs their eyes directed the parameters of the frame. In contrast to the nearly expressionless faces of the figures in the other three drawings, here, the children’s faces and postures reveal fear; one has a furrowed brown and tightly closed lips and holds his arm up as if to pull the cloth further over his body. The two other children clench their hands and look anxiously to the left with large, watchful eyes. The mother’s face reveals an expression of both fear and strength, as if she is afraid, but ready to fight whoever threatens her children.

The mother, looks to the left, frowning in concentration and watchfulness. There is nothing in the background to pinpoint the exact location or the source of the threat; the emphasis here is on their bodies and faces.

Eleven images, directed from codes involving prison or imprisonment and fall into the third category, Prison (PR). This category includes images that contain clear symbols of imprisonment, i.e., discernable bars on windows, barbed wire, fences, etc.; these images are coded by PR-1. The following eight images fall into PR-1: Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport…(1), Women in the

Holocaust (3), Imprisoned (33), Despair (71), Roll Call (159), Self-Portrait after Four Sections (301),

The Hell for Women (354), and Suicide on the Wire (355). This category also includes images that depict situations with no visible bars or wires, yet entrapment or imprisonment are clearly indicated in the representation or title, and are coded with PR-2. The images in this category are: Gestapo in the House

(36), Forced Labor (77), and Aged Woman Arrested (165).

The fifth code is Victimization (VIC). The seven images in the category represent the numerous ways in which women’s vulnerability is exploited, including threats of physical violence, starvation, humiliation, etc. More specifically, victimization refers to any direct threat to the woman’s safety or health as well as to situations where they confront those who aim to harm them. To be included in this code, the threat must be physically present in the image. Six of the seven images, 3, 33, 59, 224, 231, and

354, are located within camps and depicts selections, soup lines, prisons, etc. Accordingly, Despair (71), is not included; although imprisonment is a type of victimization, this subset deals with images of immediate, visible threats. Despair (71), though it depicts a woman in a tiny cell-like room, does not depict a current and direct threat.

Victimization has several subsets involving the source of the oppression. The images, 159, 224, and 231, show women victimized by other women and are categorized with the code VIC-1. Roll Call

(159) depicts a female guard assisting the male Nazi soldier. In Distribution of Soup (224), a group of monstrous cooks torment women waiting to be fed. Shorn (231) portrays women shaving the heads of other women. In contrast, three images show women victimized by men, and are coded as VIC-2. Women in the Holocaust (3) reveals a grouping of naked women behind bars, with armed Nazi soldiers threatening them. Imprisoned (33) depicts a woman situated behind multiple rows of bars with a man far off in the distance. In Roll Call (159), a group of women stand before the massive figure of a Nazi soldier, assisted by the previously mentioned female solider; this image represents both the VIC-1 and VIC–2 codes because the women are oppressed by both the male guard and his female lackey. Gestapo in the

House (36) and The Hell for Women (354) make up the final subset, VIC-3, where women are threatened by non-human forces, such as the dog in The Hell for Women (354) or by invisible forces such as the unseen soldiers in Gestapo in the House (36).

Throughout the corpus, nine images of grouped women appear. These images represent code

GOW. I divided these images into two subsets. In one, a sense of community is present, and depicts as

GOW-1. In the other, isolation is highlighted, and becomes GOW-2. I defined the difference by

considering if the women seem to interact with each other, for example, in order to protect or assist each other, or if they are represented as being near other women, but project a sense of physical or emotional isolation.

The first subset within this category, GOW-1, is comprised of numbers 3, 69, 77, 143, 159, 225, and 231. These images represent scenes where groups of women appear to protect or aid each other when they are in danger. Women in the Holocaust (3), Roll Call (159), and Shorn (231) reveal vulnerability in the groups of women physically huddle for protection from soldiers, doctors, and guards. In all three pieces, the women hold or shield each other in postures that suggest they are aware of immanent victimization. The women in numbers 3 and 159 stand close behind each other, in an attempt to shield themselves from the soldiers who threaten them. Shorn (231) depicts women at three stages, waiting to have their heads shaved, being shaved, and after the humiliation. The women on the right side of the frame stand close to each other, huddled for protection from the threat of the soldiers and razors. Scene in

Camp Ravensbruck (225), by Jirsikova, portrays women helping other women by offering food.

Within this category, I also found a second subset, GOW-2. These are images where groups of women are represented, but no real sense of community is observed. In Stone Carriers (223) and

Distribution of Soup (224), groups of women appear, but not with the same sense of togetherness, comradery, or protection, as exists in the other images. These images may almost be considered to represent multiple women, rather than a community of women together. Other works in this subcategory do indeed show women who do not constitute a community. Stone Carriers (223) exemplifies an image of multiple women, rather than any kind of communal grouping. The three women carry their loads in postures of isolation, heads tuned down and away from each other. Only one woman looks up and out at the viewer. The women all perform the same job, but each exists within her own sphere, never cognizant of the others. Distribution of Soup (224) belongs in the subset for two reasons. First, the serving women victimize the prisoners, thus severing any communal ties based upon gender. Second, the women waiting for food do not interact, they do not try to help or support each other in any way. Their placement in a

line, rather than in a huddled group, increases this sense of isolation. Interestingly, Shorn (231) is cross- referenced here as well because, after having their heads shaved, the women are represented as isolated and no longer a part of a protective community. They do not assist or try to shield each other as they do before they have their hair cut off.

My next code, Star of David (SOD) is comprised of only three pieces, numbers 1, 45, and 165, but the low frequency highlights the significance of the code. The category refers to the Star of David that the women were forced to ear as a negative mark rather than allowed to wear as a voluntary sign of faith.

In Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), the star appears on the child; in In the Ghetto

(53), and, in Aged Woman Arrested (165), on the clothing of the women present.

Not surprisingly, images of Motherhood are extremely important in women’s Holocaust art and appear in several iterations. In this dissertation, Motherhood refers to depictions of pregnancy, child rearing, and images where mothers are pictured with their children in camps, on transports, etc.

Essentially, any image of a woman who can be identified as a mother belongs in the category Motherhood

(MH). I divided this category into two categories, one where mother embrace or shelter their children with their own bodies (MH-1) and images where the mothers and children appear vulnerable (MH-2). The first subset includes Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), Untitled (2), Grain for

Sowing Shall not be Milled (27), Mother and Child (70), and Women Crouching in Extermination Camp

(346). These images depict mothers cradling or embracing their children in protective, sheltering postures, or women, such as in Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), where the mother appears able to do so as a result of being represented with a certain amount of strength or resolve. Images 2, 70, and 346, have the figures in the protective Classical Mother-Child pose discussed earlier in this chapter.

Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27) offers a more extreme posture of protection, with the mother extending her arms completely over her children. Her torso is represented as a womblike environment within which she shelters three children.

Images where the mother is vulnerable and cannot or does not appear to protect or shield her child from harm represent code MH-2. In the Ghetto (53) shows a pregnant woman in the company of children, but, unlike Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), which is MH-1, she does not protectively hold her child’s hand, instead, she grasps a sack. Moreover, Gestapo in the House (36) and

Arrival in the Ghetto (74) portray mothers that are physically separated from their children. The mother in

Gestapo in the House (36) hides behind a door, unable to protect her child or other family members from the soldiers invading her house. She is separated from her child, physically blocked by the door. Similar elements of separation appear in Arrival in the Ghetto (74); it is the only image in this category where the mother’s face is hidden. She is separated from her son by a male figure reclining under blankets. Mother and Child (70) is cross-referenced with this code because the drawing is vague about whether or not the mother embraces her child since her torso and arms are not clearly depicted.

Throughout the corpus, eighteen images evoke location in some way. Often, the location is defined and identifiable. Given this, I have established the code, LOC-D for the works with defined locations and LOC-U for art with undefined locations. In LOC-D, a clearly defined location refers to works with an easily recognizable background environment. For example, in images like Gestapo in the

House (36), it is easy to discern specific details about the location; here, the doors and wooden floors indicate a hallway in the house. The code also includes images with more subtly discernable features of location, such as fences, prison bars, or outlines of buildings on vague backgrounds, such as in Women in the Holocaust (3). Thus, the code breaks down into two subsets, LOC-D1 to designate the twelve images with specific locations and LOC-D2 to refer to non-specific, but recognizable locations. When specific locations appear, these articulated places play a significant role in the narrative. If the viewer can easily recognize a prison or barracks, etc., then the location is specific. If the physical environment is recognizable, but does not shape the narrative, the location is discernable. As such, if a viewer could potentially recognize sketchy details about the environment, such as a bed, stool or window, then the image also falls into the discernable category. In each subset, I include only images where the location is

recognizable without relying upon the title, as that might serve to make the location vague and, thus, not included in this code.

Pieces with specific locations (LOC-D1) include: 1, 3, 33, 36, 69, 77, 143, 159, 224, 231, 354, and 355. Women in the Holocaust (3) and Imprisoned (33) are both obviously located in prison cells, as indicated by the bars and solider with guns. As previously discussed, Gestapo in the House (36) is clearly located in the hallways of a house. Schalkova’s two images, Sleeping Quarters (69) and Forced Labor

(77), both contain minute details of rooms in concentration camps. In Sleeping Quarters, (69) three containers appear in the bench next to the bottom bunk, and it is possible to count the number of beds, etc.

The same amount of detail exists in Forced Labor, (77), the grain on the wooden tables and chairs is visible, the windows have panes, and the size and shape of the room are discernable.

The three other specific scenes, Roll Call (159), Distribution of Soup (224), and Shorn (231), take place inside the buildings in camps. They are detailed enough to communicate the sparse surroundings, bare floors, naked lightbulbs, and spare, functional furnishing. Interestingly, in these images, the presence of the people combines with the details of the physical space to shape the narratives. Because the details of the physical space are so vague, people’s actions add specificity to the narrative. For example, the line- up of women in front of the Nazi guard, who holds keys and points at the women, indicates to the viewer that this is a room inside of a building in a concentration camp. The same holds true for Distribution of

Soup (224) and Shorn (231).

Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport … (1) is included in the category because the barbed wire in the lower left corner clearly locates the scene within a concentration camps. Similarly, in

Audoul’s The Hell for Women (354) and Weissova-Hoskova’s Suicide on the Wire (355), the wire fences, chimneys, dogs, and rows of barracks identify the location; however, as in the images mentioned above, it is the people’s location and actions within the space that create the narrative.

Discernable locations are, not surprisingly, vaguer than the specific locations. That is, it possible to discern some details about the environment but difficult to pinpoint exactly where the image takes place. The locations are not specific yet recognizable because of the context or sketchy details. It is difficult to recognize the image’s specific location because the images focus on the specific details of people’s faces and bodies, rather than on the details of rooms, buildings, or landscapes. Examples of these images include: 45, 71, 73, 74, 165, and 225. Many times, as is the case with In the Ghetto (45), there is no physical environment, only the bodies and faces of the woman and her two children. In the Ghetto

(45), Despair (71), and Scene in Camp Ravensbruck (225) contain vaguely discernable details about location in In the Ghetto (45), a woman with the Star of David on her back sits at a table, but the table could be anywhere and it is impossible to tell what she is holding in her hands. Despair (71) has a similarly vague environment; an old woman sits, it is hard to tell on what, perhaps a bed or a bench, in some kind of cramped room. The window high on the right suggests it could be a cell. The focus is on the woman’s plight and vulnerability, not on the physical details of the space.

The final three images from this code have less specific locations and have a composition that emphasizes situation over the environment. Elderly Deportee (73) shows an old woman, under covers and propped up on a pillow. The details of her face far outweigh those of her location. Her eyes are sunken and sorrowful, the lines around her mouth are well-defined, and her gnarled hands grasp weakly at the blanket. We know she is in a bed, but that bed could be anywhere.

The same holds true for Arrival in the Ghetto (74). It depicts three people but not their exact location. The woman, overcome with sorrow, hides her face in despair as she weeps beside a man in a bed. A small boy looks on. At best, the viewer gleans that they are or have recently been outside –the woman and the boy wear coats and mittens cover his hands and a hat protects his head. As in Elderly

Deportee (73), their exact location is impossible to identify. The title provides little clue, simply saying that the have arrived in “the ghetto” without specifying which one. The woman's grief is emphasized, not her location.

Ro Mogendorf’s Elderly Woman Arrested (165) rounds out the location category. In this image, a large woman sits on something impossible to identify. There are no other discernable objects in the image, other than the basket behind her. The image represents the least specific location in the category.

Instead of the location, the work focuses on her eyes and large, soft body. There is no real narrative told about her, without the title, the viewer would not know the situation.

There are also instances where the location is vague and undefined, while the images focus on the faces and figures of people with no background or hints to location whatsoever. The is true even in cases where the title of the pieces identifies the location, as is the case with In the Ghetto (53) and other examples I discuss below. The images represent Location Undefined (LOC-U). Seven images make up this theme, numbers, 2, 27, 53, 70, 223, 301, and 346. In each, the story is told by the faces and bodies depicted. Sometimes, as is the case with 53, In the Ghetto (53), and Self-Portrait after Four Selections

(301), viewers can see the pain and sorrow in the faces, but must rely upon the title for additional context.

Other images need only the people located in the frame to tell the story. In Grain for Sowing Shall Not be

Milled (27) a woman stretches her powerful arms protectively over three small children, keeping a watchful eye out of anything that could cause them harm. Stone Carriers (223) represents three women dressed in rags, laboring under their loads. Their faces and physical features are clearly defined but not their location. Their faces tell the story of their physical and emotional toil.

The final three images in this category are the two depictions of mothers with children.

Olomucki’s Untitled (2), Mother and Child (70), and Women Crouching in an Extermination Camp (346) are strikingly similar portraits of women with small children nestled in their arms. The faces and upper bodies of both women and their children are fully detailed, with wisps of hair and outlines of clothes clearly visible. In both cases, the backdrop is a foggy swirl from which the figures emerge. Again, the narrative is evident from facial expressions, the mothers anxiously looking out of the frame to the right and the direct gaze of the children. The spatial ambiguity is overshadowed by the emotions on their faces.

Women Crouching in an Extermination Camp (346) contains the fewest discernable details of either

location or physical characteristics. Viewers must work hard to pick out the two women and even harder to identify that one woman holds a small baby. The women appear to be seated, but the details of their environment are vague. Finally, the heavy shading entirely obscured the background, creating a scene that encloses them in darkness.

The final theme is Healthy Bodies (HB). This theme denotes images in which a woman’s body is represented as physically strong and capable of functioning as it would have outside of the camps and before the ghettos. The code includes images of pregnant women, women with strength in their oversized legs or arms, and women whose bodies look generally healthy, etc. The fourteen images within this code are: 1, 2, 3, 27, 33, 53, 69, 70, 74, 77, 143, 159, 165, and 231.

Two of the images actually depict exaggerated strength. Women and Children Being Sent on a

Transport… (1) is the only image in the group with a pregnant woman. The woman’s belly is not the only example of health; her large hands tightly grasp the hand of a small child, and her oversized feet, which extend from legs with exaggerated calf muscles, stand firmly on the ground. Grain for Sowing Shall Not be Milled (27) functions in the same vein. The woman’s arms and huge hands are powerfully strong, almost to the point of being masculine, as they envelop the three small children sheltering for protection.

The next three images depict women with bodies that do not exaggerate their strength, although they appear abundantly healthy. Three Women in Front of Barracks (143), Roll Call (159), and Aged

Woman Arrested (165) show women with seemingly well-fed, round bodies. Their hips and breasts are full, the legs and arms are plump and strong. There are no visible signs of starvation of disease.

The final group of images represents the naked female body in situations of extreme vulnerability. Women in the Holocaust (3) and Imprisoned (33) depict women behind bars. In both images, the naked bodies appear healthy and strong. Women in the Holocaust (3) shows three women with voluptuously full hips and breasts and powerful legs. Imprisoned (33) portrays a less voluptuous woman; but her body is not overly thin and her outstretched arms show strength as the grasp the bars.

Shorn (231) depicts many women as the line up to have their heads shaved. These women’s bodies, although incredibly exposed and vulnerable, are represented as young, strong and healthy. The same curving hips and strong legs that appear in the other images are represented here, their bodies reminiscent of the nudes in Classical Art.

The themes described in this section underline patterns which represent characteristics of these women. Moreover, the themes which emerge from the codes contribute to the narratives within each respective work; at the same time, the motifs frame out understanding of these women’s Holocaust experiences. Further, these eleven themes reveal patterns which appear as lines of argument describing the female Holocaust experience. I will fully explore the intersections between these narratives and topoi in my analysis in Chapter Four.

The Topoi

As indicated previously, I am using topoi in the classical rhetorical sense that they constitute lines of argument. Recent scholarship in the disciplines of literature and law, for example, has taken a more liberal definition of topoi, to mean frameworks, codes, or tropes. While these new approaches are interesting, the classical approach is more appropriate to my analysis. They provide a means of connecting themes and arguments or narratives and from this, a means of interpreting the visuals. As indicated previously, after identifying the themes, I tracked their appearances across the art. In doing so, I found two kinds of topoi, amplification and synecdoche (see Chapter Two). In this section, I describe how amplification and synecdoche appear in the corpus. In Chapter Four, I analyze how the lines create arguments and stories which address the experiences of these women.

Amplification

Fourteen of the sixteen images in the primary data set use amplification or hyperbole to form lines of argument about women’s Holocaust experiences. As fully outlined in Chapter Two, amplification applies to an image in which elements of style emphasize matters of conceptual importance in several

ways. Within the topos of amplification, lie three subsets: amplification of a person’ physical features, such as mentioned in Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport…(1); amplification of buildings or surroundings, for example, Three Women in Front of Barracks (143); and amplification of emotions, as in

Suicide on the Wire (355). I provide fuller examples and details in the sections below.

To reiterate from Chapter Two, amplification is evident when elements are exaggerated, and in my corpus, these include, but are not limited to, facial features, height, or size of a woman’s limbs, etc.

Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1) exemplifies amplification because the women’s pregnant stomach, hands and feet are disproportionality large. Amplification can also refer to the scale and size of buildings or when other environmental features are exaggerated. Further, it may also refer to when the proportions of certain features and people within the image are exaggerated in relation to other elements of the image. In The Hell for Women (354), for instance, the woman stands at the same height as the chimney and fences that appear behind her. This is not a matter of artist’s perspective because the two women behind her are drawn much smaller in relation to her, the chimney and fences.

As previously stated, there are three subsets of amplification presented in my corpus, the amplification of physical features, of buildings, and emotions. I now more fully explain and illustrate examples of these subsets. I found that ten of the images use hyperbole to significantly amplify a person’s physical features, by exaggerating their eyes, limbs, or other body parts, by having their body fill the space of the frame. These images are: Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), Women in the Holocaust (3), Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27), In the Ghetto (53), Despair (71), Elderly

Deportee (73), Roll Call, (159), Aged Woman Arrested, (165), Distribution of Soup (224), and The Hell for Women (354). For example, the belly of the pregnant woman in Women and Children Being Sent on a

Transport… (1) is amplified; her feet, hands, and calf muscles contrast in proportion and scale with her thin face, neck and arms, suggesting extreme malnourishment, in so doing, as Chapter 4 discusses, the amplification of these parts of her body form a line of argumentation about the physical conditions of women in the camps that relies upon hyperbole in order to represent the diversity of the female Holocaust

experience. The woman in Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1) towers over the barbed wire fence in the left of the frame. The fence comes only to her knees; she seems capable of stepping right over it. Women in the Holocaust (3) also deals with amplification of the female form. The three women have extremely curvaceous hips, thighs and breasts, contrasted against small, almost indistinguishable heads. Amplified female physical power also appears in Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27). The woman’s huge arms and hands cover the more typically sized bodies of three small children. Her forearms and hands are massive, almost masculine, as they protect the children. In this case, hyperbole is at work because she fills the frame with her body, her elbows even extend beyond the borders of the image.

In Self-Portrait After Four Selections (301), the woman’s eyes are huge vis-à-vis the rest of her face; her eyes are even more highlighted because they are drawn with dark, think lines, while the rest of the image is penned in thin, wispy strokes. The fact that her eyes are centered in the frame’s upper section draws the viewer’s attention, emphasizing them further. Distribution of Soup (224), a final example of amplification affects the serving women’s’ size in comparison to the size of the women waiting for food.

The serving women are twice the size of the prisoners; the servers’ misshapen heads almost tough the ceiling of the room. Beyond this, their faces are amplified because they are drawn as monstrously distorted and grotesque cartoons. The woman serving the soup looks human enough other than her gigantic size, huge arms, and giant serving spoon. The two women behind her appear far less human.

Both representations intensify the ugliness of these two women, one woman’s wide toothless mouth grimaces in laughter; her round face misshapen in ugliness and cruelty. The other woman’s face is elongated and seems to be falling off of her skull. Her ugliness contrasts sharply with the dainty bow that holds back her stringy hair. The broom she holds appears to have sharp spikes, like a pitchfork.

Amplification of size appears prominently in the corpus. Figures in In the Ghetto (53) fill the space of the frame, nothing surrounds them, and thus the image relies upon amplification. Though depicted with normal size bodies, the three figures take up the entire space, giving the viewer nothing else

on which to focus. In Elderly Deportee (73), the space surrounding the woman appears to shrink into the background; this contrasts with the extreme close-up of her body, with sharp focus on her dark, hollow eyes. As with Self-Portrait After Four Selections (301). The woman’s eyes are emphasized by their placement at the top of the image. Despair (71) also amplifies the female form, in this case, by the sketchy and shadowed background surrounding her and the window above her. Once again, her body fills the space and, accordingly, the room. Her body bends as if about to sit, but we cannot see the chair or bench underneath her. In the case, the close up perspective amplifies the woman’s physical size in relation to her surroundings.

The Hell for Women (354) amplifies the female form by contrasting it with the size of the surroundings and the other women in the background of the image. The woman in the foreground has a body of giant proportions; she stands nearly as tall as the walls of the concentration camps and the chimney that spews black smoke behind her. Her body is focus of the image; it is her form that draws our eyes towards the center, not the chimney or other elements within the image. Thus displayed, the representation expresses lines of argumentation about her individual experience and agony. I return briefly to Self-Portrait After Four Selections (301) to note that amplification works in a similar way to

The Hell for Women. The woman’s face in Self-Portrait After Four Selections (301) fills the entire space.

There is no background, just vague shading. Once again, we witness a close-up of her physical features that creates an individualized portrait of a woman in the Holocaust.

Aged Woman Arrested (165) illustrates another example of amplification where the figure fills the space. The image shows a large woman with thick legs and large breasts who fills the space, both horizontally and vertically with her whole body. By filling the space, her figure is thus amplified for the viewer. In addition, she is not out of proportion; she simply occupied the majority of the frame. In fact, she seems to burst out of it at points, the ends of her feet extend beyond the boundary of the image, and her knee and head touch the right side and top of the frame.

Examples of this variation appear in other images where the entire frame is occupied, creating a sense that the artists has zoomed in on one woman. The use of extreme close-up focuses not on the environment of situation, but on the woman as in individual person. Indeed, each of the four images where amplification involves figure filling the space (53, 71, 73, and 165) have this same sense that they are very personal snapshot of one person’s emotions or experience. Accordingly, the argument suggests that each woman experienced the Holocaust in unique and personal ways (see Chapter 4).

Four images, Imprisoned (33), Three Women in Front of Barracks (143), The Hell for Women

(354), and Suicide on the Wire (355) have noticeably amplified buildings or surroundings. The proportion of people to the buildings and surroundings is exaggerated in either scale or style. Three Women in Front of Barracks (143) exemplifies the types of amplification. N this image, three women stand in front of a barracks’ outer wall which nearly touches the upper frame of the image. The building seems to rise out of the ground and take up the majority of the background, appearing in a sense, to literally block the women in. There is no way around or through. Though they stand in the same level as the foundation of the building, they are engulfed by its size and come only about a third of the way up it outer wall. That they fill horizontal space as a group, while the building fills both the horizontal and vertical space of the image, adds to the sense of entrapment.

Two other examples amplify physical space. Imprisoned (33) shows a woman locked behind rows and rows of bars, creating the sensation that the prison goes on eternally. The bars take up the majority of the space; the woman behind them is normally sized, but appears dwarfed by the bars. The man at the end of the bars starts back at her, the distance between them highlighted by the multiple rows of bars. The arrangement suggests that her imprisonment is all encompassing. In the same vein, The Hell for Women

(354) has an amplified barbed-wire wall and a smokestack that reaches almost as high as that wall. This image amplifies the physical environment of concentration camps and the unique dangers they posed for women. In this case, the camp’s barbed wire walls loom in the background, amplifying the sense of permanent imprisonment. Also amplified are the dangers for women, the “hells” they faced; vicious dogs,

the crematorium, forced labor, barbed wire, etc. There is a sense that escape and survival are impossible because of the presence of danger at every turn. Still, although the woman in the foreground is physically enlarged, the other women in the background are dwarfed by the height of the wall and chimney; accordingly, amplification of physical space applies here as well.

The final image featuring amplification of the physical space is Suicide on the Wire (355). In this piece, the barracks and fence stretch into the distance beyond the frame in three directions, to each side and upwards, creating a sense of endless confinement. It is not the sizes of the fencing and building that amplify, as much as the fact that they appear to be endless. In addition to amplified physical space,

Suicide on the Wire (355) also amplifies emotional despair by showing a woman committing suicide on an electrified barbed wire fence. The image has an increasing and culminating emotional force; as she touches the wire her emaciated body collapses, contorting backwards as she falls to the ground. Thus, the images use the woman’s body to amplify her emotions. In this case, the fragility of her starved and abused body contrasts with the power of her despair and desperation, forming a line of argument speaking to the enormity of her suffering.

Self-Portrait After Four Selections (301) also highlights a woman’s emotional agony by focusing on and amplifying her huge dark eyes, eyes that are full of fear and exhaustion. There are lines, perhaps meant to indicate fencing or wire, bifurcating horizontally and vertically, fragmenting the image into eight sections, with the uppermost section, also the largest, highlighting her eyes and pointing the audience’s attention there; once again the image creates a window into her personal portrait of pain and despair.

Several of the images also amplify sources of power. Amplification stressed the enormity of rampant, unchecked power as well as the quiet, watchful power of mothers and women. Roll Call (159) and Distribution of Soup (224) use physical amplification to suggest power structures and hierarchies. In

Roll Call (159), the Nazi soldier looms large over the women in the room, including over his female assistant. There is a sense here that his power comes both from his positon as a Nazi solider and from his amplified masculine strength. His huge thigh muscles bulge in an almost super-human way, his shoulders

are broad and solid. Distribution of Soup (224) shows women prisoners cowering before monstrously large cartoonish women who slop soup into their bowls. These women are grotesquely large, their power coming from their size and the bizarre physical characteristics that I discussed earlier in this chapter. As I show in Chapter 4, there is something especially obscene and dehumanizing about women oppressing other women, and the use of amplification adds to that effect.

Synecdoche

Synecdoche refers to images where the argument suggests that the part belongs to a whole, as described in Chapter Two. Five of the sixteen images from the primary data set use synecdoche: Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), Untitled (2), Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27),

Mother and Child (70), and Roll Call (159). As an example, Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27) shows a woman hovering protectively over three children. The details of her body from the neck down have been replaces by a womb-like space that shelters three children. Essentially, the children are part of the whole the mother symbolizes; the mother’s body serves as a protective cavern for her children.

Viewers glean no information about the shape of her neck or chest, whether she is thin or fat, what clothes she wears, etc.

In this project, I found two sub-groups of synecdoche. The first sub-group contains images representing lines of reasoning about motherhood. The second group contains images where synecdoche forms arguments about power. Four of the five images, Women and Children Being Sent on a

Transport… (1), Untitled (2), Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27), and Mother and Child (70) deal with motherhood or family. In Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), the woman’s heavily pregnant belly represents part-for-the–whole; it appears to almost have taken over her entire body; she is her pregnancy. A woman’s growing stomach is the main visual indicator of pregnancy, but pregnancy affects a woman’s entire body, not just her womb. Second, her body carries future generations of her family and of the Jewish people, thus she is both an individual and a part of the child she carries because she is the vehicle for its life. The same holds true for the child itself. It is an individual

encompassed and dependent upon the whole body of its mother. Similarly, in Grain for Sowing Shall not be Milled (27), the woman’s body is a womb sheltering future generations that rely upon her for their protection and existence.

Olomucki’s Untitled (2) positions the mother and child in a complementary manner. They have nearly the same physical body; from the shoulders down. They are continuations and completions of each other. Mother and Child (70), by Buresova, uses synecdoche in similarly. The bodies of the mother and child are practically one and the same their faces are articulated and individual, but they are connected at the torso and seem to share bodes from there down.

Roll Call (159) also employs synecdoche here, it the power of one person stands in for the power of an entire institution or, as Fahnestock terms it, the singular standing in for the plural (2011, p. 101).

The image shows a Nazi solider facing a room full of women prisoner’s; we only see the back half of his body. His presence represents the entire Nazi army. His authority stems from being a member of that institution, so he is both representative and a vehicle for its power. Similarly, the small groups of women represent the millions of women who were victimized by the Nazi institution. Though they have unique faces, they all wear the same uniform and stand in a similar pose, thus forming a collective whole.

As this chapter has demonstrated, the conceptual codes within the visuals represent themes which, in turn, represent amplification and synecdoche. Together, these thematic figures form lines of argument which speak to the very personal ways in which the women experience survivance. As I discuss in Chapter Four, the lines of argument which amplification and synecdoche offer several iterations of the role of survivance in the women’s lives and, thereby, offer alternative narratives about the experiences of women in the Holocaust.

Chapter Four: Discussion and Analysis of the Art

Introduction

Chapter Three detailed how I coded the data in terms of two topoi, amplification and synecdoche. Such coding is telling, because it indicates, at the least, that certain motifs appear consistently throughout the corpus. More significantly, by analyzing these codes, it becomes clear that topoi are rhetorical messengers of arguments. As such, the arguments delivered are potentially interesting.

My next step, then, is to uncover and analyze the ways in which the women argue about their experiences through representations of their bodies. Jacobs (2006) writes that the female body is a text for remembrance and the Jewish woman’s body is at the center of atrocity narratives; on her body, the memory of Jewish subjugation is encoded (p. 244). Accordingly, this chapter synthesizes and interprets the codes within the dataset as lines of argument about the women’s Holocaust experiences. I discuss the ways in which the art represents the female body, making visual arguments which speak to Vizenor’s concept of survivance; they speak to motherhood, physical strength, and the importance of community within the context of the Holocaust.

As I detail below, the analysis shows how two distinct narratives emerge from the art’s use of amplification or synecdoche and there are two versions of each narrative. In the first version of the first alternative narrative, some women use amplification to represent their selves as if, following Ochs and

Capps (1996), these selves are still intact. More specifically, the women use amplification to demonstrate how their awareness of their present connects to their traditional past and to a future. By embracing past, present, and future, the women represent their selves as displaying this narrative. Thus, as I discuss, and in contrast to the grand narrative of women’s Holocaust experiences, in the first alternative narrative, the art utilizes amplification to reveal that aspects of the women’s pre-Holocaust identities remain intact, such

as when the women demonstrate the active ability to nurture and protect their children, display sustained physical strength, and their capacity to form communities.

The first alternative narrative uses amplification to focus on the individual identity of each woman to show that some women maintain an intact sense of self and a connection to their traditional lifestyles. These images typically use amplification to depict women as capable of functioning in their roles as mothers and with the healthy, well-nourished bodies they would have in their pre-camp lives. The women in these images appear active rather than passive; as a result, this alternative narrative presents a somewhat unrealistic image of women’s lives within the camps. These images show survivance through an active sense of self, revealed by the strength of the women’s bodies and their apparent emotional health. This use of amplification shows how the women in these in images were able to maintain individual identity.

In a second version of the first alternative narrative, amplification argues that some women no longer have an intact sense of self. Certain of the images representing the first alternative narrative use amplification to show that, though the women maintain their physical or emotional health, they are passive and resigned to their fate; thus they do not have an intact sense of self. This story is evident when the women experience emotional despair; they appear isolated and vulnerable, sometimes because of the efforts of other women. As with the first version of the first alternative narrative, this second version does not frequently appear in published survivor stories; the women’s damaged characterizations contrast with the more comfortable, familiar narratives of noble women. But, as discussed in Chapter One, the social expectations for survivors, and women especially, involve positive, uplifting, and life affirming tales, even if the tales do not accurately reflect actual lived experiences.

Interestingly, neither use of amplification acknowledges the brutality of the Holocaust on the women’s bodies, therefore offering an unrealistic portrayal of the camps. Regardless, whether or not the self is intact, some images use amplification to focus on the individual identity of the woman in a way that does not recognize the brutality of the Holocaust and neither form of amplification upholds the grand

narrative of the Holocaust. Images where amplification creates the argument stress the individual identity of each woman, whether she possesses an intact self or not.

The second alternative narrative uses synecdoche to focus on collective communities of women, rather than individuality; as a result, in the second alternative narrative, the self is never intact. Like the first alternative narrative, this second alternative narrative also has two versions, each offering different, but equally significant stories of survivance that reveal contrasting yet complimentary perspectives on the women’s sense of self and identity. In the first version of the second alternative narrative, the images show collective communities of women who band together, part-to-whole, demonstrating how women sacrifice their intact selves in an attempt to resist Nazi brutality. There is the sense that, while the women do not have intact selves, through community, still survivance exists.

The second version of the second alternative narrative offers representations of synecdoche showing a disruption in the mother-child community. While the grand narrative of motherhood positions mothers and their children as a part-to-whole unit, the child always belongs to the mother and the mother to the child. In this alternative narrative based on synecdoche, the images depict mothers and children who are physically connected, and thus still a unit; yet the images also depict a fissure in the emotional connection between mother and child; the rupture is evident because the mothers and children direct their gazes in different directions. This fissure indicates that the mother’s self is not intact and that she is unable to maintain her hold on her traditional maternal role. Table 4 (see Appendix) provides a visual explanation of the differences between the iterations of each of the two alternative narratives.

Regardless of which iteration, images that use synecdoche are more realistic then those based upon amplification and acknowledge the physical and emotional brutalities of the Holocaust. Unlike in images utilizing amplification, however women in these part-to-whole images are never depicted as individuals with intact selves; they appear to sacrifice their individuality in an attempt to save the entire community or are so disconnected from their children that their sense of self is shattered. As I explain more fully in this chapter, neither alternative narrative uses the topoi to depict the grand narrative but

rather shows different kinds of survivance, regardless of the presence of an intact or shattered self. The notable appearance of alternative representations provides access to stories not heard by creating two alternative narratives about survivance that demonstrate, through the topoi, either a strong sense of individual selfhood, the shattered self, or the self-exchanged for group survival.

A Word on Organization

Before undertaking the analysis, let me discuss the organization of this chapter. I begin by explaining Vizenor’s concept of survivance as it relates to this study. I then move on to a very brief explanation of the differences between the ways women and men represent themselves in the art; my discussion addresses how those differences sparked this project and why they remain important. Finally, I turn to the full analysis of the art. My discussion of the art is arranged around the two alternative narratives created by the topoi of amplification and synecdoche. Each topos has subsets oriented around the aforementioned themes of motherhood, physical strength, and community; however, human actions and their consequences do not fit into such strictly defined categories. At times, my discussion of the themes relates to the topoi, survivance, and the grand narrative of the Holocaust overlap. For example, discussions of some images depicting the theme of motherhood overlap with themes involving strength. It is not always possible or desirable to separate the themes to draw distinct boundaries between them. In fact, these connections belong to the argument.

My recursive approach to organization is in keeping with the feminist methodologies and DS theories that guide this project. This approach reflects, in a small way, that trauma narratives are not linear; because trauma and human experience are not linear, we should not force rigid boundaries on the arguments within the art. Having said this, I do realize that some intentional organization is necessary; and so I have created loose categories that allow for natural intersections between themes.

Given these circumstances, as indicated, I begin by discussing the first alternative narrative of survivance created by amplification then move on to the second alternative narrative created by

synecdoche. In my discussion of the amplification narrative, I first explore how images of motherhood use amplification to argue about the women’s connection to this traditional role. These images show how maternal power is amplified, creating the first version of the first alternative narrative of survivance. I then examine images where amplification depicts women as physically strong and well nourished, despite their imprisonment. This physical strength is a representation of survivance. Finally, I acknowledge that some images use amplification in less empowering ways; in these instances, the topos depicts women in situations of extreme isolation who have lost their sense of self. These images make up the second version of the first alternative narrative. These images complicate my thesis that amplification represents a positive sense of self; however, the images also exhibit survivance in that these images endow the particular story with a sense of permanence and significance.

My analysis of synecdoche, the second alternative narrative begins with a discussion of the first version of the second alternative narrative, where synecdoche reveals a fissure between some mothers and their children, a disconnect that argues that these women cannot sustain their sense of self in a traditional maternal role. I then explore the second iteration of the second alternative narrative, that is, how the women use synecdoche to argue about how they connect to their community rather than to their individual, intact selves. As with amplification, my analysis considers the ways in which both versions of alternative narratives use synecdoche to push back against the grand narrative, enabling the women to create visual arguments about the role of survivance in their lives.

In sum, whether amplification or synecdoche, the topoi grounds stories which depart from the grand narrative to depict survivance. Organizing the chapter around the topoi allows me to focus on how the two topoi, amplification and synecdoche, create alternative narratives of survivance. This organization allows me, in turn to provide a more overarching perspective on the art, rather than focusing separately on particular images with no room for overlap. Accordingly, my discussion of particular paintings and arguments may appear in several places in the analysis.

The Self, Survivance and the Topoi

My data speaks to the concept of survivance. To link Vizenor’s concept of survivance to my analysis, this chapter demonstrates how amplification and synecdoche each create alternative narratives about survivance. Vizenor defines survivance as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion: survivance is the continuation of stories, not a mere reaction, however permanent….Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (2008). Vizenor originally applied this term to characterize how Native people, specifically the Anishinaabe, retain and continue their native stories and culture, despite efforts to assimilate them into mainstream culture. I believe that this definition may be expanded to include other oppressed groups, specifically, Jewish women of the Holocaust. In my conceptualization, survivance involves pushing back against annihilating an identity by means of stories which are, broadly construed, associated with the oppressed group. In this project, I apply the term specifically to how women use art to assert a sense of identity. As indicated, this chapter discusses my results where two kinds of alternative narratives that connect survivance to the topoi of amplification and synecdoche respectively.

Representations of Women vs. Representations of Men

Before moving to the analysis, let me address an important matter, that of gender. My study focuses on women; although men are beyond my project’s scope, it is nonetheless significant to acknowledge male Holocaust representations and to suggest that they typically represent the male body in ways that differ from the women. Such recognition is necessary to ground my argument that the women represent themselves in gender related ways. In fact, the marked differences I observed between representations of women and men was one of the catalysts of this project; it showed that women and men represent their identities in different ways, or as I came to think of them, lines of reasoning (see Chapter

Five on Limitations).

In contrast to women, men repeatedly depict themselves in physically abusive, degrading positions, in dehumanizing and emasculating poses. Their bodies retain none of the shreds of dignity that the women’s typically retain. Clearly, men do not represent themselves in maternal terms; nor do they represent their bodies as intact. True, I argue that in one alternative narrative, women represent their selves as damaged; but they represent this damage through stronger relationships they form with other women, not through physical evidence of degradation on their bodies.

Almost exclusively, in Blatter and Milton (1982), images of men within the camps show them as broken individuals, often they resemble the walking dead. Auguste Favier’s work, Medical Examination, typifies this kind of male in Holocaust art. Here, the men are as exposed as possible; bright light shines down upon them, and they are forced to hold their arms up as their genitals are examined. Nothing shields the men from the eyes and hands of the doctors. Moreover, the men appear barely alive; with their bodies cadaverous, and their bones protrude, one wonders how they manage to move at all6. George Grosz’s

After the Interrogation also illustrates the marked differences between the ways men and women are depicted in Holocaust art. In this image, Grosz shows a man’s body after being tortured by two Nazis.

The brutality is incredible; there is nothing left of the man except a pile of rags and blood. These types of images are virtually unique to male artists in the art I examined. Women simply do not draw themselves in these ways.

Images such as these show that men acknowledge the physical torture and destruction in a way that women do not. As a result, the women appear to have stronger sense of their identity in relation to their pre-Holocaust selves. These representations would not be so remarkable if they appeared once or twice in the corpus; however, images of dehumanized men appear over and over again in Holocaust art. It might be tempting to ask why men are portrayed so differently from women when both suffered equally brutal physical abuse. But, this project neither seeks to examine the psychological workings behind these

6 For these examples of men’s Holocaust art and others, see Appendix C

paintings, nor to provide words for what only the artists can explain; rather, this study establishes how lines of reasoning function within representations of women. Further discussion of male representations follows in Chapter Five when I discuss this project’s limitations. I now turn to the analysis of the art, beginning by examining how amplification forms arguments about motherhood and women’s Holocaust experiences, thus establishing the first alternative narrative.

Alternative Narratives: Amplification

As previously discussed, the first alternative narrative uses amplification to represent how individual women either maintain an intact sense of self or appear to lose their sense of self. In the first version of this first alternative narrative, the women use amplification to argue that, despite the conditions in the camps, the oppression, and the day-to-day dangers, they are able to sustain an intact sense of self; to that end, they connect their present situation with their past tradition and future legacy in that tradition.

These images often depict situations that could not reflect the reality of the camps; thereby, the artworks highlight the women’s self-characterization in terms of health they enjoyed before the camps.

Specifically, they connect their present selves with the tradition which brought them into the camps and still sustains them; In other words, they link their individual identity to the broader Jewish heritage. To make this argument, the women often use amplification. In so doing, they speak to the first version of this alternative narrative; in this sense, survivance involves maintaining an individualized sense of self. The adherence to tradition becomes an act of survival and resistance. The self survives because it is connected to traditions, and the traditions survive to sustain future generations; thus the women resist victimization and annihilation.

The artworks manifest this argument and alternative narrative about survivance by means of amplification in three ways: though reference to motherhood and maternal power, physical strength, and community. At times, of course, these themes intersect. In my analysis, I discuss them separately and also cross-reference the intersections.

Amplification and Motherhood

Motherhood in the Jewish tradition plays a central role. As I discussed in Chapter One, once traditional Jewish women are married, motherhood is all but required (if possible). In Nefesh Chaya: the

Unique Avodas Hashem7 of the Jewish Woman, Rav Shimshon Dovid Pincus (2011) writes that an individual’s identity as a Jew is determined by his/her mother, “the root of everything is the mother” (p.

13). Sadly, the reality of the camps is that children were often separated from their parents and were among the first to be killed; “at Auschwitz-Birkenau, women who refused to be separated from children under age of 14 were sent to the gas chambers with them” (Waxman, 2006, p. 142). In the face of reality, the works demonstrate how the women connect their present selves as in tact with their traditional roles as mothers.

As indicated, Holocaust images of motherhood often present maternal power and protection by means of amplification to focus on appropriate features of motherhood. Two of the images, amplify physical features of motherhood, Weissova-Hoskova’s Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport…

(1), Kollwitz’s Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled (27) to argue that, in its traditional manifestation, motherhood is critical to women’s Holocaust experiences and that it must be maintained. To that end, these three pieces, represent the ability to ensure future generations, often by the presence of children or pregnancy. Thus, the women maintain their own sense of self and project it forward, maintaining it for their families and traditions. When the women make the argument that, by maintaining their maternal role, the women reveal their individual identity intact and manifest survivance.

Weissova-Hoskova’s Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1) makes this argument by amplifying the physical presence of pregnancy and associated maternal strength. At first glance, this picture appears to present a simple narrative about traditional Jewish mothers; on closer inspection, the piece amplifies certain elements, thereby creating an argument about survivance. In the painting, an

expectant mother holds the hand of a child. Weissova-Hoskova highlights the woman’s heavily pregnant belly and her motherhood; her large, ripe belly commands our attention and stands in sharp contrast to the rest of her emaciated frame. Amplifying her belly creates a narrative which belies the reality in the camps; pregnant women were frequently killed upon arrival. It is hard to imagine how a woman so far along in her pregnancy would have survived, let alone in the company of her other child. At the same time, however, the image, historically unrealistic though it may be, shows another kind of reality. By depicting the woman in a healthy pregnancy, the woman argues that she is a traditional Jewish mother, as the significant matriarch, she creates future generations of Jewish people.

The painting supports that traditional sense of the future in other ways. Five people are present in this picture, the four who are visible and the unborn child the woman carries; that child is in many respects, the focus of the image. The presence of the unborn child suggests hope for future generations.

Being able to envision a future, if not for herself then for her children, indicates that artist maintains a connection to her traditional self (as conceptualized by Ochs and Capps). By representing advanced, healthy pregnancy the woman can produce further generations of Jewish people, and thus challenges the

Nazi’s attempt at annihilation. As such, the woman transcends passive victimization; the amplified, healthy pregnancy gives her power because she is capable of perpetuating the tradition and legacy.

In some ways similarly, Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1) offers this alternative Holocaust narrative which connects motherhood and strength via amplification. The woman’s heavily pregnant belly is amplified, it is enormous in relation to the rest of her body which displays the ravages caused by extreme malnutrition: her eyes are sunken, her cheek bones jut from her skin, the sinews in her neck are visible and her shoulder bones stick out sharply from her body. A woman this malnourished is at high risk for miscarriage, yet this woman carries a baby apparently unaffected by the lack of food; her amplified belly indicates that her baby seems to be growing well. Again, this image constructs that pregnancy and motherhood themselves as a means of preserving the tradition against the

Nazi’s plans. The amplification of the belly within which the unborn child rests emphasizes that future

citizen and symbolizes the possibility of survival. Again, no matter what happens to Jewish mothers, the promise of a future remains. Such strong adherence to gender roles may appear to uphold the typical grand narrative, but it instead demonstrates the woman possess a concrete sense of self and does not resign herself bravely to a sad fate.

Other amplified aspects of the mother’s body speak to her resilience. Although much of her body is painfully thin, her muscular calves and powerful hands show physical strength. Her large breasts, those of a well-nourished woman, imply she will have no trouble nursing her children; they will survive as the result of the nourishment they receive from her. Similarly, her feet are disproportionally large in relation to her height and to the rest of her limbs. They appear to root her firmly in place, lending a sense of steadfastness to her persona; her amplified feet recall Pincus’ statement that mothers are the root of everything (p.13). The woman’s solid, grounded presence, reveals her identity, and thus her children’s and that of all future generations, have deep roots.

One of the most powerful and moving representations of amplified maternal power and resilience is Kollwitz’s Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled (27). In this simple image, a woman shelters three children under hands and arms, arms that are so massive that they suggest a certain masculinity. Indeed, her hands are nearly the same size and the children’s heads. Her elbows stretch from side to side as her arms and body form a protective shield over the children. Amplified in this stance over her children, she appears ready and able to defend them from anything, when, of course, she cannot. Significantly, her physical presence draws attention to her calm, nearly expressionless, face. While the children’s faces clearly show their fear, she looks composed, as if she knows she can rely on her physical and maternal power to persevere. Her power is as definite as the title’s claim that no harm shall come to future generations. Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), and Grain for Sowing… (27), combine synecdoche with amplification to present images of powerful, capable mothers. In both artworks, mothers and children are physically united. Amplifying the mother’s body emphasizes her fiercely protective nature and her capability to defend her children and carry on their tradition.

Both mothers in Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport…(1) and Grain for

Sowing…(27) have extremely amplified arms, legs, feet, hands and stomachs. These highlighted features constitute sources of protection for the children, both born and unborn, in the images. In Women and

Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), the mother’s pregnancy is not a source of vulnerability, as it would have been in the camps; it appears to be her source of power, strength, and identity. Her motherhood makes her capable of protecting the children. Her amplified belly, feet and hands demonstrates the strength she has, not in spite of her pregnancy, but because of it. The reality of her imprisonment and victimization by the Nazis is belied by her healthy pregnancy, the strength in her legs, and the power of the hand that holds her child. The same may be said of the powerful mother in Grain for

Sowing … (27). Her physical and emotional strength make her capable of shielding her children from danger. Her motherhood defines her, her ability to sustain active, protective motherhood shows that her sense of self is well intact. Such protection, moreover, ensures the past tradition will continue in the future.

In these two images, amplification tells a story about maternal power and about the steadfast sense of self that is represented through the use of the topos. Motherhood is an integral part of the Jewish woman’s experience and these two women appear to be grounded deep within that tradition. In both images, for example, the mothers face the same way as one or more of the children in the image, creating a sense of protection, of continuity, and of connectedness; they are all moving in the same direction, forward, within one tradition. Healthy motherhood is their source of power and selfhood and the source of survival. As Vizenor (2008) writes, “survivance stories are renunciations of dominance” (p. 1) and these images function in exactly that way. Amplification makes the women more powerful than their oppressors and shows that they have an unflinching grasp on their past, present, and future selves.

Amplification: Women’s Communities Within Camps

In addition to representing themselves in terms of motherhood, the artists also use amplification to focus on individual identity and, thus, to suggest how the imprisoned female body symbolizes strength

and, thereby, supports survivance. In this case, amplification reveals the first alternative narrative in that it argues that the imprisonment designed to annihilate the body and individual identity did not do so. To that end, the artwork uses amplification to depict women, who, although they are imprisoned, maintain healthy, well-nourished, fully functioning bodies, although not pregnant ones. Such images amplify certain physical attributes, such as strong arms, well-developed leg muscles, robust hips, and broad backs.

The unrealistic assumption here is that women sustain their strength prior to the Holocaust. Clearly, the women in camps were not in excellent health, nonetheless women choose to represent themselves in this way. In these cases, ordinary women appear with arms, legs, or heights that appear healthy; by amplifying their health, they argue that their strength has not been undermined by imprisonment. Thus, the art uses amplification to show healthy strong female bodies, a health that speaks to their maintenance of a strong identity. Given their health, the women function as they would outside of the camps and ghettos. In so doing, women are able to survive as individuals. Again, this reflects how the women transcend their immediate circumstances and maintain their pre-camp sense of self. Yes, they are horribly vulnerable, but they remain physically strong with the potential to survive as individuals. None of them suffers the frailty that comes from prolonged malnourishment.

Judith Liberman’s Women in the Holocaust (3) addresses the strength of the female body by presenting multiple women defying the reality of the prison camps. Specifically, she amplifies the broadness of their hips and fullness of their breasts to reflect not presumed weakness but strength. The women are robustly healthy, the power and health of their bodies are fully displayed. Significantly, they stand in a classic “Eve” pose, fully naked, but covering their breasts and their genitals. Such a pose amplifies their femininity, which is the source of their strength. Ironically, this same femininity also makes them completely vulnerable to the SS guards behind them. But they remain strong, essentially healthy, and robust as before the Holocaust, rather than resigned to death. Again, this representation of women’s physical vitality indicates that they are nourished by something beyond whatever meager food they are given.

Several images use amplification to highlight how strength sustains the women, even under hopeless conditions. Grundig’s Imprisoned (33), like Liberman’s Women in the Holocaust (3), depicts women behind bars. Unlike Liberman, Grundig amplifies the physical environment rather than just the bodies to show the hopelessness of the situation. Also unlike the Liberman piece, which has only one set of bars, in Grundig’s image, the prison bars go on infinitely. In this image, the woman is alone and faces away from audience, with the SS guard in front of her. Notably, instead of amplifying the power of her hips or fullness of her breasts, Grundig emphasizes the strength of the woman’s well developed arms, back, and shoulders. She faces her captive and defiantly grips the bars, as if she would tear them down if she could. Also, unlike Women in the Holocaust (3), her stance is open, rather than vulnerable or resigned. Although escape may be physically impossible, given the rows and rows of bars, the amplification of her strength positions her as determined, rather than defeated. Again, this strength suggests survivance. This woman faces her oppressor and seems determined to survive and fight back and live in the future.

Ro Mogendorf’s Aged Woman Arrested (165) also presents an argument about female strength and resilience. In this image, we see a large woman, seated on what might be her belongings. Unlike the previous artwork, the title tells us she has been arrested; but there are no shackles or restraints.

Intriguingly, the women is represented as calm. She sits still and she gazes directly out at the viewer without fear, much like the children in Untitled (2) and Mother and Child (70). Her composure indicates that her sense of self is firmly intact, even facing potential vulnerability. This composure is highlighted because her large body is amplified with respect to the space which she fills. She appears strong, healthy, and robust with her thick, sturdy legs, strong hands, and large breasts. She looks directly at the audience, and therefore seems completely capable of taking care of herself, physically and emotionally. Here, amplifying her body reveals both her physical and inner strength. Rather than suggesting that she is passive, the image shows her dignity. This image speaks to the first alternative narrative that emphasizes her strength as an individual.

This quality appears over and over again in the corpus; the women do not panic. Instead, they are represented with an innate strength. These are not images that uphold the narratives of submissive women. Instead, the images show the women maintaining a sense of their pre-camp selves under dire circumstances to support the first version of the first alternative narrative described above.

Amplification: Images of Isolation

Certainly, not every image that uses amplification depicts calm, dignified women able to maintain their self. In some images, amplification supports a less empowering narrative about isolation. To that end, some of these images use amplification to represent instances of isolation that do adhere to the first version of the alternative narrative where women are victims of oppression, but also appear able to preserve aspects of the self.

The Hell for Women (354) and Suicide on the Wire (355) use amplification to represent women who, while oppressed and victimized, are not passive; their selves are clearly intact as evidenced by their actions and choices as individuals. In certain respects, therefore, they complicate the grand narrative of the Holocaust by offering depictions of women’s Holocaust experiences where amplification shows an intact self. The images depict survivance as not simply equivalent to physical survival, but rather equates to a self that attempts to fight back against oppression, even if that resistance takes the form of choosing to end one’s own life. Further, the choice to represent these specific examples of survivance is in itself a way of resisting annihilation. For example, when Weissova-Hoskova draws a woman choosing to commit suicide, she represents the woman’s body to memorialize her and the countless others who made the same choice. In essence, that woman lives on in our group memory through the representation of her suicide. It is a narrative to which we do not frequently have access, but true, given the situation that was a viable option. It is part of the alternative narratives that are necessary in order to recover the stories of the many women who took an alternative path.

Two images, The Hell for Women (354) and Suicide on the Wire (355) demonstrate how amplification contributes to arguments about sustained selfhood, thus exemplifying the first version of the first alternative narrative. In The Hell for Women (354), the woman in the foreground is amplified to the point where she is as tall at the chimney and fencing behind her; the camp appears to engulf her. Two women behind her are much smaller than she; their heads are down; they do not interact or intervene in any way. They do not try to protect themselves or others. In contrast, the amplified woman takes action and attempts to fight off a dog who attacks her. Her arm is raised in preparation to strike it down. Because the dog is an agent of the Nazi regime, this gesture may be read as an act of resistance. Her willingness to fight back against the dog, also identifies her as one women fighting for herself without the support of a community. Nevertheless, her amplification and willingness to fight reveal that she has an intact sense of self the smaller women lack because she appears to believe that her life is worth holding on to and fighting for. She is literally larger than her oppressive and dangerous environment while the smaller women are overcome by it. As the image suggests, some women maintain a sense of self, regardless of their access to community and that an intact self is a source of tremendous power.

Suicide on the Wire (355), amplifies emotion and space and, in so doing, demonstrates the woman as maintaining an intact sense of self. In this image, the fence and barracks stretch to the four borders, making escape impossible. The woman’s bodily actions exemplify her emotions. Her right arm touches the fence, her left arm is flung backward and her body collapses to the ground as she dies. We cannot see exactly what kills her; the fence does not appear to be electric and there are no bullets or weapons in the picture. Regardless of the exact cause, her unending imprisonment, implied by the endless fence and barracks, has led her to end her life because she can envision no future beyond the wires. Obviously, her suicide does not illustrate a positive action, still, the image contrasts starkly with the resignation and passivity represented in the three other images I will examine next, namely Self-Portrait After Four

Selections (301), Elderly Deportee (73) and Despair (71). In an odd way, her suicide is an act of autonomy as much as an act of desperation and helplessness because it is, ultimately, a choice. The

women in Suicide on the Wire (355) makes the choice for herself alone. Certainly, stories such as hers are left out of the grand narrative that women always fight through despair or sacrifice themselves for their family. In the grand narrative, suicide is an act of ultimate selfishness. This image indicates suicide to be the woman’s final act of selfhood, and as such, offers a more complex way of thinking about survivance.

Other images use amplification to depict situations where women’s communities are shattered and, as a result, the self is destroyed. These images support the second version of the first alternative narrative, where amplification argues that some women are unable to sustain an intact sense of self.

Several images in the second version of the first alternative narrative use amplification to depict women who are oppressed, threatened, and even suicidal. In these instances, women are depicted as either totally isolated or as disenfranchised from other women. These women have given into despair and are especially vulnerable to emotional and physical pain. This vulnerability is represented by amplifying specific physical features, to convey that the women have lost their sense of identity and selfhood. Accordingly, the women often appear physically small, naked, or especially defenseless. Because amplification is used to depict women who succumb to oppression rather than surmount it, thus, their self is not intact. These images include: Distribution of Soup (224) Despair (71), Elderly Deportee (73), Self-portrait After Four

Selections (301).

In Distribution of Soup (224) amplification demonstrates how women’s self can be destroyed by the oppression of other women. In most Holocaust narratives, women are victimized by men. Not only is there something particularly disturbing about women dehumanizing each other, depicting this type of abuse highlights that the brutality was not limited to male soldiers. This element of the narrative that we do not often have access to, and therefore, lack an understanding of the unique consequences it had on the women who suffered through it.

Two groups of women appear, either amplified or understated. The tiny, frail, emaciated prisoners depend on litotes to highlight their vulnerability while the monstrous figures of the serving women are amplified to emphasize their power and willingness to abuse their own. The serving women

are dressed in grotesquely dainty clothes, with ribbons in their hair and bows on their high-heel shoes8. It is impossible to know if they are Jewish, but their lack of uniforms seems to indicate that they are not.

Regardless of this, their positon of privilege is clear. They are strong and well-fed with giant arms and fat bellies. Their physical power overwhelms the sickly, emaciated, rag-clad prisoners who try to salvage the food as it falls around, not in, their bowls. Further, through amplification, this image presents the serving women as an obviously allied group, brought together by their power over the prisoners. Their power rests in their size in relation to the prisoners and, thus, makes them appear all the more monstrous and inhumane9.

Interestingly, the amplification of size, and thus power, in Distribution of Soup (224) complicates the grand narrative of the Holocaust by representing how some Jewish women became implicit in the oppression and abuse of other Jewish women. The serving women turn against their own people, thus disregarding the tradition and safety of community and support between women. This representation of women rarely appears in the more familiar narratives. Distribution of Soup (224) has multiple ways of complicating the narrative about women’s relationships with each other. First, it presents a power dichotomy between the prisoners and the guards, created by amplification. Second the oppression of the serving women creates a fissure between the prisoners as a group, and the fragmenting of each individual prisoner’s self. Most Holocaust narratives represent women trying to help each other, or, at the very least, trying to help themselves. Rarely are audiences presented with such a blatant lack of self as this image presents.

Despair (71) depicts a woman sitting in what appears to be a cell. The background is vague and non-descript except for a window in the upper right corner. Interestingly, in this case the woman’s

8 I use the term “serving women” generically to refer to the seemingly favored or privileged female prisoners depicted in Distribution of Soup (224). 9 Scene in Camp Ravensbruck (225 from secondary data set) contrasts with this image by showing women who serve and nourish each other. In this image, there is no amplification of physical features, health, dress, etc. The omission of amplification is important because it shows a relationship of care, rather than abuse, between the women, and thus serves as an important piece of complimentary data to Distribution of Soup (224)

proportions are amplified in relation to the rest of the space. She fills most of the space in the room, her head almost touching the ceiling, even though she is seated. There is the sense that, if she stood up, she would burst out of the image’s frame and thus, out of the cell. However, the amplification of her seated form gives the impression that the walls are closing in around her. Her hunched posture, amplified though it may be, conveys a sense of hopelessness and resignation; she is slumped forward, her hands clasped on her lap. There is no vitality, no chance for escape, no future, thus, her sense of self is not intact.

The same sense of resignation comes through in Elderly Deportee (73). Like the previous image,

Elderly Deportee (73) uses amplification to represent the woman as trapped, resigned to her fate and without a sense of self. The woman in Elderly Deportee fills the space of the frame, thus capturing vivid details of her face, and rendering her surroundings as unimportant. The woman in Elderly Deportee (73) lies in a bed, her hand curled over a blanket. She appears ill and exhausted. Attention is drawn, by amplification, to her huge, sunken and shadowed eyes. Her mouth turns down in pain and her head lolls to the left. No sense of her previous identity or of a future one is apparent. The close-up heightens this effect by blocking out the environment around her and focusing on her face and upper body. Although herself appears to be destroyed, this images still speaks to the first alternative narrative because this images focuses on this particular woman’s plight. Though herself is lost, the audience sees her as an individual.

Her personal suffering is apparent in her posture and expression. Given this, Elderly Deportee (73) pushes back against the grand narrative of the Holocaust by showing a woman suffering as an individual, not as a part of a conglomerate where all anguish is the same.

Self-portrait After Four Selections (301) offers another close-up of a woman in isolation. As with

Elderly Deportee (73), her huge eyes are the focus of the image and are emphasized by dark lines and shadows. The image amplifies her eyes and face to create an argument about her emotional state. Her face fills the frame in extreme close-up, the only environmental features are the lines running across the images, which may be actual bars or wires, but are also symbolic of her physical and emotional imprisonment. Again, no sense of self exists, no hope or recognition of a future. By including prison bars,

this self-portrait represents the artist’s imprisonment as part of who she understands herself to be; all her autonomy is lost. However, like Elderly Deportee (73) and Despair (71), the image amplifies the individual and her personal pain because the image is such an extreme close-up, the audience gains full access to her emotions and can clearly see the loss of self. In all of the previous images, survivance is evident in the simple fact that the images tell the story of individual women, whether they maintain an intact self or not, thus preserving their narratives as unique and valuable.

Alternative Narratives: Synecdoche

In addition to the first alternative narrative that uses amplification to make arguments about women’s ability to maintain the self, other images in the corpus use synecdoche to create a second alternative narrative that offers a different argument about women’s Holocaust experiences that does not support the grand narrative. Instead of depicting the stoic and self-less woman, images in this second alternative narrative argue about the horrific effects of the situation, where the self never remains intact.

Specifically, this narrative illustrates one of two effects. The first version of this narrative shows that, due to the fractured self, some women cannot locate themselves within sustaining traditions, such as motherhood. These stories challenge the grand narrative of motherhood within the context of the

Holocaust. A second version of this narrative argues that some women exchange their individual sense of self to become part of a community of women who stood together to survive. This argument asserts that a

“one for all” mentality overtakes the need for an individual sense of self. In sum, the both version of the second alternative narrative use synecdoche to unite as well as divide communities of women and mothers and children. These images in this second alternative narrative also reveal that survivance may require acceptance of aspects of their reality. Thus, the following section explains how synecdoche creates multiple arguments about women’s Holocaust experiences, each dependent upon how the women represent their sense of self, as either disconnected from their individual, maternal identity and tradition, or as a loss of self that is the result of a larger need for community survival.

Synecdoche: Motherhood and Fissure

In this first version of the second alternative narrative synecdoche depicts mothers who appear more isolated and disconnected from their children; as such, the women appear to have lost the connection to the tradition of motherhood. As Waxman and others remind us, not every woman could maintain her sense of self under the circumstances in the camps; the use of synecdoche creates another alternative narrative where women are depicted as having lost their sense of self through a lack of connection to their children. In familiar grand narratives about motherhood, mothers and their children are conceptualized as a collective whole, a small community where the children are part of their mother and she is part of them.

The images discussed in the section create an alternative to that narrative by revealing a split of the part-to-whole argument. In these images, the whole of the mother-child grouping gets visually fractured, thus showing that some women lost their connection to their maternal roles and thus, lost their intact sense of self. Accordingly, these images depict a fissure in the connection between mothers and their children. The grand narratives of both motherhood and the Holocaust depict all mothers as willing to sacrifice themselves for their children or to defend them against the brutality of the Nazi’s, but images where this fissure exists tell a different tale. In these images, the mothers do not appear able to protect their children because their self is fractured. As such, while these images depict a passive, ineffective form of motherhood, they may be more realistic in representing the reality of they do not follow the grand narrative of women’s Holocaust experience; they show mothers who appear to be resigned to their fate and unable to protect and nurture their children.

Olomucki’s In the Ghetto (53) offers one example in which synecdoche presents this type of alternative representation of motherhood. As with Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport… (1), an example of amplification, the mother in In the Ghetto (53) is accompanied by multiple children. In both images, pregnant mothers lead a group of children off to the left. However, unlike Women and

Children Being Sent On a Transport… (1), the mother of In the Ghetto (53) does not hold or touch her

children; her left arm is obscured and her right hand holds a sack. Although the mother and her children are together, they are not touching and the mother does not appear able to defend herself or anyone else.

Moreover, her stance is not protective and her pregnant belly is barely discernable; thus the image understates her pregnancy negatively. The images create a disconnect between the mother and her children; there is none of the maternal strength that appears in Women and Children Being Sent on a

Transport (1). In depicting a sense of resignation, the image offers a second alternative viewpoint; it moves away from artificially upbeat, positive narratives towards more realistic representation of women’s

Holocaust experiences.

In this way, In the Ghetto (53), and images like it, recover the stories of women whose experiences may have been negated in favor of more comfortable narratives. Part of Waxman’s claim is that the majority of women’s Holocaust narratives offer only one representation of survival, that of the triumphant and noble woman. However, survival has many facets and many faces, including those women who found themselves unable to fight back against oppression, maintain tradition, or protect their children. Mothers did not necessarily always act in heroic ways. Thus, we must acknowledge this representation of women’s Holocaust experiences, one neglected because it does not meet conventional expectations.

Next, I show two cases, Olomucki’s Untitled (2) and Buresova’s Mother and Child (70), that show a minor but significant variation from the way the fissure between mother and child is represented in In The Ghetto (53). In this variation, both the Olomucki piece (2) and the Buresova piece (70) depict the mother and child as physically connected at the shoulders, but the direction of the mother’s gaze distances her from her child, thus creating a fissure in the part-to-whole argument. This is different from

In the Ghetto (53), where the mother and children do not touch in any way. Untitled (2) and Mother and

Child (70) both use the Classical Mother-Child pose, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, where the mother protectively cradles the child to her breast. In each piece too, the mothers gaze to the right of the frame, while the children look directly at the audience. The pose appears to situate mothers in the traditional role

of protector and nurturer, but close examination reveals a disconnect of the self, and a disconnect between mother and child.

In both images, synecdoche complicates the traditional narrative about motherhood. Though they have distinct faces, in both pictures, the mother and her child appear to share a torso. In Olomucki’s image (2), the child nestles directly under the woman’s chin, obscuring the woman’s right shoulder. The woman’s left arm and the child’s right arm appear to complete an embrace. In Buresova’s work (70), only the faces and neck of the woman and child are clearly articulated; both of their bodies are obscured and blended into each other as if they are of one body. In both images, the part-for–whole reasoning implies that they are physically one and the same person. As such, the mother is her child and the child is the mother; each piece argues that traditional motherhood is critical to the women’s identity.

Interestingly, the composition of these particular images shows that synecdoche can both unite and divide the subject, and implicitly the artist, and audience. For example, in both Untitled (2) and

Mother and Child (70) the women’s eyes are focused on the empty space beyond the frame of the picture.

They do not look at the viewer, but rather at some unseen point beyond. This gives the impression that they are somehow removed from the moment, and thus, disconnected from the world and audience. In contrast, the children, who look out of the picture toward the audience, and more aware of the present.

Seemingly, the children acknowledge the actuality of a world beyond the image, thus connecting subject and audience. The children’s awareness creates a sense of communication and invitation. Further, children symbolize the possibility for a future. In a sense, they look forward, connected to that future.

Ochs and Capps claim that the self needs all three, connection to the past, acknowledgement of the present and hope for the future. As such, the children appear to have a stronger sense of self than the mothers in these two images.

On the one hand, synecdoche connects mother and child physically. On the other hand, these images have the mother and child looking in different directions which divides rather than uniting. The ideal mother centers her day and life around her children, “The daily schedule of a wife and mother in a

Torah home today is…[that] she gets up in the morning, [prays], cleans the house, cares for her children, and so on” (Pincus, 2011, p.24-25). The art shows that only some women were not able to maintain some level of this devotion.

Synecdoche: Women’s Communities Within Camps

Given that synecdoche represents part-for-whole reasoning, it is no surprise that images where women appear gathering together en masse form a type of “all-for-one” collective grouping that constitutes the second version of the second alternative narrative. In these images, a threat to one women equals a threat to all, and thus, the women sacrifice their self in exchange for the safety of the community.

Three pieces in the corpus suggest that women’s strength and resilience comes from the creation of communities of support and protection. In Women in the Holocaust (3), Three Women in Front of

Barracks (143), and Roll Call (159), groups of women form protective communities around each other.

Although amplification plays a role in each of these images, synecdoche forms the main line of reasoning.

In each image, synecdoche is grounding for metaphors of community which serves as sources of strength and survivance.

In all three of the images, the women are visually connected by their proximity and by their similar body language. The women in Women in the Holocaust (3) all stand with their legs crossed and their arms folded across over their breasts. In Three Women in Front of Barracks (143), the three women are all the same height, two stand so close as to be touching and two stand with the arms folded. Finally, in Roll Call (159), the group of women line up shoulder to shoulder and wear prison uniforms. In all three images the uniformity of posture and physical features aligns the women so that the group is emphasized rather that the individuality of each individual.

In a previous section, I discussed how Judith Liberman’s Women in the Holocaust (3) amplifies the female form to argue about physical female strength and resilience. This image also addresses the concept of community by means of synecdoche. There is a deep sense of togetherness as the women

huddle with each other for support and safety. The image’s most obvious feature is formed by their bodies; they depict an almost solid wall of protection against the SS men behind them. The women huddle in a group, standing sideways and hiding behind one another. At certain points, their bodies blend into each other, or they share a shoulder here or a hip there. Here, synecdoche suggests that says these women are individuals, but at the same time, as a part of each other. Thus, they share a group identity— the whole is stronger than the individual, and that each individual is made stronger for being a part of the whole.

Despite the different context, Mabull’s Three Women in Front of Barracks (143) functions much like Women in the Holocaust (3). The close proximity of the women’s bodies creates a sense of community. In this image, three women stand as if they are in private conversation. Nothing about these three women indicates that they are prisoners; they appear to be friendly neighbors having a conversation.

Even clothes they wear do not appear to be prison uniforms; and they have their hair, as if they were back in their familiar neighborhoods, stopping to chat as they go about their days. Upon closer inspection, however, it is clear that the physical size of the barracks is amplified; it towers above the women and stretches beyond the left and right boundaries of the frame. Incidentally, the amplification shows the extent to which the women are physically blocked and overwhelmed by the barracks’ presence. As such the barracks becomes a metaphor for their imprisonment and a catalyst for the creation of their community. They suffer their imprisonment together. The women stand in an intimate group, heads and faces turned towards each other as they engage in conversation.

Despite their imprisonment, women seek each other out and form groups for support and companionship; this practice would have been a daily part of life before internment. In so doing, the women maintain their identity as social and communal beings, even where women face a distinct and immediate threat of violence (such as in Roll Call). In this image, the amplified figure of the Nazi guard towers over the group of women; they barely reach his shoulders. His huge leg muscles and shoulders, along with the keys he holds behind his back, indicate his power over the women. This power is not his

alone; by virtue of synecdoche, he has the institutional power of the entire Nazi regime behind him.

Accordingly, he is faceless, his individual identity is of no importance, he represents the institution. His arm and hand, stretched over the women to point or count, forms a Nazi salute.

Interestingly, in Roll Call (159), while the guard’s power is amplified, he is not the focus of the image. Bathed in a stream of light on the left side of the frame, the women form a large mass, grouped together for protection. They stand shoulder to shoulder, in identical uniforms. Though they touch, and as opposed to the guard, they are identifiable as individuals, with unique faces, expressions, even hairstyles.

Similarly, in Women in the Holocaust (3) synecdoche represents the women as individual parts of a greater and more powerful whole.

Similarly, France Audoul’s Shorn (231) and Roll Call (159) represent what happens when women’s communities are broken apart. As previously explained, in Roll Call (159), a group of women stand together to protect each other from a Nazi guard; in contrast, Shorn (231) shows what happens when women’s protective communities are destroyed.

Shorn (231) was created in Ravensbruck, a camp designed especially for women; it depicts a group of women having their heads shaved. On the right side of the image, the women awaiting their turn huddle together, much as they do in Women in the Holocaust (3) and Roll Call (159). They form a protective mass, trying to shield themselves and each other from the impending shame. In the center, our eyes are drawn to the naked, supremely vulnerable woman being victimized by two women who shave her hair while the Nazi guards issue commands. She sits naked and totally exposed, she is also physically aligned with those on the left side of the page those who have already suffered the humiliation. In fact, her right foot nearly touches the woman closest to her. She appears to be shifting away from her role within a protective community towards isolation and loss of identity. On the left side of the frame, all sense of community has disappeared; the women are separate and do not interact. Instead, they try to cover their own bodies without concern for their sisters recalling “The Fall” in Classical art. On the right

side, the damned huddle together for protection, in the center, one individual is singled out for victimization, while those on the left lose their sense of self and community after the fall from grace.

Conclusion

Blatter and Milton (1982) explain that Holocaust art is a “phenomenon” of identity and resistance. They speak of the fact that, “The Holocaust victim was denied all access to his self; he was forcibly separated from both his past experience and any reasonable expectations for his future; he became unable to change or even make moral and intellectual judgments about his present” (p.23).

Blatter and Milton (1982) describe artistic creation as a serving three functions: to provide a powerful link to a former identity, to forge a bridge to the future, and as a vehicle through which to transcend the present by transforming the victim’s experience into artwork. Similarly, Ochs and Capps’ (1996) concept of the self focuses on a conscious awareness of one’s past, having a present, and envisioning a future.

Thus, as my analysis shows, Holocaust art was partially an attempt to preserve the self, in very real physical and psychological levels. Through art, the women take rhetorical control over a situation in which they lacked any physical control.

In my corpus, amplification presents several arguments about conditions of motherhood in the camps. Some mothers felt able to protect their children and see themselves as belonging to a tradition of maternal strength and duty, and thus, maintain a sense of self and individual identity. Other images use amplification to show that women who are not mothers are able to sustain an individual identity and composure that is the result of an intact self. Finally, a second version of the amplification narrative depicts women who were overwhelmed by events and unable to carry out their traditional roles or found themselves so isolated that the self was fragmented and destroyed.

In the second alternative narrative, synecdoche reveals two examples of how the self is lost and identity sacrificed. In the first example, women chose to sacrifice the self to become a united front against the oppression and violence of the Holocaust. These images use synecdoche to argue that the collective

whole is more powerful and, thus, more important than individual identity. In the second example, the whole of the mother-child community is fractured. This does not appear to be the result of a conscious choice, but rather a ramification of the brutality of the Holocaust.

As a whole, the images in my corpus use amplification and synecdoche to represent the women in ways that challenge conventional ideas about the identity of survivors; in so doing, create two alternative narratives about women’s Holocaust experiences. Each narrative, moreover, speaks to survivance in its own way. The first alternative narrative offers, by means of amplification, a more positive, yet unrealistic representation of women’s experiences. In these cases, amplification represents the ability of the individual and her traditions to survive, thus, exercising resistance and selfhood. The second alternative narrative offers a more realistic portrayal of women’s experiences via synecdoche. In these narratives, individual selfhood is sacrificed in an attempt to save the community and its traditions. These arguments suggest that without traditions on which to hold, the women must band together to survive, if possible, and, as such, lose their individual sense of self. As such, both arguments represent personal memories of historical truths and depict lived experiences of individual and group identity. The final chapter addresses the contributions and limitations of this project by directly answering my research questions and discussing how this dissertation adds to the field of Disability Studies and feminist rhetorical theory.

Chapter Five: Conclusions and Limitations

As I wrote in the introduction, Waxman (2006) argues that many published women’s

Holocaust texts reify gender stereotypes and expectations by privileging narratives that focus on women who nobly maintain their roles as wives and mothers. She goes on to claim that these stories create a grand narrative of the female Holocaust experience which obscures the presence of counter-narratives.

My project acknowledges and speaks back to Waxman’s point by exploring how women’s Holocaust art functions as alternative form of representation that challenges the master narratives that so trouble

Waxman. While the familiar themes of motherhood and family are present, they appear alongside other themes, such as strength, despair, victimization, etc. and offer narratives that are perhaps not as familiar or easy, but that offer up new facets of understanding about the female Holocaust experience

In this chapter, I discuss what the alternative narratives are and how they differ from familiar written and verbal narratives. I then use that discussion to reiterate and answer my two research questions.

My first research question focuses on how the art constitutes an alternative ways of telling. I answer this by examining the art in relation to Birdsell and Groarke’s (1996) argument that visuals are no more or less capable of making arguments than words. I also consider the lexical gap created by trauma and exploring how the art works to fill this gap. My second question explores the how the women use specific lines of argumentation to represent their experiences. I discuss the women’s use of amplification and synecdoche as specific and deliberate rhetorical choices that enable them to move away from traditional survival narratives and towards alternative narratives of survivance. I then explore the contributions this dissertation makes to the field of rhetoric, especially to visual rhetoric and feminist rhetoric, and to the field of Disability Studies. Finally, I consider the limitations of this study and where I might expand it for future projects.

Alternative Texts

This dissertation has examined how art created by women who experienced the Holocaust uses the topoi of amplification and synecdoche to from alternative Holocaust narratives that speak to the concept of survivance. By analyzing the themes and topoi discovered through coding, I have shown some of the neglected ways in which women represent themselves; these representations challenge master narratives of what it means to be a woman in the Holocaust. By positioning the art as alternative texts, I extend Waxman’s argument that comfortable master narratives about the Holocaust, and especially about women’s experiences, can negate alternative accounts and create inaccurate expectations of “acceptable” narratives. Further, my analysis and interpretation has demonstrated how Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance (survival + resistance) belongs to the women’s representation of their bodies as powerful, reproductive, and maternal. Finally, my analysis enables me to demonstrate that women represent their bodies in gendered ways, ways which different from those used by men.

My initial research, conducted during coursework, disclosed interesting patterns in the way women represent themselves in both the texts and the art. In written narratives, women tend to tell their stories in matter-of-fact ways, recounting the bare realities of the circumstances. For example, in Dina

Pronicheva’s (2008) testimony of her survival of the Baba Yar massacre, she states:

A policeman told me to undress and pushed me to the edge of the pit where another group was

waiting for its fate. But before the shooting started, I driven by terror, fell into the pit. I fell on

dead bodies. At first, I could not understand anything: where was I? How did I get there?

I thought I had gone mad. But when people started falling on my (sic), I came to my senses and

understood everything. I started checking my arms, legs, abdomen, head. It turned out I was not

even wounded. I pretended to be dead. Under me and above me there lay the killed and wounded.

Some of them breathed, others moaned. Suddenly, I heard a child cry, "Mommy!" It seemed like

it was my little daughter. I burst into tears.

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The execution went on, and people kept falling. I was pushing corpses away in fear of being

buried alive. But I did this in a way so that the policemen would not notice.

All of a sudden everything was quiet. It was getting dark. Germans with submachine guns were

killing those who had been wounded. I felt someone was standing above me, pretended to be

dead, no matter how hard it was. Then I felt we were being covered with earth. I closed my eyes

to protect them. When it became completely dark and quite - deadly quiet in literal sense - I

opened my eyes and, having made sure no one was around and watching me, I dug myself out of

sand that was covering me. (holocaustreserachproject.org)

The matter-of-fact tone is typical of spoken and written Holocaust narratives. Frequently too, the narratives are non-linear, with gaps in details about time, location, and events. As the introduction discusses, these fragmented accounts are typical of chaos narratives because chaos and trauma themselves are non-linear and, as such, may not be represented in a chronological manner.

In contrast, the art I have studied represents emotions that words cannot capture. The art in my corpus was created by artists wishing to represent their personal experiences and memories of the

Holocaust; while the art, like spoken or written narratives, can be non-linear, it attempts to make meaning about the events. As mentioned before, precision is not a pre-requisite for effectively representing the women’s chaotic experiences and emotions. The non-linear quality of which the art affords the women allows them to make complex arguments about their sense of identity and enables them to represent themselves in multi-faceted ways without being required to adhere to “Truth” or precision.

As Chapter Four showed, women are frequently represented as they might have appeared before the travesties of the Nazi genocide. No matter how starved their physical bodies may have become, the art suggests that the women’s identity remains intact, sustained by other forces such as community, strength of family, and a deep sense of cultural identity. As Chapter Four discusses, although the drawings are of realistic situations, many of the women are physically represented as they were before the Holocaust,

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their bodies relatively strong and healthy and often as maternal, capable of protecting and nurturing their children. Other representations show women who were unable to connect with their pasts and, as such, appear to have lost their sense of self. The presence of both narratives shows that women’s Holocaust experiences and their connection to their identity are varied and multifaceted.

Most scholars see narrative as a means of understanding the human condition and as a means of constructing knowledge in a way that does not rely upon logic and uni-vocal absolutes, but rather allows for verisimilitude (Bruner, 1991). Bruner argues that our life experiences serve as the framework for the narratives we tell and, in this sense, narrative can constitute reality. In other words, narrative does not just represent reality; it constructs and shapes it (1991). My study supports the notion that the artwork functions as narratives that construct Holocaust experiences into stories about the complexities of identity and survival; thus framed, survival does necessarily to an individual, but to a carefully articulated cultural identity. The art leaves behind a trace of the identities of those who did not survive while simultaneously arguing that it is possible to sustain a connection to identity even in the midst of attempted annihilation.

By leaving a trace of the self, the women live on in public memory. As Vizenor (2008) argues, the survival of even a small part of the self is an act of resistance and, therefore, an act of survivance. This dissertation shows how the art is an alternative mode of narrative and that the artists make deliberate rhetorical choices in order to create arguments about the role of survivance within their experiences.

Given all of this, my research questions are:

1. How does the women’s artwork constitute an alternative ways of telling?

2. How do the women use the topoi of amplification and synecdoche to create lines of

reasoning about women’s Holocaust experiences?

My project responds to these questions by examining the rhetorical patterns and choices the women make to represent their experiences. Although Holocaust narrative is a familiar genre, women’s narratives are often overlooked, especially those that somehow challenge hegemonic views of Jewish

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womanhood. The purpose of this project is not only to examine the rhetorical significance of these narratives, but to also create a space for perspectives that do not adhere well to the grand narrative.

Research Questions

Research Question 1 - How does the women’s artwork constitute an alternative ways of telling?

The artwork is an alternative, non-verbal, non-linear way for the women to communicate their experiences. This alternative is necessary for several reasons; first, in the introduction to this dissertation,

I explain that my definition of text extends beyond the written word to include art and other material objects, like the bra that inspired this project. Given this, I share Birdsell and Groarke’s view that such artifacts can and do make arguments, and that they too become part of the rhetorical spaces of our lives

(1996). Birdsell and Groarke argue that words are no more precise than visuals and, as with words, being able to understand a visual in context is necessary to developing a theory of visual argument. Considering that the art is created within the context of the Holocaust, the trauma of which, for many survivors, was beyond the scope of words, precision is not so much the goal as is the representation of lived experiences.

By creating these visual arguments about their experiences the women express non-linear emotions and perspectives; at the same time, they represent experiences that rely on verisimilitude rather than truth.

Given this, I view the art as texts that represent the unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust. There are times when words fail to fully get at the essence of a thing (Bernard-Donals, 2001). This is especially true in traumatic situations. Therefore, those who experience trauma of this magnitude may turn to representational modes, such as art, in order to express themselves. In “Commemoration in the Art of

Holocaust Survivors” Sheryle Silver Ochayon (2016) quotes Primo Levi on the inability of words to articulate fully the emotions of survivors:

On many occasions, we survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have come to notice how little

use words are in describing our experiences. …[I]n all of our accounts, verbal or written, one

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finds expressions such as “indescribable”, “inexpressible”, “words are not enough”, “one would

need a language for…”. This was, in fact, our daily thought; language is for the description of

daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language “of this other

world,” a language born here. (Ochayon, 2016, ¶ 2)

Defining an art work as a text, something we read, is possible because, in certain situations, our emotions and experiences are literally beyond words, requiring other, non-verbal, non-linguistic, forms of expression. These forms are no less available for rhetorical analysis than words because non-text based symbols can also frame and contextualize claims and reveal rhetorical choices and patterns.

It is my conclusion then that the art fills a lexical gap, the space where words cannot reach the complexities of the trauma and chaos experienced by people who experienced the Holocaust. In The

Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank (2013) points out that chaos narratives, which include Holocaust survivor stories, contain narrative holes that cannot be filled with words, “Words suggest its rawness, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words necessarily fail” (p. 98).

Thus, the necessity for alternative ways of telling. Art offers these wounded artists alternative ways of representing their experiences.

Creating alternative venues for survivor’s voices speaks to Vizenor’s (2008) concept of survivance (survival + resistance) as fully explained in Chapter One. Vizenor theorized that an oppressor’s power is reduced when oppressed people find avenues of physical and cultural survival, i.e. keeping language, food ways, or other customs alive. The survival of cultural aspects equals resistance over oppressors. The same applies to the art in this project; it was created to depict women’s Holocaust experiences, and, as such, creates an argument that the women, and millions like them, have stories to tell.

The Nazi’s goal was to annihilate the entire Jewish population. The art and other narratives are artifacts from the lives of the millions who died. That circumstance alone makes the art a form of resistance against oppression and extermination. The fact that women frequently represent themselves as they were

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prior to the Holocaust shows that aspects of their identity, as individuals and as members of a larger culture, remained intact. These representations are, in some ways, acts of defiance against extermination.

Research Question 2 - How do the women use the topoi of amplification and synecdoche to create lines of reasoning about women’s Holocaust experiences?

As discussed in Chapter Three, the careful coding of themes revealed the use of the two basic topoi of amplification and synecdoche, which offered points of entry into the women’s experiences. As mentioned in my discussion above, the artists made intentional rhetorical choices during the process of composition, much like a writer makes deliberate word and stylistic choices in the process of authoring a text. When the artists choose to amplify certain aspects of their bodies or environments, or to let a part of something stand in for the whole, they reveal deliberate rhetorical choices about their identity, self, and relationship to traditional Judaism.

Interestingly, these deliberate choices coincide with the non-linear structure of the art. That is, the use of amplification and synecdoche show that the art may be a non-linear mode of communication, that it is not created haphazardly or without thought to the arguments it presents. These deliberate rhetorical choices support Debra Hawhee’s (2006) point that rhetorics’ province is not just discipline but also practice and effect; rhetoric does not privilege only linear logic, it is messier and more complicated.

Accordingly, she contends that gesture, images and the body belong to rhetorical enterprise and that extra-rational features, like gesture and image, are critical to rhetoric.

The women use amplification and synecdoche to write the history of their bodies. The ways they do so indicates, as Cixous (1975) argues, that their bodies are their voices and their representations of those bodies are vehicle for those voices. Cixous envisions “writing the body” as a way for women to challenge the phallocentric tradition (Ritchie and Ronald, 2001). Extending this idea, my dissertation shows that the women in this corpus represent their bodies as capable of resisting and surviving horrific

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patriarchal oppression and violence. For example, when a woman amplifies pregnancy, she is “writing a body” that is capable for holding on to the traditions of Jewish motherhood, not simply for herself, but arguing against annihilation. She represents her body as powerful enough to sustain pregnancy and to produce future generations of people who will survive and thrive.

In sum, this study has made space for alternative narratives of survivance, narrative which are told in non-linear ways, best reflect the women’s experiences. The narratives themselves are valuable by extending how audiences understand and Holocaust narratives, who Holocaust survivors are, and the ways in which their stories are told.

Contributions to the Field

This project contributes to the field of visual rhetoric by understanding the art rhetorically and examining texts that deviate from linear, patriarchal lines of argumentation. Sonja Foss’ (2005), work

“Theory of Visual Rhetoric” argues that “visual images provide access to a range of human experience not always available through the study of discourse” (p. 143). Foss goes on to say that visual rhetoric offers rhetors alternatives to persuasion; their work may invite audiences to formulate, sustain, or modify their attention, perceptions, and attitudes about a subject. Therefore, I add to the growing body of work that has accepted that visuals can argue explores the various forms those arguments may take. Further, visual rhetoric rejects the aggressive aspects of traditional rhetoric’s emphasis on persuasion, thus it is well-suited to topics of trauma and oppression where the burden of persuasion can be especially inappropriate.

As such, this project contributes not only to the field of visual rhetoric, but also to Holocaust

Studies, Women’s Studies, and Disability/Trauma Studies. The fact that the study reveals space where women can represent their experiences without patriarchal frameworks makes it inherently valuable to

Women’s Studies and DS. As Foss and Foss (1991) write in Women Speak, there is a tradition of deliberately distorting women’s and other oppressed groups perspectives and rhetorical actions to

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preserve more patriarchal modes. However, all people are worthy rhetors and expressions of experience are meaningful. In this way, my project links feminist rhetorical theory with Disability Studies, showing that becoming a rhetor and writing or representing one’s lived experiences can counter grand narratives about trauma, such as the Holocaust (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson, 2001). Both Waxman and Wilson and

Lewiecki-Wilson. explain that grand narratives can be debilitating and cause further trauma to the survivors, even as they seek to ease the complexity of the trauma for audiences. Like the disabled and traumatized, women rhetors have been historically silenced or forced into patriarchal modes of expression. Ritchie and Ronald (2001) reason that women must find available means to speak. This project extends that argument to women who were traumatized by the Holocaust; it suggests that the art provides a new means of expression, one better capable of representing the unspeakable trauma visited upon their bodies and selves, without the need to be linear or to participate in patriarchal persuasion.

Thus, using rhetorical means to tell alternative stories helps the traumatized to reclaim their experiences and their identity and audiences to better understand those experiences (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson,

2001).

As discussed in my introduction, persuasion can be understood, by some to equate with combat and conquest, creating a potentially damaging either/or dichotomy. I have provided an alternative way for women to represent their narratives and for audiences to read their stories. Positioning the creation of the artwork as an experiential rhetorical act allows women to distance themselves from the potential violence and instead use an invitational form of rhetoric. This use of invitational rhetoric allows for what Flynn, et al. (2012) call “rhetorical resilience” that uses rhetoric to retain a sense of identity by creating meaning even in the most oppressive circumstances. Rhetorical resilience does not require neat, linear logic, rather, it embraces vulnerability, experience, and non-linear arguments. This study uses visual rhetoric to examine how viewing the art as alternative texts of survivance opens new frameworks for feminist rhetorical theory, disability and trauma theory.

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This dissertation argues, in part, that making art is an act of resistance. Holocaust art was created under the most horrific oppression as a way to push back against the threat of death and cultural annihilation. The creation of each piece of art is declaration of survival. This perspective is supported by other feminist rhetoricians. For example, bell hooks positions the art of black people and other oppressed groups in much the same way, arguing that art that is created outside of the cultural marketplace can function as “a force that promotes the development of critical consciousness and resistance movement’.

Art occupies a radical place in the freedom struggle precisely because it provides a means for imagining new possibilities” (Foss, Foss, and Griffin, 2006, p. 90). Hooks views art as a healing, as well as oppositional, force because it “makes whole” what oppressors attempt to destroy. She explains, “in the vacant space after one has resisted, there is still the necessity to become – to make oneself anew [with] new alternative habits of being [that present] possibilities for a transformed future” (Foss, Foss, and

Griffin, 2006, p. 91). These examples show that this dissertation meshes with current work in visual and feminist rhetoric. It also expands the field by applying survivance to the rhetorical function of the art.

This project argues that the creation of the art is not just about speaking back to an oppressor, but also about the women’s ability to speaking out for themselves. Following Foss, Foss, and Griffin (2006), the art offers audiences a means to modify their perceptions about the female Holocaust experience. The art asserts the complex relationship between the women’s bodies, traditions and ability to survive and resist, thus complicating the grand narrative of the Holocaust and recovering the silenced narratives.

Given these qualities, this project bridges some of the divides, which I see as unnecessary, between the fields of rhetoric, narrative and literature. As a study of visual rhetoric that positions art as a narrative, my study invites perspectives from many fields, potentially merging the scholarship to foster new discussions about how we read first-person Holocaust narratives, what counts as rhetoric, and where we draw the line (if we draw it at all) between narrative and literature. For example, scholars such as

Cixous, have much to say about the female body as a source of knowledge and, thus, as a source of

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narrative. This project works under the ‘both/and” philosophy that feminist scholars embrace by inviting productive discussions about where disciplines might merge and add to each other.

As a former high school English teacher, I also see discussions such as the one I offer as inviting educators in the public schools to expand their Holocaust curriculum. This expansion is necessary in order to avoid giving students the impression that there are only a few noteworthy Holocaust narratives, or a limited number of ways in which those stories are told. This is important not only from the perspective that responsible education offers multi-faceted accounts of historical facts, it also challenges the practice of negating voices that are typically silenced. Offering multiple perspectives enables students to think critically about history by engaging with the voices of many who experienced it. A discussion on heroism, for example, becomes much more meaningful when students understand the complexities of history, culture, and identity. The goal should not be to know the stories of two famous people, but to understand that there is a multiplicity of voices and experiences.

Limitations

Although this study contributes to multiple fields, it has certain limitations. First, this study does not allow me to consider men’s Holocaust art, but only to recognize that it is vastly and inherently different from women’s art and give the briefest example of those differences. Second, this study is exploratory, thus the sample size is not overly large. Still it is a systematic exploration of a small body of art from a few sources. It is in no way intended to be a large-scale study of all women’s Holocaust art. It began because I noticed that a single object, the bra from the Maltz Museum’s exhibit, was able to shed light on the complexity and individuality of women’s Holocaust experiences. As a rhetorician, I saw the creation of that bra as a way of making meaning about a horrifying and deeply personal experience and wanted to explore how the need to make meaning in other, non-textual, non-verbal ways and under such oppressive conditions. My goal was to notice rhetorical patterns. These patterns generate audience response, responses which then lead to inferences and suggested meaning. Moreover, with respect to

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approach, this was a rhetorical study, rather than a sociological study, without actual human participants. I worked neither qualitatively nor in a true quantitative fashion and did not utilize a second reader.

Given these limitations, there are several ways in which I would like to extend this study at a later date. First, as the noticeable contrast between how women and men represent themselves was significant,

I would like to revisit these differences in a larger monograph; this work would involve a large sample size and explores the differences in rhetorical choices and topoi in part to articulate more concretely the different arguments about women and men’s Holocaust experiences. More specifically, much of the scholarship that I read for this dissertation dealt either with survivors in general, or female survivors specifically, men were rarely if ever the focus. My initial work on this topic shows that, in some ways, men’s voices have been silenced because they have been absorbed into the general conversation about survivors, rather than examining how men, specifically, represent themselves. Men were subjected to much gendered oppression, for example, genital probes and other sexualized form of experimental that objectified, emasculated, and dehumanized them. I feel that, as feminist scholar, I have an obligation to consider both women and men in light of their own experiences. I attempted to do some of this by showing examples of men’s art as a means of contrasting, not contextualizing, the women’s repetitions.

Given this, I would like to continue my work by examining how Holocaust art treats the male body in terms of masculinity and the violence and trauma of emasculation. As I discussed in Chapter One, it would be interesting to test the current assumptions in the scholarship, assumptions with which I to tend to agree, that men and women represent the Holocaust differently. There may indeed be different grand narratives for women’s and men’s experiences that deserve exploration. As I have stated throughout this project, exploring the grand narrative in terms of gender does not essentialize women or men. Reflective exploration recognizes Holocaust experiences as gendered events while also recognizing that each woman and man experienced these events in unique and personal ways. Given this, it is worth investigating the potential intersections between representation and gender identity within Holocaust narratives.

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Second, one of the few regrets that I have about this project was not being able to interview survivors or any of the artists about their work. Time and access made both of these impossible.

Throughout this project, I have been conscious of the danger of appearing to speak for survivors or the artists, or of putting my interpretation upon art that, while available for public viewing, is deeply personal in nature. These concerns sparked my reliance upon careful coding and tight focus on observable topoi.

Interviewing the artists or survivors about intention and personal interpretation would not only add another level of scholarship to the project, thus recovering and preserving their voices. Specifically, I am interested I interviewing survivors who were mothers during the Holocaust in order to continue to explore the observed fissures between mothers and children. I envision a project where I compare the data from a much larger corpus of art depicting mothers and their children with data from personal interviews with mothers to examine the intersections and disparities between the verbal and visual narratives.

Intent also limits my project because I have no way of confirming what a particular artist meant or intended in any specific work. It is impossible for me to verify that any piece was created as an act of resistance or that any woman represented felt especially connected to particular aspects or her religion and culture. Adding the perspective of the artists, whenever possible, not only adds another layer of validity to the project, but does much to work toward the goal of recovering and preserving the voices of female Holocaust survivors. An intensive study of the artists’ backgrounds, biographies, interviews, and personal documents would enable me to produce a full-length book on female Holocaust artists and their personal perspectives on the art they created.

As I moved through this project, I have realized that my personal interest lies in the amplification of the female form as it pertains to motherhood and how alternative narratives of motherhood come to light through the use of amplification. I have also come to see how the women represented their ability to maintain maternal strength as an act resistance in the way hooks describes it. The power and resilience of motherhood is a powerful force against patriarchal oppression. I would like to explore this concept more

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directly in a later publication, perhaps one that marries discursive or written survivor narratives that focus on motherhood.

Finally, as mentioned above, this is not a sociological study, but I would be very interested in writing a collaborative piece with a sociologist where visual rhetorical acts are interpreted in terms of human behavior within the context of traumatic conditions. I have had to be very careful not to suggest anything psychological or sociological about artists’ rhetorical choices in regards to trauma, conclusion such as these are more appropriate to a sociological study about meaning-making within the context of human trauma. I am especially excited about the possibility to investigate the connection between motherhood and trauma. As my study indicated, some women seem to be able to thrive on and because of their maternal strength, while others are rendered powerless and ineffectual as mothers. The opportunity to mesh sociological and psychological scholarship with rhetorical theory extends the importance of this study to new audiences within other fields. It would offer the opportunity to have my data and results interpreted by scholars in other fields and applied to their disciplines in an interdisciplinary study that opens up new avenues of scholarship and understanding.

A Final Thought

Beyond the value to this field or others, in fact, beyond thinking about this project as a simple scholarly endeavor, it has been my desire, from the beginning to simply open up another space where survivors’ stories may be heard and honored. It is a recovery of sorts and a necessary preservation. The rapid loss of survivors means that it is up to the rest of us to hear, see, honor, and preserve their voices and the millions whose voices were silenced before their time. I hope, in some small way, that this project does this and that it is a worthy commemoration.

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APPENDIX A. Art from Primary Data Set

Figure 1. Weissova-Hoskova, Helga. Women and Children Being Sent on a Transport from the Terezin Ghetto. 1963. Medium unknown. Ghetto Fighters House Archives.

Figure 2. Olomucki, Halina. Untitled. Warsaw, 1945. Pastel and charcoal. Ghetto Fighters house, Israel.

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Figure 3. Liberman, Judith. Women in the Holocaust. 1996. Acrylic. Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Minneapolis, MN.

Figure 4. Kathe Kollwitz. Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be Milled. 1942. Lithograph. Galerie St. Etienne, NY.

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Figure 5. Lea Grundig. Imprisoned. 1936. Copper Engraving. Landengalerie, Berlin.

Figure 6. Halina Olomucki. In the Ghetto. 1943. Charcoal and ink. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 7. Charlotte Buresova. Mother and Child. 1944. Monotype. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

Figure 8. Charlotte Buresova. Despair. 1944. Monotype. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 9. Malvina Schalkova. Elderly Deportee. 1943. Soft pencil. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

Figure 10. Mabull. Three Women in Front of Barracks. 1940. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 11. Jadwiga Tereszczenko. Roll Call. 1941. Pencil. Warsaw.

Figure 12. Ro Mogendorf. Aged Woman Arrested. 1944. Charcoal. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 13. Maja Berezowska. Distribution of Soup. 1944. Pencil and watercolor. Warsaw.

Figure 14. France Audoul. Shorn. 1944-45. Ink. Paris.

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Figure 15. Halina Olomucki. Self-Portrait After Four Selections. 1943. Pencil. Holon, Israel.

Figure 16. France Audoul. The Hell for Women. Undated. Oil on wood. Paris.

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Figure 17. Helga Weissova-Hoskova. Suicide on the Wire. 1945. Ink and ink wash. Prague.

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APPENDIX B. Art from the Secondary Data Set

Figure 18. Lea Grundig. Gestapo in the House. 1934. Copper engraving. Landengalerie, Berlin.

Figure 19. Esther Lurie. In the Ghetto. 1942. Pen. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 20. Malvina Schalkova. Sleeping Quarters. 1944. Soft pencil. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

Figure 21. Malvina Schalkova. Arrival in the Ghetto. 1943. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

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Figure 22. Malvina Schalkova. Forced Labor. 1943. Watercolor. Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel.

Figure 23. Maria Hiszpanska-Neumann. Stone Carriers. 1944. Crayon. National Museum, Warsaw.

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Figure 24. Nina Jirsikova. Scene in Camp Ravensbruck. Undated. Ink and crayon. Terezin memorial.

Figure 25. Halina Olomucki. Women Crouching in the Extermination Camp. 1950. Gouache, watercolor, and chalk. MDGM, Paris.

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APPENDIX C.

Examples of Representations of Men in Blatter and Milton’s (1982) Art of the Holocaust.

Figure 26. Auguste Favier. Medical Examination. 1944. Ink. Villeurbanne, France.

Figure 27. George Grosz. After the Interrogation. 1935. Watercolor. Princeton, New Jersey

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Figure 28. Waldemar Nowakowski. The Jew’s Last Road. 1943. Watercolor. Warsaw, Poland.

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Figure 29. Zoran Music. Dachau. 1945. Ink and rust. MDGM, Paris.

Figure 30. Felix Nussbaum. Deathdance. 1943-44. Oil on canvas. Osnabruck, FRG.

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APPENDIX D

Tables

Table 1. Informational Breakdown of the Artwork

Artist Title Ref. # Date Primary (P) or Supplement al (S) Data Audoul, France The Hell for Women 354 Unknow P n

Audoul, France Shorn 231 1944-45 P

Berezowska, Maja Distribution of Soup 224 1944 P

Buresova, Despair 71 1944 P Charlotte

Buresove, Mother and Child 70 1944 P Charlotte

Grundig, Lea Gestapo in the House 36 1934 S

Grundig, Lea Imprisoned 33 1936 P

Hiszpanska- Stone Carriers 223 1944 S Neumann, Maria

Jirsikova, Nina Scene in Camp Ravensbruck 225 Unknow S n

Kathe Kollwitz Grain for Sowing Shall Not Be 27 1942 P Milled

Liberman, Judith Women in the Holocaust 3 Unknow P n

Lurie, Ester In the Ghetto 45 1942 S

Mabull Three Women in Front of Barracks 143 1940 P

Mogendorf, Ro Aged Woman Arrested 165 1944 P

Olomucki, Halina In the Ghetto 53 1943 P

Olomucki, Halina Self-portrait After Four Selections 301 1943 P

Olomucki, Halina Women Crouching in the 346 1950 S

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Extermination Camp

Olomucki, Halina Untitled 2 Unknow P n

Schalkova, Arrival in the Ghetto 74 1943 S Malvina

Schalkova, Elderly Deportee 73 1943 P Malvina

Schalkova, Forced Labor 77 1943 S Malvina

Schalkova, Sleeping Quarters 69 1944 S Malvina

Tereszczenko, Roll Call 159 1941 P Jadwiga

Weissova – Suicide on the Wire 355 1945 P Hoskova, Helga

Weissova – Women and Children Being Sent on 1 1963 P Hoskova, Helga a Transport from the Terezin Ghetto

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Table 2. Conceptual Thematic Codes for Primary and Secondary Data Sets

M- Code GZ CP PR VIC GOW SOD MH LocD LocU HB Artwork # 1 GZ-3 PR-1 SOD MH-1 LocD1 HB M- 2 GZ-2 CP2 MH-2 LocU HB GOW- 3 PR-1 VIC-2 1 LocD1 HB M- 27 CP3 MH-1 LocU HB 33 PR-1 VIC-2 LocD1 HB 36 PR-2 VIC-3 MH-2 LocD1 45 SOD LocD2 53 GZ-3 MH-2 LocU HB GOW- 69 1 LocD1 HB M- MH- 70 GZ-2 CP2 1&2 LocU HB 71 PR-1 LocD2 73 GZ-1 LocD2 74 MH-2 LocD2 HB GOW- 77 PR-2 1 LocD1 HB GOW- 143 1 LocD1 HB GOW- 159 PR-1 VIC-2 1 LocD1 HB 165 GZ-1 PR-2 SOD LocD2 HB GOW- 223 GZ-1 2 LocU GOW- 224 VIC-1 2 LocD GOW- 225 1 LocD2 GOW- 231 VIC-1 1&2 LocD HB 301 PR-1 LocU M- 346 CP1 MH-1 LocD 354 PR-1 VIC-3 LocD 355 PR-1 LocD

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Table 3. Data Set Representing the Relationship Between the Art of the Primary Data Set and the Topoi of Amplification and Synecdoche

Artist Title Ref. # Amplification Synecdoche Audoul The Hell for 354 X Women Audoul Shorn 231 X Berezowska Distribution of 224 X Soup Buresova Despair 71 X Buresova Mother and Child 70 X Grundig Imprisoned 33 X Kollwitz Grain for Sowing 27 X X Shall Not Be Milled Liberman Women in the 3 X X Holocaust Mabull Three Women in 143 X X Front of Barracks Mogendorf Aged Woman 165 X Arrested Olomucki In the Ghetto 53 X Olomucki Self-portrait After 301 X Four Selections Olomucki Untitled 2 X Schalkova Elderly Deportee 73 X Tereszczenko Roll Call 159 X X Weissova – Suicide on the 355 X Hoskova Wire Weissova – Women and 1 X X Hoskova Children Being Sent on a Transport…

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Table 4: Explanation of Different Versions of the Alternative Narratives of Amplification and Synecdoche

Alternative Versions of the Alternative Narratives Universal Qualities of Each Narrative Alternative Narrative

Amplification 1st Version – Self intact  Unrealistic

 Active women  Focus on individual identity

 Physical strength

 Connection to traditional role

2nd Version –Self not intact

 Passive women

 May maintain physical strength

 No connection to traditional role

Synecdoche 1st Version – Fissure b/t mothers and  Self never intact children  Realistic  No connection to maternal role  Focus on community and 2nd Version - Part-to-whole group  Sacrifice self for survival of group

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