"From a world beyond": women in the Holocaust.

Author: Goldenberg, Myrna. Source: Feminist Studies v. 22 (Fall 1996) p. 667-87 ISSN: 0046-3663 Number: BSSI97006093 Copyright: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. By Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. New York: Paragon House, 1993.

Auschwitz and After. By Charlotte Delbo. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Outwitting the Gestapo. By Lucie Aubrac. Translated by Konrad Bieber and Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943. By Erica Fisher. Translated by Edna McCown. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. By Mary Lowenthal Felstiner. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. By Ida Fink. Translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995.

Millions of pages in dozens of languages have described, reported, and analyzed the twelve years that comprise the Nazi period. Far fewer pages document the experiences of women than of men. The handful of women's survivor memoirs published in the 1940s and 1950s went quickly out of print even as memoirs by Victor Frankl, Eli Wiesel, and Primo Levi were reprinted and reviewed; those few studies of the Holocaust written by women--historians Lucy Dawidowicz and Nora Levin and philosopher Hannah Arendt--did not reflect a feminist consciousness. Only with the publication of Germaine Tillion's Ravensbrück (1975) and Konnilyn Feig's Hitler's Death Camps (1981) did there begin a period of feminist Holocaust scholarship recognizing women as legitimate subjects for study. With Joan Ringelheim as the "founding mother" of the field, the few feminist scholars of the Third Reich encouraged others by their example, sharing information, questions, insights, and doubts.(FN1) Although scholarship from a feminist perspective still raises some eyebrows and even tempers within the fields of Holocaust and Jewish studies,(FN2) the last fifteen years have seen both an outpouring of survivor memoirs by Jewish women and a dramatic increase in the number of feminist Holocaust scholars in the United States and abroad. These scholars have concerned themselves with the relatively basic challenges of recovering women's history and women's writings of the Nazi period, of contextualizing racism and sexism within the framework of genocide, and of recognizing the murder of women and children as crucial to Nazi strategy.

The recent publication of even more memoirs by Jewish and non-Jewish women, as well as histories, biographies, sociological studies, fiction, and poetry, attests to the fact that women's lives--and deaths--are becoming recognized as crucial to understanding the Holocaust.(FN3) The success of the June 1995 conference, "International Workshop on Women in the Holocaust," sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, is another encouraging turn, as is the new attention to women in general studies of the Holocaust, the rediscovery of scores of survivor memoirs by women, journalistic accounts by Jewish and non-Jewish women, and the recent reprinting of Marlene Heinemann's 1986 Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust. In selecting books for this essay, I had a luxury of choices that would not have been available five years ago. The titles under discussion here are both illustrative and representative: they are especially powerful works that provide excellent examples of Holocaust scholarship in a range of modes--memoirs, biography, short stories, social history, and philosophy--and include two works about non-Jewish women whose lives were intertwined with those of Jews. I have emphasized survivor memoirs--whether marked explicitly as biography or dressed as poetry, drama, or fiction--because I believe they create complex representations that may be missing from other writings on the Holocaust.

Together these books make clear that while Nazi policy in regard to the destruction of its enemies was not gender specific, Nazi practice was: Hitler's rigid application of separate-sphere ideology shaped the treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish women and men. All women in Nazi patriarchy were destined to serve the state,(FN4) but Jewish women, classified along with Jewish men as "life unworthy of life," became both nonpersons and nonwomen--in other words, objects and functions. Yet five of the six books discussed here bear witness to the pathetic irony that although Jewish women were allegedly nonpersons, they absorbed an enormous amount of Nazi attention and energy. As Mary Lowenthal Felstiner elucidates in To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era:.

It was the Nazi view of all women as cell-bearers (child-bearers) that condemned the Jewish ones. Even within the lowest life-form--the antirace--women ranked lower still, for spawning it. In Hitler's cliche, "Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people." Because women in their biology held history, one gestating Jewish mother posed a greater threat than any fighting man. To be father to a child had no impact on selection. To be a mother in fact or in future--that was the final sentence. (P. 207).

To be sure, many experiences were common to women and men, but the differences, like those between ethnic and religious victims of Nazism, are informative. Early in the Third Reich, for example, Nazis targeted Jewish and dissident men for forced labor, leaving women and children to survive in a society that isolated and disenfranchised them. Diaries, memoirs, and interviews of Jewish women describe agonizing decisions--about the health and survival of their children, about when to leave and where to flee, how to cope with ghetto humiliations and starvation, how to survive the camps. From the earliest to the most recent writings, women's Holocaust memoirs reveal the pains of unbearable choices and unspeakable loss: whether to send one's children to the gas chambers alone or hide them with strangers and expose them to betrayal or accompany them to the murder pits. Most often, of course, women simply had no choice; Nazi policy wrote their fate. As mothers and therefore caregivers, the overwhelming majority of the women went with their children to the gas chambers, and it is axiomatic that surviving the Holocaust was largely a random event.(FN5).

Women's memoirs also graphically depict gender-differentiated humiliations and abuse. Because most women were or were expected to be modest, nakedness, body shaves, and public searches, especially by men, were particularly traumatic. The "Guide to the Auschwitz Museum" notes that women guards often "excelled in unspeakable cruelty" and offers this description of a typical women's cell block:.

Here is the interior of the block, as empty as the interior of a big barn. In the middle all the blankets are put together, stacked in piles. The berths had not been finished as yet and the women slept on the floor. All round the block ... one can see women lying almost naked, grey with dirt and exhausted. The rags they have on have long since ceased to give sufficient covering. The dresses they were given were burnt through by frequent delousing; they had been of silk or lace, evening dresses sometimes, with low cut backs, no wonder they had split and had almost gone to pieces. One sees women clad in a torn chemise only or covered with an apron, with nothing underneath. There is more and more of this nakedness from day to day.(FN6).

The guide also notes that childbirth almost always caused the death of both mother and infant either by infection or murder, and pregnant women were usually sent straight to the gas chambers.

Religion and gender not only framed the ways in which Jewish women were treated but may also have framed their modes of response. In her analysis of a women's mutual assistance group in the Plaszow labor camp, Judith Tydor Baumel draws heavily on the paradigms of female bonding and mother-daughter relationships to understand the strength of the "phenomenon known as 'camp sisters, small groups of unrelated inmates who formed quasi-family links."(FN7) Baumel also attributes the group's "willingness to extend assistance to non-members" to its orthodox religious background and specifically to the Talmudic principle that "(s)he who saves one life, it is as if (s)he saves an entire world." Baumel quotes one member of the group: "You can't imagine how often we had been taught the meaning of the phrase 'all Israel is responsible for one another in our youth. Not merely in order to mouth the saying, but to carry it out in conditions such as those under which we were living." These women invoked both Torah and "sisterliness" to explain the behavior they, like thousands of other women, report as the most crucial element in their survival.(FN8) Although no one has studied the primacy of "sisterly" values over religious ones, it is clear from the women's own terminology that gender made a significant difference in the ways in which these women met the challenge of survival.

Such accounts suggest a range of important questions for a gendered analysis of the Holocaust. Female socialization in pre-War Europe was largely traditional, emphasizing family, household, and social obligations even for women who worked outside the home. How was this socialization expressed in such extreme and hostile settings as the concentration camps?(FN9) Were women, raised to care for others, more likely than men to form surrogate families? Did those Jewish women who aspired to be balabustas (Yiddish for mistresses of the household) adapt their management skills to ghettos and camps? Did men and women prisoners cope with hunger and starvation differently? Were women more likely to comply with the Nazis than to resist them? How do we account for women who were unusually brutal and cruel to other women? Do recently written women's stories focus more than the earlier narratives on connection and relationship, and if so, do these later writings reflect current discussions or "accurate" memories?

A rich body of primary and secondary material that explores such questions is emerging in history, literature, sociology, and art, as Carol Rittner and John K. Roth's Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust demonstrates. Published in 1993 as a response to Rittner's challenge to Roth's own 1989 book on the Holocaust, coauthored with Michael Berenbaum, which was entirely "male-dominated,"(FN10) Different Voices focuses on women's lives and on feminist interpretations of those lives. One-third of the book is devoted to memoirs of Jewish women primarily in Auschwitz, the symbol of Nazi bestiality; the other two sections provide historical and philosophical interpretation. The anthology's contextualizing prologue reminds readers that women were imprisoned as early as October 1933 and notes that at Ravensbrück Jewish and Gypsy women, "segregated from and treated more harshly than the other inmates," experienced the full junction of Hitler's racist and sexist ideologies.

In their first section, "Voices of Experience," Rittner and Roth emphasize the relationship of mothers to children. A 1943 letter written by Etty Hillesum describes a night she endured in Westerbork (a transit camp in the eastern part of the Netherlands) when she helped 1,020 Jews, mainly women and children, prepare for their departure to Auschwitz. Mothers cajoled their youngsters into good behavior; some feared that their babies' sicknesses would become death warrants at the unknown destination; still others went into labor and were temporarily spared. Isabella Leitner opens her memoir as a free woman on her birthday in May 1945 by recalling her mother's admonition when she, four sisters, and a brother suffered deportation to Auschwitz: "Stay alive, my darlings, all six of you" (p. 68). Five of them do. One of the most searing passages in the book is Olga Lengyel's horrifying confession, excerpted from her 1947 memoir Five Chimneys, describing her arrival at Birkenau. Unwittingly, she sent her youngest son to the line destined for the gas chambers; then, thinking she would spare her mother and older son from hard labor to which she herself was assigned, Lengyel sent them too to their deaths. "How should I have known?" she moans (p. 72).

Different Voices presents both recurring themes specific to women's memoirs--misogyny and sexual abuse, amenorrhea and fear of sterilization, the "crime" of pregnancy and childbirth, the impossible burdens of childcare--and the life-saving actions of prisoners as filtered through women's memories. Thirteen years old on her arrival at Auschwitz, Livia E. Bitton Jackson watches the selection process incredulously, suffers being forced to undress completely, sees her heavy blonde braids fall into "a heap of gold" on the floor, dodges insistent SS whips, survives her first "roll call," anguishes over the cessation of her menses, and echoes the fear of Nazi sterilization--the extreme method of genocide--that forms a central preoccupation of many Jewish women's memoirs. Gisela Perl, an obstetrician, vows to "remain alive ... to save the life of the mothers, if there was no other way, than by destroying the life of the unborn children." She aborted pregnant women to save them from hideous torture and unimaginable death: "They were beaten with clubs and whips, torn by dogs, dragged around by the hair and kicked in the stomach with heavy German boots. Then, when they collapsed, they were thrown into the crematory--alive" (p. 113). Anna Heilman and Roth Meth narrate women's role in the October 7, 1944, Auschwitz revolt; and Sarah Nomberg-Przytyk's tale reveals the life-saving nurturing of a generous anonymous inmate aboard a death train to Ravensbrück.

The voices of historians dominate the second section, supporting the memoirs with references to Nazi documents and other archival data as well as to other eyewitness accounts. Gisela Bock, Marion Kaplan, Claudia Koonz, Sybil Milton, and Gitta Sereny discuss the significance of Nazi patriarchy for Jews and non-Jews, weighing the implications of women's activity and passivity. Milton's account of what has come to be known as the Rosenstrasse Frauen incident demonstrates courage and free will in the face of the mighty regime. In an attempt to round up the remaining Berliner Jews and present Hitler with a Judenfrei Berlin for his birthday, Goebbels incarcerated about 5,000 Jewish men married to Aryans and sent 2,500 to the former site of a Jewish welfare agency at Rosenstrasse 2-4. The Aryan wives demanded their husbands' return. Faced with adverse popular reactions to the unmovable "wall" of women who stood for days, attracting more and more protesters, Goebbels backed down and released the prisoners, including twenty-five men who had already been sent to Auschwitz.(FN11) In raising the issues of civil disobedience and the role of Aryan women, these writers suggest that German citizens had opportunities to resist which could have made a difference.

Moral responsibility is also crucial for Vera Laska, who calls herself a "gatherer of memories" and who considers Jewish and non-Jewish women in hiding and in the resistance. And perhaps no voice speaks as loudly as that of Magda Trocme, wife of the pastor Andre Trocme. The Trocmes' courage and morality shaped the response of the villagers of Le Chambon who rescued 5,000 Jews, most of them children. In Magda Trocme's words:.

A poor woman came to my house one night, and she asked to come in. She said immediately that she was a German Jew, that she was running away, that she was hiding, that she wanted shelter. She thought that at the minister's house she would perhaps find someone who could understand her. And I said, "Come in." And so it started.... Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done--nothing more complicated.... There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help! (P. 312).

The third part of Different Voices reflects on the paradoxes implicit in the Holocaust: belief in the face of consummate evil; reason in the face of Nazi madness; survival as acts of resistance and sabotage. There are no satisfying answers, but we are left with the contemplative artistic voices of Irena Klepfisz, Ida Fink, Charlotte Delbo, Rachel Altman, and Joan Ringelheim. Mary Jo Leddy, a Roman Catholic sister, and Deborah Lipstadt, a Jewish historian, draw on their spirituality in their challenge to move from the interpretation of the Holocaust as radical evil in the presence of a powerless God to a creative new empowerment that energizes us to be forces for good in our relationships and communities.

Three extraordinary Holocaust memoirs, which had been out of print for years, comprise the new publication of Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After. This long-awaited volume of poetry and prose, exquisitely translated by Rosette C. Lamont, traces Delbo's experiences as a French resister and political prisoner. A non-Jew born near Paris in 1913, Delbo was on tour in South America with her theater company when the war began. After an arduous journey home, she joined her husband, George Dudach, in resistance work. They were arrested in March 1942 for their anti-German propaganda leaflets; the Nazis executed Dudach and sent Delbo first to Auschwitz, then to a satellite labor camp, and, in January 1944, to Ravensbrück, the camp from which she was liberated.

Delbo's finest work, "None of Us Will Return," is impressionistically rather than chronologically told, presenting Auschwitz as the nightmare where people arrived expecting "the worst--not the unthinkable." It is "the end of the line .... desolation," where "women and children are made to go first." Fundamentally a poet and dramatist, Delbo uses her artistry to convey more than to portray the "unimaginable." A panorama of humanity from all over Europe parades before us in misery and fear:

Some from the casino ... married couples who stepped out of the synagogue ... the bride all in white wrapped in her veil wrinkled from having slept on the floor of the cattle car ... boarding school girls wearing identical pleated skirts, their hats trailing blue ribbons ... intellectuals ... those who having journeyed for eighteen days lost their minds, murdering one another inside the boxcars ... a little girl who hugs her doll against her chest, dolls can be smothered too.

Perhaps more than any other survivor memoir, this one captures the hell of the death camp from which, Delbo concludes, "none of us was meant to return." She described the death-in-life of block 25, an antechamber to the gas chamber where Jewish women were kept without food or drink, "lying almost naked on boards without straw or blankets. Locked up with dying or crazy women they awaited their turn to die or go mad" (p. 19).

In detailing roll calls and work commandos, Delbo shows how Jewish women are "reduced to heartbeats," singled out for more severe conditions than the rest. In the Auschwitz winter, "where time is abolished," women prisoners live numbly in order to survive the next hours and days. Delbo's stage juxtaposes women who dehumanize or objectify other women with those who nurture one another, their only concern "not being separated." She contrasts the prisoners, living with relentless cold, mud, slime, beatings, starvations, attack dogs, death and more death, with the women guards in their immaculate black capes and the female residents of the town of Auschwitz who "wore hats/ perched on curly hair." But "none of the inhabitants of this city/ had a face/ and in order to hide this/ all turned away as we passed" (p. 87). Yet in the land of death, we find women who manage to "protect one another. Each wishes to remain near a companion, some in front of a weaker one, so as to be hit in her stead, some behind one no longer able to run, so as to hold her up if she begins to fall" (p. 92).

In "Useless Knowledge," Delbo memorializes her husband and presents vivid and direct vignettes about her sister prisoners that are more accessible than those in "None of Us Will Return." This memoir ends with a "Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive," a biting moving injunction to "justify your existence" ... "because it would be too senseless/ after all/ for so many to have died/ while you live/ doing nothing with your life" (p. 230). Delbo has learned a tragic lesson after Auschwitz: "I have returned/ from a world beyond knowledge/ and now must unlearn/ for otherwise I clearly see/ I can no longer live" (p. 230). "Memory peels off like tatters," she whispers in the third memoir, "Measure of Our Days" (p. 255). After her return to Paris, gradually recovering, Delbo struggles with a sense of alienation, of feeling nothing, of having experienced the unthinkable, until one day she tentatively accepts the premise that "there is no wound that does not heal," a reality she repeats "from time to time/ but not enough to believe it" (p. 241). In his introduction to Auschwitz and After, Lawrence Langer analyzes the paradoxes inherent in survival and endurance. He recalls Delbo speaking of deep memory, of living "next to" rather than "with" the Holocaust, of the futility of shedding snakelike the skin of Auschwitz, to "explain the inexplicable" (p. xi). Indeed, Charlotte Delbo's works present paradox after paradox, embodying and echoing the incredible truths that define the Holocaust.

Until the last decade, with the exception of Delbo, memoirs by Jews dominated the works devoted to women and the Holocaust. In 1994, however, the University of Nebraska Press brought out Outwitting the Gestapo, which not only filled in gaps about the infamous Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, but also provided information about women in the Resistance(FN12) from the perspective of a French Catholic woman who was part of the Lyon underground. Lucie Aubrac consciously writes as a feminist and woman warrior. A well-regarded history teacher in the lycée, she and her Jewish husband, Raymond, an engineer, had decided to remain in France despite the dangers of Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration in the roundup of French Jews. The Aubracs joined the Resistance, where Raymond became second in command. Caught after a colleague broke during interrogation, Raymond was jailed, severely tortured, and sentenced to execution. With the assistance of others in the underground, Lucie organized several daring rescues of Raymond and other fighters. She found hiding places, made courier runs, diverted the Gestapo so that others could carry out missions, conducted herself with dignity when confronted and interrogated by Klaus Barbie himself, and used feminine "tricks" and sharp intelligence to deceive Gestapo officers and help pull off high-risk missions.

After three years marked by three daring rescues, Aubrac, eight months' pregnant, awaits a plane that will take her, Raymond, and their baby son to safety in England. Her rescuers tell her that she is "a man.... You fight like a man." Not at all flattered, Aubrac looks at her swollen belly and thinks,.

Why is it that the greatest compliment a man can pay a woman is to tell her: you write, you work, you act like a man. When I was preparing the history agrégation at the Sorbonne, my teacher ... had said to me: "You ought to for the male section...; you have the intellectual power of a man." I had been extremely upset by that judgment, which classified me according to a stereotype.

Aloud, she retorts, "As far as I'm concerned, I feel perfectly at ease as a woman." Referring to her successful breach of Gestapo headquarters, she declares, "What I did was a woman's job, a pregnant woman's, something that would never happen to you" (p. 195).

Written as a substitute for the diary she didn't dare to keep from 1942 to 1944, Outwitting the Gestapo is immediate, spare, and suspenseful. Margaret Collins Weitz's informative introduction sets the framework for Aubrac's heroism, guiding all but the most unknowing reader through the politics of German occupation and French response. Weitz reminds us that the first French victim of the German invasion was a woman, assassinated because she refused to surrender her home to the Nazis. She also analyzes the special challenges faced by women who supported Free France: women caught sheltering or aiding a resister, a Jew, an Allied pilot, or any other enemy of the Reich were subject to immediate execution; yet their male counterparts were often captured as prisoners of war. French women resisters like Aubrac also fulfilled their duties as housewives, mothers, and workers. Ironically, Weitz explains, stereotypes of French women deluded the Germans for a time into discounting them as capable of underground activities. Petain's regime perpetuated French paternalism until the shortage of men had the same "Rosie the Riveter" effect as in the United States. At the end of the war, French women too were relegated to the domestic sphere but were finally given the vote and the right to run for office: Aubrac became the "first French woman parliamentarian when she was designated to represent the United Resistance Movements at the consultative assembly of the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers in 1944." Eventually, Aubrac returned to teaching and raising her family. In 1984, when the Klaus Barbie trial precipitated a new interest in the French Resistance, she offered a clear picture of a French woman's role in fighting the Nazis.(FN13).

Until the appearance of Erica Fischer's Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943, very little had been published about lesbian life in the Third Reich. A major exception is Claudia Schoppmann's Days of Masquerade which profiles ten lesbians who were harassed, imprisoned, or otherwise persecuted by the Nazis.(FN14) While their love for women may have made some of them vulnerable, lesbianism was not illegal and therefore not defined as a category in the concentration camp system of crimes. Lesbians did not wear the pink triangle, as gay men did; instead they wore triangles that designated them as "asocial" or as "political" prisoners. Because "Nazi ideology saw the 'Aryan woman as predestined to motherhood and marriage as a matter of principle," Nazis regarded lesbians as women who were not fulfilling their biological destiny and as women in need of intercourse (p. 11). Generally, women were commodified and lesbians were victimized as a result of pernicious Nazi misogyny while gay men were victims of pathological homophobia. Legislators of the Third Reich did, however, extensively debate the question of whether lesbianism should be criminalized and proponents of criminalization were eventually distracted by the war.

Fischer's book explores the love affair between a Jewish woman and the wife of a Nazi officer. Set in Berlin during the early 1940s, their love affair is foregrounded against activities targeting Jews: roundups, property confiscations, actions or mass deportations, the Aryan women's revolt demanding the release of their Jewish (or "Aryan-by-marriage") husbands, "Uboats" or Jews in hiding, the infamous Stella Goldschlag stalking other Jews to turn them over to the Gestapo,(FN15) the centrality of the Jewish Hospital (incongruously open throughout the war), and the myriad details of an everyday life that also categorized homosexual men as unfit for life.

Elisabeth Wust and her officer husband had a household like "thousands of households ... households that had no interest in anything but their offspring." Known as Lilly, and later "Aimée," Wust bore four sons in six years, claimed to have been indifferent to Hitler except as he impinged indirectly on her life, and was generally unhappy in her marriage. However, her husband's lengthy and frequent absences as a soldier gave her the opportunity to befriend a group of women that included lesbians, heterosexuals, and bisexuals. Through this group, she met Felice Schragenheim who wooed the flattered and enchanted Lilly. Gradually Felice, or "Jaguar," became part of Lilly's household and was accepted by her sons, according to Lilly, as a surrogate mother. Their love is documented in hundreds of letters, written when they were apart for a few hours or a few days. When Felice finally disclosed to Lilly that she was Jewish, living on false papers, Lilly spilled out a long protestation about her liberal, tolerant family, her brother's real (Jewish) father, her confession of insensitive apoliticism, and her love and dedication to Felice.

On August 21, 1944, Felice was betrayed. The Gestapo was waiting for Lilly and Felice when they returned from a lakeside outing. Felice was taken to the basement of the Jewish Hospital, the central roundup point, shipped to Theresienstadt, and then marched to Bergen Belsen where she died on December 31, 1944. On the day that Felice was caught, Lilly began a diary that details and "proves" her devotion to Felice (who was probably fingered by the "catcher Stella"). Lilly claims to have worked ceaselessly to bring and send food and clothing to Felice in the various prisons in which she was incarcerated. She traveled to Theresienstadt and demanded to see Felice. The commandant, of course, sent her back and sternly warned her about her own safety. Even though Felice was declared legally dead in February 1948, Lilly traced her for years after the war. She dragged her four sons to synagogue, registered them in schools as Jewish, tried unsuccessfully to convert, and slowly believed herself to be a victim like Felice.

Although Fischer faithfully reports Lilly's renditions of reality from 1933 to 1945, she clearly does not accept her statements as truth. She points out the contradictions in Lilly's remembrances as well as inconsistencies in the behaviors between 1933 and 1942 that Lilly offers as evidence of her anti-Fascism. Nevertheless, Aimée and Jaguar is an amazing story of Felice Schragenheim's courage against a political and military regime geared to her destruction. It also portrays a women's community that includes lesbians as a given, not an anomaly. And Berlin is itself a character in the narrative, as Fischer recreates the city's social and political climate along with Lilly's flats and neighborhoods.

Another Berlin community is presented in Mary Lowenthal Felstiner's To Paint Her Life. In recounting the life of Charlotte Salomon, who was born in 1917 and died at Auschwitz, five months' pregnant, in 1943, Felstiner also traces the history of the Germans in Berlin and in southern France, where Charlotte hid from 1939 to 1940 until she was picked up by Eichmann aide Alois Brunner, infamous for his brutality. Felstiner's prodigious research re-creates the privileged family into which Charlotte was born and the cultured elite society in which she was nurtured. We learn about the so-called suicide epidemic among Jewish women in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s which affected six women in Charlotte's family, including her mother, aunt, and grandmother. The suicide rate of German Jews was nearly twice that of Protestants and four times higher than Catholics', and the rates of both suicide and admission to mental institutions of Jewish women exceeded that of any other group. The significance of these rates in an age of eugenics is profound: "In the world of 1920s Berlin, suicide passed judgment on everything the family was tied to and troubled by--its women, its bloodline, its racial stock. Only silence would fend off a sweeping conviction of guilt" (p. 17). So Charlotte was told that her mother died of influenza.

Salomon learned the family secret when her grandmother's second suicide attempt succeeded in 1939. At that point, she began a unique autobiography that took the form of over 1,325 vivid gouache paintings, each with an overlay of paper carrying dialogue or sometimes music.(FN16) The autobiography begins with the death of her mother's sister, who drowned herself at age eighteen, and traces the process by which Charlotte, named for that aunt, comes to understand the prominence of suicide in her own development. She called the entire work Life? or Theater? and, aware of the intended fate of all things Jewish, parceled it out to people she trusted. Charlotte's parents survived the war in hiding, and in 1947 her stepmother recovered the bulk of the paintings which were ultimately donated to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Felstiner's sensitive analysis of schooling under the Nazis explains Charlotte's decision to leave the college preparatory course at the Bismarck School and try art instead: "A Nazi decree kept Jews at 1.5 percent of the student body (of the university), and female graduates hardly got jobs now that women's education was called a 'Jewish-intellectual misdeed" (p. 34). Charlotte persisted and finally was admitted to art school under the quota; however, by Kristallnacht, November 8, 1938, when her father Albert Salomon was carted off to forced labor in Sachsenhausen, to be released only after his second wife, Paulinka, charmed enough SS men into discharging him, did "Jewish panic to exit match for the first time a Nazi passion to expel" (p. 92). Nearly 80,000 Jews left Germany in January 1939. Most did not go far enough away; like Charlotte, they found a refuge in western Europe that would prove all too temporary.

Using Charlotte's autobiography as the centerpiece, Felstiner provides the historical and cultural context that underpins the fate of one Jewish woman, a gifted artist whose legacy remains in one monumental original work. Felstiner reinforces the differences in the treatment and attitudes toward women with statistics showing that more Jewish women than men were left in Germany in 1940, the men having been sent out ahead of their families to find suitable places to live and to work. From a typical Nazi transport, more men were selected for work than women. Those with special skills, such as chemical engineers, were far more likely to be assigned "lighter" work than road construction or swamp clearing. But as Felstiner comments, "How many women had been trained as chemical engineers?" (p. 206). Felstiner's firm sense of the connection between racism and reproduction shapes her interpretation of Charlotte Salomon's life. To Paint Her Life is a searing reminder of the loss of potential next generations contingent upon the survival of women and demonstrates a relatively new genocidal strategy, the murder of mothers and potential mothers.

My final book illuminates at its finest the art of women writing and representing the Holocaust. Ida Fink, a survivor from Belzec, Poland, who lived in ghetto until 1942 and then hid until liberation, waited decades before publishing her first book, A Scrap of Time. Each story is a slice of very specific life under the Nazi occupation of Poland from September 1939 to the Displaced Persons camps established in 1945. Arranged chronologically, the stories introduce Fink's family and friends, whose experiences constitute the material of the book. Fink takes us into gardens, in view of rivers "flowing noisily, turbulently, eddying and churning" in "nature's revolt" against the relentless march of the Nazis (p. 45). Minutes later, the Nazis invert the natural order by shooting the five-year-old in front of her Jewish parents, who are being marched to their death, and Christian churchgoers, who are neither quick enough nor willing to accept the child as she runs toward them for shelter.

In each story, Fink contextualizes a single event by providing texture; a foaming yellow river rebelling against a Nazi action or fragrant flowering shrubs as backdrop for a painful, unconsummated reunion. In "Night of Surrender," the narrator is a Jew who has survived on false papers. She meets Michael, a GI who promises marriage and a secure happy life in the United States. Although she "very much wanted to be rid of the burden of those three words," she is afraid to say to him, "I am Jewish." When she finally does so, watching him closely so as not "to miss even the tremor of an eyelid," she tries to explain that during the three years of hiding, "never, not even when I was alone, did I dare to say them aloud.... Do you know what it means to live in fear, lying, never speaking your own language, or thinking with your own brain, or looking with your own eyes?" Michael assures her that she will never have to tell anyone else that she is Jewish; she can remain the non-Jew he thought she was! "It will simply be easier that way," he assures her, "simpler for you to cast off the burden of your experiences.... I'm not saying this out of prejudice, but for your own good." Michael doesn't hear the "river (that) was still roaring, the river that was flowing inside" her (pp. 93-102).

The tensions of everyday existence in wartime are structured as irony. One doesn't forget the peasant family who hid a Jewish couple in payment for enough money to rebuild their meager house after the war. When they do so, they create a roomy shelter "just in case something happens, you won't have to roost like chickens, a shelter as pretty as a picture, with all the comforts" A Scrap of Time ends with a radio script, "The Table," an ironically tragic re-creation of an interrogation of survivors who witnessed a bloody selection. It comes as no surprise that the prosecutors "prove" the witnesses unworthy. It is even less a surprise that Fink claims that her stories, although fiction, are all true. This is a breathtaking work--understated, dramatic, ironic, and very powerful.

At the literal level, Mary Felstiner may be oversimplifying to claim that "genocide is the act of putting women and children first" (p. 208), but metaphorically this is a profound way to understand the process of breaching nature and civility in order to destroy a society. In their reiteration of a massacre at Budy, a subcamp of Auschwitz, during which women murdered women, Rittner and Roth confront the fact that neither the camps nor the Holocaust were created by women:.

At issue is not a facile and unsupportable thesis about the moral superiority of women ... (although) the Holocaust was fundamentally a male-made flood of catastrophe. Of course, men were also its victims; they died in huge numbers to stop the disaster. So neither is the issue here a facile and unsupportable thesis about the viciousness of all men. Instead the point ... is to see more clearly how racism and sexism combined and conspired to unleash a "Final Solution." ... The task is to understand better how and why women--especially Jewish but also non-Jewish women--were central targets as women during the Holocaust. (Pp. 322-23).

As Jews, women were singled out for slavery and extinction as a matter of policy; as women, they were objects of sexual abuse, subjects for experimentation and, as perpetrators of a despised people, singled out for extinction as a matter of policy. As Jewish women, their vulnerabilities were multiple. Thus, although it is pointless if not vulgar to pursue studies in competitive victimization by gender or any other criterion, it is important to identify the different horrors women experienced while subject to the hell that all Nazi victims faced. As the books discussed in this essay demonstrate, women's voices are distinctive, revealing the misogyny that blended extreme racism with entrenched, simplistic sexism. Through the eyes and experiences of the women who wrote these books, we become witnesses to a range of feminist responses to hatred and state terrorism. As intended victims, the women emerge from hell to share with us their singularly important stories.

FOOTNOTES

1. For example, see Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim, eds., Proceedings of the Conference on Women Surviving the Holocaust (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983); Vera Laska, ed., Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Joan Ringelheim, "Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of the Research," Signs 10 (summer 1985): 741-61; Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).

2. At scholarly conferences on the Holocaust, feminist perspectives are often claimed to trivialize the Holocaust by diminishing the role of anti-Semitism and overemphasizing the role of sexism in the extermination of Jews. Occasionally, feminists have also challenged a gendered analysis of Holocaust survivors as an essentialist practice. The subject of women in the Holocaust has thus been most often expressed through narrative rather than through scholarly analysis.

3. See, for example, Maurie Sacks, ed., Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Judith Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper, 1993); and Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims (New York: New York University Press, 1990).

4. For a sensitive discussion of "the portrayal of socially, sexually, or ethnically alien women as non-women, and thus as threatening to the norms for all other women," see Gisela Bock, "Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State," in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, 161-86, esp. 177.

5. It is almost universally conceded by Holocaust scholars that survival was random, subject to factors far beyond the control of the prisoners. For example, it has been estimated that at least 85 percent of all transports went directly to the gas chambers.

6. See Auschwitz, 1940-1945 (Albuquerque: Route 66 Publishing, 1995), English language edition of the "Guide to the Auschwitz Museum," 62-63, 109-10.

7. Judith Tydor Baumel, "Social Interaction among Jewish Women in Crisis during the Holocaust: A Case Study," Gender and History 7 (April 1995): 65.

8. Ibid., 79. Clearly, luck was the most critical element in survival although companionship seems to be the most frequently stated reason in women's memoirs. Still, to escape the arbitrary directive to the gas chambers or to outside work duty (in summer or winter) or the whim of a camp guard or an SS or countless other random events was the necessary first step to survival.

9. See Myrna Goldenberg, "Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust," in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed., Roger Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 150-66, and "Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust," in Active Voices, 94-106.

10. See Michael Berenbaum and John K. Roth, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York: Paragon, 1989), xi.

11. Sybil Milton, cited in Rittner and Roth, 234, 247; Newsletter, German Information Center, New York City, 13 Mar. 1992, 7. At this writing, the still-unfinished memorial for the Rosenstrasse women reads, "The strength of civil disobedience and the strength of love defeat the violence of dictatorship.".

12. See Myrna Goldenberg, "Choices, Risks, and Conscience" (review essay), Belles Lettres 10 (winter 1993/94): 42-45.

13. See also Claire Chevrillon, Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), for an account of a Paris-based code clerk. One of the Paris elite, Chevrillon's memoir reveals the effect of the Nazis on Parisian upper-class cultured society.

14. Several recent books discuss homosexuality in the Nazi period, but these emphasize the experiences of men. However, Claudia Schoppmann's Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), presents the stories of ten lesbians of the period. An essay by Schoppmann also appears in the recently translated collection edited by Gunter Grau, Hidden Holocaust: Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-1945 (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn/London: Cassell, 1995). Several women's concentration camp memoirs suggest that women sought love where they could; Olga Lengyel makes outright slurs against lesbians.

15. See Peter Wyden, Stella (New York: Anchor, 1992).

16. See the magnificent volume of her work, Charlotte: Life or Theater? trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Viking, 1981).