Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (review)

Research on women and the Holocaust began with several groundbreaking conferences and publications in the early 1980s and is a growing area of inquiry within Holocaust studies. Authors of the earliest assays into the field of gender and the Holocaust had to argue for the legitimacy of isolating gender as a factor in the Holocaust experience; they faced scores of hostile critics who believed that the focus on women would trivialize Holocaust scholarship and detract from the specificity of the Jewish fate. Although numerous books on the subject by recognized and respected scholars have come out since those pioneering years, the editors of and contributors to Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust still find it necessary to defend their consideration of women and gender. In their introduction to the anthology, editors Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg argue that there are differences not only in the experiences of men and women in the Holocaust, but also in the narration of those experiences. The theme connecting all the essays is the impact of socialization on women's construction of memory and consequently women's translation of experience and memory into narrative. The introduction includes a useful survey of previous scholarship in the field with a particular emphasis on feminist approaches.

Experience and Expression is organized into four sections, each of which begins with a brief introduction. The first section contains two chapters that establish a theoretical framework for analyzing gender and the Holocaust. The remaining three sections offer more specific examinations of women's experiences (four chapters), gender and memory (four chapters), and women's postwar expressions (three chapters). In Chapter One, John Roth defends gender-based Holocaust research against critics such as Lawrence Langer and argues compellingly that we need further research on the specifics of gendered experience so that we may better understand the complexity of the Holocaust. In the following chapter, Pascale Bos argues that normative narrative paradigms and socialization determine a discourse of memory that is "inevitably gendered" (p. 39) and outlines a form of analysis that is designed to evaluate gender differences in testimony and memoir.

Sybil Milton's essay on Roma and Sinti women and Nazi regulations affecting "Gypsies" opens Part II and confronts the reader with the difficulties of assessing gender-specific Holocaust experience in the absence of sufficient information on socialization and gender roles. The following chapter, by Anna Rosmus, covers territory that is even less familiar: the involuntary abortions performed on Polish and Soviet laborers who had been deported to work on farms in the Reich. Rosmus's essay is an invaluable addition to the volume because her archival research is extensive and she brings to light information that has been largely untouched by existing scholarship; however, there are no solid statistics available, and her conclusions on the number of abortions performed are therefore necessarily speculative. Even so, this chapter is the most disturbing of the entire anthology, not only because of the descriptions of abortions performed without anesthesia as late as the eighth month of pregnancy on unwilling "patients," but also because of the silence surrounding these atrocities after the war. Two chapters on the role of nurses in the Nazi euthanasia program conclude Part II. Authors Susan Benedict and Mary Lagerwey both emphasize that the qualities revered in the nursing profession in the 1930s and 1940s—obedience to authority, selflessness, sense of duty—contributed to nurses' passive compliance. What is particularly intriguing in these two essays is that gender perceptions infuse both the authors' rhetoric and popular attitudes toward nurses and nursing. While Benedict manipulates language to stress the nurturing qualities of the female nurses (p. 107), Lagerwey notes that only the two male nurses at Hadamar were hanged for their role in the killings (pp. 117, 123).

Although they are placed under the general heading of "Gender and Memory," all four of the chapters comprising Part Three deal in some way...