Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (review)

Some Holocaust scholars have argued that focusing on gender differences trivializes the Holocaust experience by making invidious comparisons among victims and detracting from the notion that Jews were persecuted because they were Jews. Drawing on wartime diaries, postwar memoirs, archival materials, and interviews with survivors, Nechama Tec shows exactly how gender affected the initial stage of German occupation in Eastern Europe, life in the ghettos, concentration camps, the Aryan world, the underground movements, and the forests. Tec shows how gender mattered at every stage — identification, expropriation, removal from gainful employment, isolation, and annihilation. Because Jewish men were viewed as a greater threat to the Nazis than Jewish women, men were targeted first to quash political opposition. Jewish women were considered less threatening. Thus, their coping mechanisms and responses to persecution were different.

During the initial stages of German occupation, for example, Nazi measures prevented men from fulfilling the traditional masculine role of provider and protector. When Jewish men lost all prospects of gainful employment, their wives and children took over these roles. Upper-class Jewish men were particularly distressed by wartime deprivation, as they had more to begin with and thus more to lose. Disempowered fathers and husbands often fell into deep depressions. The Nazis attacked Jewish women through their children. Children within the ghetto were deported or starved, and women arriving at concentration camps pregnant or with small children were gassed immediately.

Men and women also reacted differently in concentration camps. Men had a harder time coping than women, partly because their physical sufferings were greater. Moreover, since women traditionally were involved in food selection and preparation, they were more knowledgeable about food in general and better equipped to deal with chronic hunger and starvation. Women also have more body fat than men and were better able than men to ration their meager food portions to last longer.

The concentration camp created new social distinctions among prisoners. Men were affected more than women by their prewar standing. Most divisions were determined by access to food and, indirectly, by the kinds of jobs prisoners performed. Most of the prewar male elites, equipped with irrelevant skills and habits that the Nazis targeted for destruction, moved to the bottom of the social structure. The skilled laborers, craftsmen, and manual laborers had better jobs than the prewar male elite.

In the concentration camps, Jews who established collective support systems by bonding together were better able to cope with the slavelike environment. A few of these associations were based on familial ties: mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and same-sexed siblings. While prisoners were powerless against the authorities, a group could protect its members from other prisoner's hostile acts like stealing food and could offer aid at desperate moments. These informal bonding groups improved the quality of their lives, and gave them a reason to live. Tec argues that regardless of country of origin, or which camp they were transferred to, women invariably formed cooperative groups and thus increased their chances for survival.

In a fascinating chapter on hiding and passing on the Aryan side, Tec shows how patriarchal predilections that led men to be seen as more intelligent, rational, and aggressive than women resulted in legislature requiring all adult males to work in jobs that benefited the German economy. Thus, authorities would likely check the documents of men on the streets before checking those of women, making it easier for women to hide and pass. Moreover, Jewish men were circumcised; a casual examination could easily reveal their Jewishness.

In order to hide or pass, Jews also needed Christian protectors and fluency in the native language of the area. In Eastern Europe Jewish women were traditionally confined to the domestic sphere and barred from Jewish religious, political, and cultural leadership. Because of this, they had more freedom to become involved in secular education and were often more familiar with the...