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5. Sex-Based Violence and the Politics and Ethics of Survival
- University of Washington Press
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99 5 Sex-Based Violence and the Politics and Ethics of Survival Myrna Goldenberg The Holocaust “nearly destroyed Jewish life and left the world morally scarred forever.” —John K. Roth Jewish women were victimized as Jews. Simply because they were Jews, they were subject to the Final Solution. Because they were women, they were also subject to the physical abuses and sex-based violence that all women face, particularly in wartime.1 However, during the Holocaust, the consequences of an act of rape by a German man differed from what is often called wartime rape2 because, in addition to violating a woman’s body and causing her both bodily and emotional harm and, in the process, declaring Jewish men impotent to protect their women, the German who raped a Jewish woman violated his own existential identity and damaged his future identity as member of a separate and, indeed, in its own eyes, a master race. Racial purity was an essential component of Nazi ideology, and, accordingly, sexual contact with a Jew contaminated the bloodline for several generations. The very act of violating the Law to Protect German Honor and Blood threatened the physical purity of a people and, in so doing, set into motion a chain of long-term consequences that threatened the ideology on which Nazism stood. Yet Germans, military and otherwise , raped and tortured Jewish women. It is obvious that Jewish women 100 Myrna Goldenberg were almost always powerless to save themselves from attacks by German men. On the other hand, in certain circumstances, they were able to use their bodies as commodities, as items of value to exchange for life.3 This chapter focuses on Jewish women who were subjected to unthinkable cruelties, including rape and torture, at the hands of the Nazis and who were also victimized by Jewish and other non-Aryan men. By no means can we equate the treatment by Nazis and their Eastern European allies with that by Jewish men, but neither can we ignore the fact that some Jewish women were “used” by Jewish men, particularly in ghettos and camps. I will briefly examine the sexual violence done to Jewish women by Nazis, including the policy on race mixing, or Rassenschande, and then discuss the situation in which Jewish women, though essentially powerless , responded to offers of food or shelter in return for sexual favors. The former involved rape and torture (and almost always murder of the victim ) and reflected German betrayal of both the civil law governing the Third Reich and the higher laws that hold human life valuable.4 The physical abuse of Jewish women by Jewish men was non-violent yet coercive as the circumstances were neither neutral nor balanced. I consider this type of sex for survival as another dimension of the “gray zone” in that the male further victimized the female, both of whom were victims of the same oppressor.5 It behooves us to acknowledge, at the outset, that the Holocaust was not about gender or sex. However, because Jewish women were vulnerable in different ways than men were, gender and sex cannot be dismissed by responsible scholars. Moreover, acknowledging women as victims of (sexual) violence also asserts that women’s lives are as valuable as men’s. To ignore or neglect the abuse and murder of women is to assert that the murder of women is less consequential than the abuse and murder of men. Though not totally ignored, the subject of women as well as the subject of rape during the Holocaust has not received serious attention until recently. Perhaps the fact that the Nazis prohibited sexual contact with non-Aryans and prosecuted it as a violation of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, one of the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, led scholars to assume that rape was not an issue of importance. The Law, after all, was supposed to prevent rape and any other physical contact between Aryans and non-Aryans. It may also be that scholars saw race-mixing as an expression of legal theory rather than as expression of behavior, thus transforming physical violence into an abstraction. Perhaps, too, resis- [52.91.54.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:30 GMT) 101 Sex-Based Violence and the Politics and Ethics of Survival tance to the inclusion of women into the study of the Holocaust, except as part of the population of Jews, contributed to the neglect of rape as a legitimate subject to examine when...