Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

Foreword

Foreword Elizabeth Minnich Different Horrors/Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust is a book that matters. Speaking responsibly to scholars and movingly also to a wider audience, it is informative in ways that turn out also to be transformative . It is a work of retrieval, of recognition, of reinterpretation, of memory individual and collective. It goes into the small as well as large arenas to be with its subjects. The authors speak in their differing voices, approach their subjects from various fields, draw on differing methods, and together reach toward no single resounding conclusion even as sharable meaning and memories are corrected, deepened, extended. It is courageous, such work. With each of these studies, and with all together, editors and authors step forward to take up a purpose that ought to be common but assuredly still is not. Writing as scholars of the Holocaust , an interdisciplinary field in which racializations overwhelm other forms of categorization of humans by “kind” for the most obvious of reasons , these authors draw also, and richly, on sex/gender as an illuminating lens—or, simply, look as clearly as they can at females both actual and signified, leaving gender theorization to others while providing materials to ground and test it. Readers will find no one feminist method, theory, or consciousness in play here. Whether or not they use analytic categories of gender or gendering, of race, racializing, or racial formations, the authors of the papers here enable us, as scholars, as citizens, as moral individuals, to relearn what we thought we knew best insofar as it may turn out to have been, in fact, partial. ix x Foreword The information gathered, interpreted, formalized into knowledge by scholars that informs us always more than we may realize is not and never will be complete, but that does not release us from commitments to seek better, truer, fuller facts, observation, data. Nor does it release us from obligation to move past old ordering concepts, paradigms, theories when a richness of sound scholarship challenges us to see the whole anew, and differently . This is how we keep learning, continue coming to know ourselves, each other, our shared and divided worlds. Some knowledge is not just additive. The recognition that the meaningful existence of half of humankind (defined, even across other essentialized categories of “kind,” as naturally alike in being female and so non-normatively “man”) cannot be set aside as if it were a distraction without limiting—skewing—meanings of human. And when human is a partial term, knowledge of those defined out of and down a scale of worth from it can by no means just be tacked on later. Consider again, for instance, how differently war looks when we remember and fully include women, real women who serve and oppose and suffer from and are used daily with and without their agreement to serve male warriors, as well as women as symbols and those gendered prescriptions of masculinity that are so glaringly obvious in talk of war. How long has it taken to realize, as finally we have, that rape can be, has been, is a genocidal act? That sexual violence against women is endemic to war? Tell the full story, fully honoring the realities of women, and a remarkable number of conventions, clich és, assumptions transfigures. We begin afresh to think, and so also to judge more aptly, to act more truly. This book thus honors the simple albeit still too often avoided truth that, in scholarship as in all areas of human concern, the invisibility, the silence of the female half of humankind is the very opposite of trivial. Indeed, the silence and invisibility of women can violate professional, personal, moral, and political values of the first order. Overlooking women, paying no attention to girls, pretending that gendering systems that reach into every aspect of our shared and private lives do not have significance for scholarship: of course such massive failures of attentiveness have serious consequences for, and far beyond, scholarly circles. Decades of research across virtually all fields have now variously demonstrated that such exclusions have deformed both our precious store of shared knowledge and our far more widespread opinions, beliefs, behavior—right along with all our social systems. Failure to be attentive to hierarchical systems of human xi Foreword differentiation is neither correct, nor, judged by searing realities, safe. Holocaust scholars of course know that we must not ignore the...