Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

1. What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?

16 1 What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust? Doris L. Bergen What do studies of women, gender, and sexuality contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust? The short answer is “a lot.” A focus on women, gender, and sexuality shifts the terms of analysis from individual motivations to social relations. It complicates familiar and outworn categories and humanizes the past in powerful ways. It can also help to answer some persistent questions about the perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of the Shoah. What drove the perpetrators to act as they did? What was the relationship between Jews and their gentile neighbors? How does the integration of Jewish sources challenge master narratives of the Holocaust? The answers to these questions are both obvious and elusive. Like much everyday history in general, studies of women, gender, and sexuality frequently generate insights that at first glance might appear small or even insignificant . Sometimes the most profound insights evoke the response, “I knew that all along.” About nine hours into Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, two women are shown singing a song. Identified in a caption only as “Gertrude Schneider and her mother, New York, survivors of the ghetto,” they appear for barely a minute. They sing, in Germanized Yiddish, Azoi muss sein: “That’s the way it has to be.” Neither a translation nor subtitles are provided. The younger woman does most of the singing, her face composed, her hands 17 What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute? busy knitting or perhaps crocheting, her body inclined toward her mother, seated next to her on a sofa. The older woman weeps and shakes her head, her hands covering her face.1 In a moving and insightful essay, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer point to this scene as a demonstration of “the double speechlessness of women” in Lanzmann’s Shoah.2 Present, but only in the background, women provide “emotional texture” and serve as the “shadowy intermediary voices between language and silence” in the film’s exploration of the machinery of death and “the hell created by the encounter between past and present.”3 Hirsch and Spitzer’s observation and the voices and faces of Gertrude Schneider and her mother hint at how much can be learned about the Holocaust by studying women. Women’s histories of the Holocaust have proliferated since the first path-breaking studies appeared in the 1980s.4 Three decades later, dissertations , articles, and monographs have appeared in a range of disciplines, and numerous volumes of essays, college courses, panels, and entire conferences have been devoted to issues of gender and sexuality in the Shoah.5 Yet to a remarkable extent this work remains outside the mainstream of Holocaust studies. It is true that we rarely hear anymore the kinds of objections that Dalia Ofer and Leonore Weitzman describe in the introduction to their 1998 volume Women in the Holocaust, that focusing on women draws attention away from the assault on all Jews, or that feminist scholars instrumentalize the Holocaust for their own ends.6 Instead, studies of gender and sexuality are accepted, but as “different voices,” to borrow the title of Carol Rittner and John Roth’s influential anthology,7 voices that speak from and for the most part to a “separate sphere,” removed from what count as the big questions in the field. And yet, as this chapter contends, the study of women, gender, and sexuality is no mere sideshow. Instead, consideration of these often sidelined issues sheds light on at least three major debates in Holocaust historiography: How did the killers carry out their task? Who collaborated and why? And do we need victims’ voices to understand genocide? The Perpetrators: Ordinary People, Family Members Attention to women’s experience shows that perpetrators of the Holocaust were embedded in social and familial contexts. Family and intimate rela- 18 Doris L.Bergen tionships facilitated the murderers’ actions by providing emotional and material support and easing troubled consciences after the fact. To borrow a cliché, it takes a village to commit genocide. Women, both as individuals and through relationships with men, played essential roles in the complex, collaborative effort of destruction we now call the Holocaust. Many studies of Holocaust perpetrators focus on issues of motivation and ideology at the individual level or among groups of men. But a focus on women’s roles reveals that killers found legitimation, approval, and...