Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust

Eight. Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps

EIGHT Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps Myrna Goldenberg “Food wasn’t a subject to be joked about. You could laugh about death, but not about what kept you alive.” Fania Fenelon, Playing for Time Early in his memoir, Survival in Au s chwitz, Primo Levi recounts a scene of women preparing for the deportation the Nazis had scheduled for the next day: All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him [food] to eat today?1 In this passage, Levi reflects the pattern of traditional Western culture that identifies women with nurturing, caring, and the preparation of food. He singles out food preparation as the natural work of women as they prepared for the terrible experience that lay ahead. He interprets 161 162 Myrna Goldenberg women’s management of their homely duties as an integrity of behavior, consistent with their roles and the expectations of their community. Levi’s sympathetic portrayal is rare but not singular. In his discussion of the routine of everyday living in Terezin, Norbert Troller portrays mothers’ ingenuity with reverence. Referring to the evening meal that brought husbands and teenage children to the women’s barracks, he describes the menu: There is no one so sacrificing or ready to make sacrifices as a mother. She will save her rations; usually the husband would also bring some food he had saved. She has a little pot, or a bowl, and concocts something tasty: “ghetto cake made from dry breadcrumbs, coffee with ground, saved sugar, or saccharin, or penezeln, paper-thin slices of toasted bread, with or without margarine, with garlic, or slices of toasted bread with a dusting of powdered sugar.” He then explains that the women created salads “from all sorts of weeds.” Later, in descriptions of romance in Terezin, he ironically details the makeshift repast that lovers prepared, divulging parts of the secret recipe of Mrs. Windholz’s incomparable “ghetto torte,” the preparation of which featured bread, coffee, saccharine, a trace of margarine, lots of good wishes, and an electric hot plate.2 Considering the socialization of women before the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, it is neither surprising nor inappropriate that these writers associate women with food preparation. But the Third Reich perverted the “normal.” Normal life was disrupted, most devastatingly for Jews and other victims. The routine of food preparation took on new meaning and ritual in an environment of state-planned and state-executed starvation. In the ghetto and camps, their different prewar experiences and roles influenced the ways men and women addressed the brutalities the Nazis foisted on them. One specific and important example of difference can be seen in survivor memoirs and their discussions of food. Food—or, more precisely, hunger—dominates Holocaust narratives , along with depictions of violence, vermin, thirst, fear, sickness, and death. Time was measured by hunger: “We have a calendar in Birkenau . It is hunger. . . . Morning is hunger. Afternoon is hunger. Evening is hunger.”3 Passages about hunger range from recitations of remembered and fantasized meals, to graphic descriptions of food stolen from other prisoners or Nazis, to statements of grotesque hunger and thirst, Food Talk 163 to reflections on preparing meals and menus. We have photographs and drawings that illustrate the physical results of unrelieved starvation . Children’s responses to hunger are recorded in their artwork from Terezin, where the cook is often the only person with facial features, an indication of the singular importance and clearest memory of the person who nourished them.4 The subject of the economics of food during the Holocaust has been explored, as have the methods of food distribution, but we have relatively few, if any, analyses of the ways in which men and women responded to hunger. Is...