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5: “Only Pretty Women Were Raped”
- Brandeis University Press
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chapter @ 5 “Only Pretty Women Were Raped” The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in Concentration Camps MONIKA J. FLASCHKA Toward the end of the war, Holocaust survivor Pearl Gottesmann found herself imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, about which she later said the following: it was “the most horrible. You know you don’t hear about the other concentration camps so much, you hear about Auschwitz because I think that was the worst, worst camp . . . I mean that was [the] darkest, darkest era.”1 While in Auschwitz, Gottesmann witnessed the rape of a fellow concentration camp inmate by a Ukrainian soldier. As other survivors have also testi- fied, she associated being raped with being pretty. She described her friend as follows: “[S]he was beautiful, and her hair grew in, started to grow in very nice, so they picked her out to rape her.” The importance of hair to a woman’s gender and human identity is something several Holocaust survivors have mentioned in their recollections. When describing their physical appearance without hair, survivors refer to themselves as indistinguishable from one another , as a “monolithic mass,”2 as “animals,”3 or as “sub-human.”4 One survivor , describing the German reaction to women with shaved heads, wrote: “They think we are some kind of animal, a species they have never seen before. No wonder. Whoever saw a woman without hair?”5 Gottesmann also associated the presence of hair with attractiveness, and she drew upon this association to explain the rape of her fellow inmate. What Gottesmann’s quote about witnessing the rape demonstrates is the relationship between a characteristic associated with physical attractiveness particularly noticeable in the concentration camp environment—the presence of hair—and how women explained the occurrence of rape. In examining rape 78 | rape of jewish women in the concentration camps, this chapter explores the connection between attractiveness, femininity, and rape, as perceived by the historical subjects themselves.6 Theories of Rape According to scholars of rape, the act of rape is one of both feminization and masculinization—the violation feminizes the victim, male or female, and enhances the perpetrator’s masculinity. Sharon Marcus writes: “Masculine power and feminine powerlessness neither simply precede nor cause rape; rather, rape is one of culture’s many modes of feminizing women. A rapist chooses his target because he recognizes her to be a woman, but a rapist also strives to imprint the gender identity of ‘feminine victim’ on his target.”7 Beyond the concept of feminization, philosopher Ann Cahill argues that “the threat of rape is a formative moment in the construction of the distinctly feminine body, such that even bodies of women who have not been raped are likely to carry themselves in such a way as to express the truths and values of a rape culture.”8 She also writes that “[r]ape not only happens to women; it is a fundamental moment in the production of women qua women.”9 If we accept that rape does, in some fashion, reinforce, “imprint,” or “script” gender identity for women,10 then it makes theoretical sense to ask whether women of the camps themselves understood the act of rape as such—as a reminder that they were women, particularly in an environment, the concentration camp, which challenged their identities as women.11 Scholars are in agreement that rape functions to reinforce masculine gender identity in cases of ethnic cleansings and genocide,12 that it may act as a statement of “hetero-nationality,”13 or that it may serve as an attack on the “nation’s culture” of the woman.14 Lisa S. Price most clearly articulates how rape functioned to reinforce masculine gender identity in former Yugoslavia when she writes that rape, for the man, expresses the following: “I AM only to the extent that you are not—male because you are female, Serb because you are Muslim, soldier because you are civilian. Your absence marks, verifies my presence and your pain becomes my power.”15 What is less clear, however, from these works on ethnic cleansing and genocide is what rape means to the woman. If rape functions in this manner to reinforce the masculine identity of the rapist, then, as stated above, conceivably it also reinforces the identity of woman to the rape victim. Thus Price’s explanation in this context could be reconfigured as: I AM female because you are male, Jewish because you are not [18.116.63.236] Project...