Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

11: Sexual Abuse in Holocaust Literature

chapter @ 11 Sexual Abuse in Holocaust Literature Memoir and Fiction S. LILLIAN KREMER Since the late 1980s, literary scholars have become increasingly sensitive to gendered Holocaust su=ering, paralleling the findings of feminist historians and social scientists about women’s biological and socially gendered su=ering and coping patterns.1 I examine themes and approaches to sexual abuse appearing in memoir and fiction by men and women who wrote from recollection, extensive research, or literary imagination. Among the survivorwriters are voices of a Communist, a cabaret singer, a schoolgirl, a resistance fighter, and health professionals. The creative writers, “witnesses through the imagination,”2 as Norma Rosen termed them, are clearly influenced by survivor testimony and research. Women’s wartime tribulations were complicated by biology and by pre-war normative social constructs. Passages focusing on female anatomy and defeminized appearance reference the deterioration of and attack on women’s bodies through induced amenorrhea, sterilization, forced abortions, punishment for pregnancy and subversive childbirth, annihilation based on maternal status, and sexual assault. Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the e=ect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists’ strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women’s writing. Representative of women writers’ detailed depictions of the deterioration of women’s bodies and health problems is the testimony of Hungarian medical worker Olga Lengyel, trained to qualify as first surgical assistant , deported in 1944, and assigned to an infirmary job. She writes in her early Auschwitz memoir, Five Chimneys, that “prisoners looked like skeletons . . . 178 | sexual violence in literature and cinema [having] lost from 50 to 60 percent of their original weight . . . [and had] shrunken in height.” She cites a Moscow professor’s report that autopsies established that “nine out of every ten internees revealed a distinct withering of the ovaries.”3 Sexual Humiliation during Camp Induction Process Concentration camp induction processing, among the most dehumanizing experiences for men and women, is a central motif of Holocaust literature. Prisoners are ordered to undress, subjected to rapid and brutal removal of all body hair, and drenched with harsh delousing chemicals. Perhaps because women were socialized by religious teaching and communal values to be modest, they experience and write of the induction ordeal as a sexual assault. Highlighted in women’s writing are the shame and terror of facing men who make lewd remarks and obscene suggestions during delousing and shearing processes as they search women’s bodily cavities for hidden valuables. Characteristic of the survivors’ brief, straightforward reportage of these outrages, heightened only by occasional commentary, Lengyel writes, “[W]e were compelled to undergo a thorough examination in the Nazi manner, oral, rectal, vaginal. . . . We had to lie across a table, stark naked while they probed. All that in the presence of drunken soldiers who sat around the table, chuckling obscenely.”4 Although she writes in great detail of the women’s barrack conditions, daily humiliations, and su=ering, and most e=ectively about resistance by political prisoners, in Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Sara NombergPrzytyk —survivor of Stutthof, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrück—presents her Auschwitz induction in a dramatically di=erent voice. The prose of her chapter titled “New Arrivals” departs from her typical somber tone as she acerbically denounces the Nazi system. The newcomer, who is later to join a camp Communist resistance group, renders the confusion of newcomers who “made themselves absurd trying to defend their human dignity.” She remarks initially , in moral indignation that readers anticipate, on the wretched state of huddled naked women, shivering in an unheated room in January 1944. Her final observation captures the irrationality of the Nazi universe: Jewish women “waiting for the SS men to visit.”5 We jumped up from our places and stood naked in front of a large group of SS men who looked us over slowly, with disdain in their eyes. . . . Sexual Abuse in Holocaust Literature | 179 The shearing of the sheep had started, and with scissors so dull that they tore bunches of hair out of our heads. . . . The sheep bleated as they were being shorn, but we stood there in silence with tears streaming down our cheeks. “Spread your legs,” yelled the blokowa [prisoner in charge of a block]. And the body hair was shorn too. All of this took place very quickly, to the accompaniment...