-
16: The Shame Is Always There
- Brandeis University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter @ 16 The Shame Is Always There ESTHER DROR AND RUTH LINN While Holocaust survivors rarely speak about sexual abuse, especially from first-person experience, our interviews with Israeli survivors included several who commented about this usually taboo subject. In this chapter we present the insights of “Leah,” “Roza,” and “Reuven,” all of whom shared with us memories that involve various forms of sexual abuse. These three interviewees were among twenty-eight participants (twenty-four women and four men) in a study that took place in Israel between 2006 and 2009.1 Without being told the study’s purpose, the female participants were asked to share their wartime experiences as women, and men were asked what they knew about women’s experiences. Leah, Roza, and Reuven were interviewed by co-author Dror, and Reuven’s son was interviewed by co-author Linn. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, we have protected our interviewees by changing their names and not revealing their places of birth. Although Rassenschande (race defilement), prohibited by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, may have reduced the number of rapes in the ghettos and camps, it did not prevent them entirely. As these three survivors testify, sexual humiliation , rape, and forced prostitution of women victims all occurred. Even on their way to extermination, “[t]here were also instances of SS men of all ranks pushing their fingers into the sexual organs of pretty young women,” according to one survivor.2 In addition, there were cases of the use of sexuality as a recourse for survival—sex in exchange for food and basic necessities—and “romantic” connections. Even if they survived physically and mentally, the women victims almost never told this chapter in their Holocaust narratives. In Israel the national narrative , the historians, and the educators preferred to focus on the sphere of heroism—the Läuferin (female messenger) in ghettos or women who helped the partisanstokillGermansorsavehelplessJews.Exceptforrumorsandguesses, 276 | the violated self sexual abuse never had a place of its own in the Israeli Holocaust narrative— even sexual abuse and exploitation as modes for rescuing oneself or others are still not used in constructing categories of bravery.3 On rare occasions, fictitious stories were told by men.4 When told by women survivors they ranged from examples of forced choice between death and survival to prostitution to vague statements such as “they chose whom they wanted,” without indicating the purpose of the choice.5 Unlike these women’s testimonies, Italian diplomat and journalist Curzio Malaparte describes a brothel established in 1941 in the city of Soroca, Romania , by the medical service of the 11th German Military Division. This brothel for soldiers “employed” a group of young Jewish women as slave laborers, about a ten at a time, from the city and its environs. According to Malaparte, “Every twenty days the Germans provided a change of girls. Those who left the brothel were shoved into a truck and taken down to the river. Later Schenk [the Nazi Sonderführer] told me that it was not worth while [sic] to feel sorry for them. They were not fit for anything any more. They were reduced to rags, and besides, they were Jews.”6 What is an appropriate story of a female Holocaust survivor in the face of potential sexual abuse? Is it a narrative of survival? Of sexual violation? Of women’s place in a society at war? More than sixty-five years after the Holocaust , this chapter attempts to locate women’s narratives of victimization and survival. “Leah”—One Can Always Choose “Leah” was an adolescent when Germany occupied Poland in September 1939. She arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944, after a long period of edicts, persecution, and su=ering in her city and then in a ghetto. After a few weeks in Auschwitz-Birkenau, she and her companions were sent to BergenBelsen , where they stayed until December. They managed to survive under the harshest conditions of hunger and disease, before being transferred to a German armament factory in a forced labor camp. In April 1945 Leah and her friends were liberated by the U.S. Army and transferred to a displaced persons camp set up in a magnificent building in the area. Upon returning to her native city, Leah did not find anyone from her family. She joined a group of people intending to immigrate to pre-Israel Palestine, who first settled in a model preparatory kibbutz in Italy. There she met “Avraham ,” whom she...