ABSTRACTS
ABSTRACTS
Hanna Abakunova
The Role of Ukrainian Women in Helping and Rescuing Roma and Jews
during the Holocaust in Ukraine
The rescue of Jews by non-Jews is a broad topic in Holocaust historiography. Regarding occupied Soviet Ukraine, however, this topic is represented mostly by collections of testimonies rather than analytical papers. When it comes to the Roma, there are only few attempts to research an interaction between Roma and non-Roma during the Holocaust in Ukraine. The same applies to gender studies: while the gender factor with a focus on women was examined within the topic of the rescue of Jews, the gender analysis does not exist in research regarding assistance to Roma. Therefore, this paper is the first attempt to fill the existing lacuna in Romani Studies and Holocaust Studies with its focus on the Ukrainian women’s role in attempts to help and rescue Jews and Roma.
This paper investigates cases of individual and collective assistance and rescue efforts undertaken by Ukrainian women. First to be examined is the difference in attitude of Ukrainians towards Jews and Roma which has been formed before the Second World War as a result of inter-ethnic relations in the Soviet Union. Secondly, the attention will be paid to the level of risk involved in helping Roma and Jews in comparison. At large, this research seeks to answer the question, why Ukrainian women were involved in the act of help more than men; what forms of assistance have been applied; which methods Ukrainian women employed to rescue Roma and Jews; and how those methods and forms varied in different occupied zones (Transnistria, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and Distrikt Galizien).
The paper is based on an author’s interview collections with the Jewish and Roma survivors, on the Yahad in-Unum interview collection archive, and on the USC Shoah Foundation Visual Archive. The archival documents, including the Yad Vashem Archival Collections, Bundesarchiv, archival collection of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and five Ukrainian State archives, as well as published testimonies of the Holocaust survivors are also used for this research.
Michal Aharony-
“Ordinary Virtues: Spiritual Resistance among Women in the Nazi Concentration Camps”
This article explores the range of possibilities that were available for female prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps to maintain their humanity. It demonstrates that even in the most infamous and lethal Nazi concentration camp, many of the female prisoners showed some resistance to the process of dehumanization – a process specifically designed by the Nazis to destroy them both physically and spiritually – through various forms of struggle. Following the theoretical framework set forth by Tzvetan Todorov in his book, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996), I delineate the unarmed manifestations of resistance as acts of “ordinary virtues” taking place on two intertwined levels: preserving personal dignity and caring for others. Other forms of resistance that will be examined in this piece are grouped under the title “The Life of the Mind.” These include intellectual, cultural, and religious activities in the camps.
The theme of spiritual resistance is examined in this article through a unique case study of prolonged mutual help among female camp prisoners, the “Zehnnerschaft” (“group of ten”), formed in the Plaszow labor camp in Poland in 1943. It consisted of ten young Jewish women, nine of whom were ultra-orthodox, who consider themselves “camp sisters.” These women helped each other for almost two years and through three camps: Plaszow, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They made every effort to keep its members alive and to stay together at all costs. Nine of them survived the war; one woman died of typhus several days after being liberated. This study utilizes archival material that has not been published before, as well as an interview I recently conducted with a survivor, the sister of the Zehnnerschaft’s members who had not survived.
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz
“Heroines, Holocaust, and Everything In-between”
Heroism – "great bravery, putting others first even at your own peril." Heroine – "a woman admired or idealized for her courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities." Holocaust – "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children…by Nazi Germany and its collaborators."
What made a woman a heroine during the Holocaust? What was considered "great bravery" under Nazi or collaborationist rule, in ghettos or camps, while hiding, or living under a false identity? What made women's heroism during the Holocaust different than that of men? Can one speak of a particular "pattern" of women's heroism, or did it express itself differently under different situations? Is a starving mother in a ghetto who puts aside her own food for her children a heroine ("putting others first even at your own peril")? A young health woman who arrives at Auschwitz with a young child and could have been selected to live, yet chooses to accompany her child so that child would not die alone? An elderly woman next to them at that selection who forcibly takes that young child from her mother's arms as she realizes she will not live in any case, while pushing that mother towards the group of women selected for forced labor? What about a teenage Jewish girl in Poland who leaves her parents and younger siblings behind in the ghetto to fend for themselves while she goes out to be a courier, carrying messages to other ghettos and to the partisans? Or a Jewish woman in Germany whose husband is incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp and goes almost daily to the Gestapo with documents to try and get him released? A Jewish woman volunteer in the British army who parachutes into Europe in the hope of helping Jewish communities under collaborationist regimes? Is she a heroine then, or only after she is caught and put to death by one of those regimes? What made a woman a heroine during the Holocaust? Not an easy question to answer, and one that this symposium will address from many different angles.
Michal Ben Ya'akov
“Assisting Refugees in Morocco during World War II: The work of Hélène Cazes-Benatar”
Historiography, collective memory and even personal memory of refugees and of refugee assistance during the Holocaust have overlooked a critical intersection of time, place and people – that of refugees who escaped Nazi Europe via North Africa and received assistance from local Jews. Women were primary agents of assistance, but have often been marginalized in research, and the activities of Sephardic Jews and the Jews in North Africa are usually sidelined. This paper aims to address these lacunae by presenting the refugee assistance activities initiated and organized by one woman in Casablanca during World War II and how they impacted on tens of thousands of European Jews.
After the fall of France in June 1940, Morocco became an important "fire escape" from the flames of Europe, through which tens of thousands of refugees passed, as they continued across the Atlantic to the Americas. In Morocco the refugees faced a new set of challenges – government restrictions, internment by local authorities, procuring food, housing and medical assistance and a myriad of other issues. In spite of war-time restrictions and Vichy prohibitions, Moroccan Jews assisted the newly arrived refugees, orchestrated by Hélène Cazes-Benatar, a Moroccan Jewish attorney in Casablanca. In July 1940 Benatar established a Comité d'Assistance aux Réfugies Etrangers, later cooperating with international aid organizations, as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), HIAS-HICEM, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and others. Mutual ignorance had to be overcome, and new and innovative ways of assistance created.
I argue that as a woman and a widow, she was able to facilitate cooperation between the various organizations and government departments on behalf of refugees, taking advantage of her contacts as an attorney and employing strategies which expanded the boundaries of women in the elite Francophone Jewish society of Casablanca.
Chad S.A. Gibbs
“Women in Resistance at Treblinka”
On August 2, 1943, Jews held at Treblinka rebelled against their guards. At a predetermined time, prisoners fired on the killers of their loved ones while making their escape. In the process, inmates burned much of the camp and contributed to its closure soon after. While this story is relatively well-known, the contributions of women prisoners in resistance and revolt at Treblinka are almost entirely unknown.
My paper presents a sample of resistance acts by women and explanation of why their history has remained so ill-explored. I highlight moments when women attacked guards or kapos in unplanned, personal resistance, acted as couriers for the underground, and helped provide arms for the revolt. These events and others show that the history of resistance by women at this extermination camp is both powerful on its own and important to our understanding of wider Jewish acts against Treblinka’s guards.
My research further demonstrates that the absence of women in Treblinka resistance history most often results from the silences of men. Though some men did offer frank accounts of the lives and actions of women inside Treblinka, many more said nothing of their daily lives and roles in resistance, or even insisted that there were no women prisoners at Treblinka.
In explanation of the erasure of women from Treblinka resistance history, I also examine the work of one influential historian and how his choice not to address the existence of a camp brothel foreclosed any opportunity to understand how women forced to endure this place aided the revolt. My paper helps restore women to Treblinka resistance history while providing space for the consideration of gender, masculinity, archival silences, and how these issues weigh on our knowledge of women’s actions during the Holocaust.
Hana G. Green
“Sailing Under False Colors: An Exploration of Agency, Self-Help, and “Quiet” Heroism in Jewish Women Passers”
This paper will explore the experiences of Jewish women passers and designates both their response to pass, and their daily lives in “illegality” as forms of resistance. Here, passing reflects the response wherein an individual disguised their Jewish identity and, effectively, functioned as Christian or Aryan by “hiding in plain sight,” or in “open hiding” as a method of evasion and survival during the Holocaust. Incorporating oral testimony as well as both published and unpublished manuscripts and memoirss, this paper will plumb the ways in which female Jewish passers exhibited agency, actively engaged in efforts towards self-help, and demonstrated a “quiet” heroism in their day-to-day pursuit of survival “in plain sight.”
Following both Lenore J. Weitzman’s sociological definition of resistance which suggests that individuals who try to “thwart, defy, subvert, outwit, or otherwise resist the aims of the oppressor” are engaging in resistance, and Brana Gurewitsch’s characterization of a resister as “anyone who refused to accept Nazi domination and his or her predetermined fate within Nazi ideology,” this proposal posits that the act of passing was inherently one of resistance. Through the evaluation of Jewish female passers, this paper will respond to larger historiographical debates and definitional dilemmas about whether evasion tactics—such as passing—qualify as forms of resistance, and maintains that even female Jewish passers “solely intent on trying to save themselves from an increasingly frightening fate,” were engaged in active defiance, and thusly, should be recognized as resisters. Centering first-person accounts, this study will evaluate the lenses through which Jewish female passers framed and categorized their own experiences: Did they consider passing an act of resistance? Did they view their actions as heroic? Why or why not?
Wolf Gruner
“This Thug Hitler!”Defiance and Protest of Jewish Women in Nazi Germany
Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still largely (mis-)understood by the public as well as by many scholars as rare occurrence of organized and armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East. By contrast, this research uncovers forgotten individual acts of resistance in Germany proper, such as the case of the 36-year-old Jewish woman Hertha Reis, who in 1941, protested against the Nazi persecution in plain daylight in the capital of the Third Reich.
A new broader definition of resistance helps democratizing our gendered perspective. Based on hitherto unused police records and trial materials from various German cities as well as video testimonies of survivors, this talk will demonstrate how countless German Jewish women performed acts of resistance between 1933 and 1945: German Jewish women publicly criticized Hitler and his entourage, Nazi policies and anti-Jewish violence, disobeyed laws and local restrictions, refused and sabotaged forced labor, and finally, some even physically defended themselves against verbal insults and physical attacks.
The Nazi state punished their resistance harshly: Most of these female resistors were denunciated, arrested, tried and punished with harsh prison sentences. Many of them later perished in concentration camps or after their deportation to the occupied East. From this research, however, Jewish women emerge as historical actors, who resisted Nazi oppression in manifold ways. This research gives back agency to ordinary Jewish women in extraordinary circumstances and helps to incorporate their forgotten acts of resistance into the general narrative of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany in particular and the Holocaust in general.
Laura J. Hilton
“Understanding and Teaching Gender in Jewish Resistance & Rescue during the Holocaust”
The aim of this presentation is to encourage critical and thorough examination of how scholars and educators integrate gender into the intertwined topics of Jewish resistance and rescue during the Holocaust. Given the dominant place of representations of resistance and rescue in public memories and understanding of the Holocaust, it is essential to provide not only a strong context for the broad array of actions that fit within these terms but also inclusive examples along the spectrum of both resistance and rescue.
Using gender to analyze both resistance and rescue, it delves into how and why explanations that privilege examples of resistance and representations, especially those involving armed/violent actions, leads to obscuring other important actions. Other, lesser-known, resistance and rescue work included couriers who moved vital information across borders, the provision of food, shelter, and medical care for armed resisters and those in hiding, and running illegal schools in ghettos and camps. In these three examples, women were more likely to engage in these efforts than were men. It also delves into the reasons why scholarly work on rescue, in particular, has focused more on non-Jewish efforts, leaving Jewish self-help under-explained until recently.
The presentation will begin by explaining how scholars have framed these topics and how the explanations have changed over time and why. It will focus on the ways in which definitions of resistance and rescue have gendered scholarly and public understanding of what “counts” under these terms and provide educators with guidance about how to teach this framework to their students. It then outlines three key, but often submerged, aspects of these topics, each of which is informed by a gender-based analysis. The first is how Jewish resistance and rescue fit within the larger narrative of anti-Nazi efforts across Europe, and in the case of rescue, more global efforts. The second is the level of inherent risks and illegality of these activities, how this encouraged and/or discouraged participation, and how the gendered assumptions of the Nazis and their collaborators played a role therein. Third is the importance of setting resistance and rescue within their specific time and place, especially in terms of the path of the war and relationships with the non-Jewish population. This portion of the presentation will emphasize the realities and difficulties that Jews faced in multiple geographic locations in terms of both offering resistance and engaging in rescue attempts.
Elizabeth Hyman
“Tosia Altman and Tema Schneiderman: Voices from Beyond the Grave”
Tosia Altman and Tema Schneiderman were active members of the Jewish Fighting
Organization, or, the ZOB, as couriers, weapons smugglers, and fighters. Their exploits included: smuggling grenades concealed in their underwear, spreading word of the first deportations from ghettos to death camps, and fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And, they were both dead by the middle of 1943. I group these two women together not simply because they were women and Zionists who died early and young as resistors, but because they were two prominent female members of the Jewish Fighting Organization who left few writings of their own. As a result, their stories and legacies have been attested and shaped primary through the words of their peers, friends, and comrades. In this paper, I use the writings and memoirs of prominent movement members and leaders—as
as well as secondary sources—which touch on and discuss Tema and Tosia in order to attempt to create a character sketch for each woman; and determine what we can learn of their personalities, motivations, and inner lives purely through the words of others.
Finally, I both pose and attempt to answer the following questions: 1) What does it mean to have your legacy constructed without your voice? 2) How do we incorporate these “voiceless” legacies into the broader framework of the history of Jewish women’s resistance during the Holocaust? And: 3) How do we, then, incorporate these legacies into our public-facing work?
Sayantani Jana
“Gender in Crisis: Women’s Experiences during the November Pogrom of 1938 in Berlin and the 1946 Great Calcutta Killings”
This paper is part of a larger dissertation project that juxtaposes two cases of mass violence that are socially, politically, and geographically distinctive from one another. The first is the November Pogrom of 1938, specifically as it transpired in the city of Berlin, and the second is the Great Killings of 1946 in Calcutta in British India. While the former is widely remembered and studied as a pogrom perpetrated by the Nazi bureaucracy against the Jewish population in Germany and its annexed regions, the latter has been studied as one of the first major communal riots that set off a chain of Hindu-Muslim (and, later, also Sikh) violence across north and northwest India, culminating in the massacre in Punjab during the Partition of 1947. Yet, the terminologies of pogrom and riot themselves, as they have been applied to each of these cases, can be called into question when we look closely at each event. This paper looks at the ways in which the violence in each case was highly gendered, while focusing particularly on women’s experiences. In Berlin, the arrests and deportation of Polish-Jewish men prior to the pogrom, as well as the mass arrests of Jewish men in its immediate aftermath created new, unprecedented situations for Jewish women who were thrust into the role of becoming providers for their families, negotiators on behalf of their husbands, as well as participants in other acts of self-preservation and resistance. During the violence in Calcutta, that would claim some 4000 lives and leave 10,000 people injured, accounts can be found of women standing guard at the doorstep to ward off armed mobs or rescuing neighbors of the alleged “enemy” religion, despite the prevalent threat of physical violence to themselves. In both cases, such examples provide interesting insights into the ways in which women perceived their roles within the family, the community and society that, in turn, informed their course of action. I juxtapose these two very different events to observe whether a gendered analysis, particularly one focusing on women, can reveal similarities in the ways in which gender roles in each society affected not just how the violence was carried out by perpetrators, but also how existing gendered notions in society allowed women to adapt and take on roles that actively resisted this violence in direct and indirect ways. Through such juxtaposition and gendered analysis, the paper thus also tries to understand how gender can be used a method in studies of mass violence to shed more light on certain kinds of ethnoreligious conflicts.
Sabine Kalff
“The Reich from Below: Maria Leitner’s Undercover Reportages and Research on German National Socialism”
The journalist Maria Leitner, of Jewish Austro-Hungarian descent, composed between 1933 and 1938 a series of fascinating reportages on everyday life in National Socialism, for which she returned several times to Germany, after having gone to exile in spring 1933. Taking on the false identity of an American tourist she explored for instance how the city of Düsseldorf now dealt with the memory of its most prominent, but Jewish descendant, Heinrich Heine (1938). Under life-threatening circumstances, Leitner investigated into the working conditions of women in the chemical plants of IG Farben, describing the unscrupulous exploitation of their health (1937). Since she equally reported on Leuna in Saxony, Bayer in Leverkusen and Hoechst in Hesse, she must have had informers at several of the IG Farben plants. Her reportages concentrate on the conditions of the working class in National Socialism. She pointed out that, far from being integrated into a classless “Volksgemeinschaft”, workers of both sexes experienced an unparalleled exploitation through the alliance of the dictatorial state and capitalist industry. Leitner brought concealed chemical accidents to the audience’s attention, which exterminated the whole fish population of the Main River , as well as German’s secret rearmament, which became obvious accidentally through the detonation of a subterranean plant of explosives.
She published her reportages in renowned German exile newspapers like Die neue Weltbühne (Prague), Pariser Tageszeitung and Das Wort (Moscow). She also composed her research material into novels, which, like Elisabeth, ein Hitlermädchen (1937), appeared in weekly instalments in the exile press. Here again, Leitner’s focus was on the female experience of National Socialism, describing for instance extensively the practice of compulsory sterilization as a means of increased social segregation.
She was literally the only journalist who reported on topics like the conditions of working women in National Socialism, on the practices of compulsory sterilization and of abortion, inside of Germany as well as outside. Also the reports by the exiled German Social Democratic Party (Sopade) and the socialist group Neu beginnen aimed at informing the public abroad on what was really going on in Germany and concentrated on the conditions of the working class. But they firstly almost never focused on the female experience of National Socialism, and secondly, their labour of writing was divided. While one person secretly reported from inside the Reich, a second one in a safe place in exile composed them into articles. Their authors were furthermore almost unanimously male.
Leitner not only singularly combined undercover research in the Reich with reporting on it from abroad, she also took risks that were only comparable to those of the female communist couriers, who were frequently employed for dangerous missions because women were considered less suspicious than males. Her writing on National Socialist Germany which includes research on site, is thus to be considered as an act of resistance. After having fled the infamous Gurs camp, Leitner died miserably in Marseilles in 1942, unable to obtain a visa to the US. She surely qualifies as a heroine of the Holocaust, particularly through her unique undercover reportages on the Third Reich that have not yet attracted the attention they merit.
Bozena Karwowska
“Auschwitz, October 1943 - A Woman Hero Without a Name”
The lack of witnesses and reliable documents often make it impossible to confirm or verify the identity of heroic women in Nazi German camps; such is the case of one who became a legend in Auschwitz for killing SS officer, Josef Schillinger; the event is thus known as “the death of Schillinger”, immortalizing the SS officer, rather than the heroic woman prisoner. Historiography similarly lacks regarding events likely brought on by heroism, such as the massacre of women in the penal colony in the Auschwitz sub-camp in Budy. Factual shortcomings in cases like this are easily substituted with patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, providing explanations that can distort understanding of women’s heroism.
In example, the information the on Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum website about the death of Josef Schillinger merely reads: “A transport of Jews arrived from Bergen-Belsen in October 1943. The SS sent them to the gas chambers immediately after selection. In the undressing room of crematorium II in Birkenau, the antechamber to the gas chamber, one of the women realized the danger they were in and seized SS man Josef Schillinger’s pistol. She shot him and wounded him badly, and also shot a second SS man, Wilhelm Emmerich. This was a signal for other women to attack the henchmen. However, the SS suppressed the mutiny and killed all the women. Schillinger died on the way to the hospital.”
The story of this brave (nameless) women and her killing of Schillinger circulated among the prisoners and has been described in over forty memoirs and memory-based narratives about Auschwitz, making it arguably one of the most famous heroic acts of defiance in Auschwitz. The one keystone fact available in historical documentation is that Schillinger was killed by a woman; survivors (and historians) nonetheless do speculate as to her identity. In many accounts, authors fill in historical gaps with fictional (though sometimes very probable) narrations; some survivors present themselves as well informed witnesses or point out historical findings; others openly admit to knowing little other than vague gossip.
Using the theoretical framework of the sequential development of Jewish women’s coping strategies (Dalia Offer and Lenore Weitzman), this paper will take a closer look at Franceska Mann (Franciszka Manheimer-Rosenberg), who is believed to have been Schillinger’s assassin; earlier however (in the Warsaw Ghetto), she most likely collaborated with the Gestapo. A trajectory of her life under Nazi-German rule allows for a better understanding of the heroic roles women could perform without transgressing gender expectations during the consecutive stages of the Holocaust.
Descriptions of the killing of Schillinger, the portrayal of Francesca Mann in diaries and memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto, and descriptions of the dancer in contemporary popular media all differ significantly, making evident the social construct of heroism as enacted by women, both then and now. This paper will discuss the constructionism of the legend of Schillinger’s assassin, focusing on the utilitarian aspect of patriarchal views on femininity and their functions as found in available historiography of this event.
Yitzchak Kerem
Greek Women as Resisters and Rescuers in the Holocaust”
Since the 1980s, several Greek Jewish women partisans like Sarika Yehoshua Frezis and Buena Sarfaty were uncovered by myself and other researchers. Also several female Gentile Righteous in Greece like Catholic sister Eleni Kapar were recognized by Yad Vashem, but in general most of the recognized Greek Righteous Gentiles are male. Since the 2010s, the paradigm of Jewish rescuers emerged, thus exposing numerous Jewish women from Greece as heroes, rescuers, and critical assistants for Jewish survival in German occupied Greece or in the death and concentration camps in Poland and Germany from 1943 to 1945.
Sarika Yehoshua founded a small leftist ELAS female resistance unit which fought in battle, but she also helped Jewish refugees cross the Evia Peninsula to wait for illegal immigration boats to Turkey and continue to ELAS-EAM. Buena Sarfaty as an ELAS partisan helped illegal immigrants and was a runner between Greece and Turkey. She refused to reveal her story to researchers, but from her Sephardic Judeo-Spanish poetic coplas, Rene Melamed and others deciphered her story. Two other Jewish women partisans were murdered so they remained incognito: Mindy Moskovitz was a cohort of Sarika as an ELAS fighter, but as teacher in the Stroponos village, was raped and murdered by the Nazi commander. In Athens on 20 September 1942 Corfiote Julia Bibo(as) participated in the sabotage of the Greek youth Nationalist-Socialist ESPO office, which also ignited the adjacent German officers club in Athens. Before her execution, in her trial she proudly stated her Jewishness.
From her Pireaus apartment Esther Benmaior passed on to the Greek resistance illegal immigration organizer Capt. Thomas some 200 names of Jews to be located to be whisked to Evia for illegal immigration from fall 1943 until summer 1944. Esther died in the last out of Evia which was sabotaged by the Germans in August1944.
Athenian Catholic sister Eleni Kapar risked her life to save hundreds of Jews under German Nazi occupation by feeding them, giving them money, arranging hiding in convents, and finding alternative hiding in the Athens area. She also brought to Greece seven boatloads of wheat from Australia during the 1941-2 famine.
Several Greek Jewish deported women were heroic in Birkenau in deflecting groups of Jewish women from being sent to gassing. Esther Maestro Sadikario Esther Maestro Sadikario saved a total of 181 girls from Bloc 25 in Birkenau who were destined for gassing, snaking them through the windows to an adjacent shack. This happened in the course of at least three separate selections. Later in Ravensbruck, she worked in the kitchen, stole food, and distributed amongst friends. Daisy Arouh helped at least four Greek Jewish women survive in Birkenau. Fluent in German, she became translator for Greek Jewish female inmates. She was in charge of Bloc 27 in Birkenau and was nicknamed “Daisy Blokova (Bloc Leader)”. Her position enabled her free movement, which she exploited to assist women in the camp. She acquired and secretly distributed food, replaced women in work groups, hid sick women during selections, and hid information about pregnancies and abortions. She saved at least four Greek Jewish women selected to die. On the death march, strongwomen like Elka Levy of Ioannina or Miru Alkana of Rhodes dragged/pushed onward numerous women to remain living.
Borbála Klacsmann
“Salvaged bonds – Fates of Families as Reflected in Women’s Compensation Claims”
“I was a 14-year-old child at the time. The deportation itself, then what happened to me later meant such a shock that I cannot remember exactly. But I do remember that when we were taken back from the revier to the camp, I got together with my mother again. I was so weak that I could survive only with my mother’s nursing and her food ration.”
This is how Katalin R. recounted her selection for medical experiments in Auschwitz and how she was taken care of by her mother afterwards. This testimony was given as part of her compensation claim, which was sent from Hungary to the FRG in 1964. She was not the only one who mentioned her family bonds: several other applicants also testified about their losses or the emotional support that the presence of family members had meant in the concentration camps.
From the end of the 1950s, as a result of the diplomatic negotiations between West Germany and socialist Hungary, certain groups of Hungarian survivors were eligible for compensation programs – first, those who had been subjected to Nazi medical experiments. The applications were equipped with questionnaires, medical certificates and various other documents, which provide data about the experiences of the survivors.
This unique batch of sources has hardly been used in historical research before, let alone analyzed from the perspective of gender or history of emotions. The compensation applications provide an unusual lens for the investigation of family relations: since the testimonies are not “regular” life stories or oral histories, but are based on questionnaires focusing on hard facts, the scattered mentions of family members mean that these bonds were extremely important. The aim of this paper is to present a collection of women’s experiences connected to family members, as described in their applications.
Samantha Lakin
“Local and International Impacts of Rwandan Women’s Testimonies and Advocacy After Genocide”
What role did women play during trials and advocacy of crimes that specifically impacted women in the aftermath of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda? In 1994, genocide ravaged the small country of Rwanda, where an estimated one million Tutsi and Hutu who opposed the genocidal project were killed in 100 days, from April to July. Patterns of violence reflected other past genocides, including the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia--rape and sexual violence against women and men, forced pregnancy, and other gender-based crimes. Such violence was both systematic and symbolic, used to show power and dominance of the perpetrators, to dehumanize the victims, torturing them before they were ultimately killed. In these ways, among others, the genocide disproportionately affected women, who made up the majority of survivors, but who also suffered from specific crimes that targeted them as women.
After the genocide, two main juridical transitional justice initiatives were implemented during which women played a significant role. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was established by the UN Security Council in 1995, to prosecute those most responsible for the genocide. Additionally, local Gacaca proceedings took place in Rwanda from 2005-2012. Gacaca, adapted from a traditional mediation-based process for solving problems between community members “on the grass,” constituted a system of 12,000 community-based courts that sought to try genocide criminals while promoting forgiveness by victims, ownership of guilt by criminals, and community reconciliation. During both of these processes, women played significant roles as witnesses, at times risking their lives in pursuit of justice. Women’s testimonies and advocacy resulted in precedent-setting changes to international law regarding gender-based crimes and genocide. At the ICTR, women’s bold testimonies solidified the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, which was the first international trial to conclude that rape is an act of genocide. Additionally, women’s advocacy helped escalate crimes of sexual violence and rape to higher categories with more serious punishment during Gacaca processes.
This paper will present new findings based on testimonies of Rwandan women who participated in such legal processes, tracing their impact, including challenges and setbacks, in order to create such significant legal change. Especially in a country that relied on oral tradition and community-based justice prior to the genocide, many women did not expect that their testimonies, participating in trials, and advocating for the seriousness of crimes of rape and sexual violence to receive escalated attention would result in positive changes in international law. They did not anticipate that their actions, sometimes risky, would pave the way for future cases of post-genocide justice. This paper will discuss the local-international connection from the perspectives of women who participated in these trials, to understand their personal views of their own impact.
Daan de Leeuw
“Girls, We Need Each Other So Badly, Be Strong and Steadfast”: Female Solidarity and Hostility in Concentration Camps.”
In the first postwar decades scholars mainly relied on narratives of male survivors to reconstruct the experiences of concentration camp prisoners; female voices were elided or ignored. More recent research has made major contributions to incorporate women’s experiences. Yet our understanding of their ordeals and agency remains limited, even though concentration camps were filled with women obliged to work for the German war industry during the latter years of the war. Jewish women slave laborers struggled courageously to survive in hostile conditions as they faced threats from the SS, the guards, and other prisoners. Their efforts to organize and commitment to solidarity, to maintain their dignity amidst dehumanizing conditions, constitutes one form of resistance. In this paper, I will use postwar testimonies to reconstruct the experiences, agency, and rescue and resistance activities of one group of Jewish female slave laborers.
Arriving in Sobibor in March 1943, some 30 Dutch Jewish women were selected for slave labor, while the rest of the people on that train were murdered in the gas chambers. Moved from camp to camp to conduct labor, the women stayed together as a group until nearly the end of the war. On their very first night in the camp – exhausted, hungry, disoriented, and ignorant about their loved ones’ fate – they made a pact to stay together as a collective and to help and support each other as long as they could. Thirteen survived. Although the Germans frequently relocated prisoners to camps where the war industry needed them and tried to break any forms of prisoner solidarity, these women intentionally defied the Nazi logic of the camp system. How did they manage to stay together? What threats did they encounter as they were constantly moved through the camps? And how did they help and support each other?
Anita Lukic
“Thea Altaras: Reclaiming Jewish Identity after the Resistance”
Thea Altaras was an extraordinary woman: a Holocaust survivor, resistance fighter, and restorer of Jewish monuments. She survived concentration camps in Italy and Croatia, joined the Yugoslav partisan movement, and later emigrated to Germany, where she tirelessly worked to preserve the rich material history of the Landjuden [country Jews]. In her interview with the Shoah Foundation, she calls on future generations to perform the same work that she has done in Germany: namely, to preserve the memory of all the Jewish lives that had been lost in the Holocaust. Altaras’ call to action is clear, as is the fact that she couldn’t have made it in the former Yugoslavia as a partisan and member of the communist party.
The Yugoslav partisans had accepted all nationalities and ethnicities into their ranks while they were shoring up support during the Second World War. Although Jews made up only about 0.5% of the total Yugoslav population, they had joined the partisans in large numbers, making up about 1.5%-2% of their total members and four out of 1,322 national heroes of Yugoslavia. Men and women could join as individuals, but not as members of a particular group. For example, when a branch of Hashomer Hatzair signed up as a group, they were rejected. Having fought in the resistance made it easier for Jews to integrate into the new socialist government after the war, but also limited their freedom to remember the victims of the Holocaust. The new government only knew of the sacrifices of the partisans and avoided paying tribute to any one ethnicity.
In her interview, Altaras describes how her fear during the war was transformed once she joined the partisans: she no longer felt targeted because she was Jewish, but simply had the same fear that anyone at war would have. Her commitment to the partisan cause gave her a sense of identity that she had never had before, a potentially universal identity that contrasted with the particular sense of Jewishness and anti-Semitism she had known up to this point in her life. While she lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, however, her identity as a partisan did not allow her to also express her identity as a Jew and follow her calling, which she describes in the interview as memorializing the dead. This was, ironically, only possible in the country that had carried out the Holocaust. Altaras’ biography exposes some of the fraught paradoxes of identity in post-war discourses of history and memory.
Mary Katherine S. Matello (Katy S. Matello)
“Professions of Life: Teachers, Nurses, and Social Workers in the Resistance to Nazi Atrocities”
During the era of the Nazi regime, participation in social welfare-oriented professions led hundreds of thousands of women into direct contact with the Holocaust. This paper examines how female teachers, social workers, and nurses resisted Nazi atrocities in Germany and occupied Poland. These women took their occupational skills and resources into the fray against the Hitler regime in a variety of forms including hiding, arranging shelter, supplying goods and resources, and providing forged documents. This paper highlights the ascendency of these women to rescuers and care providers during the Holocaust as an extension of their professions. It focuses on how the skills of teachers, social workers, and nurses were utilized to resist Nazi oppression by presenting case studies of heroines of resistance. Research conducted through the Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Database, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive this paper explores their writings, oral testimonies, newspaper reports, and personal accounts of those rescued. This paper emphasizes, not just the rescuers themselves, but their occupational skills and how they utilized these skills in situations unimaginable prior to the Holocaust.
Darlene Cheyenne Martin
“Profiles in Moral Courage: Women Medical Warriors in Resistance During the Holocaust”
This paper examines the powerful legacy of hundreds of women nurses, physicians, and other health professionals who engaged in resistance activities to try to help save Jewish adults and children, as well as Roma (Gypsies) and other groups who were targets of Nazis annihilation. They’ve remained largely in the shadows of medical and Holocaust history until recently, yet collectively made remarkable efforts to help save thousands of people across occupied Europe. Their actions were a striking moral contrast to Mengele and other Nazi doctors and nurses who tortured and murdered thousands of disabled children and adults in euthanasia programs in Germany and other countries as well as in experimental research studies in Auschwitz and other camps.
The author documents the extent and nature of health professionals’ involvement in resistance activities across Europe and analyzes ethical decisions to engage in resistance, as well as wrenching issues they confronted in providing care in the face of unrelenting brutality and murder. It draws on the author’s extensive historiographic research on nursing and medical resistance including interviews with resistors in Europe and the U.S. as well as interviews with survivors aided by resistors, and extensive review of archival documents. Rings conceptual framework of resistance guided this study.
Study results underscore that women physicians and nurses played substantial roles in a broad spectrum of individual and collective resistance activities in many occupied countries to help rescue targeted children and adults from deportation to death camps. They were largely motivated by a profound sense of duty as reflected in a statement from Sister Jeanne d’Arc who helped co-ordinate resistance efforts in a Limoges hospital: “I had to act -there was evil all around us.” Caregivers, including large numbers of nurse nuns, dramatically redefined healing and care giving to include stealing and smuggling medicines, food, and supplies, serving as couriers, working with rescue groups such as l’OSE to relocate children to group homes and safe houses, and often helping transport them across enemy lines. Many became experts at sabotaging records and orders, forging documents, and in some instances made extraordinary efforts to help hide women in the face of selections in camps eg Dr. Adelaide Hautval who hid a number of women targeted for sterilization experiments in Auschwitz by Drs. Dering and Clauberg.
Significantly, many nurses and physicians assumed leadership roles in resistance organizations, eg nurse Bertie Albrecht co-founded Combat resistance network in Paris and helped publish an underground newsletter with writer Camus. Nurse Andrea de Jong founded the Comet Escape Line which rescued hundreds of Allied airmen shot down in Belgium, France and the Netherlands and arranged transport over the Pyrenees to Spain. Many of these caregivers endured beatings, imprisonment and died in their efforts to save Jewish children and families and Allied airmen.
The compelling legacy and moral courage of women health professionals who engaged in resistance efforts to try to protect those who were “hunted” provides crucial lessons for contemporary nursing, medicine and society in a time of increasing global intolerance and conflict.
Khatchig Mouradian
‘In the Night of Our Lives’: Women Resisters to the Armenian Genocide"
The talk explores the role of women in an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria in resisting the destruction of the Armenian people during World War I. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor, demonstrating the critical role women played in pushing back against the genocide. Mouradian ultimately argues that despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered—unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving lives and laying the groundwork for postwar rebuilding.
Avinoam J. Patt,
“Don't Set Us On a Bright Pedestal: Collective Memory and Myth-Making after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”
In the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jews in the "outside world" felt a need to create heroes/heroines after the revolt, in the process of shaping a collective memory of the revolt in ways that could serve varied political agendas. For the surviving ghetto fighters themselves, a deeper ambivalence about being mythologized highlighted the emotional distance between those who were there and those who were not, and the gendered political conventions of Jewish myth-making during and after the war. While Jews outside the ghetto sought to interpret the meaning of the revolt through pre-existing political frameworks, the experiences of the ghetto fighters themselves challenged these conventions, expanding the image of what Jewish heroes/heroines might look like soon after the war.
Elisabeth Pönisch
“A heroism which was left to fend entirely for itself”. Everyday Routines as a Form of Female Resistance
Victor Klemperer described in his book LTI the “heroism which was completely deprived of support of being part of an army or a political group, of the hope of future glory, a heroism which was left to fend entirely for itself. These were the handful of Aryan wives (there were not that many of them), who resisted every pressure to separate from their Jewish husbands. And just imagine what everyday life was like for these women! ...” (Klemperer 2006: 6). For him it was the heroism of the non-Jewish woman that stood above any hero-worship (Heldentum). In the early 1940’s, many Jewish people had to live together in overcrowded
“Jews’ houses”. Elena Bork was one of them.1 Since July 1942, she lived with her parents in an apartment in Hamburg Eppendorf. There, she got regular visit of a “non-Jewish” woman who brought food and stockings – a highly risky acting. Even if this situation was “neighborly help” under normal circumstances and therefore not dangerous in itself, the fact that the woman kept coming to the “Jews’ House” was a danger. There are many of such situations where “non Jewish” former maids, neighbors or well-known shop assistants came to the “Jews’ houses” with food and clothes.
The resistance in everyday life is not to be underestimated, but until now it had been a rather marginal part of historical research about life in National Socialistic Germany. This paper focuses on female resistance as an everyday activity and included to daily routines. Firstly, I will analyze the relationship between “heroism” and everyday resistance. For this purpose, I will deal with the following question: Where did resistance begin in National Socialist everyday life? To what extent was the everyday resistance a female form? The second part of my lecture is about everyday heroism. The basic idea is that when “harmless” objects, situations and actions of everyday life suddenly become dangerous, everyday resistance or acting as before became a heroic act. Heroism was always both “to do something” and “not to do something”. Not divorcing from the “Jewish” partner was as heroic as bringing food to starving families, despite the ban. It is important to consider, to what extent were the women aware that they were taking a risk with these actions. For this purpose, I analyze various of material such as diaries, correspondence, interviews from oral history projects, memoirs, and reports.
Sheri Rosenblum The Power of Women; Female Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
During the Holocaust, more than 30,000 Jews fought back in armed resistance against the Nazis and their collaborators. More than 10% of them were women. Thousands of remarkable women who defied gender roles to fight back as Jewish partisans. Faced with the constant threat of death, these women, many teens, overcame nearly impossible odds and demonstrated extraordinary strength and courage to disrupt the Nazi war machine by blowing up bridges, sabotaging railroad lines, and saving Jewish lives to hasten the end of the war.
Avihu Ronen,
"A New Type of Girl": Chajka Klinger and the Leading Role of Women in the Jewish Fighting Organizations
My paper deals with the role of women as leaders in the Jewish fighting organizations, focusing on the diaries of Chajka Klinger, my mother, who was one of the first to notice about this new kind of Jewish girls, "ready to serve the self-defense".
The heroic image of Jewish women in the Ghettoes as brave curriers and fighters must not blur the leadership role women acquired in the Ghettoes uprisings which was not necessarily a combat one. In most of the underground headquarters one can finds outstanding women: Zivia Lubetkin and Tosia Altman in Warsaw; Haika Grosman in Bialystok; Gola Mire in Cracow. Women also had leading roles in rescue underground organizations: Hansi Brand in Hungary or Gizi Fleischman in Slovakia. The reasons of this unique historical phenomenon, incomparable to the role of women in other organizations at that period, was grounded in two modern traditions: The revolutionary legacy of female activists and the egalitarian framework of the youth movements, where the girls were considered as equal to the boys, taking an active part in guiding and leading their young comrades.
The emergence of girls into leadership roles during first stage of WW2 was not a dramatic turning point, but rather a natural development of their pre-war functions which accelerated by the war conditions. Tosia Altman, Frumka Plotniczki and Haika Grosman were not mere "curriers" using their gender as a mean of easy travels from town to town. They were delegates (Shlicha) of the central leadership who organized seminars, gave instructions to the local branches, solved ideological conflicts and more. Other women, like Gusta Dawidson of Akiva in Krakow or Chajka Klinger in Będzin were dominant leaders in the local branches of the youth movements in the ghettoes and later ideological and social leaders of the armed underground. Hashomer Hatza'ir branch in Będzin was run by five girls and only one boy – all of them became important activists of the underground.
During the second stage of the war, some of these women integrated into the military leadership, but usually, their functions diminished a bit, according to the hegemonic male ethos that fighting is manhood task. However, a "dual leadership" of man and woman developed in some organizations, where the man functioned as the "mission oriented" leader and the woman as the "people oriented" leader. The feminine leaders represented the moral and ideological cause of the uprising; they were most instrumental in keeping the social cohesion of the underground groups; rather more it seems that they were more qualified to face death situation and presented high mental resilience – none of them, like Chajka Klinger or Renia Kukeilka was broken in interrogations and tortures. For many fighters they symbolized the uncompromised spirit of the uprising against darkness.
Some of these women survived their war but in their memoirs they focused on the story of their dead comrades and tended to minimize their own role in the events. That is one of the reasons why their important role as leaders was not studied for many years. It seems that the time has come to give the women their due.
Daniela Ozacky-Stern
“ Jewish Women in the Framework of the Partisan Units in Lithuania and Belarus”
The partisan resistance in World War II was born shortly after “Operation Barbarossa”, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, June 1941. In the course of 1942, the partisan movement saw the formation of organized units in the forests of Lithuania and Belarus. A special segment in the Soviet partisan movement were the Jews who had fled from different ghettos to the forests. Among them there were many Jewish women.
In the recent decades, the research on women during the Holocaust has gained momentum, as gender studies and research had developed and the uniqueness of women's experience during wars, genocides and traumas has been recognized. Attention was given also to women in the resistance movements and in actual fighting, however little had been written on Jewish women in the framework of the partisan units, where they had led daily-life together with men and had special role in guerilla fighting and resisting.
My paper will focus on Jewish partisan women and describe the complexity of their situation. Naturally, most Jewish women had no previous military experience nor any experience of life in combat units. Like their fellow male partisans, they had to adjust themselves to the harsh conditions of living in the savage nature of the forests. Women were facing additional obstacles such as trying to avoid sexual harassments and rape, keeping feminine hygiene, pregnancy and giving birth, physical difficulties, lack of privacy and more. To avoid sexual misconducts from their fellow male comrades, there were women who sought protection by men partners and lived intimately with them.
However, despite those rough circumstances, women learned how to use weapons and became skilled fighters; they were critical to the partisan resistance both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false paper. Some women engage themselves in household jobs, like working in the partisan base kitchen or in the makeshift clinics in the forests or in doing other economic duties for their units.
My research is based mostly on testimonies and life-stories of former Jewish partisans who related their memories after the war. Many on them remain until now shrouded in obscurity and I aim to give them a voice.
Jay Saper and Corbin Allardice
“Rikle Glezer: Partisan Poet of Vilna”
Rikle Glezer leapt off the train from the Vilna ghetto bound for death at Ponar to take up pen and pistol against the fascists, chronicling her life as a partisan through poetry. While her home city of Vilna, known as Jerusalem of Lithuania, lay in ruins, Glezer, through her work as a partisan poet, transformed the city’s legacy and breathed into it life anew. Despite the historical specificity, documentary nature, and overt politics of her poetic output, Glezer barely shows up in scholarship on partisans and Holocaust poetry in any language, save for the song “It was a Summer Day,” preserved in Kaczerginski’s Yiddish anthology and made famous in Chava Alberstein’s recording. Most scholarly and popular attention has been given to male Yiddish partisan poets, particularly Sutzkever, Kaczerginski, and Hirsh Glik. This canon, however, ignores the specifically gendered aspects of the Holocaust and of partisanship which lie at the core of Glezer’s poetic work. While canonical Jewish revenge literature, typified by Bialik’s pogrom poems, tended to represent women as “the raped woman,” an object of violence rendered mute, Glezer posits the partizanke (female partisan) both as the active subject of violence and the representative of Jewish resistance. This paper, the first devoted to Rikle Glezer, written by the translators of Glezer’s sole collection of poetry (in process) and drawing upon research in the archives of Yad Vashem, traces her life, investigates her work, and explores the relationship between her poetic work and her political actions. It concludes with a discussion of the authors’ use of Rikle Glezer as a means of teaching Yiddish language, culture, and history to a diverse cohort with a focus on promoting ongoing cultural engagement and political action. Ultimately, Yiddish translation is posited as a means of challenging historical erasure and opening the archive to allow the voices of female partisans to once again resound in the present as a vital force, as David Roskies writes of Sutzkever, “making each reader a partner in poetic resurrection” (Roskies, Against the Apocalypse).
Dr. Joanna Sliwa
“Counterfeit Countess: One Woman’s Involvement in Rescue, Relief, and Resistance in Lublin in German-Occupied Poland.”
A petite and elegant woman with impeccable Polish, German, and French languages skills, Countess Janina Suchodolska earned respect even from representatives of German civilian authorities and some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators stationed in Lublin in German occupied Poland. Fearless, persuasive, and goal-oriented, Janina advocated on behalf of Polish prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp. As a coordinator of relief in the Main Welfare Council, the only German-approved organization to provide aid to non-Jewish Poles, Janina entered Majdanek regularly to bring food and medicine, smuggle in correspondence and supplies, check on prisoners, and to arrange for the release of detainees expelled from their homes and held in the camp temporarily. Janina was a relief worker and a member of the Polish Resistance (the Home Army). Neither the people whom she helped nor her coworkers and fellow resisters (except the man who facilitated her arrival in Lublin) knew that Countess Janina Suchodolska was in fact Dr. Pepi Spinner Mehlberg, a prewar mathematics scholar from Lwów or that she was Jewish.
This paper will examine Janina’s involvement in rescue, relief, and resistance activities in Lublin on behalf of non-Jewish Poles. In particular, it will focus on factors that led her to engage in “flipped rescue,” or rescue of Poles by a Jew, and a Jewish woman masquerading as an aristocratic Pole at that. While Janina’s wartime and postwar activities are well documented in both primary and secondary sources, her personal life, including her Jewish identity, have only recently been confirmed. This paper will conclude with the reasons for this situation.
This paper derives from a book project that Dr. Elizabeth (Barry) White, Historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and I are currently working on. A copy of Janina’s memoir was given to Dr. White in 1990 by a former colleague of Janina’s husband, Henry Mehlberg. Previously, an eminent Holocaust expert in the United States with whom Henry’s colleague consulted, found the memoir interesting, but he did not consider the experiences of one woman Holocaust survivor sufficiently significant to merit publication. This was in the still early days of Holocaust studies, when the academic focus was mostly on the perpetration of the “final solution,” and before the experiences and activities of women during the Holocaust had attracted the interest that they enjoy today.
By focusing on Janina’s extraordinary history, this paper will lift one woman’s story from obscurity. In doing so, it will shed new light on women’s rescue and relief activities during the war, women’s involvement in resistance networks, and highlight one Jewish woman’s survival strategies during the Holocaust.
Sue Vice
“Rescue in Hungary: Representing Hansi Brand on Screen”
This paper offers a twofold argument: it not only presents the case for Hansi Brand’s importance as a Holocaust rescuer, but also claims that the significance of her actions is evident even in those filmed interviews where she seems to be sceptically treated. I will do so by comparing three apparently very different instances of her on-screen appearance.
Despite Brand’s status as the longest surviving member of the underground Relief and Rescue Committee from wartime Hungary, her role in the attempted rescue of the Hungarian Jews is considerably less well-known than that of her husband Joel Brand or her colleague Rezső Kasztner. Yet there is wide-ranging evidence of Brand’s importance as a negotiator, rescuer and post-war spokesperson for the wartime rescue operations, in the form of a series of filmed interviews conducted over the course of her post-war life. I will examine these visual images of Brand, in order to explore the ways in which her account of the attempted rescue has been integrated within or challenged by other narratives, and the conclusions about her historical role and its reception that can be drawn from such an analysis.
I will thus compare Brand’s self-presentation in three central cinematic examples: her testimony at the 1961 Eichmann Trial; an interview with Claude Lanzmann from 1978 that exists in the outtakes to his film Shoah, from which it was excluded; and an interview for Petr Bok and Martin Smok’s 1998 Czech television documentary Among Blind Fools about the Working Group in wartime Slovakia. I will place consideration of these filmed interviews in the context of other visual material, including the documentary Killing Kasztner (2009) and the Israeli television mini-series The Kasztner Trial (1994), both of which attempt to rehabilitate the eponymous protagonist alongside whom Brand worked, in relation to a wartime initiative that continues to divide opinion even today.
In comparing these filmed interviews with Brand, I will focus on such topics as the significance of shifts between languages – from Hebrew to German in both the Eichmann Trial and Lanzmann’s interview, exclusive use of Hungarian in that with Bok and Smok – as well as what seems to be her wary demeanour as her position threatens to turn from that of witness to defendant. The framing of Brand’s testimony in each case takes a very different form, as evident in the Eichmann Trial’s focus on the importance of armed rebellion versus negotiation; Lanzmann’s scepticism at the selective nature of the Kasztner Train initiative; Bok and Smok’s offering a corrective to these implied critiques, in their efforts to retrieve such remarkable attempts at rescue as those of the Slovakian and Hungarian initiatives.
I will conclude by evaluating the relationship between how Brand has been perceived in the post-war era, in the reductive terms of ‘wife, lover, woman’, in Sharon Geva’s formulation of her being viewed only in relation to male figures, and the nature of a highly unusual and painful story of attempted rescue initiated by her that this received wisdom obscures.
Lori Weintrob
Leadership Lessons of Zivia Lubetkin in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
This paper will argue that Zivia Lubetkin, the only woman on the high command of the ZOB (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa), was a critical decision-maker in the organized resistance to Nazism. Her transformative leadership skills include: strategic planning, creating community, critical reflection and sustaining a common purpose. Twenty-five years old at the outbreak of war, she negotiated strategically with Polish employers to obtain seasonal agricultural work for Jewish youth. Her strong diplomatic and communication skills made her invaluable in negotiation with the Joint Distribution Committee, the Judenrat and the Bund. She was directly involved in military operations, in both the January and April uprising. Mordechai Anielewicz often needed Lubetkin’s help to ease tensions with ardent Dror activists in his area. She placed “mutual aid and compassion” and her Zionist passion at the center of her actions. Observers like Shalom Cholawski pointed to her “emotional ability to unite” youth with an “ideological experience…full of warmth.” At the height of the battle in late April, the Komenda, notably including Zivia, directed the battle in the Central Ghetto. Further, in her memoir, Zivia constructed an astonishing portrait of wide-spread female activism, detailing the courage of the women in Warsaw and identifying dozens of heroic women, including those who were killed fighting. This article will make visible the central role of women leaders in building anti-fascist networks and in direct, armed confrontation as well as non-violent actions against the Nazis.