A moving and detailed portrait of women in the most terrible circumstances, by a respected author and Holocaust survivor.

Introduction : the role of gender in the Holocaust / Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer -- Gender and the Jewish family in modern Europe / Paula E. Hyman -- Keeping calm and weathering the storm : Jewish women's responses to daily life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 / Marion Kaplan -- The missing 52 percent : research on Jewish women in interwar Poland and its implications for Holocaust studies / Gershon Bacon -- Women in the Jewish labor bund in interwar Poland / Daniel Blatman -- Ordinary women in Nazi Germany : perpetrators, victims, followers, and bystanders / Gisela Bock -- The Grodno Ghetto and its underground : a personal narrative / Liza Chapnik -- The key game / Ida Fink -- 5050

Despite some pioneering work by scholars, historians still find it hard to listen to the voices of women in the Holocaust. Learning more about the women who both survived and did not survive the Nazi genocide — through the testimony of the women themselves — not only increases our understanding of this terrible period in history, but makes us rethink our relationship to the gendered nature of knowledge itself. Women in the Holocaust is about the ways in which socially- and culturally-constructed gender roles were placed under extreme pressure; yet also about the fact that gender continued to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Indeed, paradoxically enough, the extreme conditions of the Holocaust — even of the death camps — may have reinforced the importance of gender. Whilst Jewish men and women were both sentenced to death, gender nevertheless operated as a crucial signifier for survival. Pregnant women as well as women accompanied by young children or those deemed incapable of hard labour were sent straight to the gas chambers. The very qualities which made them women were manipulated and exploited by the Nazis as a source of dehumanization. Moreover, women were less likely to survive the camps even if they were not selected for death. Gender in the Holocaust therefore became a matter of life and death.

The many powerful accounts of the Holocaust have given rise to women’s voices, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular and how they related to them. In Experience and Expression, the authors take on this challenge, providing the first book-length gendered analysis of women and the Holocaust, a topic that is emerging as a new field of inquiry in its own right. Accessible to readers on many levels, the essays portray the experiences of women of various religious and ethnic backgrounds, and draw from the fields of English, religion, nursing, history, law, comparative literature, philosophy, French, and German. The collection explores an array of fascinating topics: rescue and resistance, the treatment of Roma and Sinti women, the fate of female forced laborers, Holocaust politics, nurses at so-called euthanasia centers, women’s experiences of food and hunger in the camps, the uses and abuses of Anne Frank, and the representations of the Holocaust in art, film, and literature in the postwar era. The introduction provides a thorough overview of the current status of research in the field, and each essay seeks to push the theoretical boundaries that shape our understanding of women’s experience and agency during the Holocaust and of the ways in which they have expressed their memories.

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies.

About the participation of German women in World War II and in the Holocaust.

The first book in English to specifically address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust