Women in the Holocaust

Around three million Jewish women were murdered in the Holocaust. The figure is the female share of the six million total and the murder rate among Jewish women in Europe was, if anything, slightly higher than among Jewish men because the SS selection rules at the death camps almost always sent women with young children straight to the gas chambers. The men’s selection rate was higher because slave-labour assignments were more often given to fit men. The result was that the surviving population at the end of the war was disproportionately male, and that, of the women who did survive, a far higher share than of the men had survived alone, having watched their mothers and children selected to die.

Women’s experience inside the catastrophe ran on a different track from men’s at almost every stage. The early antisemitic legislation of 1933, 1939 hit the men first, with the bans on Jewish men in the professions, the boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses and the political arrests. Women’s lives were transformed second hand by the loss of male earnings and by the increasing burden of running a household under sanctions, then under occupation, then in the ghettos. The journals and letters of Jewish women in the period describe an enormous expansion of domestic work: queuing for rations, repairing clothes that could not be replaced, finding food on the black market, smuggling food into the ghettos through children too small to attract the attention of the German guards.

The ghetto period brought women into the workforce in large numbers. The textile factories in the Łódź ghetto, the most heavily industrialised, employed thousands of women on twelve-hour shifts; production of German army uniforms continued in the ghetto until summer 1944. The Jewish councils, by contrast, were almost entirely male. The few exceptions, including women in middle-rank council positions in some smaller communities, were rare enough to make the lists of named individuals. The Jewish ghetto police were entirely male. The underground armed organisations were mixed, with women like Vladka Meed, Tosia Altman and Zivia Lubetkin in central command roles in Warsaw, and women couriers in numbers because the Aryan-side smuggling and message work was almost always done by women, who could pass with false papers more easily than circumcised men.

The death camps treated women, in the procedural sense, much as they treated men. The selection at the ramp at Birkenau separated men from women and children. Women were tattooed in different number ranges. The women’s camp at Birkenau, BIa, was run with the same brutality as the men’s. The women’s slave labour details ran the same hours and the same death rates. What was different was the addition of sexual violence by SS and male prisoner functionaries, the addition of forced sterilisation and forced abortion in the medical block, and the addition, at Birkenau and at Ravensbrück, of organised brothels for male prisoner functionaries that pressed women into sexual slavery. The brothels operated in around ten of the major concentration camps from 1943 onwards. The German term was Sonderbau. Around two hundred women were forced to work in them. The brothels are documented in SS records and were a topic of considerable postwar embarrassment in West Germany; they were not seriously studied until the 1990s.

Pregnancy in the ghettos and the camps was a death sentence. The Germans banned Jewish births in occupied Poland by decree in 1942. Women who became pregnant in the ghettos used backstreet abortionists or, in some cases, were aborted by Jewish doctors who knew that a pregnancy detected by the SS would mean the woman’s death. Pregnancies discovered on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau meant straight to the gas chambers. The Jewish midwife of Auschwitz, Stanislawa Leszczynska, who is now under consideration for canonisation by the Polish Catholic Church, delivered around three thousand babies in the women’s barracks at Birkenau between 1943 and 1945. The babies who were delivered alive were almost all murdered by the SS, drowned in barrels by Schwester Klara, the criminal kapo of the maternity block, in the early period and gassed with their mothers in the later period. A handful survived because they were hidden by their mothers and the kapos who had taken pity on them. Leszczynska’s account, written after liberation, is one of the documents.

The historiography of women in the catastrophe is recent. The first major study, Joan Ringelheim’s work in the early 1980s, argued that women’s experience had been systematically marginalised in the postwar literature because the historians had been male and the dominant survivor voices had been male. The argument was contested at the time, particularly by Lawrence Langer, who argued that the catastrophe should not be split into separate male and female stories because that would obscure the totality of the crime. The argument has settled into a working consensus: the catastrophe was the same in its outcome for both sexes, but the experiences leading to that outcome differed enough, and the surviving testimony differed enough, that the women’s track has to be told in its own terms as well as in the general account. The major women’s memoirs, Klüger, Heller, Hart-Moxon, Lasker-Wallfisch, Klein, Delbo, are the body of work that has carried the women’s track since the 1990s.

See also

Sources

  • Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 1998
  • Joan Ringelheim, ed., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, Paragon House, 1993
  • Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz et après, Editions de Minuit, 1965, 1971; Auschwitz and After, Yale University Press, 1995
  • Stanislawa Leszczynska, Raport położnej z Oświęcimia, 1965, on the Auschwitz maternity block
  • Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell, Schöningh, 2009, on SS brothels in the camps
  • Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton University Press, 2007