AP/JWST 3856 3.00

Women and the Holocaust

Through the work of a small group of scholars across disciplines, there has been a growing acknowledgment of the importance of gender as a category of analysis in deepening our understanding of the past and its relevance to the present. Although both men and women were victimized by the Nazi genocide, writing by men and women victims and survivors indicates significant differences in their experiences of atrocity in ghettos, in hiding, and in concentration camps, as well as different ways of remembering and coping with the past and its aftereffects. Gender analysis enables us to discuss both the similarities and differences in the experiences and responses of men and women to the Nazi genocide, and in the ways they respond to the aftermath of extreme trauma.

In addition, scholars have observed that when we study the Holocaust, we inevitably extract from it contemporary meanings. Analyzing the images of men and women in the Holocaust in retrospective descriptions – the narratives of historical and literary accounts, as well as art, film, and popular culture – helps us better to understand the interpretations and ideological uses to which history and memory are put.

In contemporary modes of representing the Holocaust, men and women are featured in particular ways that are frequently at odds with experience and historical reality and, moreover, sometimes suppress real memory, such as recollections of sexual violation, or disruptions of parent-child bonds under Nazi atrocity. Bringing gender analysis to bear on the Nazi genocide – by examining both traces of the past (such as survivor narratives) and the role of that past in the contemporary imagination – expands the compass of Holocaust studies, and also has bearing on contemporary genocidal actions and gender-related war crimes.