Presentations

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    The Holocaust, Memory and Trauma moderated by Eleonora Bergman

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    Structures of Memory. Auschwitz in Women’s Literature My paper focuses on how memory of Auschwitz was represented in memoirs written by women survivors and how it developed in the period from the first years after the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, through the 60 years of the postwar period until the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries.I will analyze literature written in Polish and English languages. This will be complemented by outstanding memoirs that were originally written in other languages and later translated into English.I will present literature written both by the Jewish victims of mass deportations and those women who were eith

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    Gender Conscious Art of Theory: Trauma, Memory and the Holocaust Studies In my presentation I would especially want to address the issues of methodological and theoretical innovations, or the so-called expanding of the field, related to the trauma theory as elaborated by Cathy Caruth, Griselda Pollock and Bracha Ettinger. One of the essential insights is that gender should not be treated as a non-issue or a transparent problem in the context of the discussion on war or genocide, but only with keeping these context in mind is one able to actually grasp the specificity of this particular limit event and its memory. Both literature and visual arts provide a good field

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    Sex, rape and survival- Sexual violence against Jewish women Moderated by Darcy Buerkle

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    Jewish women biographies of their escapes to Switzerland and biographies of Swiss rescuers and the gendered nation of „ego-documents” While the production of biographies increased in the post-war-era, people who had suffered persecution did not speak about their painful experiences for years. In this paper, the biographies of Jewish women and men who escaped to Switzerland with the help of non- jewish people, will be analysed. Likewise, biographies of Swiss rescuers – especially women – who wrote their biographies in the eighties and nineties, will be involved in the research of narration the past. Questions, why women in general had difficulties to narrate their biographies after the Second World War and whether and in whic

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    The Motif of Rape in Ida Fink’ s short story Aryan Papers and in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’ s play ‘Our class’ My paper is about the gendered representation of Holocaust stories from Central Europe in post WW II societies. I will endeavour to show how sexual violence functions in culture and in how many different ways it can be represented in literary texts: on the one hand, it can be understood as a symbol of relationships between men's antagonistic communities (mythology according to R. Barthes); and on the other hand, as a symbol of the continuum of violence in the patriarchy (violence against specific women, structural violence and symbolical violence). The different ways of understanding the repre

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    „November winds destroyed my happiness“. The unique woman´s story in the holocaust and the consequences after Shoah My study deals with the career of Klara Fischer-Pollak, a German-Jewish medicine doctor from Czechoslovakia. I use the biographical study in order to analyse the following themes: post-holocaust trauma on a gendered perspective, multiple identities (Czech-German-Jewish), the (post)war experience of home (physical and social), the marginalisation of women´s life, pauperism, the question of displacement, migration, the suffering of mixed families during holocaust, consenquences after 1945. All above mentioned subjects I would like to deal with in the interdisciplinary perspective based upon Klar

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    Gendered Narratives of Eastern European Survivors in Israeli Feature Films ‘To forget and […] to get one’s history wrong, are essential factor in the making of a nation’, observed Renan in his path-breaking essay ‘What is a Nation?’ After some decades of ‘memory culture’, forgetting and repressing seem to become ever more fascinating categories for analyzing collective narratives. Regarding the public discourse of the Holocaust in Israel, remembering and forgetting are entangled in specific ways since the establishment of the state. Although the Holocaust and its six millions of Jewish victims are ever-present in legislation, ceremonies, schools and monuments, Israel

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    The Woman – the Jewess – the collaborator My paper is an analysis of Gizy Fleischmann - important person of Slovak Jewry during the war Slovak State (1939 - 1945). She made great effort to save Slovak Jews from deportations. Gizy Fleischmann was in contact with the German Berater Wisliceny. It is questionable - was it voluntary cooperation or forced collaboration?  However, this seemed to be only possible alternative how to rescue Slovak Jews before the tragic end.

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    Women’s Luxury Items in the Nazi Death Camps The terms luxury and gender are seldom discussed in the context of the Holocaust. A close reading of memoirs of the survivors of the Nazi extermination camps, however, reveals that both luxury and gender can provide an interesting lens for looking at the realm of the extermination camps. First, by not seeing prisoners as women and men researchers are double victimizing prisoners and repeating the gesture of perpetrators. Moreover, gendered acts and behaviors of prisoners in the Nazi death camps were of a crucial importance for their chances of survival and for their abilities to resume “normal

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    Meaning, importance and permanence. Amateurs’ poems from the time of Shoah Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute are in possession of collection of literary pieces collected after the end of WWII.  Those texts are mainly poems written in 1939-1945. In 2009 two of JHI employees started to work on those materials with the aim to publish an anthology of the texts, with title Yellowed Pages.  Authors of those texts in their majority didn’t survive the war.  There are 28 female authors out of total number of 42.  They were very young, often teenagers or young women in their early twenties.  They wrote in Polish, as they attended Polish schools just before the war st

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    Collaborative Analysis of Interviews with Holocaust Survivor Families Multi-Layered Tellings of Women, War, and the Will to Live: This paper discusses the ways in which traumatic events and the meaning of survival are remembered and reported in the research analysis teams of the Transcending Trauma Project, a multi-year effort focused on coping and adaptation in Holocaust survivor families, focused in this discussion on new insights that become available on the transmission of messages about women, war, and the will to live. These triads of researchers working together to analyze 275 in-depth psychosocial life narratives of survivors and their families from 50 i

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    Hidden from Eye and Heart: Stories of Four Women Who Directed Children Homes and Accompanied Them to Their Mortal Fate After the Holocaust, in order to refute the behavior of the Jews defined as ‘lambs to slaughter’, the Israeli society adopted stories, which put an emphasis on the resistance movements, such as revolutionaries and attempts to fight the enemy. In later years there was a trial to add in elements of ‘spiritual resistance’, but in spite of this, the fundamentals of the narrative changed only slightly. Death awaited all the Jews. Those who tried to resist it, fought for a privilege that most people could not afford: to choose the way they would die, to be killed in action. In most situations, other

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    Women’s Fear and the Perception of Emotions in Czech-Slovak Memoir Literature of the Holocaust (with Ivana Koutníková) The Holocaust was an extreme life experience, which had effect on lives of several millions people. In spite of the fact, everyone went through the same hell; their horrors of everyday’s life were different. The aim of our paper is focused on women’s emotional perception, especially fear. Women had to face very often completely other situations than men. In our contribution, we are focusing on these situations, which were influenced by their femininity. The women’s perception of the Holocaust was strongly influenced by several facts, which had to lead to perception of ‘another’ reality. Becaus

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    A Missing Voice: Hungarian Jewish Women Slave Laborer in Austria At the time of the deportations from Hungary in the spring of 1944 approximately 16.000 Jews were sent not to Auschwitz but to Strasshof an der Nordbahn. In Eastern Austria they were deployed for forced labor in agriculture, trade and industry. Nevertheless they were not completely spared the terrible experience of concentration camps: They were taken to Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt and Mauthausen. More than half of those deportees were women, many of them came with their children, parents and/or in-laws, but without their husbands who were serving in the Hungarian army. Those women played a

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    Gender of Memory: The Representation of Jewish Women in the Lithuanian Holocaust Film Ghetto Holocaust, alongside with the Soviet repression, was one of the most traumatic experiences in the 20th century Lithuanian history. However, in Lithuania, there still exists a vacuum within the academic field of cultural memory research and there is a lack of studies on the Shoah and its representation. The approach of “closing the books” and “forgetting the past” was chosen. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the medial representation of the Holocaust in the post-independence Lithuanian cinema focusing on the gendered depiction of Jewishness. Ghetto (2005) is the first and the only

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    I will never forget what you did for me during the war Relationships Between Polish Women Rescuers and Jewish Survivors In The Light of Correspondence to the Central Committee of Polish Jews and the Joint, 1945-1949: In spite of a growing number of publications over the last decade, the history of Christian Polish rescuers of Jews during WWII and the intricate relationship between the rescuers and the rescued has been under-researched. The presentation and self-presentation of the rescuers, the perceptions of rescue activities by rescued Jews, the impact of gender on these activities and their perceptions, and the memory of the interactions betwee

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    Gendered Spaces of Holocaust Traumas in Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address My paper examines a woman’s travel memoir of displacement dealing with the experiences of the Holocaust and Communism, and with the author’s subsequent emigration to the US: this is Anca Vlasopolos’s memoir No Return Address. In identifying the coordinates of these various spaces of trauma in a travel memoir, my paper addresses questions on gender and Holocaust representation and remembrance: What was the impact of living in post-Holocaust Romania on forming the memory of the Holocaust and gender? In what way did the US space reflect women’s attempt to work through traumas? I argue that Vlasop

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    Picture of Holocaust in Central European Cinema. The Victim and it‘s Female Face The topic of holocaust has always had a strong presence in the cinematographies of Central Europe, especially Czechoslovakia and Poland, although the approach has radically changed for several times since the end of the WWII, depending on the actual socio – political context. Even during these radical changes, one thing remained quite stable – the gender of the heroine. If we take a close look on the films dealing with the topic, which were made in Czechoslovakia and Poland from the end of World War II until the end of the eighties, we will see that in the vast majority of the titles the main

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    Visual and Literary Representation of the Female Experience of the Holocaust Moderated by Radosław Muniak

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    Female body imprisoned in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau I would like to give a voice to female survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp. Published memoires of both Polish-Jewish women (Halina Birenbaum, Miriam Akavia) and Polish female activists of the underground Home Army (Zofia Kossak, Wanda Ossowska, Seweryna Szmaglewska and Krystyna Żywulska) will be analyzed. All of them were Polish citizens. Furthermore, the adjective Jewish is used regarding Polish-Jewish women and gentile regarding Christian-Polish women. The goal of this linguistic division is avoiding the exclusion of Jewish narratives from Polish discourse. I will take an interpretative app

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    Open lecture: A Conceptual Framework for explaining the Presence and Disappearance of Traditional Gendered behavior during the Holocaust This paper analyzes the apparent contradiction between two dramatically different portrayals of women’s experiences during the Holocaust, and proposes a new framework for incorporating both into a more sequential theory of Jewish responses during the Holocaust. In reviewing the recent literature on women in the Holocaust in Central Europe, we found a substantial body of scholarship that links women’s experiences during the Holocaust to their pre-war roles as mothers, wives, and homemakers. In contrast, we also found a body of scholarship that challenges the view that women responded in gend

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    Different Holocaust Narratives Interviews with Hungarian Zionist Women in Israel Katalin Pécsi-Pollner visited Israel in August and September 2010 to speak to 54 women originating from Hungary, who were involved in rescuing Jewish children and adults in occupied Budapest in 1944/45. For many of the women she interviewed, this was the first time they were prepared to break their silence. In the interviews on their life histories, they relate their own persecution under National Socialism and their involvement in a wide range of resistance and rescue work in Budapest’s Glass House. They tell how they managed to survive the Nazi terror and a new life bega

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    Gendered memory of the Holocaust and its consequences Political changes in 1989 opened up new opportunities for Holocaust research in Central Europe. The paper analyses how, in spite of hopes and fantasies, interpretative opportunities in national historiographies remained mostly unchanged: a historical discourse ignoring other options such as the aesthetic discourse or the analysis of affective encounters. Based on my research on post Second World War legal processes I am pointing out what are the theoretical and methodological consequences of this deadlock to historians working on Holocaust from a gender perspective in Central Europe.

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    The Stereotype and beyond: the Image of the Jewish Woman in the Holocaust in writings of the Time This lecture will examine the image of the Jewish woman in the Holocaust as it is presented in texts that were written by Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II. The analysis will deal with the ways in which images of Jewish women and their functioning in the situation of extreme repression are depicted. The main question that arises from analysis of different texts is whether the presentation of the image of the Jewish woman during the Holocaust went beyond the boundaries of the accepted stereotype and added an additional dimension or whether it did not. In other words, did the reality of

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    Jewish Women in Transnistria 1941–1944 Coping with Extreme Circumstances – A Gender Perspective: This article deals with Jewish women in the ghettos of northern Transnistria in 1941–1944 and how they coped with the Nazi and Romanian occupation and its anti-Jewish policy. I differentiate between local Jewish women residing in this part of the Ukraine, which the German occupiers named Transnistria, and women among the Jews expelled by the Romanian authorities from Bessarabia, Bucovina, and Dorohoi. Two sub-groups can also be discerned within the latter: women expelled from Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, and those from southern Buc

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    A Space of their Own: Women’s Visual Art during the Holocaust Although men and women inmates during the Holocaust faced the same fate, and had a similar daily schedule, there were several gender-based distinguishes, which are reflected in the visual art done by women-inmates. Despite the horrendous conditions in the ghettos and camps, women inmates fought against the dirt by continuously cleaning and tidying up. Following their ‘familiar’ routine of housework not only prevented the spread of disease but also served as a kind of practical therapy, enabling them to feel as if they were gaining control over their limited lebensraum. Although it was metaphor

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    Genia Silkes – a Pedagogue of the Ghetto in Warsaw I would like to present the educational work in the Ghetto of Warsaw and the pedagogical work of a women, who acted as a teacher in a clandestine school in the ghetto – Genia Silkes. Silkes studied paedagogy at the “Jewish Teacher Seminar” in Vilnius and had already been a member of the left Poale Zion during her studenthood. After her studies she did also teach at Tsisho-Schools. I considered the following topics to be the most important ones concerning her work in schools of the Ghetto of Warsaw: 1. The links between Silkes political and educational ideas and their realisation in the ghetto;

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    Love as a strategy of survival The topic of love as a strategy of survival leads to the the phenomena of the emotional coping strategies applied by prisoners in concentration camps. It guides to these fragments of recollections that talk about personal attachment, kindness, compassion, emotional closeness and friendship during the time of imprisonment. Analysing love in the terms of coping strategies requires looking at it in different aspects, just to mention few: maternity love, relatives’ love, distance relationship love, camp families’ dedication, and affection – also unwanted.The camp literature and film provide many e

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    Narratives about Irena Sendlerowa In 1999, a group of U.S. female students produced a high school play called Life in a Jar about Irena Sendler’s life story. That performance turned out to be a spark that set off a whole chain of events. The Polish social worker, member of the underground Council for Aid to Jews ‘Żegota’ under German Nazi occupation, recognised with a Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965, became then an icon of popular imagination, as well as, incidentally, an icon of a heroic view of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. Based on Anna Mieszkowska’s book entitled Mother of the Children of the Holo

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    Intersections of Erasures from the Kadar era During the Kadar era in Hungary, both Jewish  identification and anti-semitism were taboo topics, and with them, consequently, historical investigation and memorialization of the Holocaust were severely circumscribed as well. The memory of the Holocaust as inextricably linked to the persecution of Jews was exiled, at best, to the margins of the private sphere. When it was considered, abstract, antifascist ideas were emphasized, while any special individual, or differentiated view of the Holocaust was hidden.  In art, the universalist ideas of both socialist aesthetics and modernism after WW2,

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    “Masculine”/”feminine” in Autobiographical Accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto Comparative Analysis of the Recollections of  Cywia Lubetkin and Icchak Cukierman. Up till the 1980s, gender-based war experience was marginalised by many scholars or  excluded entirely from the scope of  research. It was only with the studies of J. Ringelheim, E. Katz and M. Goldenberg that a crucial turning point was reached in the re-evaluation of the wartime past, leading to a consideration of “gender-related responses” to the Holocaust and war. My presentation aims to explore the relevance of the distinction between what are regarded as “masculine” and “feminine” coping strategies duri

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    Gender and Family Relations in the Łódź Ghetto I will discuss the ways in which the construction of female gender impacted on family relationships in the unique circumstances of the Łódź Ghetto, especially under conditions of severe hunger and forced labor. Sources on gender relationships can be found in a large and varied number of original sources as personal letters sent by Ghetto residents to a special office of Complaints and Petitions in the Jewish self-administration; The Chronicle of The Łódź Ghetto, 1941-1944; minutes of court hearings on conjugal affairs in the Ghetto from which we can learn the causes of the conflicts within the

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    Biographic narratives of female Holocaust survivors after the year 1989 Biographic narratives are multi-layered social texts which hide in themselves “symbolic worlds of a society and sub-cultural narrative societies” and these keep being constructed over again in the given moment, carrying in them, apart from other things, an imprint of the given era they are from. In connection to the notion of the conference, I ask in my lecture the following question: can we find specific female topics and forms of interpretation of one’s own experience of the Holocaust in the above-mentioned stories? The documents I have been working with for a long time are transcripts of bi

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    ‘Girls’, ‘lasses’, ‘typical prostitutes’. Forced prostitutes of KL-Auschwitz-Birkenau in the “Statements” of former prisoners and camp staff – use of memories in formation of the discourse Archives of National Oświęcim Museum (Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum Oświęcimskiego – APMO) are located in block 24 of former KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the first floor, where a brothel, one of two in the camp complex, used to exist since 1943. 134 volumes of the “Statements” contain more than 3 thousand official accounts of former prisoners, witnesses, forced laborers and members of the German crew, collected from 1954 on to the 70s. In 2002 I found there few dozens of references (of various length) to brothels in KL Auschwitz and its ‘workers’. Accounts were given mostly by men, only a few come

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    Women’s Fear and the Perception of Emotions in Czech-Slovak Memoir Literature of the Holocaust (with Eliška Žeravíková) The Holocaust means a big milestone in history, which effected whole world. It exists hundred of documents and books which are dealing with it. Among other things, memoir literature plays very important rule in passing experiences on younger generations, but it stand out of researchers’ interest long time. Beginning of 90s meant change in working with this type of literature but memoir literature is still in background of interest in Czech-Slovak context. The contribution focuses on the reflexive Holocaust experiences through women’s eyes because women’s Holocaust has several specific featu

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    Biographies and Autobiographies Moderated by Jolanta Żyndul

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    Book launch: Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust Rochelle Saidel, Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, Sonja Hedgepeth, Rochelle Saidel, co-author, Director of Remember the Women Institute, Sonja Hedgepeth, co-author, Middle Tennessee State University, Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, chapter author, Chair of Culture and Film Studies, University of Haifa The groundbreaking anthology Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press), edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, is part of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute's Series on Jewish Women. Using testimonies, Nazi documents, memoirs, a

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