Report

• On 17^th,  18^th and 19^th November 2011, Gender Center Foundation held conference Women and Holocaust. New Perspectives and Challenges. The Conference, hosted by the Gender Studies Department, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, gathered high profile speakers, experts on the Holocaust research from all over the world.

  The conference started with key note address by Professor Andrea Pető from the Department of Gender Studies of the Central European University in Budapest. In her lecture “Gendered Memory of the Holocaust and Its Consequences” she argued that despite opening new opportunities for the Holocaust research in Central Europe after political changes after 1989, the national historiographies remained mostly unchanged and she pointed out the theoretical and methodological consequences of this deadlock to historians working on the Holocaust from a gender perspective in Central Europe.

  The key note lecture was followed by session “The Holocaust, Memory and Trauma” moderated by director of Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw Eleonora Bergman. Aleksandra Ubertowska (Associate Professor  at the University in Gdańsk, Poland) in her paper ”‘Masculine’/ ‘Feminine’ in Autobiographical Accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto (Comparative Analysis of the Recollections of Cywia Lubetkin and Icchak Cukierman)” discussed the challenges of applying the feminist theory of women’s autobiography to ‘holocaust literature’. Alicja Białecka (Ph.D. candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland) in her contribution entitled “Structures of Memory. Auschwitz in Women’s Literature” discussed how memory of Auschwitz is 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. Dana Mihăilescu (Ph.D., University of Bucharest, Romania), discussed a woman’s travel memoir of displacement dealing with the experiences of the Holocaust and Communism in her paper “Gendered Spaces of Holocaust Traumas in Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address”. Gintare Malinauskaite (Ph.D. student, Humboldt University, Berlin, GErmany) talked about how gendered representation of the Jewish woman contributes to the understanding and remembrance of the Shoah in Lithuania in her paper “Memory of Gender: The Transmission of Gender in the Lithuanian Holocaust Film Ghetto”. Dr Katalin Pécsi-Pollner from Hungary presented her pioneering research on biographies of  Hungarian Zionist  Women in Israel. Dr Louise Hecht (Senior Lecturer in Jewish History at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic), in her presentation “Gendered Narratives of Eastern European Survivors in Israeli Feature Films” discussed the 1980s shift in the discourse on the Holocaust and illustrated her argument with analysis of Israeli feature films from the 1960s until today.

  The second session, moderated by Professor Andrea Peto, opened with presentation by Susanne Businger (University of Zürich). In her presentation “Jewish Women Biographies of Their Escapes to Switzerland and Biographies of Swiss Rescuers and the Gendered Nation of ‘Ego-Documents’” she talked about difficulties faced by women narrating their biographies after the Second World War and use that can be made of  biographical research in Switzerland. Sarah Rosen (Ph. D. candidate at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem) dealt with survival strategies of Jewish women in the ghettos of northern Transnistria in 1941–1944 in her presentation “Jewish Women in Transnistria 1941–1944: Coping with Extreme Circumstances – A Gender Perspective”. Dr Monika Vrzgulova (Director of the Holocaust Documentation Center in Bratislava) presented paper examining biographic narratives of female Holocaust survivors after the year 1989. Dr Joanna B. Michlic (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) in her paper entitled “‘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” analysed the relationship between Polish Christian women-rescuers and the rescued Jews. Katarzyna Bojarska (Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School for Social Research in the Polish Academy of Sciences) in her presentation “Gender Conscious Art of Theory: Trauma, Memory and the Holocaust Studies” addressed 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. The closing discussion was followed by open lecture,

  Professor Lenore J. Weitzman and Professor Dalia Ofer discussed a new sequential model for analyzing women’s experiences during the Holocaust in their paper “A Conceptual Framework for Explaining the Presence and Disappearance of Traditional Gendered Behavior during the Holocaust”.

   

  The second day of the conference started with session Sex, Rape and Survival – Sexual Violence against Jewish Women moderated by Professor Darcy Buerkle (Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts). The first speaker,  Agnieszka Nikliborc (a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Holocaust Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow) talked about representations of the female body in survivors’ memoirs in her paper “Female Body Imprisoned in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau”. Aranzazu Calderon Puerta (the Institute of Literary Research of Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) in her presentation ”The Motif of Rape in Ida Fink’ s Short Story Aryan Papers and in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Play Our Class” analysed different ways of understanding the representation of rape and their relationship with the difference between masculine and feminine points of view. Collaborative paper on women’s experience of fear during the war authored by Ivana Koutníková and  Eliška Žeravíková (Palacký University in Olomouc) was delivered by the latter. Historian Agnieszka Weseli’s paper “‘Girls’, ‘lasses’, ‘typical prostitutes’. Forced prostitutes of KL-Auschwitz-Birkenau in the “Statements” of former prisoners and camp staff” explored use of memories in formation of the discourse on Holocaust in last decades in Poland.

  The panel was followed by a book launch: co-authors of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, Rochelle Saidel and Sonja Hedgepeth presented their book.

  The afternoon session Visual and Literary Representation of the Female Experience of the Holocaust was chaired by dr Bożena Karwowska. Dr Pnina Rosenberg discussed the inmates’ artistic expression as the manifestation of a feminine voice and interpreted them as a subtle yet heroic attempt to survive as a dignified woman and a human being in her lecture “A Space of Their Own: Women’s Visual Art during the Holocaust”. Dr Bożena Keff provided analysis of several literary pieces from the collection of the Jewish Historical Institute in her paper “Meaning, Importance and Permanence, Amateurs’ Poems from the Time of Shoah”. Dr Lea Prais examined 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 in her paper “The Stereotype and Beyond: The Image of the Jewish Woman in the Holocaust in Writings of the Time”.

  The third day started with session Visualizing the Holocaust moderated by dr Radosław Muniak (Warsaw School for Social Sciences and Humanities). Dr Hedvig Turai from Ludvig Museum in Budapest in her presentation “Intersections of Erasures from the Kadar Era” examined the interweaving of gender features with the memory of the Holocaust as it appeared in the Kadar era art in Hungary, in works by Erzsebet Shaar. Monika Mikusova (Ph.D., lecturer in Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava) discussed different portrayals of Holocaust victims in Central European Cinema.  Kazimiera Szczuka from Polish Academy of Science talked about construction of heroism using different examples of narratives about Irena Sendler.

  The second session Biographies and Autobiographies was moderated by Jolanta Żyndul, the Head of the Mordechai Anielewicz Center for the Study and Teaching of the History and Culture of Jews in Poland. Dr Michal Unger (Ashkelon Academic College, Izrael) in her presentation entitled “Gender and Family Relations in the Łódź Ghetto” discussed the ways in which the construction of female gender impacted on family relationships in the unique circumstances of the Łódź Ghetto. Johanna Schüller (University of Potsdam) presented paper on life story of pedagogue Genia Silkes. Yehudit Kol-Inbar (Yad Vashem, Israel) revealed fascinating stories of 4 women doctors in her lecture entitled “Hidden from Eye and Heart: Stories of Four Women Who Directed Children Homes and Accompanied Them to Their Mortal Fate”. Dr Katarina Hradska (Institute of History of Slovakian Academy of Science, Bratislava, Slovakia) presented the portrait of Gizy Fleischmann in her paper entitled “The Woman – the Jewess – the Collaborator”. Monika Hankova from the Jewish Museum in Prague in her paper “‘November Winds Destroyed My Happiness’: The Unique Woman’s Story in the Holocaust and Consequences after the Shoah” used the biographical study of Klara Fischer-Pollak in order to analyze the following themes: post-Holocaust trauma from a gendered perspective, multiple identities (Czech-German-Jewish), the (post-) war experience of home (physical and social), the marginalization of women’s life, pauperism, the question of displacement, migration, the suffering of mixed families during the Holocaust, consequences after 1945.

  The final session of the conference was moderated by dr Louise Hecht. Dr Joanna Stöcker-Sobelman (Gender Studies Department, Institute for Literary Research Polish Academy of Sciences) in her paper “Love as a Strategy of Survival” presented love  as a strategy of survival in concentration camps. Dr Eleonore Lappin-Eppel (Graz University, Austria) discussed women’s testimonies of their fate as Jewish forced laborers in her paper “A Missing Voice: Hungarian Jewish Women Slave Laborer in Austria”.  Bożena Karwowska (Associate Professor in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia), discussed the role played by luxury items in life of extermination camps in the paper entitled “Women’s Luxury Items in the Nazi Death Camps”.

  The conference was organized by Gender Center Foundation in partnership with the Gender Studies Department, Central European University, Budapest; Historical Institute, Slovakian Academy of Sciences, Bratislava; Institute for Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw; Kurt and Ursula Schubert Institute of Jewish Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc.

  The conference was supported by the International Visegrad Fund, Heinrich Boell Stiftung, Joint Distribution Committee and Beit Warsaw Foundation.

  For details of the conference please contact info@womenandholocaust.eu