Togetherness and Isolation: Holocaust Survivor Memories of Intimacy and Sexuality in

the Ghettos
Author(s): Jonathan Friedman
Source: The Oral History Review , Winter - Spring, 2001, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter -
Spring, 2001), pp. 1-16
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Oral History Association

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Oral History Review 28/1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 1-16

Togetherness and Isolation: Holocaust

Survivor Memories of Intimacy and
Sexuality in the Ghettos
by Jonathan Friedman

In the ever-expanding world of Holocaust studies, some have

argued that we are quickly reaching a saturation of knowledge
and that a popular environment congested by Holocaust institu-
tions might actually have a detrimental impact on the scholarly
study of the Nazi genocide.' Although justified in their fears, such
critics may fail to realize other possibilities for future research
and inquiry into the Holocaust. Historians may know about the
apparatus of death, but there is still much more that we need to
investigate, everything from personal narratives to the mystery
of human survival itself. Holocaust oral histories and video tes-
timonies present scholars with a vast archive to mine for this
purpose.2
Survivor memories are also an undiscovered arena for new
theories and methodologies. In fact, there is an almost telescopic
connection between post-structuralist theory and the Nazi geno-
cide, the latter seeming to substantiate the former from its utter
eradication of the "center" and the "rational" to its implications
about power and life as meaninglessness.3 Broadly speaking,
post-structuralism can serve as a point of departure for an analy-
sis of an extremely illogical situation like the Holocaust - a situa-
tion in which the constants of life - order, civility, and morality--

Jonathan Friedman is currently a historian in the Division of Exhibitions at the United

States Holocaust Museum. Author of The Lion and the Star: Gentile-Jewish Relations in

Three Hessian Communities, 1918-1945 (University Press of Kentucky, 1998), Dr. Fried-
man received his doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1996 and
worked as a historian at the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation from 1997 to 1999.

1See especially, Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Auschwitz and the Professors," Commentary, June
1998, and the responses to it in the August 1998 issue.
2 See Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven, 1991), and his Admitting the
Holocaust (New York, 1995).
3See Dominick LaCapra's History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998), and his
Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994).

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2 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

lost all relevance. Searching for power in the

ing places, as Michel Foucault did, one could
impact of the ghetto experience on somethin
sexual behavior?4
The question is not an innocuous one. Viewing the experi-
ences of Holocaust survivors through the prism of sexuality is a
task that invites a host of problems. There are those, for instance,
who believe that such an analysis may politicize the historical
narrative, and like its gender twin, "poison" the well of discovery.
Still others may see a focus on sex and sexuality as somehow
diverting attention away from mass murder and thus trivializing
it, or worse, desecrating the memories of survivors. This problem
is compounded by the lack of viable models and precedents in
scholarly literature. Even the groundbreaking monographs on
survivor psychology by Bruno Bettelheim, Terence Des Pres, and
Viktor Frankl discount or distort issues of sexuality while restrict-
ing their analysis essentially to the concentration camps.'
Survivor memoirs are often similarly vague, dismissive, or
perfunctory in their descriptions, and there is as yet no systematic
investigation of sexual behavior during the Holocaust from the
perspective of survivors who have given oral and video testimo-
nies. Because of this, I have utilized as my primary source numer-
ous catalogued oral histories from the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation (Steven Spielberg's Los Angeles based
project). Although the interviews I have surveyed are mostly in
English, they reflect a broad spectrum of survivor age, experi-
ence, and ethnic origin. More importantly, because in-depth ques-
tions about women's issues and sexuality were built into the inter-

4 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-

1977 (New York, 1980), 141, 142.
5 Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (New York: Free Press, 1960), 96, 97, 195-197,
248-250, Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 188-191, Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
(New York, 1959), 52-53. For a few studies that incorporate gender and sexuality into
their studies of camp and ghetto life, see: Joan Ringelheim, "The Holocaust: Taking
Women into Account," The Jewish Quarterly (autumn 1992): 12-23; Ruth Schwertfeger,
Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp (London: Berg Pub. Ltd.,
1989); Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust
(Greenwood, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986); Charles Roland, Courage Under
Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992); and most recently, Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in
the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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 Togetherness and Isolation 3

viewing process, these testimonies address a wide array of issues

such as pregnancy, abortion, menstruation, consensual sex, court-
ships, weddings, marriages, and sexual molestation. By doing so,
the interviews make it clear that sex was an often unspoken, but
ever-present element of the amoral power dynamic within the
slave labor and concentration camps, ghettos, forests, and hiding
places--at once exploited by many men and some women in
positions of authority, and exchanged by the victims, again both
men and women, to sate more immediate needs, such as hunger,
self-worth, and self-preservation.
When survivors speak of sex in oral testimonies, however,
they are not always analytical, as they invite listeners into their
concentric circle of intimacy. One must be ever sensitive to this,
for the pain pervading testimony about mass murder is only natu-
rally compounded by revelations about the most personal and most
sensitive aspect of one's humanity. This open, frank, and public
discussion of sexuality in many respects complicates the picture
by crossing a psychoanalytical threshold; survivors take what is
most often buried subtext and make it text - in the case of video
testimonies - for all the world to see. One way to reassure survi-
vors of the importance of a scholarly endeavor dealing with sex
and at the same time to get at the subtext behind sexual discourse,
would be to couple discussions of sexuality with questions about
the social construction of memory. By investigating potential dif-
ferences in how survivors recount their most intimate memories
through sociological prisms such as gender, we might gain under-
standing on several fronts: what mechanisms enabled some vic-
tims to survive, what types of survivor personalities were able to
speak of sex, how were survivors able to cope with physical bru-
tality that involved sexual abuse, how did women's experiences
and perceptions of those experiences differ from those of men,
how did the experiences and perceptions of adults differ from
those of children, and so on. How a survivor encodes sex through
language should be of prime interest and importance to the histo-
rian. To quote psychologist and researcher Henry Greenspan, " ...
survivors retell more than specific incidents they witnessed and
endured. They also convey what it is to be a survivor.... In the
course of recounting, such self-presentations emerge in various
ways: in survivors' direct reflections about who they are and what
they have become; in the narrative identity each assumes while

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4 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

retelling; and, most implicitly, in the tones a

speech... ."6
If we situate survivor discourse on sexuali
of the ghetto rather than the concentration c
the analysis has been focused, we find ma
Although many facets of life in both environ
comparable - the disease, starvation, arbitrar
privacy, there are far more discussions, in t
surveyed for this study, of consensual sex,
riages in the ghettos than in the camps. The
obvious. In the camps, men and women were
rately, but in the ghettos, families basica
allowing for the possibility of men and wom
macy. The fact that a Jewish infrastructure
provided a greater potential for abuse by Jew
ish women as well. Other issues like situatio
shearing of hair, and sterilization find little or
able ghetto reminiscences because of their u
the camps. However, themes such as pregnan
struation, coerced sex and sexual abuse by N
tors, do - because they cut across the camp an
To begin, then, with weddings: in most sur
ceremonies were small, improvised affairs, w
pas and wedding cakes made out of potato pe
of one wedding in particular, that of Tola and
is curious because husband and wife chose to
elements in their interviews. Tola essentially
served, a piece of bread, potato peels, and cof
expounded on the origins of their relation
when I met her. She was beautiful. Her mothe
ing [at her], 'So, you want to go with the big
Asking survivors why they married elicit
responses, some of which had very little t
Irena S. says that she ran off to get married

6 Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors (W

1998), 15.
7 Interview with Tola H. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Phila-
delphia, United States, 19 May 1997, 2:12:23-2:15:34, and Interview with Jack H. by the
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Philadelphia, United States, 19 May
1997, 3:13:27-3:16:30.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 5

A bride and groom pose with family members at their wedding. Their wedding
was hastily arranged two months before their deportation so that they might be
able to stay together. All perished at Auschwitz. Photo courtesy of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum photo archives.

liquidating the Warsaw ghetto because her boyfriend had "protec-

tive" papers from the Jewish community.8 Solomon K., who was
married in Kovno, also recalls that although he fell in love with
his future wife when he was 12 and she was 13, they did not
decide to marry until it became clear that police in the ghetto
were selecting single people for deportation in greater numbers.9
And Freda P. remembers that she chose to marry her boyfriend in
the Plonsk ghetto for very practical reasons: "One day, we got
the idea that if we got married, we would have a place to stay [in
the ghetto].... We would get a corner to a room... ."0
Memories attributing marriage solely to romance, however,
are abundant. Emil N., for one, has such a recollection of his
courtship to his girlfriend, Regina: "What I did, it seemed it was
right at the time. I did it because I loved her. Maybe she did it
because she knew I wanted her ... [all I said] I'm taking you for

SInterview with Irena S. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, San
Francisco, United States, 19 July 1997, 2:15:08-2:20:35.
9 Interview with Solomon K. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Mount Vernon, United States, 20 January 1997, 2:17:50-2:20:51.
o Interview with Freda P. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Cal-
gary, Canada, 27 August 1996, 2:24:44-3:00:10.

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6 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

my wife. That was about all."" Rachel D. too ad

were wondering - you're getting married in th
were very much in love."'2 One of the strange
ghetto wedding comes from George B., a surviv
the Shanghai ghetto.'3 He recounts that he met his
theater. In his words, "she kept grabbing my le
was complicated by the fact that his newfound
widow and hence, under Jewish law, obliged t
husband's brother. The two opted out of an Or
as a result.14
One of the more pronounced characteristics o
ories of marriage in the ghetto is contrast. De
ding ceremonies are almost always followed
Marc R., who married his childhood sweetheart in Radom in
1943, remembers that he initially opposed the idea of marriage
in the context of deportations. At first fearing that he would leave
his wife a widow, he eventually came around to the idea of mar-
riage when it seemed that neither would survive and that neither
had anything to lose. Indeed, as Marc describes, six weeks after
their wedding, he and his wife were sent to Majdanek.'5 (Fortu-
nately, both survived the camps and were reunited after the war.)
Chana W. was not as lucky. She remembers that during the night
before her family's deportation from Munkacevo in Czechoslova-
kia, she slept between her parents in a small bed and held her
mother's hands. She recalls that her father said quietly to her
mother, "If I had to marry you again, I would." She immediately
follows with two brief yet anguished statements: "It was the last
night in the ghetto" and "My mother was very pretty."'16 Irena S.
was married in the Warsaw ghetto, and on her wedding night, she

" Interview with Emil N. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Brooklyn, NY, United States, 19 June 1996, 2:18:22-2:22:24; 2:25:13-2:27:46.
12 Interview with Rachel D. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Mel-
bourne, Australia, 5 August 1996, 2:06:05-2:10:03.
" The inclusion of the Shanghai ghetto may give readers pause because the conditions here
for Jews were better than they were in the ghettos established by the Germans in Poland.
However, this difference does not mean that life in the Shanghai district was not a "real"
ghetto experience, but rather that it was a unique one within the overall Holocaust narrative.
14 Interview with George B. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Del-
ray Beach, FL, United States, 4 September 1997, 2:17:40-2:21:58.
15 Interview with Marc R. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Scars-
dale, NY, United States, 12 October 1997, 3:39:10-3:23:30.
16Interview with Chana W. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Monticello, United States, 22 August 1996, 2:11:49-2:15:10.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 7

opted to stay with her new husband rather than have a cup of tea
with her mother, which she had done regularly before and during
her courtship. The day after her wedding, Irena discovered that
her mother had been deported. With this memory firmly embed-
ded in her mind, she admits that she can never disassociate her
wedding night from her mother's death.17
Irena, Emil N., Rena G., and Rachel D. associate their wed-
dings not only with deportation, but also with the termination of a
pregnancy. Abortions in the concentration camps and the ghettos
were common because of the prevailing German threat to kill
newborn infants and their mothers. Irena went to a doctor friend,
who performed a hazardous abortion on her in his basement.
Later the same day, she managed to escape from a round-up of
Jews in Warsaw.'8 Emil remembers: "I was with my wife after
this so-called ceremony [in Starachowice]. She got pregnant. We
didn't know what we were doing. The blood of youngsters is dif-
ferent. I said that she should go to do something by a doctor. She
didn't know what to do. ... She said she was afraid."'9 Rena G.,
in more pained language, insists that her "most difficult memory"
of the Radom ghetto was the termination of her pregnancy.20
Finally, Rachel D. recalls that she and her husband were together
for six weeks in the Vilna ghetto when she became pregnant and
was faced with the decision to abort. Her dilemma was com-
pounded by her mother, who believed that if she [Rachel] were to
undergo an abortion, she would never be able to conceive.
In discussions of pregnancy, there are noticeable gender dif-
ferences in survivor language. Not surprisingly, first-hand accounts
from women who were pregnant tended to be more descriptive
(and reliable) than accounts from men or second-hand accounts
from women who were eyewitnesses. From Nellie A., who gave
birth in the Lodz ghetto, Chasia K., who was pregnant in the
Kovno ghetto, and Luba L., who had a child in Warsaw, we have
some very vivid reminiscences:

[from Nellie A.]. . . . I was married and got pregnant. When I

started to show, [the people hiding me] made a grave for me in a

'7Interview with Irena S.

8 Ibid.
'9Interview with Emil N.
20 Interview with Rena G. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Farm-
ington Hills, NY, United States, 30 August 1996, 2:16:15-2:20:18; 5:00:44-5:04:18.

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8 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

cellar. I felt like screaming. I would put my hand over

was dark, cold. It was like being buried alive, being in
not being able to come out. After a while, I started to
the baby, the life in me, and that was something incr
occupied my time. When I had dreams, I would drea
mother, who would talk to me gently and say it won't
have patience. I would feel much better. She would b
carry me through the months and months when it was
it wasn't day.... A woman came down with a little ke
and helped me bring the baby into the world. He wa
was able to nurse him. I stayed there until my liber
Russians.21

[from Chasia K.].... When I gave birth,.... [there was] no sanita-

tion. [We] did have a stove that warmed the room. It gave off so
much smoke. . . . The baby was born in this small room. My
mother and a nurse were there when I gave birth. I was suffering
very much, but I gave birth. The baby's name was Tikvah, [mean-
ing] hope - hope that she would bring a better future. I didn't have
anything to wrap it. I used the cover of a piano. My mother tore it
into pieces to wrap her in it. I gave her to eat scraps, no breast
milk. My mother cooked kasha. My doctor said that it was unbe-
lievable that her intestines could take it. Impossible. But she did.
She grew and was developed and was talking and knew what was
clever.... She knew Germans. She knew [when to] hide.22

Chasia's child was killed in 1944 during an Aktion to clear the

Kovno ghetto.

[from Luba L. - note the similar passages and the similarity in lan-
guage]. ... I was pregnant. I didn't want to die. But I bought a
piece of poison with bread. If the Nazis were close to killing me, I
would kill myself. . . . I had the baby in a bathroom in 1941 in
April. I named her Zelda, but I called her Zenia. There was a lady,
a midwife, who put a handkerchief in my mouth. I wanted to
scream. I was in labor from Friday to Monday. The woman said
only bite. [Zelda] was a scrawny little girl. I thought [she] would
die of starvation. She didn't. She grew up. . . . She didn't cry at
night. I was in such pain in the morning, but the baby didn't cry....
She was four years old when they killed her. .. .23

21 Interview with Nellie A. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Tor-
onto, Canada, 7 July 1997, 3:00:08-3:04:12.
22 Interview with Chasia K. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Tel
Aviv, Israel, 28 September 1997, 2:03:35-2:10:01.
23 Interview with Luba L. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Stock-
ton, CA, United States, 2 November 1997, 3:16:32-3:25:32.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 9

After escaping to Czestochowa, Luba was caught by the Nazis

and placed in a forced labor camp. She hid Zelda with other chil-
dren in a bunker under her barracks. Six months before liberation,
the children were discovered and executed.

What is striking in each of these excerpts is the close pairing

of desperate and joyful imagery and the choice, conscious or not,
to employ simple sentence structure when describing the infants.
Thus, Nellie's boy was "beautiful;" Chasia's girl was "hope;" Luba's
girl "grew up." Only one second-hand account that I surveyed, that of
a man - Benesch T.-was even remotely parallel in description.
Benesch's wife, like Chasia K., also gave birth in Kovno:

She gave birth under completely abnormal conditions. The child

was born on March 4, 1941. Her name was Aviva. We gave her that
name because we couldn't find a better name, and it was spring.
Aviva means daughter of spring. I didn't have the means to raise
the baby. [We didn't have] a crib. I put two chairs together and a
board on the side of the chairs. That was the crib. My wife gave
birth in the home. The doctor that came was a friend of ours. My
wife nursed but didn't have enough milk because she didn't have
enough to eat. I gave her whatever I could. Luckily, the baby was a
healthy one . . .24

Benesch was able to hide Aviva with a Christian woman. He and

his wife were reunited with Aviva after the war.
On the delicate issue of menstruation, only a handful of
women discuss it in the context of the ghetto; most of the contro-
versy surrounds the causes of amenorrhea in the camps. What little
is said, however, lends credibility to the argument that hunger,
disease, and starvation, rather than bromide or other Nazi devices,
most likely caused the loss of menstruation. Greta K., among others,
asserts, "I didn't menstruate [in the Lodz ghetto]. There was no
food. I thought I'd never have one. But after the war, six months, I
got it. .. ."25 Dresla S., also in Lodz, avers exactly the same
thing.26 Only Bianka K., from Warsaw, describes how she began
menstruating in the ghetto, but she is younger than both Dresla

24 Interview with Benesch T. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Walled Lake, United States, 10 February 1997, 3:09:22-3:15:09.
25 Interview with Greta K. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, San
Francisco, United States, 3 March 1997, 2:15:58-2:19:06.
26 Interview with Dresla S. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, New
York, United States, 7 October 1997, 3:24:33-3:27:20.

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10 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

and Greta, by thirteen and five years respectively

bly in better physical health when she experienced
in the ghetto.27 Clearly, before one can issue a bl
in this discussion, more testimonies need to be vi
Memories of sexual activity also defy simplist
although not to the same extent as memories of
There are, for instance, patterns emerging from
consensual sex that cut across gender lines. Whil
women talk candidly about sexual affairs, victims
in the ghettos are almost exclusively women, and
accordingly, more tormenting in detail. Moreover,
who discuss consenting intimacy come from a vari
a large number of them are Jews interned in Th
Terezin, the so-called "model, or paradise ghetto"
miles north of Prague. What is surprising about this
was both a transit camp and a ghetto, both a way sta
witz and a restricted urban area run by the SS and
a day-to-day basis by a Jewish Council of Eld
respects, too, Terezin was more akin to a concentr
much of the housing in barracks and separated a
Nevertheless, Kurt T. and Dina B., offer these exp

[Kurt T.]. . . . In Terezin, we were herded into a stabl

remember if there was a toilet. The next morning, there
ing in the other side of the isle, there was a guy marrie
wife. It was not bragging. It was rather expressing a spir
ance when he told me that he made love to his wife three times. It

was a way of saying, 'Hitler can't do anything to us. .. .'28

[Dina B.]. ... Karel became the love of my life. This completely
changed my life. I was nineteen when I got there [Terezin]. I had
had many platonic boyfriends, maybe kissing, but I never had a
person about whom I could say I cared more than myself. Karel
felt the same way about me. Every free moment we had, we were
together, and when we weren't together, we automatically thought
about each other....29

27 Interview with Bianka K. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Oakville, Canada, 29 March 1996, 3:27:10-4:02:32.
28 Interview with Kurt T. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Boca
Raton, FL, United States, 15 April 1997, 4:12:45-4:14:59.
29 Interview with Dina G. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Felton,
United States, 26 September 1998,4:24:21-4:27:08.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 11

Karel was to perish in Auschwitz.

From Paula P., in Rzeszow, we have the following account:

There was a boy. We fell in love. We made plans after the war to
get married. His name was Henry.... We didn't go out much. We
just stayed in the house, talking about school, food ... I had my
first kiss. I enjoyed it. 30

And from Sol R., in Warsaw:

One day, in a surprise, I was assigned to a barracks outside the

ghetto. I became a handyman for a German office, because I knew
some German. I was a pretty good size boy, strong at fifteen. This
German officer had a daughter, about the same age, maybe sixteen.
Her name was Amy. She got to like me. I didn't realize the conse-
quences, what could happen. I taught her how to dance .... Half
the time I didn't work. I was schmoozing most of the time with her.
All the Jews working with me started to get worried. [They said],
'here's Sol fooling around with the commander's daughter.' I made
love to her. She told me she wanted me to run away to her grandfa-
ther's farm in Germany. She was like - 'no-one has to know if
you're Jewish.' Amy got a little too close to me. Every night, the
Germans would party. Amy arranged for me to take the star off and
have me serve at these [parties]. The Poles who served with me
knew that I was Jewish, but they couldn't speak German like I
could. I'd dance with Amy and dance with her mother. One day, a
30-year-old Jewish man in the barracks took me aside and said,
'you're gonna get us killed - cut it out!' I didn't realize the conse-
quences, when you're having a good time as a young boy.31

Later, during a smuggling run, Sol was taken in by a Polish fam-

ily outside the walls of the ghetto, where he began another liaison
with the daughter.32 The two stories appear incredible, and they
may in fact be embellishments or fiction; that cannot be deter-
mined from the interview. Still, it is clear that for Sol, his image as
a "Casanova" whether real or imagined, empowers him as he con-
fronts the otherwise horrible reality of his wartime experience.
Testimonies of women who were victims of sexual assault in
the ghetto have varied origins. Some of the survivors are from
Poland, some are from Czechoslovakia, some from Belarus, some

30o Interview with Paula P. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Cote
St. Luc, Canada, 16 July 1997, 1:23:01-1:26:06.
31 Interview with Sol R. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Monroe,
United States, 9 March 1996, 2:18:00-2:25:00.
32Interview with Sol R., 3:09:16-3:14:38.

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12 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

from Germany, and some from Hungary. The m

them is their gender - their existence as wom
lated by men - by Germans, Poles, Czechs, R
ans, on down the list - even, as difficult as it
admit, by some Jewish men. From the perspe
the same tropological use of contrast (beauty p
tion, courage paired with shame) that was evide
of weddings and births operates in recollection
Inge F., interned in Theresienstadt, descr
impact of being raped by a German officer:

I was very hungry. Somebody in Terezin gave me a p

and a German saw it. He took me and raped me
wanted the bread I had to earn it. I didn't eat it. I didn't
more. Then I started to grow up and see. I am nothing
whatever they want. I never told anyone. I don't wan
to know. I am so very ashamed. I am 70 and stil
shouldn't have happened that way .... I never marr
like men. Now I tolerate them. I couldn't stand the
going to bed with them.33

Bina W., from Lodz, remembers that she had

Hans Biebow, the Nazi administrator of t
ashamed to tell you. Hans Biebow came once at
me out to undress naked."34 Mina L., tells of a
who tried to rape her and her sisters one night
ghetto: "My sister jumped out of bed. We saw h
drunk. He was outraged, mad. He went to the d
the mezuzah. Then my sister talked to him. H
even apologized. It was a miracle. In that half-ho
fied. He left after two hours. He didn't touch us
The testimony of Dana S., from Lvov, is per
difficult to sit through - mainly because she s
and appears desperate to affix a positive ending

I was playing with friends. . . . A German soldier

tall, with a part in his hair, and he had a case of pa

33 Interview with Inge F. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual H

lyn, NY, United States, 18 January 1996, 3:19:00-3:24:47.
34 Interview with Bina W. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual
bourne, Australia, 6 August 1997, 2:09:47-2:12:25.
35 Interview with Mina L. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual H
delphia, United States, 20 August 1997, 1:26:43-2:02:31.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 13

me by the hand. I was scared. He squatted down and started to

grope me under my dress. He took out a tomato and said, bite it.
I knew that no possible good could come of this because I knew
about 'Snow White' and the apple. And he was just as wicked.
He showed me his gun. I remembered, would I be shot if I ran
to [my] apartment which I could see. I ran, but he didn't shoot
... my mother made a bath and hugged me and put me to bed.
She didn't ask any questions. I felt really grateful and it was
OK.36

Accounts from men and women who witnessed rapes,

coerced sex, and prostitution are no less disturbing, implicating
Germans and a wide array of allies and collaborators. Bernard Z.,
in the Tacovo ghetto, Czechoslovakia recalls: "The [Hungarian]
guards would take out young girls and do whatever they wanted
to do with them. The girls would come back crying. The mothers
would be beaten for trying to protect them."37 From Imre H., in
the Satoraljaujhely ghetto in Hungary:
A young lady, about seventeen, was the most beautiful thing I'd
ever seen in my life. A drunk Hungarian gendarme told her to take
off her clothes. He approached her and ripped off her blouse. She
was standing there. He wanted to rape her. He asked his comrades
to help. They raped her in the synagogue. It was the first time I
ever saw a naked lady.38

From Malka W.:

I remember there was a rape from the police. In the next room in
our home there was a family. They had a beautiful girl, Peshke. I
remember this. A [German] policeman got drunk, and he came to
have a good time. He sent everybody out and remained with
Peshke. My father was very brave. He ran into the room, and I ran
in behind him. I took his rifle from the room. My father and my
brothers threw him and the rifle out.39

From Paula H. in Prszemysl:

. [. [the Gestapo head] Reisener [sic] ... found my niece, [my]
husband's brother's daughter. She looked like a young Elizabeth

36 Interview with Dana S. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Bev-
erly Hills, United States, 7 May 1996, 2:06:39-2:11:51.
37 Interview with Bernard Z. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Martinez, United States, 2 November 1997, 3:05:12-3:08:09.
38Interview with Imre H. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Downsview, Canada, 9 November 1995, 1:13:02-1:17:44.
39 Interview with Malka W. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
Allentown, PA, United States, 28 May 1998, 2:03:09-2:05:58.

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14 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

Taylor. He took her out of the ghetto. He loved her. We

was going to kill her. He was a good-looking man. Durin
ond Aktion, he knew he wasn't allowed to live with a Jewi
knew she was going to be killed. He took her to the trai
her before she would go to Auschwitz.4

And From Sigmund T., who fled with his family

to Shanghai when he was a small child:
There were refugee women working in bordellos. My fa
a man who had been a peddler and who brought [his] gr
daughter along. They were visiting, and I saw a Japan
drive up, and the daughter went off with the Japanese o
parents came in and grabbed me [as I] was playing with
grandson]. The [boy] said, my mother has a lot of friend

In what can only be described as the darker

more controversial side of Jewish life in the ghet
Pabianice in Poland, and Gina L. from Lodz, remember sexual
crimes committed by Jewish community leaders. Rita remem-
bers that, "Judenrat leader Rubinstein owned a grocery store
before the war. I knew his wife and knew his son. He started

molesting me when I came for milk for my mother. My frie

[would say] that this is the only way to get favors from him
Gina L. takes on an even larger and more well-known figure
was afraid of Rumkowski. When he liked a young girl,
wanted to sleep with her. [The] husband [of a friend of m
was a judge before the war. Rumkowski wanted to sleep w
her, so he had her husband [Molek B.] deported. She was a ve
very good friend. Any time Rumkowski came, I was going r
away to the bathroom to hide."43 As a second-hand accou
Gina's testimony is dubious, and it is sometimes impossib
follow her narrative let alone corroborate her stunning accu
tion.44 From a linguistic standpoint, however, it is quite rev

40 Interview with Paula H. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
St. Luc, Canada, 15 September 1997, 2:19:11-2:21:20.
41 Interview with Sigmund T. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundat
Teaneck, NJ, United States, 30 October 1997, 4:03:31-4:06:00.
42 Interview with Rita H. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Silver
Spring, United States, 2 July 1997, 2:13:10-2:14:59.
43 Interview with Gina L. by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Mont-
real, Canada, 1 August 1997, 2:19:09-2:23:51.
4 See Leonard Tushnet, Pavement of Hell (New York, 1972), 69. Tushnet recounts only
that Rumkowski, after having been a widower, took a much younger woman as his bride.

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 Togetherness and Isolation 15

ing; it captures Gina's hatred of Rumkowski in perhaps the only

words and images available to her, even if these words and
images may be misleading.
Questions of truthfulness lie at the heart of oral history's
problem as a source. While survivors bring a level of believability
to a story when they say that something happened directly to
them or when they can situate an event in a specific time and
place, there is never a guarantee that their story is accurate or
true. Even the often-used gauges of consistency and likelihood
have little meaning in the context of the Holocaust, in the absence
spatial and temporal constants, and where everything - the unthink-
able, the unimaginable, the undoable - was possible. However,
despite this very real problem of verification, non-Holocaust-
connected studies on the effect of trauma and positive and nega-
tive stresses on the human psyche reveal that memories of cata-
clysmic events tend to be more accurate than those of ordinary
ones - at least in a broad sense. According to Harvard psycholo-
gist Daniel Schacter, when a person experiences trauma, the
essence of it is almost always well remembered, and if there is
any distortion, it is most frequently in specific details. This
unusually accurate recall, Schacter claims, can be traced to the
release of stress-related hormones, signaled by the brain's "emo-
tional computer," the amygdala.45 It would seem, then, that events
impacting such a central pillar of our existence as sexuality would
elicit rather precise recollections (unless of course we proceed
from the assumption that all survivors are incapable of telling the
truth or intentionally trying to mislead, in which case the thresh-
old of believability, indeed all epistemological value, would be
raised to a level far beyond that imparted to written documents).
More importantly, as I argued at the beginning of this essay,
the choice of words and the emotions exhibited when a survivor
speaks of an event are as significant from an analytical perspec-
tive as the content of the narrative. According to social anthropol-
ogist Elizabeth Tonkin, "The mental registration of an event is
itself an event. These registrations are so many and so hard to pin
down.., that it is tempting to set them apart from critical analy-
sis. But it is misleading to do so, since they are formative of his-

45 Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory:The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York:
HarperCollins, 1996), 205, 209, 216.

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16 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

tory in all its sense - action and report. There

ments that the flux of life is not in itself demarcate
is the subject who registers them as structured
Psychologist Henry Greenspan makes a similar
caust testimonies:

[There is an] unmistakable quality of personal ownership that char-

acterizes their retelling ... It is as though the recounter were say-
ing, 'This is my story,' salvaged in memory for some particular rea-
sons and later retold in order to make some particularly vital
point.47

On a most basic level, Holocaust testimony tells us a great deal

about how we as humans build and rebuild the past amidst our
own linguistic limitations.
What can no longer be claimed is that survivor memory adds
little or nothing to the Holocaust narrative or may simply be dis-
tracting for today's researchers. Quite the contrary, new narratives
and new textures continue to emerge from the thousands of testi-
monies already catalogued. For the purposes of this paper, it is
clear that sexuality and other issues affecting women as women
were facets of everyday life in the ghetto, and that memories of
sexuality and related themes were often the central nexus points
between survival and death. For some, sexuality was the road to
survival. For others, it lay at the core of their dehumanization.
And still for others, sexuality stood for the possibility of all that
was supposed to be good about life and all that was ultimately
taken away.

46 Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cam-
bride: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 120.
47 Greenspan, 12 ,13.

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