Women’s Experiences of Life Force Atrocities in the Baltic Ghettos, 1941–1944

1 Sources

The key sources for this work are women survivors’ interviews and memoirs. Oral testimonies used in this work were accessed through the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (Fortunoff), which is characterized by free-flowing narratives largely unguided by the interviewer, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum interview collection (USHMM) and USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive (VHA), both of which use structured interviews and seek to elicit information chronologically.^[5] Other sources include testimonies taken by smaller Holocaust centers in Montreal and Melbourne, and Centropa, which offers cleaned, transcribed testimonies, rather than recorded ones. Most of the 28 testimonies cited here were given in English.^[6] The seven memoirs used to directly develop the narrative are either published works, or unpublished or self-published works drawn from collections at Yad Vashem and the Museum of Jews in Latvia: these items were in English, Latvian, or Russian. All sources were produced in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Contemporaneous victim sources could only reflect the experiences and understandings of their moment, which was incomplete: ghetto inhabitants knew of the context of imminent risk through personal traumas, partial information, and rumors. Survivors in later decades were cognizant of how Nazi atrocities began and ended, and how and whether their own family members had survived. These accounts of the past cannot be untouched by subsequent events and particular motivations of survivors in telling their stories (Waxman 2012).

Working with women’s testimonies also presents some particular challenges. Among the most acute is stigma that is normatively associated with sexual violence: shame is too often attached to victims rather than perpetrators. As Henry Greenspan notes, “… stigma has always impacted how and what survivors retell. Memories of sexual violence may be especially likely to remain unspoken in response.” (Bergen et al. 2021, 504; see also Ephgrave 2016).^[7] Silences around sexual violence and humiliation are not, however, uniform. They may vary depending on the setting and vehicle: for instance, sharing with family directly, recounting episodes in writing, or interacting with an interviewer (Ibid.).^[8] Notably, later interviews, specifically those of the USC Shoah Visual History Archive, asked about whether a survivor had witnessed sexual abuse (Sinnreich 2008), which opened opportunities to share experiences that could be one’s own, or that of another.^[9] It is estimated that about 1000 of the over 52,000 interviews in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History Archive reference rape and sexual violence by a variety of perpetrators (Hedgepeth and Saidel 2010). Beverley Chalmers points out, “While relatively few of the recorded testimonies recall rape or sexual violence, most of those subjected to these assaults would have been killed. These survivor testimonies, no matter how few, do confirm that rape and sexual violence did occur” (2015, 212).

Pertinent to another topic in this article, Ellen Ben-Sefer writes, “Abortion and forced sterilization still are not discussed in depth in historical books about the Holocaust” (2010, 156). Women’s experiences may be marginalized in mainstream accounts if their stories are perceived to be outside the “proper collective memory of the Holocaust” (Ringelheim 1997, 20), or may remain absent because many victims were murdered, and survivors traumatized by the loss of a wanted child or childbearing capacity (Ben-Sefer 2010). Some key work has begun to address this void in the literature (Chalmers 2015; Hedgepeth and Saidel 2010). Published literature on Baltic ghettos, however, continues to be broadly pervaded by silences on this topic, though testimonies confirm that coerced abortions were common, as Nazi authorities prohibited childbirth in the Baltic ghettos.

Testimonies cannot be a precise rendering of the past. Waxman cautions that they are neither “sacred text,” nor can they “be representative of Holocaust experience – the vast majority of victims died without writing down their experiences … ” (2012, 152). It is important to recognize the subjective nature of personal testimony (Young 1990), but not, at the same time, to segment testimonies into a literary category of cultural products closed off from critical historical writing. Writing of the wartime diary of a young Łodź ghetto victim, Waxman points out that, “in addition to wanting to leave a record of [the victim’s] own, and in particular, their families’ existence, they also wanted to provide a basis for future historical research” (2012, 146). While testimonies should not be “viewed as history in the strictest sense … each testimony nevertheless constitutes an important historical document, for they all contribute to what we know about the Holocaust and the destruction of Jewish life” (Ibid., 152).

By revealing “more about the life of the victims and emphasiz[ing] the individuality of lived experience” (Waxman 2017, 150), testimonies contribute to our body of knowledge of gendered experiences of life force atrocities in the Baltic ghettos between 1941 and 1944. As the review of literature on the Baltic ghettos below shows, a robust framework within which to build woman-centered accounts of life force atrocities in the Baltic ghettos exists. First-person sources, while fragmentary, enable the development of a historical narrative that fills voids of history that emerge from the absence of women victims’ voices in perpetrator or other official documents, the presence of uncomfortable stories about women’s lives and losses in the ghettos, and a longtime lack of access to the cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1984), that would have enabled women to write their experiences into mainstream histories. Women’s testimonies, arguably, help us to avoid collective memory’s obscuring of the diversity of Holocaust experiences (Waxman 2007, 125).

2 Places of Horror

This work develops a narrative of life force atrocities in large Nazi ghettos in the Baltics, focusing in particular on the Riga and Daugavpils (Dvinsk) ghettos in Latvia and the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto in Lithuania.^[10] The Riga ghetto was established in a working-class neighborhood in July 1941, and sealed in late October, when its population, mostly comprised of local Jews, was approximately 29,600. The population underwent a dramatic shock when the majority of prisoners were murdered in a mass action at Rumbula in late November and early December. The few not killed were herded into the “small ghetto.” About 22,000 Jews deported from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia started arriving after the murder of the Riga Jews, and continued to arrive until mid-1942. They were housed in the “large ghetto.” German-born survivor Renee B. remembers that when her family’s transport arrived in the city in mid-December 1941, “there were 4000 [Latvian Jewish] men left. The women and children, and most men were not there anymore.” She describes the surviving men, who had lost their families, as “utterly destroyed.”^[11] Henny S., who arrived on a transport from Germany, also recalls the near-absence of women: “The few [women] that survived, I think those were mostly … people the Germans had use for.”^[12] The ghetto was liquidated between July and November 1943 (USHMM 2012, 1019–22).

The history of the Riga ghetto has been documented most fully in The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (Angrick and Klein 2009). The book uses German and Soviet records, as well as perpetrator and survivor accounts, to build an expansive story of German and Latvian crimes, the killing of Latvian and Western European Jews, exploitation of Jewish labor, and ghetto liquidation. Largely absent is discussion of the prohibition of births, forced abortions, and sexual violence and its threat, though, as testimonies show, these shaped the experience of many women prisoners. A work on the deportation of Jews from Terezín to the Riga ghetto notes that, “… it also was forbidden to give birth. Pregnant women and newborns were to be destroyed” (Makarov and Makarov 2014, 46). It does not, however, go into detail, and testimonies suggest that pregnant women who underwent abortions were not always killed. Books written and published after the war’s end by survivors illuminate some of the quotidian experiences of life and death in the Riga ghetto (Michelson 2004), and endeavor to provide a broader history (Kaufman 2010; Press 2000; Schneider 1979). Schneider’s account offers insight into the lives of women in the ghetto, though that is not the purpose of the work.^[13]

Before the war, in the southern Latvian city of Daugavpils, Jews comprised about 25 % of the population, or over 11,100 people. The ghetto, located in a Tsarist-era fortress, was created quickly after German occupation and enclosed by July 31, 1941, when it held about 11,000 Jews, most from Daugavpils and surrounding localities. By the end of August, about 6500 prisoners had been murdered,^[14] and by the beginning of November, most inhabitants of the ghetto had been killed, leaving behind an estimated 1000 people. The ghetto was largely liquidated in May 1942, though a small number of prisoners remained into 1943 (USHMM 2012, 1001–03). A comprehensive English-language work has yet to be produced on the Daugavpils ghetto, though it is featured in an English-language history of the city (Swain 2004), and is a key subject in memoirs (Frankel-Zaltzman 2003; Iwens 1991), which offer glimpses into the gendered-violence of the ghetto.^[15]

In the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, in 1940, a quarter of the population was Jewish – a total of about 40,000 people.^[16] The ghetto in Slobodka was created on July 8 and sealed on August 15, 1941: as in Riga, most families went to the ghetto together, and it was “the ‘last place’ in which the traditional family structure was maintained,” writes Sharon Cohen in a review of the experience of Jewish families in the Kovno ghetto (2006, 267). By the end of the December 1941, over 50,000 Jews, many of them Lithuanian-born, had been murdered, most at the Ninth Fort, a fearsome fortress on the periphery of Kaunas (USHMM 2012, 1066–9). Survivors recall several mass actions, especially those that targeted children and the elderly. In contrast to Riga, Lithuanian Jewish prisoners included both working-aged men and women, many of whom toiled at the airport, which was about an hour and half by foot:^[17] women were not specifically targeted as they were in Riga.^[18] The ghetto, with a small number of remaining inhabitants, was liquidated as the Red Army returned to Lithuania in 1944 (Yad Vashem 2009, 297). The ghetto has been the subject of an illustrated history based on an exhibition (USHMM 1997), published diaries (Anonymous members of the Kovno Jewish ghetto police 2014; Tory 1991) and memoirs (Ginaite-Rubinson 2005; Gordon 1992; Mishell 1988; Zilber 2019). Tory’s diary recounts sexual violence and child-hiding in the ghetto, and Zilber describes her mother’s forced abortion, but a fuller political and social history of the ghetto remains to be written.

The suffering of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi ghettos of Latvia and Lithuania was immense. Historical works convey the process and scale of community destruction, and memoirs and diaries offer insights into the lives of those trapped in the ghettos. This article aims to contribute to this body of work by consciously introducing a “female voice”: I follow Waxman in putting this forth as “an antidote to what remains an overwhelmingly male narrative, and which throws light on experiences which might hitherto have gone ignored such as sexual abuse, pregnancy, amenorrhea and sterility, and childbirth” (2017, 8). In contrast to mass murder by gassing, which was characterized by an engineered distance between victim and victimizer, and has come to be emblematic of the Holocaust, testimonies and memoirs show that gendered atrocities in the ghettos were often intimate, bringing perpetrators, victims, and witnesses into immediate proximity. Much of the violence was enacted in public spaces, and, particularly in the first months of the Nazi occupation, was often perpetrated and experienced by residents of the same localities.

Women’s stories show that life force atrocities were key markers of crimes against those who had been brutally expelled from the universe of obligation (Fein 1979). Jews were stripped of the right to claim or expect protection, care, or empathy, and were subject to both capricious and systematized violence. For women, this was often manifested in atrocities that targeted them in their normative family roles, or subjected them to sexual brutality.

3 Building a Narrative of Women’s Lives in Baltic Ghettos

The horrors of Nazi death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, and Treblinka are well-known (Wachsmann 2015). However, before the Final Solution turned these camps into vehicles of an industrialized process of mass murder, atrocities were occurring in territories occupied by Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. The violence of this period was intimate and intense, carried out by men with guns in a town square, at the edge of a wooded pit, or steps from a shoreline where victims may have spent summer days with family in years before the war. At the same time, the victimization of Jewish girls and women was often carried out in the ghettos that imprisoned them.

Many perpetrators were German soldiers and officers, but they were often accompanied by local collaborators who held a formal affiliation with the Nazi authorities, or perhaps did not – acting of their own volition even before the German occupation was complete or civil structures of occupation in place (Bankier 2011). Many Jewish families had lived in Latvia and Lithuania for generations. Some victims and perpetrators knew or recognized one another. Kaunas-born Henny Fletcher Aronson remembers, “It was just neighbors, people who you dealt with. Then suddenly – it was almost like they waited for it, like hungry dogs and so it was rough. It was really rough.”^[19]

The Nazi ghettos were instruments of social control and sites of displacement and danger. They were tightly packed spaces, carefully surveilled, and organized with brutality. Gendered violence existed and thrived, rendering even more acute the daily precarity of dignity, family, and survival. Robin Schott writes that women in the Holocaust were targeted as Jews, but their risks were “gender multiplied – where social and symbolic facts multiply the original harm done to victims” (2011, 6). They were targets of the life force atrocities that mark genocide as a gendered crime. Von Joeden-Forgey defines life force atrocities as “a ritualized pattern of violence that targets the life force of a group by destroying both the physical symbols of its life force as well as its most basic institution of reproduction, especially the family unit” (2010, 2).

These “ritualized patterns of violence” operate through two practices of genocidal action: first, Joeden-Forgey notes the presence of “violent inversion rituals,” which target and tear normative hierarchies and relationships within families through, for instance, the forced witnessing or perpetration of crimes like rape or torture of family members (2010, 2). Wendy Lower writes of brutal scenes where “Wives and children were forced to watch their husbands and fathers suffer beatings conducted with canes, truncheons, and electrical rods, which were often deliberately applied to the genitals” (2021, 111). In an account of the Daugavpils ghetto, Geoffrey Swain recounts a story told to Soviet authorities after the war: “… ghetto commandant Zaube and senior police officials liked to select attractive Jewish women and rape them, before having them killed. Such rapes sometimes took place in public, even in front of the parents of the girl concerned. According to one source, the sister of a local Daugavpils doctor, Dr. Goldman, was raped in this way and tried to persuade her brother to help her commit suicide, such was the shame. Suicide in the ghetto was not uncommon” (2004, 66). The circle of agony extended beyond the individual on whom the violence was enacted, transforming and fraying normal kinship relations: “… acts of sexual violence carried symbolic meanings of power while alienating victims from their kin, destroying their sense of control over their bodily reactions and devastating their social relations” (Mühlhäuser 2021, 35).

Second, Joeden-Forgey notes the significance of “ritual mutilation and desecration of symbols of group reproduction” (2010, 2). These atrocities are enacted to harm women’s and men’s reproductive capacity, women’s pregnant bodies, and infants and children as carriers of a community’s future. Lithuanian-born Bertha Wilk Taubman remembers that, “The [Lithuanian] Partisans robbed, bullied and raped many … … The Jews of Radvikiski were murdered by the partisans as they passed through a forest on their way to Žagaré … Wild men would cut off fingers together with rings and also the breasts of women, mothers of suckling children (1988). Von Joeden-Forgey points out that, life force atrocities “betray a specific state of mind among perpetrators, who are not merely engaged in killing but also in a subjective metaphysical struggle with the life force itself” (2010, 2).

Violence in the ghettos and the killing sites at which prisoners from the ghettos were murdered was rarely hidden: rather, it was brazen and performative, unbound from legal or moral limitations. Public violence engendered fear at the community level and functioned as means of social control. Lore Oppenheimer, a German-born survivor of the Riga ghetto, remembers public hangings for those who violated ghetto regulations. She tells of a young man who tried to help her father after he fell ill: “… we had to watch that while they hung him … And [the young man and other prisoners] hung for three days, each person.”^[20]

Widespread Nazi deception curtailed resistance, sometimes by generating hope for better conditions. Survivors recount deceptive practices that ended in mass death. German-born Susan Taube recalls the arrival of her Berlin transport and the transfer of prisoners to the Riga ghetto:

Once we arrived, the doors opened up and there was the SS and the dogs and the trucks and ‘Out Out Out!’ And people could hardly move, they were frozen stiff … Again they assembled us in front of the train, ‘If you can walk, it’s about 5 km to your destination. And if not, you can go on the truck and we will take you there … ’Well, whatever we left there we never saw again, and the people who went on the truck we never saw again either.^[21]

These were the notorious blue gas vans, in which vulnerable new arrivals, often children and the elderly, were murdered.^[22] Lithuanian-born survivor Miriam K. tells of the Kaunas ghetto that, “The day before the ghetto closed the Germans asked for 500 people with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 40. The SS said they needed to make an archive and they only wanted people with degrees. They never came back.”^[23] At least initially, deception enabled family separations and killings in ways that engendered cooperation and diminished resistance.

A corollary concept for framing gendered atrocities in the ghettos is Claudia Card’s notion of “social death” (2003). Card’s concept is significant because, as James Snow points out, there is a “… split between memory and official histories in general, and the split is especially pronounced with respect to women’s experiences of genocide” (2016, 608). Social death puts the loss of relationships and community, which women’s testimonies often highlight, at the center of research on genocide. Lithuanian-born survivor Zlata Santocki Sidrer remembers a mass killing in Kaunas: “It was a cold day with snow on the ground … The Germans came in and started the ‘selection.’ Left and right; left and right. At least half of the people in the ghetto were killed … thousands, families were broken up. It was the biggest tragedy … ” (in Zilber 2019, 28). Sidrer lost her grandmother and aunt, but her recollection of the event is encompassing: every family was victimized.

The concept of social death distinguishes genocide from other mass atrocities and shifts the focus from the “ruin of individual careers, body counts, statistics on casualties, and material costs of rebuilding,” which are common ways of assessing the consequences of war and terror, to ways in which aggression tears at social vitality and existential meaning (Snow 2016, 617). Physical death is but one manifestation of demise: social death illuminates genocide as an atrocity that pervades individual and community existence long after the killing has ceased. Indeed, “It could well be argued that social death as opposed to mass homicide, is the very telos – the end or purpose of genocide” (Ibid.).

Social death is poignantly rendered in testimonies. Women’s normative social roles were intimately tied in pre-war Europe to family bonds and obligations: “… uniting European Jewish family life, whether middle- or working class, urban or shtetl, secular or religious, was the fact that women’s primary roles were as wives and mothers” (Waxman 2017, 13). Evading physical death in a genocidal environment permeated by mortal threats meant struggles with social death, a status that some women resisted. Latvian-born Valentīna Freimane, who remained outside the Riga ghetto with her gentile husband, recalls that her Jewish parents decided that if other members of their community were going to the ghetto, they would go too. Freimane tells that her mother had the opportunity to hide, but it was clear she would not leave her husband.^[24]

Women’s accounts of the Holocaust are not devoid of agency: women resisted and acted to nurture ties that sustained them and restored community. Judith Tydor Baumel has written on the phenomenon of “camp sisters,” unrelated women who formed quasi-family ties of mutual support and care in ghettos and camps where many biological ties were severed (Baumel-Schwartz and Baumel 1998). Myrna Goldenberg adds, “Although all respected Holocaust sources by survivors and scholars emphasize the fact that survival, first and foremost, was random, virtually all memoirs by women implicitly or explicitly credit survival to some manner of women’s friendships and collaboration” (1996, 86). Latvian-born survivor Maly Kohn recounts a story of Ljuba, a young Jewish woman from Daugavpils, who had long blonde hair that she used to cover her yellow star to steal away from the ghetto “… to bring in some food to the compound.” Kohn tells that “She was very bold and she wasn’t afraid to talk to the German officers if she had to intervene [for] some unfortunate Jew. She would talk to the highest ranks whoever she could meet … In this time when Dvinsk had to give up their children, she spent the whole night taking the children to farmers that she knew, and so she was walking around the whole night and hiding as many children as she could with farmers.” Ljuba was arrested, but some of her friends bribed a German guard, who let her go: “And it was so important that we cared for each other, that one risked her own life for the sake of others … ”^[25]

The final concept employed to engage with Jewish women’s experiences of the Baltic ghettos is the universe of obligation. Seeking to understand the origins of genocidal atrocities, such as those visited upon Armenians and Jews in the twentieth century, Helen Fein observes that, “… the collective (or common) conscience is defined by the boundaries of the universe of obligation – that circle of persons toward whom obligations are owed, to whom the rules apply, and whose injuries call for expiation by the community.” She continues:

Within any polity, the dominant group defines the boundaries of the universe of obligation and sanctions violations legally. Injuries to or violations of rights of persons within the universe are offenses against the collective conscience that provoke the need for sanctions against perpetrators in order to maintain the group’s solidarity … Violations of (or collective violence against) those outside the boundaries do not provoke such a need; instead, such violence is likely to be explained as a just punishment for their offenses. (1979, 33)

The resistance or response of Nazis, local collaborators, or bystanders was, from this perspective, dependent upon whether Jews were included within, or expelled from, the universe of obligation. Political ideologies and exclusionary laws, layered with racism and sexism, enabled acts of violence. Most perpetrators of the Nazi genocide in the Baltics did not kill before the Holocaust, nor did they kill afterwards. The definitive and devastating expulsion of Jews from the universe of obligation was a necessary condition for mass violence against communities that had coexisted for generations.

In the independent interwar Baltic states, Jews had a legal and cultural place. In Latvia’s 1935 census, an estimated 94,000 Jews resided in the country, making up about 5 % of the national population and 11 % of the municipal population of Riga. An estimated 94 % were Latvian citizens and about 70 % were fluent in Latvian. They were granted political rights, but were often segregated educationally, economically, and socially (Eglitis and Bērziņš 2018). Lithuania was home to a larger population: about 160,000 Jews, over 7 % of the population, were Lithuania’s largest minority and an active part of democratic political life until the coup of 1926. Cultural and religious life remained active across the interwar period, in which government-financed education in Jewish schools continued, though there were restrictions and segregation in university studies and some professions (Vardys and Sedaitis 2018). There were no pogroms in either independent country before the Second World War. The arrival of Nazi forces in 1941 erased not only legal, political, and economic rights (though these had been significantly diminished since the Soviet occupation a year earlier), but violently pushed Jews outside of the boundaries of even basic care and protection.

For many of the Jews who made their homes in the Baltics, there was little anticipation of the horrors to come. Valentīna Freimane remembers a sentiment expressed by her parents: “This is, after all, Latvia, our home, we are among our own [starp savējiem], Latvian citizens, so we can feel safer” (2010, 234). The sentiment did not match the brutal reality. Both of Freimane’s parents were murdered in the Riga ghetto.

German-born Trudi Birger, who moved with her family to Memel and later to Kaunas, after the rise of Nazism in Germany, remembers that, “People had scores to settle, real and imaged, for things that had happened under the Russians. Lithuanians, who had been our neighbors, our customers, and our partners in business took up the profitable sport of shooting Jews. It was like that scene from my childhood in Frankfurt all over again, only much, much worse” (1992, 52). Lithuanian-born Nesse Godin tells that she was blonde and blue-eyed as a teenager, but she could not remove her star because the neighbors knew she was Jewish and would tell the authorities: “Some helped, very few, but most of them just let it go.” Safety was not to be found in the care of neighbors, or the protection of authorities: Godin adds that, “The Lithuanian police, the same policemen that I was told as a little girl if I get lost, I should go for help – I had to be afraid of.”^[26]

The expulsion of Baltic Jews from the universe of obligation is captured by Freimane’s comment that when German occupation began, “All Jews as a single mass were slowly step by step transformed from equal persons to things with which one could do as they pleased.”^[27] Maly Kohn remembers the first weeks of Nazi occupation in Latvia: “… after the first two weeks [during which Latvians were capriciously beating Jews in the streets] came the first German rules, not to protect the Jews, but to put them completely outside the law.”^[28]

In the sections below, I use survivor accounts to show the intimate violence of the Baltic ghettos and highlight the significance of life force atrocities as an axis around which the annihilation of Jewish communities was organized, in particular in the period before the “Final Solution” shifted the focus to industrialized mass murder. Stories of women’s lives and losses in Baltic ghettos attest to an abrupt, brutal expulsion from the universe of obligation and to the trauma of social death that carried on long after the end of the Nazi genocide.

4 The Death of the Family

For Jewish women, suffering and loss in the Holocaust included the brutal destruction of motherhood. In this section, I examine two components of life force atrocities connected to Jewish motherhood: separation of mothers and children, and the Nazi prohibition of births in the Baltic ghettos.

5 Sexual Danger

Von Joeden-Forgey writes that perpetrators of genocide use means other than mass death to annihilate the targeted group. As the previous section showed, family separation and the destruction of intimate ties leading to social death were commonplace practices and indicators of the imminence of genocide even before the initiation of industrialized mass murder. Von Joeden-Forgey points out that genocidal rage is enacted in inversion and desecration rituals that humiliate and harm women and families and include using sexual abuse and mutilation of symbols of group reproduction (2010). Humiliation came in many forms, ranging from forced nudity to public rape. Even the rituals of daily life, such as washing, were threaded with practices that functioned to shame women: Riga ghetto survivor Lore Oppenheimer remembers that, “… we had no bathing facilities, nothing … they took us to an open lake. I don’t know. Everybody could watch us. And we had to get undressed and get washed. We had no choice.”^[47]

It has been argued that Nazi regulations and ideologies of “racial purity” foreclosed sexual contact with Jews, but as Helene Sinnreich writes, “… the suggestion that a German man would not commit Rassenschande (racial shame) by engaging in sexual relations with a Jewish woman is as untenable as any argument which insists that the existence of rules against an action prove that it could or would not take place” (2008, 2). The rape of Jewish girls and women was not a policy, but as testimonies and memoirs show, it was practiced, and the conditions of the ghettos rendered women acutely vulnerable to violation.

Women were not shielded from sexual violence by being Jewish: cast out of the universe of obligation, they were vulnerable to rape or other atrocities without recourse or consequences in any location – a home, a public street, a camp, or a prison. Their dehumanization fostered pervasive risk.^[48] Lower suggests that actions on the periphery were sometimes more brutal than at the centers of Nazi power, as they were not subject to the direct supervision and scrutiny of the Reich’s authorities. “The commissars and regional police forces did not carry out the Nazi goal of genocide in a banal fashion: they fulfilled it barbarically, often encouraging sadistic methods that exceeded the expectations of their superiors, who wanted to maintain order, a measure of control, and secrecy” (2002, 8).^[49]

Some survivors describe the heinous crimes of Latvia’s notorious Nazi killing unit, the Arājs Commando. They include rape and killing of women by the Commando’s leader, Viktors Arājs, and other members of the group: “[Arājs] seized as headquarters for himself the luxurious residence of a Jewish banker on Valdemars Street and turned it into a house of horror for Jews, a veritable robbers den, where he and his ‘boys’ tortured and murdered Jews for sport and kept Jewish women for sexual entertainment” (Lumans 2006, 204). Latvian-born Zelda-Rivka Heit was one of a small number of Latvian Jews to survive the Riga ghetto: she recalls an encounter with Arājs. Heit tells that she and other young Jewish women were brought to the building and taken to the basement.

All [the men] were drunk, all had pistols in their hands. The so-called officer facing me said ‘upstairs,’ and I did go upstairs because there was no other way out. It was in his office, he raped me, he humiliated me, he tortured me sexually … I wouldn’t have known but when I was crying and weeping and asking for mercy he said, ‘you bitch, don’t you know who is standing before you?’ He said ‘I am Viktors Arājs, the boss of this place.’ I was taken downstairs, we were all sitting, all the girls were weeping, looked terrible, some had torn clothes, dresses.

Heit’s survival is an exception, though it seems to have been the result of intervention by a German officer: ‘Suddenly the door opened … and the [Pērkonkrusts] guard called my name … German officer Ervin Henkemann, German officer for whom I had been working, he saved me from the Latvians, he had saved my life. My nanny had seen me join a group, she had been following us, she saw that we had been taken to this headquarters so she had rushed to Henkemann … he tried to save my life and he succeeded.’^[50]

The ghettos were sites of acute sexual danger. A male survivor’s diary from Kaunas recalls a ritual termed “going to peel potatoes,” which was practiced by the guards: “Night after night, the Lithuanian henchmen would proceed to select their victims: the young, the pretty. First, they would rape them, then torture them, and finally murder them” (Tory 1991, 24). Women’s stories suggest that the threat was pervasive. Latvian-born Sia Hertsberg, who was 14 when her family was forced into the Riga ghetto remembers that her family’s room was visited by three Latvian militiamen, one of whom she knew from before the war. The officer threw Hertsberg on a bed, declaring, “I like this girl. I will have her.” Her mother begged the officer to take her instead. Hertsberg was helped by the young man she knew, who distracted the officer by drawing his attention to some ostensible shooting outside and the men left, with the young man advising Hertsberg to lock the door and stay inside.^[51] Frankel-Zaltzman, who was working as a nurse in the Daugavpils ghetto hospital after being imprisoned in July 1941, remembers “… we suffered greatly from the Latvians. Every night they would come and seek out some women. God protected me from this because I was in the hospital and they didn’t come here” (2003).

Latvian-born survivor Ella Medaly’e, remembers her encounter with the men of a Latvian auxiliary unit. In her memoir, she writes that she and her mother were taken to a building in the first days after German occupation and were compelled to turn over their valuables: a woman who had nothing to turn over was taken to the yard and beaten. The women were held in a damp basement with low ceilings and a filthy toilet (2006, 14–17). Medaly’e tells that the guards were largely members of the Latvian Aizsargi or Pērkonkrusts. One of them took a liking to her, telling her that she looked like his wife. One evening, when the Aizsargi were on the second floor talking, an officer went downstairs and started staring at the young Jewish women sleeping on the floor. He called a girl over and took her to an upper floor. After some time, the weeping girl came back downstairs: “Then they came for the second, the third, and they all took them upstairs and then we started understanding that there was an orgy [gang rape] upstairs and they were using the Jewish women.” Medaly’e tells that she thought she would be next, so she locked herself in a nearby toilet. The guard who had shown some sympathy to Medaly’e knocked on the door and cautioned her, “stay here, they’re all drunk, I’ll tell you when you can get out.” The next day, the women who had been raped were taken away and shot. She says that more women were brought to the building over the next three weeks, and adds that she and a small number of others were eventually released.^[52]

Edward Westermann writes, “… far away from Berlin and senior SS and police leaders, these [Rassenschande] prohibitions were widely ignored, and the abuse of alcohol often proved to be a key contributing factor … The intersection between alcohol consumption, aggression, and male bravado found repeated expression in crimes of sexual violence in the East” (2021, 87–8). Valentīna Freimane remembers a pair of Latvians – an older man and a young man, just a few years older than she was– coming to her parents’ apartment, already drunk but asking for more libations. One of men declared that Freimane’s family should hand over the “things they had tricked the Latvians out of.” Having taken the family’s gold jewelry and watches, one of the men encouraged the other to ask young Valentīna to show him the apartment’s “other rooms,” saying that if he liked something there, he should boldly take it. The implication, she says, was clear.

Girls and young women were particularly under threat, because looting was commonly accompanied by rape. Such an event had just occurred with my classmate Angelika, a beautiful redhead, who was raped by some drunken [militia men] …, and she almost lost her mind … She too later perished in the ghetto. (2010, 243)

Westermann suggests that German SS and policemen would use Jewish women, keeping them in sexual bondage, and murdering them if they became pregnant (2021, 93–4). Latvian-born survivor Eli Gever recalls a story told by a friend about Gestapo officers raping Jewish women in the Daugavpils ghetto where Gever was imprisoned. He remembers a Jewish woman who became pregnant by “Gestapo guys,” and adds, “They put her on ice, it was winter. They put her on ice to drown in the Dvina river.”^[53]

Rassenschande laws could also be turned on the victims. Iwens relates an incident that took place in Daugavpils in March 1942, a time at which only a few hundred Jews remained alive in the ghetto. He writes that Mina Gittelson was “an attractive woman in her twenties. She was accused by her Latvian employer of breaking the racial-sexual laws. Actually – the true facts were known in the ghetto – the Latvian suspected that Mrs. Gittelson had discovered that many Jewish valuables were in his possession and decided to eliminate her. He denounced her, and she was condemned.” Mrs. Gittelson was publicly hung, and her body, which remained in the open for three days, showed “obvious marks of physical torture” (Iwens 1991, 93).

Ghettos were sites of chronic sexual danger: “… the accompaniment of the physical conquest of the East with acts of sexual humiliation and subjugation established a precedent and a regular practice that would last throughout the German occupation” (Westerman 2021, 97). There were no injuries that called morally or legally for amends, and Jews could expect no care or safety in the territories many had called home. The threat in the East was rendered acute by an amalgamation of racist ideology and propaganda, the development of an environment characterized by total control and unlimited power in the hands of those who wore the Nazi uniforms, pervasive sexism and misogyny, and the extensive presence of alcohol in the spaces where lethal power was exercised. Few victims lived to tell their stories, but survivors give voice to the sexual atrocities that brutalized the prisoners of the ghetto.

6 Conclusions

Women’s stories matter. While ghetto histories written in the decades after the end of the Holocaust offer robust and significant narratives of power and pain, women’s voices contribute to a more diverse telling of the past. As survivor testimonies and memoirs show, the Baltic ghettos were sites of intimate violence that characterized the period before industrialized murder became a hallmark of the Nazi genocide. Expelled from the universe of obligation and denied legal and moral protection from brutalization, prisoners were acutely vulnerable to violence.

As von Joeden-Forgey posits, life force atrocities are a key marker of genocide (2010). These atrocities were ubiquitous in the ghettos, where the rare evasion of physical death translated into enduring social death for survivors. Indeed, social death permeated the experiences of girls and women, whose normative social roles were closely tied to their roles in the family. Women’s voices reveal underrecognized gendered components of the early years of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, and give voice to women’s unique experiences and traumas related to pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, and sexual violence that may not be visible in other accounts of the Baltic ghettos. Much work remains to be done to reveal the complexities of women’s experiences and their recollection in the aftermath of war and genocide, a process that has just begun in the study of the Baltic ghettos.