“Real Comrades in Struggle and Suffering”: Women’s Experiences in the Vapniarka Concentration Camp

1 Introduction

Research has had two tendencies in regards to women during the Holocaust. One is to treat them only as Jews, a singular body of study and the victims of the same murderous regime. The second one is to focus on them by “emphasizing the uniquely female experiences of sexual assault, pregnancy, menstruation, prostitution, etc.”, which runs the risk of reproducing “gendered stereotypes about women and re-marginalizes women as one unified and essentialized group” (Pető, Hecht, and Krasuska 2015, 16). Despite numerous autobiographies written by female survivors attesting to the active role women played in the struggle to survive during the Holocaust, women are often portrayed in Holocaust historiography as merely “double victims” (Copeland 2003, 17): first of the nazi persecution, and second of their gender and the expectations placed on it by their community and society in general.

Additionally, they have been mostly seen as passive actors in the theatre of the Holocaust without much agency and will. Women, even in the Holocaust, when inhuman conditions forced the majority to do anything and everything to survive, are most often represented as primarily caretakers (Waxman 2003, 662). In this case study, however, I highlight the nuances in the representation of women’s experience at the intersection of these research approaches, and for the case of Vapniarka, also move beyond studying women as just Jews or just through a gendered lens. Rather, I argue that women of Vapniarka were seen and saw themselves in between, because here their experience was not quite exactly the same as the men’s nor exclusively a traditionally female experience as passive caretakers. Rather they saw themselves and were seen as agents active in collective survival. In this first article to focus on the women of Vapniarka, I discuss the representation of the women’s role in resistance in the camp, that included specific political actions but also actions supporting survival in general. Through my analysis of both novel personal testimonies and official documents, I will add to the growing field of historical sociology of the Holocaust,^[1] addressing the way women related to their own circumstances, to others in the camp, their perception of self, how they narrate their performance of resistance in comparison to how men, at a ratio of 11:1 to women, perceive them. The role of memory and politics of memory in the narration of events will also be touched on.^[2]

2 Theory

Foucault posited that a prisoner becomes a “docile body” (Foucault 1977, 135) that is completely controlled by the total institution and stripped of all agency, however I take the position of Mary Bosworth who argued that “the capacity to define oneself as an agent is crucial to surviving imprisonment” (Bosworth 1999, 131). As Kim T. Richmond writes in her doctoral thesis, “the prisoner … constitutes herself as a subject through the process of becoming an agent, of choosing action, rather than being an object. … Narrative plays a pivotal role: it is a means of resistance to prison and in this it becomes a key means through which the prisoner creates agency and a sense of self.” (Richmond 2017, 14).

What I mean by agency “is the power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their experiences and life trajectories” (Cole 2019). As we shall see in the narratives cited, there is a sense of the subject’s need to manifest their agency, or “choosing action” through various forms of resistance. Some speak of “antifascist resistance”, while others of “solidarity” as the strategy used to support survival, and thus to affirm their agency when the total institution, the camp, intended to transform them into objects.

Therefore, as with any human, there was multifacetedness to women’s experience in these most extreme of times that was not only passive, but included acts of courage, friendship and love, as well as “compromising acts”^[3] that did not fit within societal values, and for which they were shamed. In this text, these acts all fit within my understanding of resistance: to oppose, refuse to comply, or have the ability to not be affected by something. Comprising acts served the subject’s ability to not be affected by the conditions of extermination around them.

As Zoe Waxman writes,

Societal constructions of gender must have continued to inform women’s (and men’s) actions, even if their behaviour did not conform to gendered expectations. The very fact that during the Holocaust women were often unable to meet these expectations has important and often ongoing traumatic repercussions for female survivors trying to not only represent their wartime experiences but also to connect them to their pre- and post-war lives. (Waxman 2003, 665)

While I consider these “actions” that “did not conform to gendered expectations”, but helped the individual and collective in the struggle to survive, resistance, I refer to Mihai’s concept of “impure resistance” (Mihai 2022, 6), which entails “moments of cowardice, betrayal, and ambivalence, the(ir) silences and complicities, and the(ir) flaws of character” (Mihai 2022, 6). This is a counterweight to the exclusively pure vision of the hero promoted and mythologized later on.

In this paper, antifascism is defined as “the opposition to Hitler” and other allies or sympathizers of Hitler, including Antonescu. This opposition “enabled antifascism to garner popular support because it was perhaps the only shared quality that united communists and socialists, as well as liberals and at least some conservatives.” Over the post-war period, “antifascism was increasingly used as a propagandistic tool to establish a clear-cut ideological dichotomy between friends” (“antifascists”) and enemies (“fascists”), us and them. But even during communism, antifascism was never only one thing, and it could mean different things at different moments, representing the varied experiences of those that used the term, including those that spoke of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust (Bohus, Hallama, and Stach 2022, 4–5). This is the case for the majority of testimonies cited in this paper.

The term “antifascist resistance” used in this paper to refer to actions in the camp is differentiated from other forms of resistance (spiritual or metaphysical, civic, individual) through its political nature. “Antifascist resistance” is an organized, political form of resistance against fascist genocidal policies that was aimed not at individual, but collective, survival. Those that write about being involved in antifascist resistance in the camp were politically conscious and understood that their personal survival was dependent on the survival of others, and therefore they willingly engaged in strategies of large-scale solidarity and mutual aid in order to ensure it. “Self-sacrifice” within this context was seen not necessarily as a gendered feminine or female characteristic, but as a duty to the prisoner body, and a heroic action.^[4]

Many of the internees in the camp were sentenced without evidence as political prisoners and their police files contained little to no proof of any political activity. They were arrested because they were Jews, viewed by Romanian authorities as an inherent enemy of the state and pro-Soviet. However, because a few internees had been engaged in some acts of political resistance, such as distributing communist or socialist literature, organizing meetings, acting as messengers, helping other Jews through mutual aid, even if they were not members of a political party, the label of “antifascist” stuck with them throughout their captivity and after, and played a significant role in the formation of their narratives after the war, aligning with the communist ideology, but also serving their need to see themselves as active resisters with agency.

Finally, most of those who were sent to Vapniarka, even those who had not been politically active before deportation, practiced solidarity and mutual aid willingly or by force,^[5] and cite these as the reasons for their survival.

“Compromising oneself” is a euphemism used several times in the narratives, mostly by the women themselves although not only, to indicate the performance of sexual barter (Hájková 2013, 526) that benefited the individual internee and not the entire camp population. “Compromising oneself” was viewed as a shameful act by society’s mores of the time, and in Vapniarka even more so because it was performed for individual, not collective, gain. After the war, especially in the context of the war criminals’ tribunals in the mid-40s, it became that much more shameful when the line between friend and foe had to be clearly demarcated, and fraternization with the enemy even for the purpose of survival was denounced. As Anna Hájková notes, after the war, the moral assessment, or social corrective, was applied mostly to women as society returned to “normal” and as a demonstration that the “state of exception” was over. “The postwar public including some male survivors, frequently assumed that returning female survivors had compromised themselves, surviving by cooperating in their own sexual exploitation … This narrative became a staple of public perception of women in the camps.” (Hájková 2013, 526). Within this context, any “impure resistance” had to be erased, while the image of the self-sacrificing, moral, pure, courageous, good heroes was mythologized. Therefore it was important for the women of Vapniarka to clarify who had and who had not “compromised” herself.

3 Methodology

In this study I conduct narrative analysis, which examines “how the narrative is an effect of specific historical, social, cultural, political and economic discourses, rather than being natural and unquestionable” (Cigdem Esin and Squire 2014, 7), on eleven testimonies by women and twelve testimonies by men who survived Vapniarka.

The eleven testimonies by women that my study relies on include: two recorded oral history interviews from 1999 made by Yad Vashem in Israel, one unpublished journal from the 1960s in USA and a story from 1970 by the same author, three testimonies from the war criminals’ trials of 1945 in Romania, three testimonies from a Vapniarka remembrance event of 1982 in Romania, one article from an Israeli publication of the survivors of Vapniarka, and one testimony published in a book written by one of the male survivors cited in this article. The thirteen accounts given by men about women are: three personal journals – one written in the camp and one in 1977, published only in 2023 by descendants in Israel, and the third written in 1962 and remaining unpublished in Romania – , the two published autobiographies of another male prisoner who also survived the massacre at Ribnita, one written in 1956 Romania and the second in 1997 Germany, the autobiography of one of the survivors as told to his son and published in 2017 in Israel by the latter, one testimony given at the war criminals’ tribunal of 1945, a book published in 1945 in Romania by someone who claimed to have been an inmate of Vapniarka but whose real identity has not yet been determined, three testimonies from the same remembrance event of 1982 in Romania, and one comprehensive historical overview of the camp of Vapniarka and other ghettos written by one of the former prisoners in 1999 in Israel.

So despite there being a large body of testimonies written by men, due also to the overwhelming number of male survivors over female survivors, in this article I chose to include approximately the same number of testimonies by males as females. Of the testimonies by women that I have identified, I included two thirds of them.^[6] The testimonies by men that I included, although they represent less than a fifth of all the mens’ testimonies that I have identified so far,^[7] offer a good cross-section of the ideological frame and socio-economic background under which they were operating at the time of giving testimony. The same is valid for the women as well.

This frame allows for a systematic analysis of similarities and differences between men and women at different historical moments, locations, ideologies and social classes, revealing how these affected narrative formation.

4 Source Analysis

As mentioned, the huge difference in numbers between males and females at Vapniarka logically resulted in an imbalance of testimonies about the camp experience, mostly coming to us from the men. Indeed, many accounts of the experiences of women are also filtered through the male gaze in the testimonies cited. While very few women left their own written testimonies, some left them unpublished, as is the case of the 1960s journal of Anna Sten and a short story written by her in 1970, both discovered in 2023 by me at the Leo Baeck archives^[8] and cited in this paper for the first time. Both were written in USA after her emigration from Romania. The majority of testimonies included in this study are in fact unpublished, and most were discovered in the course of this research. Making these previously unknown testimonies known is one of the reasons that I chose to cite longer than usual passages from the texts.

Also unpublished at the time of this writing were three journals by former male internees of the camp, one written immediately after the war by Dr. Arthur Kessler based on notes kept in the camp, the second by Zalman Broder in 1962, and the third by Adalbert Rosinger in 1977.^[9] Both Kessler and Rosinger intended their writings to be published. About Broder it is not clear. In addition to tracing these few unpublished texts and the official testimonies made either in the frame of the war criminals’ tribunals of 1945, and in 1982 for a 40-year commemoration event dedicated to Vapniarka survivors, I also consulted the oral histories of two women, which were recorded in Israel in the late 1990s, as well as books published by men in the 1990s and early 2000s. Most, although not all, of the women survivors that decided to stay in Romania for decades after the war joined the Communist party, or had already done so during the war, and some, like Ida Felix, Ernestina Orenstein (later Chivu), Ghizela Vass, and Ofelia Manole, (only Ernestina is cited in this paper) held high-ranking positions in the post-war regime, but never wrote about their personal Vapniarka experience. The other women cited in this article did not hold high-ranking positions in the party, while some were no longer even members of the Communist party in the 1980s and after. With the exception of the commemorative 1982 interviews that were never published, most female survivors were rather reluctant to testify about their experiences in the camp during the Communist period, or if they did publish something, as was the case of Ernestina Orenstein, it was not about her own experience, but rather about the Communist collective which she lionized, and the “heroes”, as they came to be known in the post-war Communist period, fallen at Ribnita prison in March 1944^[10] (Chivu 1948, 20–21).

The language used in the testimonies left by survivors that had emigrated to the West before 1989 and after, is compared to that in the testimonies made by those who remained in Romania until 1989 and after. Through this comparison we see how the politics of memory and political bias might have impacted the terminology used.

Those whose testimonies I consulted and are cited in this paper presented the first moments after their arrival at the gates of Vapniarka, on September 16, 1942, as particularly horrifying, despite the harrowing 8-day train journey during which the majority of the deportees were also robbed along the way by Romanian soldiers. According to the majority of the testimonies, the commander of the camp received the prisoners with the statement, “you will get out of here on all fours, if at all”. Although there are of course small variations in the exact wording of the phrase, the mass majority of the testimonies name the commander speaking to them as Major Ion Murgescu, while only Ana Friedman Bughici names him insistently as Captain Buradescu in her oral testimony (Bughici 1999). At points she admits that she forgot certain names and events over the years, and claims that certain details of the inner workings of the camp were unfamiliar to her until reading a well-documented book that had been recently published by one of her dear friends, Yhiel Benditer, combining archival material with personal testimonies of survivors made over the decades in Israel, starting in the late 1960s (Benditer 1995). The problem of forgetting details over time, and subconsciously being influenced by others’ testimonies is indeed an issue we find often in the oral histories recorded in the 1990s, when the speakers are already very aged. It is why I tried to identify testimonies made earlier on, immediately after the war or before 1989, when the details of the events and their sequence were still fresh, or at least fresher, in the minds of the survivors. These however are influenced ideologically. Nevertheless, I rely more on these testimonies than on the oral histories from 1999 despite their importance to certain aspects of the camp experience. As Ana Friedman Bughici herself says,

The fact is that we didn’t talk about this period at all, as we were caught up in activities and youth, I didn’t even talk with my husband at home, it was a past period that was somehow locked inside us, and we forgot … I don’t even remember who gave me the locket …

The testimonies that were made immediately after the war and are cited in this paper were mostly gathered officially to be used within the first war criminals’ tribunals of 1945 when the commanders and officers in charge of Vapniarka were tried in the same lot as Antonescu and members of his regime. That these commanders were tried so early along with Antonescu, before any of the other officials of Transnistria or authors of pogroms went to trial, shows the political importance of their sentencing within the new communist reality. Therefore, the testimonies served a specific political function and many used a particular language encouraged by the communist activists to lionize their own actions and either diminish or demonize the rest. So is also the case in the book by Sergiu Lezea published in 1945 that is cited here (Lezea 1945).

Lezea’s real identity, however, is unknown – this name appears on none of the lists of detainees, and later, in the 60s and 70s, the members of the Vapniarka association (established in Israel in 1959) knew nothing of him either, although they do cite his book in their brochure. Lezea is also mentioned by the avant-garde writer Sasa Pana in his autobiography Nascut in ’02 (Pana 2021) as one of the young poets who contributed to the famous newspaper Contemporanul shortly after the war, and is described by him as a survivor of Vapniarka.

In the majority of these 1945 testimonies, the communist collective, an underground group within the camp, is glorified and highlighted as the entity at Vapniarka that was the most responsible for saving the detainees from certain death, while minimizing, or in some cases obscuring, the role of the medical team.

The majority of the testimonies made at the trial in 1945 were by men with the exception of three: one by Anna Stein, another by Ernestina Orenstein, and a third by Rasela Topper Burileanu, all testifying against Major Murgescu and his informant from among the internees, Bubi Finkelstein.^[11] Anna Stein is mentioned in several testimonies, including by Rasela Topper Burileanu, and singled out as an “immoral” element that fraternized with the commander of the camp, and possibly even “compromised” herself for better treatment.

Not much precise biographical information is known about the childhood of Anna Sten, not even her exact birthdate (Anna Sten Collection). But from these unpublished diaries written in the mid-1960s in the United States, “22 years after liberation from captivity”, we gather that she was born in Romania into an upper-class family as an only child. On the official list of deportees to Vapniarka, an Anna Stein appears as having been deported from Bucharest, aged 35 (Arolson Archive Collection n.d.). From Anna Sten’s writings we find out that after several detentions for unspecified and probably unknown reasons, she was finally transferred into Targu Jiu camp for political prisoners. She describes herself as being a “young girl in love for the first time” and still quite innocent. Can this “young girl” Anna Sten be the same as the 35 year-old Anna Stein on the prisoners list? In Anna Sten’s journal we find corroborative information about her time spent with the commander, as charged by Rasela Topper Burileanu in her 1945 testimony against Anna Stein, giving even more credence to the idea that Anna Sten and Anna Stein are one and the same person.

In the testimonies made in Israel before and after 1990, generally more weight was placed on the importance of the medical team in collective survival rather than on the communist collective, although the spirit of solidarity was present in all, even in the journal of Anna Sten.

5 Historical Context

Vapniarka was one of two official concentration camps in the region of Transnistria (INSHR-EW 2004, 143), the area between the Prut and Bug Rivers that was awarded by Nazi Germany to its ally Romania to be occupied by Romanian authorities and exploited with Jewish slave labor. After its invasion of the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in late June 1941, the Romanian fascist regime deported to Transnistria Jews from Old Kingdom Romania and the occupied territories of Bukowina and Bessarabia. In total, Romania massacred about 380,000–400,000 Jews during the Holocaust, through pogroms, mass shootings, starvation, imposed exposure and epidemics (INSHR-EW 2004, 143). The majority of Jewish victims perished in Transnistria.

Transnistria was an area composed of towns and villages with local Soviet populations, including many Jews. Local Jews were massacred by invading Romanian and German forces, while deported Jews were dropped off in various towns, settlements and villages that were transformed into ghettos (or colonies, as Romanian authorities called them) and camps.^[12] Some were either surrounded by barbed wire, there were armed guards surveilling the areas so that no Jews were able to leave without permission, while others were even completely fenced off.

What differentiated Vapniarka from the other camps and ghettos in the rest of this territory was that it was not only surrounded by barbed wire, heavily guarded, and located in a former Soviet barracks – what we normally associate with the typical concentration camp – but had an initial regime of extermination induced by the pea fodder provided as food, which was toxic for consumption. Additionally, Vapniarka was the only space of concentration in Transnistria that fell under the authority of the Ministry of Internal Affairs rather than under the Governorate of Transnistria governed by the Antonescu-appointed Gheorghe Alexianu, because it had been categorized a political prisoners’ concentration camp like the one in Targu Jiu inside Romania proper (Benditer 1995).

There were three phases in the lifespan of the Vapniarka camp: first from late 1941 to early 1942, second from March 1942 to July 1942, and third from August 1942 to October 1943. The mass majority of prisoners in the last phase were brought here on a September 16, 1942 transport. The prisoners from the first two phases all died from typhus, cold, hunger and other debilitating diseases that were not diagnosed at that time, and some in the second group were simply shot. Only 30 survived from the second group. However, the deportees in the last phase had a very high survival rate despite the conditions of extermination, with only 23 recorded deaths (25004 SRI rola 21 ds. 40011 fila 94tabel cu decedati in Vapniarka n.d.).

Starting in August 1942, the last group was deported for being what Antonescu’s regime called “communists”, but while out of the approximately 1200 Jewish prisoners at Vapniarka, less than one hundred actually were members of the illegal communist party or with clear connections to the party, approximately 1100 were merely Jews from all social classes and political affiliations, several being religious people with no connection to politics whatsoever. This demographic represented the entire spectrum of the Jewish population, with its internal politico-social-religious rifts and conflicts (INSHR-EW 2004, 143).^[13]

In his book from the late 90s, Yihiel Benditer, a survivor of Vapniarka, writes about Zlota Steif Goichman, a deportee who “had miraculously escaped from the Camionka-Sidova women’s camp near Treblinka”. She found refuge in the city of Cernovitz, only to be recaptured by Romanian gendarmes. Benditer published Zlota’s testimony recounting her arrival at Vapniarka and her first impressions of this camp:

I told (a few Ukrainians that approached and asked me where I was going) I was on my way to Vapniarka. One old man crossed himself and said: ’Vapniarka? There people die like flies.’ … When I got to Vapniarka, I found only 30 Jewish detainees from Bessarabia. Only God is my witness as to the terrible state they were in. Their clothes were torn; they were dirty, hungry, and in a terrible state of demoralization. They told me that they were the remnants of a group of 1,200 Jews from Bessarabia and Bucovina. About half of them died of typhoid fever, and the others were taken out of the camp mostly crawling on all fours. Where they were taken and what happened to them, no one knows. (Benditer 1995, 22)

This account doesn’t only reveal the horror of the camp in general, but highlights the calamitous impact that the peas given as food had on the previous group of detainees, paralyzing and/or killing them. It also reminds us of the words with which Major Ion Murgescu welcomed the last lot of deportees on September 16, highlighting his prior knowledge of the detrimental effect that the peas would have when eaten. The cause of the paralysis, however, was yet unknown to the previous lot of internees until the arrival of the doctors of this last lot.^[14]

After the shooting murder of the more than 600 Jews from the second lot by the camp’s Romanian authorities (as hinted at by Zlota Steif above), this new group began to arrive: the first one hundred or so Jews had been deported from Bessarabia in August, joining the approximately one hundred Ukrainian Jehovah’s Witnesses and few Soviet prisoners-of-war that had been left in the camp from before. These Christian prisoners’ diet differed from that of the Jews, as they were allowed to purchase food from the village market and thus needed to ingest much less of the pea fodder distributed by the commander of the camp, Major Ion Murgescu, since his arrival at the camp in June 1942 (Kessler 1947).

On September 8, 1942, the mass majority of those who would make up the prisoner population at Vapniarka until the camp’s closure in October 1943 were deported from: the Targu Jiu camp for political prisoners (407),^[15] from penitentiaries inside Romania (85), and from what was called “liberty”, which referred to their places of residence (554). From the 554 deported from “liberty”, 55 were female, some of whom had been deported with their kids. From the group of 407 deported from Targu Jiu, 52 were female. The total of Jewish women at Vapniarka was 107 along with the five children accompanying them. It is the women of this last lot that is the object of our study.

While very few deported from “liberty” were politically engaged, it was claimed by the fascist authorities at the time, by the communists after, and by historians later on,^[16] that all the deportees in Vapniarka were communists, antifascists, or at the very least political prisoners, even when many of those from Targu Jiu were not political, like Anna Sten.

Her journal states that her family was wealthy and well-connected, so in the Targu Jiu camp she was sent to Group I where the rich had to pay for their own upkeep and had much better living conditions than the internees of the other groups.

Ana Friedman, future wife of Simion Bughici (who later became Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania in the early 1950s), both former deportees at Vapniarka and before that at Targu Jiu, says of the Groups at Targu Jiu in her 1999 oral history recording:

There were communists, fascists, socialists, Zionists in the group. In another group there were Iron Guardists, and in other groups others. Separate Group for intellectuals. (Bughici 1999)

The diverse social and ideological make-up at Targu Jiu proves that many of the 407 Jews sent to Vapniarka from Targu Jiu on September 8 were actually not at all affiliated with politics thus making the majority of the prisoner body at Vapniarka politically non-affiliated. From Targu Jiu only the Jews were deported to Transnistria and none of the gentiles, not even the communists.

In the following sections, I will discuss the forms of resistance, some specifically antifascist, others just individual, cited in the narratives, and how subjects narrate their performance of agency through these. They are: organization, care work, culture, and love/friendship. Compromise is a form of resistance that I have identified and attributed to impure resistance, as discussed above.

6 Organization as Antifascist Resistance

Upon their arrival, the buildings lacked essential amenities such as roofs, windows, doors, and sleeping quarters. There was a glaring absence of basic necessities like running water and a functional kitchen, a critical issue as winter approached. In response to the growing despair among the group, a faction of former Targu Jiu detainees appealed to the authorities, proposing that the prisoners themselves undertake repairs to make the camp habitable and manage sanitary conditions to prevent epidemics like typhus, which had already devastated over two hundred fifty thousand Jews in Transnistria. A Jewish Committee was formed, comprising individuals from the various political and social backgrounds, including religious leaders, tasked with organizing repair efforts and improving living conditions. Concurrently, an underground communist collective, three of whose members were also members of the Jewish Committee including Simion Bughici, sought to influence its decisions, occasionally causing discord, other times uniting the prisoner population. Jobs were assigned to the prisoners by these two organizations in consultation with each other.

The prisoner population was divided among different pavilions (barracks) thusly: in pavilion 1 were the women and children (both Ukrainian and Jewish), in pavilion 2 were the Jewish men that arrived with the September 16 transport, and in pavilion 3 were the Ukrainian men who arrived in early 1942, the Jewish men who had arrived in August, and some of the men from the September 16 transport. The Jewish prisoners from the September 16 transport split themselves up by city: Arad, Timisoara, Bucharest, Iasi, Dorohoi, etc. – the richer supporting the poorer. Within each city-based community, the groups were further divided into smaller groups charged with caring for the sick or for those who couldn´t afford any food beyond the poisoned food provided by the commandment (Ştefan 2020, 240). To prevent the spread of typhus, strict hygiene measures were enforced by these organizations within the pavilions, effectively averting the epidemic.

Ernestina Orenstein (Tina), who was also part of the underground communist collective in the camp, was the head of the women’s division.^[17] On the ground floor of this building, the inmates organized an infirmary to care for the sick. A team of 20 medical practitioners – doctors, pharmacists, etc. – also organized a nurse corps from among the women, headed by pharmacist Betty Belinschi (her name varies among the different sources, as we shall soon see). Anna Sten was, according to her journal, also among these nurses.

The formation of these organizations through which a strict adherence to rules and measures was mandated, was considered by the narrators a form of specifically antifascist resistance that benefited the entire prisoner body by collectively opposing the conditions of extermination imposed by the fascist authorities and leading to a high survival rate.

7 Care Work as Antifascist Resistance

From the autobiographies and testimonies cited, we find out that the women at Vapniarka were involved in work inside the camp that is sometimes gendered by simplistically being associated exclusively with femininity: the laundry, kitchen, or infirmary. However, all these care facilities were absolutely essential to survival at the camp. The laundry service prevented the spread of typhus, which had decimated the Jews of the previous lot; the kitchen was where food was prepared for the entire camp population; and the infirmary was the place where the sick, especially those that later developed paralysis from the poisoned pea fodder were cared for (as foreshadowed in Major Murgescu’s “welcome” address to the deportees). In Vapniarka, the presence of women at these facilities cannot be attributed exclusively to a traditional gender divide because some of these facilities at other spaces of concentration were not associated with femininity or gendered work. For example, in Theresienstadt “the positions in the kitchens and bakeries were also reserved for men: kitchen staff were classed as hard laborers entitling workers to extra rations that they could take home with them, as was everyone in the butcher group.” (Hájková 2013, 513).

Men also worked at these care stations, but most of the few remaining healthy men were assigned to harder labor outside the camp (starting in January 1943, more than 600 inmates became affected by paralysis caused by the pea fodder and were no longer able to work, of whom most were not even able to really move). For example, Eugene Friedlander recalls in his 1982 testimony:

I had the responsibility of picking up the laundry every day from the head of the group of 100, and of returning it on time washed and ironed. The work collective put so much love and devotion in completing this task that it managed to receive the trust of the internees, so that each one gave their laundry to be washed, knowing that they would get it back on time, washed, ironed and even patched up. Our female comrades worked hard to patch up the ripped clothing. (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 370 Transnistria. Amintiri despre Vapniarka Rabnita.pdf n.d.)

Another female deportee who helped at the infirmary and laundry was Saly Abramovici from Botoșani. She too had been deported from Targu Jiu to Vapniarka. In her 1999 oral testimony, she spoke about the attitude of “antifascist resistance” that she and her colleagues had from very early on upon arriving at Vapniarka in order to fight against the conditions of extermination imposed on them:

What do we want? To survive? The young people who had more power to help others – we wanted to do everything. The committee told us, and I was put in charge of mobilizing women. We helped in the infirmary and to make beds from wooden planks. To the women who were crying from hunger, we young people told them, "go ahead, don’t give satisfaction to the fascists who want to kill us, courage!" that’s how we mobilized women to wash clothes in the oven so we don’t die of typhus. (Abramovici 1999)

Similarly, Margareta Gall recounts in her 1982 testimony (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 371 Amintiri din Transnistria. Vapniarka.pdf n.d.) that she was first sent to work at the laundry, but that later, because she had typing skills, was sent to the commandment. There she ate with the rest of the military personnel and brought back food to the inmates. She also claimed that she brought all the news she gathered back to the communist collective, a detail that is to be noted. Additionally, she stressed the fact that she and others used “the power of persuasion” to get the internees to wash, and had to even use force to convince the recalcitrant of the necessity to do this to prevent the typhus epidemic. As a result, she wrote, there was not one case of typhus. This feat is corroborated by other testimonies as well.

The medical team is remembered with much respect by the survivors, primarily by those who were not communist, or who changed their political views over time and reflected this in the importance they attributed to the life-saving efforts of the medical team at the expense of the communist collective’s. This is especially true of the testimonies made in Israel before and after 1990. And much of this gratitude is directed toward the nurses, specifically the head nurse, by some identified as Betty Bernstein or Belinstein or Belinschi/Belinski.^[18] However, in his journal, one of the head doctors of the infirmary, Dr. Arthur Kessler, who was the one to determine that the cause of the paralysis was indeed the pea fodder, discovered to be the lathyrus savivus species, identifies her as Regina. On the prisoner list, however, we have the name of Liuba Belinski and Basea Belinstein instead of Betty, and no Bernstein at all, once again highlighting differences in remembering formed by social relations, subjective experience, interests and passage of time.

Zalman Broder, a communist inmate, describes the nurses as self-sacrificing in his 1962 unpublished journal and mentions Betty by name:

There were numerous instances when the comrade nurses sacrificed their own food, rest and time to be able to offer us the best of care. It is rightly so that the sick in the infirmary nicknamed Betty Belinstein “the mother of the sick”. (Broder 1962)

Dr. Arthur Kessler talks about someone named Regina as the head nurse and describes her in his diary as a “dear woman”:

Regina arrives from the women’s quarters. She is experienced; her husband was very ill for a long time. The dear woman knows something about nursing. She recruits others and takes over the direction of care, feeding, urine collection and skin care to prevent bed sores. She becomes head nurse. (Kessler 1946)

The women who left testimonies about their own role in care work see themselves as forces of antifascist resistance or resistance, with power, determination, and will, mobilizing the internees and “using the power of persuasion”. While some men portray them not primarily as fighters, but as self-sacrificing mother-figures, others, especially from among the communists, describe them as both fighters and feminine, utilizing the concept of self-sacrifice in the mythologized communist spirit of gender-neutral duty. Therefore, I do have to disagree with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer in their assertion that gender differences were “operative in Vapniarka: women did not work outside the camp but tended to stay in the one camp building that was assigned to them and their children; they worked as nurses and cleaning staff, and they prepared food” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006, 368). While in some cases women were portrayed as soft caretakers and they indeed did not unload coal or chop wood outside the camp, this fact is logical since it was a task of extreme heavy labor reserved for only the strongest and healthiest of the camp’s internees, who were a small minority of the men, while the rest of the men, who were weaker, were sent to other jobs within the camp, including the laundry and kitchen, otherwise traditionally associated with women’s work. However, in Theresienstadt, for example, working in the kitchen was categorized as men’s heavy labor. So, this traditionally gendered labor distribution is not completely operative in Vapniarka either, with some men doing what might be seen as women’s work and women doing what was categorized as men’s work. I do not perceive the fact that women did not work outside the camp as a sign of a gendered division of labor, but rather as a practical decision based on purely physical considerations. That the few women at Vapniarka also worked alongside men in the kitchen and other facilities actually contradicts the supposition that gender was operative. As shown so far, and as we will continue to highlight, women played an essential and equal role as agents in the work of collective survival at Vapniarka, for which they were recognized and thanked.

These differences in approach to gender were ideologically informed. Communists in the camp, trained and educated to view everyone as equals including women, addressed them as “comrades” even when portraying them as self-sacrificing, a quality that resonated ideologically in both men and women, therefore not exclusively a feminine trait when used by them. Whereas, the more bourgeois and less politically-engaged internees perceived them with more traditional female characteristics: soft, motherly, self-sacrificing as a feminine trait, “dear” creatures, etc. This more gendered representation, however, does not mean that their work was not seen as equally important in the multi-form effort of resistance.

For example, the mysterious author and poet Sergiu Lezea, whose 1945 book Vapniarka: Lagarul Mortii (Lezea 1945) implies that he too was a former detainee in the camp, dedicates a whole chapter to the women of Vapniarka as a group, with only one specific name mentioned, that of Mara who took care of the children of Vapniarka, the five Jewish and the others being Ukrainian Christian. Mara is mentioned in other testimonies as well. In strong, didactical and typically communist aggrandizing and bombastic wooden language, Lezea describes the women through his male perspective thusly:

The women of Vapniarka are real comrades in struggle and suffering. From the first moment they sprang up to contribute physically and morally to the work and life of what was demanded here. The majority are young but enough of them are old and tested fighters who have already known the strike of fascism in their righteous struggle for the peoples’ cause. They have already confronted the terror in the prisons of the reactionary masters and that’s why they are not afraid to face the difficulties and the struggle that we have to undertake until the end, victoriously ….

They are young women warriors who accompanied their parents, brothers and life partners in the struggle for life’s rights. That’s why they are always the most zealous and wise, the most hardworking and tireless. Inside these women is that which for the most humble and most sophisticated Man should evoke joy, respect and admiration.

Not without femininity, they are intelligent. Many times they understand more than the men. They have an entrepreneurial spirit. They ponder upon all the problems and are the authors of the best projects for the resolutions of the small and large problems of the peoples’ existence in this camp. Alongside the rest of the people, they work in the kitchen and canteen, in the laundry and in the sewing workshop. They patch up the washed laundry, mend socks and the old clothes. They pay their dues in this life where they can’t be present and the men have to do everything else. They are also the friends of the Ukrainian women in the third building where Mara takes care of the children of the camp. They are also nurses and collaborate on the organization of cultural programs.

8 Culture as Antifascist Resistance

As mentioned even by Lezea, several women were also in charge of cultural events. This aspect of antifascist resistance was highlighted by many of the survivors as the key element in maintaining morale, dignity and the will to live, especially at those dark moments when it seemed that the fate of the prisoners was to die, exterminated by the commander of the camp through his practices of withholding water, distributing toxic pea fodder as food, extreme torture and other similarly criminal acts. In her 1982 testimony, Asia Moraru recounted her contribution in the camp workshops and to the puppet theater that both educated and entertained the prisoners, restoring her agency and that of the camp inmates (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 371 Amintiri din Transnistria. Vapniarka.pdf n.d.):

The puppeteers went from salon to salon to present short skits of 10–15, max-30min long. The texts didn’t have the goal to only ridicule certain habits or morals, but rather, at the same time, to encourage the deportees. In this way, to raise the morale of those imprisoned, their power to resist the destructive regime to which we were subjected … In our shows we also included news from outside, although in a camouflaged form that the internees understood. The puppet shows took place in the infirmary of the camp, where their role was to raise the morale of those there.

Also in 1982, Iosif Blumenfeld, who suffered from the paralysis provoked by the poisoned pea fodder in the camp, recounts his role in the puppet theater and his collaboration with Asia Moraru thusly:

One day Asia Moraru, who was responsible for cultural events in the camp, came to me and requested my help in making the puppets. I was skilled in working in wood. Asia convinced me to get out of bed and begin making some puppets as well as trying to make them work. I put together a small group of people to help…. Then we started making a scene. I can confirm that my participation in this work, the passion with which I worked, saved me from the deep depression in which I had fallen. (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 371 Amintiri din Transnistria. Vapniarka.pdf n.d.)

Another prisoner, Esther Gonda Maghyar, organized ballet programs and described the cultural events in her own 1982 testimony:

Because I had studied choreography and ballet before the war, I organized several ballet numbers with the deportees during the artistic programs that we offered in the camp. … For Purim 1943, Ofelia Manole told the story of Meghila, and Asia Moraru played Esther. I created tableaux vivants with Hacker and Asia. Poetry readings were organized, as well as symbolic dances (the wandering Jew, the war, etc). For New Year’s Eve we organized, along with the cultural collective, a program that lasted until morning: songs, poetry readings, spoken chorus, etc. (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 371 Amintiri din Transnistria. Vapniarka.pdf n.d.)

About Esther Maghyar, Dr. Arthur Kessler wrote in his journal:

… Esti, visits her compatriots and makes them tea as a womanly gesture, but is waited on more than she waits on the others. Esti, the trim, supple phys-ed teacher from Temesvar, whose long nose is happily overlooked because of her many other imposing qualities – everyone is sure to notice her the first time they encounter her. (Kessler 1946)

Through these organized cultural activities that educated, entertained, increased morale, restored dignity, and affirmed agency, the sick and hopeless detainees were encouraged to fight against adversity in order to survive.

9 Love as Resistance

There are several episodes of love in Vapniarka, young men and women meeting there and becoming couples, in numerous cases marrying after the war. In the camp several workshops were established by the internees where, besides tailoring, carpentry, and other crafts, also small objects were produced from found materials around the camp. These small artefacts were gifted to others as symbols of friendship and love. Love stories were for many an important factor in survival when the conditions at the camp were setup to encourage savage competition for minimal resources and mutual elimination – Darwinian conditions of survival of the fittest. In this context, romantic love or friendship functioned as a form of solidarity to counter this fascist policy. Saly Abramovici, for example, became involved with Misu Wolf, a young man who was later deported to Ribnita prison along with another 55 young men, and killed there in March 1944 by retreating Nazis, aided by the Romanian guards.

There was a boy from Botoșani whom I met in Vapniarka, not in Botoșani. He helped me a lot to mobilize. He had been taken (deported) from a school in Bucharest. He was an intelligent boy, he really liked culture, we talked about books, literature, cinematography, I had the desire to read literature again, it was my first friendship with a man, two young people in their 20s. We were also making plans, the plan was the hope that "we will live", we will return together to Botoșani and we will get married … The object that he made for me, he worked on it day and night. It’s an object full of optimism, he tried to give me courage. (Abramovici 1999)

A more cynical perspective on love, however, is offered by Dr. Arthur Kessler, who describes one couple thusly:

‘I have to visit the girls for a moment,’ says Dr. Moritz. He moves on to the small room where Polia, Ray, and Mrs. Stein continue their life as women in a somewhat altered fashion. He finds our dark-haired Turri already there. Turri had already instructed his beloved Ray during the transport in basic medical knowledge and is now gazing into her eyes, faithful as a dog, and waits for her to throw him a kind word. A man and his woman belong together. Short separations reinforce the feeling of belonging to each other, long ones and those of indeterminate duration undermine it. One chooses what seems most suitable and attainable through proximity. Only after one’s return does one recognize the deficiencies of such a partnership based on need. (Kessler 1946)

It is here that we encounter the name of Mrs. Stein for the first time among the testimonies I consulted. The small room in which she lived with two friends appears here as it also does in Sten’s journal. It is difficult to ignore the observation made by Dr. Kessler that these three women continue their life as “women” in a “somewhat” altered fashion, not quite as the other internees who are constantly struggling to survive against all odds. Rasela’s testimony seems to have been an expression of her bitterness toward the privileged conditions these three lived in, especially Anna Stein who was perceived to have engaged in sexual barter to receive them.

Miraculously, a child was born in the camp. The short story mentioned earlier was written by Anna Sten in the 1970s about this birth (Anna Sten Collection; AR 25477; box 1; folder 3; Leo Baeck Institute. n.d.), an event also mentioned in the completely unrelated 1982 Bucharest testimony by Rado Alexandru, the head of the camp’s Jewish committee (Arhiva Federatiei Comunitatilor Evreilor Romania, Fond III Ds 367 Arhiva FCE Rado Alexandru. Amintiri despre Vapniarka, Olgopol n.d.). Alexandru praises the effort of the medical team and the Jewish committee on behalf of the newborn. Although interestingly in Anna’s journal this episode is missing, in the story Anna Sten stresses the hope represented by this birth, the self-sacrificial spirit it evoked among the internees (both male and female), including in Anna herself who, in her bourgeois fashion, points out how she gave up her last remaining drops of perfume for the needs of the baby. She discusses the dedication of the doctors to the baby and the great amount of love with which the baby was showered. Curiously enough, however, the only two other mentions of this extraordinary event are to be found in Adalbert Rosinger’s journal and in a woodcut made in the camp^[19] representing a mother with a newborn at her breast behind barbed wire.^[20] Not even Dr. Arthur Kessler, who would have most certainly known about it, mentions it in his journal. It remains an open question why no one else wrote about it, but it points to a phenomenon of memory and social networks.

Through love and friendship, the inmates gave each other courage and hope, and supported each other in the struggle to survive the extermination that was planned by the fascist authorities. This atmosphere of love, solidarity and mutual aid even made it possible for a baby to be born and survive captivity, an extremely rare occurrence in Transnistria. While solidarity through love and friendship was clearly a form of resistance, it was not necessarily political or organized as antifascist resistance was, and it was on a more individual level, aiding two people or small groups rather than the entire prisoner body.

10 “Compromise” as Resistance

In Anna Sten’s journal, we are told that she had been childhood friends with two other girls who came from Cernovitz, also deported to Vapniarka. According to her writings, they were in the same train car as Dr. Arthur Kessler and Dr. Moritz. Anna Sten states that Major Murgescu, who was constantly drunk, “a syphilitic” (Anna Sten Collection) always on the look-out for women, tried to attract the two girls by offering them privileges like a small individual room in the large pavilion. Sten joined the two girls there and the three stayed together. I am deducing that one of these three is Polia Dubs because Dr. Kessler mentions her along with “Mrs. Stein” in his description of love cited above. Polia also worked at the infirmary as a nurse. Of Polia, Dr. Kessler writes:

After all, Polia had approached the Major immediately to assure him that we were all a better class of people – one that had nothing to do with politics and expected to be treated well. One could be of two minds about this intervention. One bystander remarked cynically that women are better off in this world, they have something to offer under any circumstances. (Kessler 1946)^[21]

In his description of Polia, Anna Stein and Ray who live in the small room granted to them in the first pavilion by the lascivious Major Murgescu, Dr. Kessler hints to a moral lapse, or “compromise” on their part. The idea expressed here that in most cases it is women, as opposed to men, who can engage in sexual barter to gain benefits and better living conditions, is to be noted. Dr. Kessler also doesn’t seem to appreciate Polia’s attempt to ingratiate herself with the commander of the camp by distinguishing her class from the rest of the internees, while perhaps also understanding her need to do so in the struggle to survive.

Several testimonies, including the journals of Anna Sten, recall the behavior of Major Murgescu toward the women, some hinting toward rape although not using the term, others, including Rasela Topper Burileanu, as we have already seen, disparaging Anna Stein for acquiescing to his advances in exchange for privileges.

With the women he (Murgescu) behaved apparently benevolently, but only to get them to give in to his advances, and when he was refused, he would become angry and gave free reign to his beastly instincts, inventing all sorts of reasons to punish and humiliate them. (Carp 1946, 365)

In Rasela Topper Burileanu’s testimony against Bubi Finkelstein at the war criminals’ tribunal, she accuses Anna Stein by name:

The parties and “artistic-sexual” shows that Finkelstein organized for Major Murgescu, and in which the internee Anna Stein always played an important role, were … and news of them entered the camp not only once, there where people were depressed and dealing with suffering, pain, and death. (25 004 SRI rola 22 ds 22 fila 9bRasela Topper Burileanu testimony n.d.)

Anna Stein’s participation at Major Murgescu’s parties is corroborated even by Murgescu himself, in his testimony during the war criminals’ tribunal. He stated:

I knew the internee Anna Stein, who took part in the celebration of the unveiling of the commemorative cross, and who took part in the orchestra organized of 5–6 people, and when a dinner was organized. I do not admit that I have organized other parties in the camp. (25004 SRI ds. 40011 19 fila 8a1Murgescu testimony n.d.)

Another internee, Jac Mendelovici, also attests to Major Murgescu’s penchant for parties and using female detainees to cook, while others were forced to play in orchestras.

The sole preoccupation of Major Murgescu was to organize never ending parties for which he forced the female internees to cook, and us to form orchestras. (25004 SRI ds. 40011 19 fila 19Jac Mendelovici testimony n.d.)

Anna Stein’s official testimony against Major Murgescu at the war criminals’ tribunal mentions that Murgescu was always drunk, but does not address the parties he threw, nor being forced to participate. Instead, she focuses on his brutality toward the other detainees highlighting the beating of intellectuals (possibly to counter the narrative established by the communists about the particularly bad treatment that they received) and his refusal to change the diet from the toxic pea fodder. She also mentions Bubi Finkelstein, accused by numerous detainees and herself to have been a collaborationist, used by Murgescu as a spy and personal servant (25004 SRI ds. 40011 19 fila 32Anna Stein testimony n.d.).

In Anna Sten’s journal, however, we are offered a detailed account of her participation in the many parties thrown by Murgescu, how simply her beauty allowed her certain privileges, even going so far as to claim that due to her beauty and allure, letters were delivered by an enchanted Romanian camp officer to her home, thus allowing Bucharest families to find out about the fate of the internees, who until then had been held incommunicado.

One day an officer came to the camp, I do not know for what. He was shown around the camp and when he entered our room and saw me on the ground, he said: “but you are one of the most beautiful girls in Bucharest. What are you doing here? I told him I’m just a tourist visiting this nice village”. (Anna Sten Collection)

Anna Sten saw the officer later in the camp yard and he encouraged her to give him a letter for her family, which indeed he delivered. “It is thus that it became known that we were all in the Vapniarka camp,” she concluded, insinuating that it was entirely due to her looks that the camp managed to make contact with Bucharest.

While Anna Sten writes that she did not know the name of the officer, other testimonies indicate that there was an officer who indeed came into the camp and carried letters from many internees, not only from Anna, to Bucharest, notifying their families and the Centrala Evreilor of the situation and the need for supplies.^[22]

Anna Sten also recounts how Murgescu once offered to take her into his chambers and accommodate her there upon his return from Bucharest in January 1943, bestowing upon her this

“honor”: Syphilis, 5 crosses, that’s what we knew from the doctors that treated him. In a second I had an idea. (Anna Sten Collection)

Anna promised the Major to accept this invitation if he allowed her to visit the wife of an engineer who worked in a nearby village and who was due to go to Bucharest. Based on this mobility, we are left to understand that the wife was not Jewish, although this is not clarified. Murgescu accompanied Anna with his car and a guard to that location, a privilege that only his spy, Bubi Finkelstein, had received until then. In Bucharest, the wife of the engineer contacted Anna’s fiancé and “commander Tautu”, an old friend of Anna’s family who accompanied Anna’s fiancé to visit Major Murgescu and gift him something valuable for his birthday. There, commander Tautu presented “Paul”, a non-Jew, as Anna’s fiancé, and asked Major Murgescu to bring a large package for her, which he indeed did.

Regarding the parties thrown by Murgescu, Anna Sten writes that,

For these festivities, he requested that the communists bring him workers for the kitchen, for cleaning, and some artists. The communists entered the kitchen having the possibility to eat and to take food. The cleaning and the other hard labor were left to the doctors, intellectuals and the bourgeois. I was sent to sing. Before the concert, I was given a soup. Although I don’t like soups, after the pea fodder a soup and a slice of bread seemed delicious. I will never forget the taste of that soup. (Anna Sten Collection)

She continues to describe the event, where there were many military men present, making a point to mention the other women (local Christian women) dressed in “very bad taste”. She, however, wore a blue dress made by the finest tailor in Bucharest, wore lipstick, let her long, blond hair down, and danced to the rhythm of the music while singing, once again highlighting her upper middle-class upbringing and privileged status. The Colonel who arrived from Tiraspol and the Transnistrian command center invited her to dance and thus “opened the ball”. She was then asked to dance by the Christian doctor of the Vapniarka military hospital (outside the camp), whom she describes as very handsome. In her account, we once again notice how she focuses on the abuse imposed on the intellectuals and bourgeois, this time by the communists who took the job with most advantages and least work.

This conflict among the political and social groups is very important in the narrative of the Vapniarka camp, one that was manipulated after the war by the communist regime in its own favor, focusing all heroic and dignified acts onto its members while obscuring its own bad deeds and minimizing, even erasing, the positive role of other groups.

This narrative construct is clearly seen in Ernestina Orenstein’s testimony at Murgescu’s trial. As the former head of the women’s division and member of the underground communist collective she felt the need to offer a counter-example to Anna of what was proper and dignified behavior in the camp. She stated the following:

Major Murgescu had a particularly kind behavior toward me. I was invited to his office along with the internee Dr. Blum, who was the leader of the team of medics,^[23] and told us what had happened in the “camp of death” before our arrival …. I thought he meant well, especially because to me personally he had offered to bring some food and money from home. But I realized very quickly that this kindness came from a completely different place than the one of a well-behaved man. Due to my intransigence, Major Murgescu realized that he couldn’t use me as an instrument of personal pleasure or as an informant against the other political prisoners, and especially due to my attitude as a protector of the other political prisoners. (25004 SRI rola 21 ds. 40011 fila 128bErnestina Orenstein testimony n.d.)

Recalling the Vapniarka years in the Bulletin published in Israel in 1970, Fani Teitler echoes Ernestina:

It did not work for the officers in the illusions they had about the women of Vapniarka camp. They were strong fighters, idealists, and it was not those pleasures and promises beyond the gate that attracted them. They had much too much constructive work to help them maintain their resistance in the camp. We worked hard to maintain our morale raised, to be able to endure hunger, cold, death and paralysis that was imposed on us. (Teitler 1972, 7)

But beyond the moral failings of some in the camp, the worst kind of behavior, unequivocally condemned by all internees regardless of political affiliation, was spying, or collaboration with the fascist authorities. Collaboration in this case is not merely working for, or fraternizing with, them in exchange for food or out of fear for one’s life, what would be seen here as impure resistance, but rather hurting fellow prisoners for personal gain. Besides the case of Bubi Finkelstein, who was tried as a criminal of war, there was another notorious case at Vapniarka, mentioned in numerous testimonies, published and unpublished. It is the case of the beautiful, blond Russian (or Ukrainian) lawyer, Vera Isacenco, from Bessarabia. She was introduced in the camp by Captain Buradescu, an even more sadistic camp commander who took over Vapniarka after Murgescu’s departure, to collect information on the illegal communist collective. Adalbert Rosinger, who also became a victim of the communist regime in the 60s, recounts in his 1977 journal, written after his release from prison:

Considering that we are all human, that Dascălu himself was interned for almost 2 years, plus Vera’s charm, it is not difficult to imagine that an intimate relationship developed between the two beings in the harsh conditions of the Transnistrian camp months. Who can throw a stone at them? It is certain that the information collected by Dascălu, regarding Vera and transmitted to the party, did not satisfy Bernath Andrei and thus Dascălu came to be suspected by the party of having informed Vera during their private hours together. As for Vera Isacenco, after her release, the Romanian authorities handed her over to the Soviets, who set Vera free, finding her innocent. (Rosinger 1977)

Others, like Osias Stentzler, however, recount a different version of events, and claim that Vera’s espionage caused serious problems for the camp prisoners, justifying the harsh treatment she and her lover, Dascălu, received.

Dascălu Paul, our political chief in the Vapniarka camp, was changed by our leadership during the time of Colonel Motora. In the camp, a young, beautiful, blond haired woman with a very nice body was also imprisoned. She was received by Dascălu. She was sent by the camp commander in pavilion nr. 3, with Russians, Ukrainians, partisans and a few other (Jewish) prisoners. She told D. that she is imprisoned for espionage, winning D.’s trust and eventually he entrusted her with the conspiratorial way of our organization. She was removed from the camp after a few weeks, and the camp commander took some restrictive measures against us after an incident caused by a guard with the inmates in the pavilion nr. 3. (Stentzler 2017)

Matei Gall, in his 1997 book, Eclipsa, echoes Stentzler’s evaluation of the event in contradiction to Rosinger’s. Gall does not mention Dascălu by name, possibly to protect his identity since he had already served time in prison immediately after the war for his betrayal. But based on all the other descriptions of the man it is very clear that it is one and the same as Dascălu.

Our lawyer, probably tortured as much as the rest of us were, found relief in Vera’s little room, in the bed that was not only a nest of love but also of betrayal. Vera managed to find out from him certain details about the way we were organized, the people at the head of our collective, and reported all this to the commander of the gendarmes who was in charge of guarding us. (Gall 1997)

In my findings thusfar, Vera appears only in the men’s narratives.

11 Conclusions

Through a narrative analysis, I show the great diversity of world views in the accounts of the camp experience of Vapniarka’s women. This study revealed how ideology, class, time and location of testimony affected the narration and the terminology used in women’s representations of themselves and men’s representations of women.

As we have seen, Communists and the women themselves tended to see the role of women as equals in the struggle for survival, using masculine words like “strong”, “power”, “mobilize”, “fighters/warriors”, “comrades”, “intransigence” and “struggle” to describe the women’s contribution. “Self-sacrificial” for communists was a gender-neutral quality expected of all and celebrated as part of the communist ethos. The others, originating from more bourgeois social classes and less politically conscious, tended to view women through a more gendered lens, focusing on traditionally feminine qualities, such as “devotion”, “self-sacrifice” in the bourgeois tradition, “motherliness”, and using words such as “dear” to refer to them.

Some of the accounts, written either in Israel or in the west decades after liberation, also reveal the antagonisms between the communists in the camp and those from other political or social groups, as seen in Anna Sten’s journal. Adalbert Rosinger, although a communist initially and with a good position after the war, was later persecuted by the regime. His 1977 account of his time in Vapniarka, which was published in early 2023, is informed also by his terrible 1960s experience with the regime, most likely projecting this altered perspective onto the past and narrating an unequivocal indictment of the communist collective in the camp, which was refuted by other survivors, including in Matei Gall’s Eclipsa and in Yhiel Benditer's Vapniarka.

Dr. Arthur Kessler’s journal, written shortly after the war from notes kept in the camp, and now in the process of being published in English, mentions mostly those prisoners who were in his room and train car, i.e. those from Cernowitz and the few he had close contact with on a regular basis through his work as a medic. While he was not a communist, and was most likely even opposed to the ideology, he speaks highly of the organization created in the camp, headed by the communist collective to which he too as a doctor contributed enormously, and for which he was acknowledged in many testimonies. He was not acknowledged, however, in Simion Bughici’s 1975 unpublished memoirs in Romania, where the latter instead exclusively praised the communist collective and himself as the saviors of the prisoner body.^[24]

The people we remember most, the events that stick permanently in our memory, are usually also those that we had experience with directly and personally, or those that are reinforced in our memories through repetition in conversation with others over time. We might choose to remember some people and events while forgetting or erasing others. Many, like Ana Friedman Bughici, testify that they don’t remember the name of a certain person, or just don’t mention certain events or details that appear strongly in the narratives of others. Anna Sten mentions very few names from the camp. These include Dr. Kessler, Major Murgescu, and Colonel Popovici. But strangely she does not mention the names of her roommates, although they were closest to her and according to her, her friends from home.

The majority of testimonies from the 1970s on, those given in Romania or even Israel, do not mention Anna Stein or other women from the camp unless they were either in the communist collective and played a political leadership role, or nurses who helped the sick, as we have seen in the case of Betty, or Mara who cared for the kids. Fani Teitler’s article does not mention any names at all, but focuses on women in general. In their 1999 oral histories, Ana Friedman Bughici and Saly Abramovici mention each other, Mara, and the Benditers, as well as the few women whose testimonies were preserved through the 1982 memorial project or whom they met in Israel after 1989. This phenomenon of recall can be attributed to the social networks that were created or reinforced over time, from which some people were dropped and to which others were connected.

As we have seen so far, Anna Sten was particularly concerned about the fate of the bourgeois and intellectuals, the class from which she herself originated, and which she felt was unjustly treated by the Communists. She tried to justify her actions during the concentration period – for which she was publicly criticized and shamed by other women immediately after the war – in her 1960s unpublished journal intended for publication, titled “Nothing but the Truth” (Anna Sten Collection). In her narration of events, it was due to her beauty, family connections, and indeed also questionable relation with Major Murgescu that the camp inmates were able to establish initial contact with Bucharest and start receiving packages with much needed medicines and supplies. In her telling, her “compromise”, or “impure resistance”, which she describes as just dancing and being beautiful, while others allude to acts of sexual barter, not only helped her, but also helped the prisoner body, to survive. By contrast, in Ernestina’s narration, she stresses her own dignified and even heroic actions (“attitude as a protector”). Through her “intransigence” she sacrificed privileges that would have otherwise improved her existence in the camp had she “compromised” herself like Anna. Fani Teitler describes the same uncompromising situation decades later in Israel. Similarly, Margareta Gall, knowing that she had a privileged position through her work for the commandment, justified this by focusing on how this position helped the rest of the internees. In all these examples, it was essential for the women to either lionize or justify their actions as helping the rest of the prisoners, not only themselves, thus inscribing themselves in the performance of self-sacrifice mythologized by the communists.

While narratives disagree on which group in the camp was the most important to the detainees’ survival – those developed in Israel starting with the 1960s focused on the medical team, while those developed in communist Romania insisted primarily on the communist collective – all agree that survival under those conditions of extermination was only possible due to the solidarity shown in the camp and among all prisoners, which was a practice promoted by the communist collective and adopted by the Jewish committee as a form of resistance or antifascist resistance, depending on the narrator. Women played an essential and equally appreciated role within this practice of resistance and solidarity through their work in the care facilities, in cultural activities, in the organization of the camp, through acts of love and friendship that helped other individuals, or through impure resistance that they claim also benefited the rest of the prisoners.

But another vital element that is hinted at was the help received from inside the country. While the role that resistance through solidarity played is of course immeasurable, help from Romania was only able to arrive and save the camp population through personal relations and networks, such as Anna Sten’s, but not only. So what was the camp experience for women at Vapniarka? Were gender norms maintained, as Hirsch and Spitzer claim, making women double victims, or were women also agents of antifascist resistance and treated as equals? That, of course, depends on who you get your story from. For Ana Friedman Bughici, “Vapniarka was the most important school of humanity, solidarity and human dignity,” (Bughici 1999) while Anna Sten, who tried, as Zoe Waxman suggests, to reconcile her wartime experience with her “pre- and post-war life”, concludes that “women remain the same even in prison” (Anna Sten Collection), an observation echoed by Dr. Arthur Kessler in his camp journal. Therefore, we can conclude that women were neither exclusively treated like the rest of the male Jews, nor exclusively like female double victims. They were in between, acting with agency to affect their camp experience through various forms of resistance, the narration of which varied according to social class, political ideology, and time and location of telling.