Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Helga Embacher

I really appreciate having been invited to contribute to an open forum in honor of Andrea Pető. Reading and rereading some – at least to me – unknown publications by Pető, I gained important insights into post-war Hungarian politics and the competition of memories. Combining history and post-war memory, Pető shows the instrumentalization of resistance fighters, victims and heroines by the communist and post-communist governments. She demonstrates how women who contradicted concepts of gender were eradicated from Hungarian history by those governments. Like Dalia Ofer, I was especially interested in her case study The Forgotten Massacre (published in 2021), the events of which took place in Csengery Street in October 1944. Using a variety of sources, Pető analyzes the antisemitic motives and active role played by mostly lower middle-class women of the far-right Arrow Cross Party in the looting of Jewish property. I hope that this study will serve further research projects as a model of how to analyze why women were attracted by far-right and fascist parties, and how they turned into perpetrators during the Holocaust.

In my following remarks, I would like to express some thoughts provoked by Lori R. Weintrob’s interesting contribution Voices of Courage: Women and Heroism in the Holocaust. Exploring heroines in the Hungarian, Austrian and Polish contexts, she suggests using a broad concept to analyze resistance. Expressed in her own words: “The courage of women in fighting for freedom from oppression and brutality, and for a return to democracy and liberty, is often portrayed as secondary to diplomatic undertakings or Allied military battles. Yet individual voices of courage and dignity stand out and merit our attention too.” According to her approach, resistance is not limited to organized and armed resistance movements, but also includes individuals and their various strategies to resist the aims of the oppressor. Based on my own research on Austrian Jewish and non-Jewish women who supported left-wing resistance movements and Jewish and non-Jewish female concentration camp survivors, I want to additionally suggest putting special emphasis on their motives (political, moral, religious, humanitarian, etc.) Why were women ready to risk their lives when rejecting antisemitic, racist, and inhuman ideologies and laws as individuals, and what were their motives for supporting or joining organized resistance movements and partisans? To give an example, numerous Austrian-Slovenian women from the region along the Austrian-Yugoslavian border, some of them still teenagers, were deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Having been accused of supporting Tito’s partisans, they were categorized as communists and their uniforms marked with a red triangle. Looking deeper into their biographies reveals that – growing up in small villages or on remote farms – they were faithful Catholics; some displayed antisemitic prejudice even after the Holocaust. Many of these women were unfamiliar with communist ideas and supported the partisans because of moral considerations: they felt a strong responsibility towards relatives who joined the partisans, sometimes due to pressure from the partisans themselves. Many did not identify with the male-dominated partisan movement, some even felt endangered by their appearance (partisans visited farms, where women were living alone with their children, to get food supplies and to find a place to stay overnight) and begged them not to endanger their lives and leave them alone. Those who survived the concentration camps were discriminated against as “Tito’s prostitutes” by many, and thus silenced. Accordingly, by focusing on the motives of Austrian-Slovenian women and analyzing how they became involved in the partisan war, we can recognize the complexity of resistance. Furthermore, this gender-based approach also provides a critical view of the very male-dominated partisan movement.

Reading the contributions by Lori Weintrob, Dalia Ofer and especially Sue Vice, I also learned a lot about Hannah Szenes – or more precisely – how this young woman who left Hungary in 1939 became a devoted left-wing Zionist in Palestine, joined the British Army, was parachuted from Serbia into Hungary, was caught, tortured and hanged in 1944, and served as a field of projection for various interests and was put into different frameworks (religious, nationalist, Jewish, Zionist, etc.). In Hungary, as Pető regrets in her article “The Invisibility of Anikó Szenes” (published in Nashim 2023), Szenes has been ignored to this day. In the climate of the Cold War, she not only threatened the cult of communist martyrs, but, as I assume, also had to be excluded from the official memory due to increasing anti-Zionism that was used as a political instrument against “Western imperialism” in many Eastern European countries. Unlike the Austrian-Slovenian women, who acted contrary to Nazi law due to a sense of responsibility and not based on a political ideology, Szenes was a committed Zionist and ready to fight against fascism to rescue Jews in occupied Europe. There is no doubt about her bravery; nevertheless, I would like to raise the question of how far we can regard Szenes’ mission to assist anti-Nazi forces in the rescue of Hungarian Jews as successful political resistance, considering the very late stage of the proceedings. Furthermore, almost half of the 37 paratroopers sent to Europe were captured and seven of them were executed. And my final question: Is Szenes still popular in Israel; what do people still know about her?

On my next visit to Jerusalem, I will definitely visit Hannah Szenes’ grave on Mount Herzl.