Volume 3, Issue 2 - Themed Issue: Gender; Guest Editors: Tiziana D’Amico, Alexandra M. Szabó

In this article, the aim is to construct an intellectual history of Jewish modern women thinkers in 20th-century Croatia (as part of Austria-Hungary until 1918 and Yugoslavia thereafter). The concept “modern women thinkers” was embraced to broaden the concept of intellectual women. By following a generation of the Jewish women born out of the belle époque to the aftermath of the World War Two, the main purpose of this article is to develop a theoretical framework suitable for interpreting the complex and versatile trajectories of progressive women of Jewish origin in the context of distinctive 20th-century authoritarianism(s). The local context and its transnational dynamics were examined to address the question of why and how the political left offered an ideological sanctuary to many of these women even before the Holocaust.

Over decades of Holocaust scholarship, a similar narrative emerges on the sterilizations at Ravensbrück concentration camp: In January 1945, Professor Carl Clauberg experimentally sterilized between 120 and 140 Sinti and Roma women and girls in rapid succession. When survivor voices are included, they often reference one single interview: that recorded with Sintezza survivor, Wanda Pranden, for the 1982 documentary, Es ging Tag und Nacht, liebes Kind. What, however, do these narratives obscure? Drawing on a panoply of primary and secondary scholarship, this article seeks to paint a robust, victim-based history of the sterilizations conducted in Ravensbrück. When deepening scholarly understanding of the camp, both in terms of periodization and victim groups, it demonstrates that sterilizations were long practiced in the camp, and on victims other than Sinti and Roma. Generating an archive of survivor accounts, as have been published piecemeal in scholarship, in addition to complementing this corpus with survivor voices from various institutions, this article generates a bottom-up history of women’s experiences of forced infertility in Ravensbrück concentration camp. This includes a historiography in various Holocaust-related disciplines; a periodization of sterilization methods and perpetrators in the camp, drawn from survivors and witnesses; and alternate methods with which one can locate survivors.

From the 1200 Jews interned at the Vapniarka concentration camp, slightly over one hundred were women. A regime of extermination was imposed in the early months of captivity through the toxic pea fodder distributed as food. More than half of the survivors remained either with paralysis or some other permanent illness. This article focuses on the female experience in the camp, the self-perception of women in contrast to the representation of women by men, as expressed through various narratives such as novel testimonies, oral histories, and autobiographies. Using narrative analysis I show how the prisoners of Vapniarka perceived their participation in different forms of resistance to fascist attempts at extermination and how time and place of telling impacted the language used. This is the first article focusing on the topic of the women of Vapniarka.

As an intricate dynamic network of social identifications, expectations, and behavioral models in their use and abuse, the interrelation of gender and power uncovers more than established gender roles and relations: it reveals deeper layers of individual and collective reasoning, which further informs and influences one’s thoughts and decisions. This can particularly be important in the times of crisis and survival, since it can have a direct effect on one’s ways and chances of survival, as well as on the experiences survived. In the other words, gender-related mechanisms are in the background of the totality of conditions in times of crisis and war. In the case of the Holocaust, gender-power axis can be identified in the survival response of the survivors, as well as in the executive decisions of the perpetrators, and it can all be read throughout the texts of the survivor testimonies. In order to understand the Holocaust as a gendered event, a gender-fueled atrocity, I would like to analyze the testimonies of Yugoslavian Holocaust survivors gathered in the five book edition We survived: Yugoslav Jews on the Holocaust 1–5 (Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia/Serbia & Montenegro/Serbia 2001–2009).

This article explores how women’s ability to create, maintain, or avoid sexual encounters – both consensual and coerced – significantly influenced their survival and daily lives in the Sereď camp in Slovakia from autumn 1941 to March 1945. By focusing on Jewish women’s agency in forming connections, the study illustrates how interpersonal relationships provided emotional support, protection, and coping mechanisms amid pervasive violence and oppression, ultimately shaping their resilience and experiences in the camp. The article emphasises that forming intimate relationships was one of the few, albeit highly constrained, chances for survival for women in ghettos and camps. At the same time, it highlights that Jewish women entering sexual encounters under the perpetrator’s false promise of survival proved to be more illusion than strategy.

The paper demonstrates the importance of memoirs written by Jewish women dealing with postwar experiences in communist countries; and thus responds to a lack of research dealing with postwar issues connected to gender, the Holocaust and communism. Using the example of Györgyi Vándor’s memoirs Mehr als eine Stimme im Chor. Erinnerungen einer Frau an Ungarn 1948–1956 (More than one voice in a choir. Memoirs of a Hungarian woman of 1948–1956), it shows how women faced multiple discriminations: as a Jew, as a woman and as a victim of communism. In 1949, Györgyi became the youngest victim of the show trial of László Rajk; Vándor was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy and espionage. The paper analyzes how she described the female prison society and inmates she had to live with under extremely difficult conditions and how she portrayed herself in relation to the others. Her most famous cellmate was Júlia Rajk.

This article addresses the important arguments made by Andrea Pető in relation to the ‘circles of forgetting’ in Hungary. In particular, it focuses on Pető’s case study of the woman born in Hungary as Aniko Szenes, known in English as Hannah Szenes or Senesh, and the transformation of one into the other. Drawing inspiration from Pető’s analysis, the article analyses the Anglophone representation of Szenes’ history in the form of poetry and documentary cinema, to contrast the absence of Szenes from Hungarian memorialization with the ways in which she is remembered in the USA, Israel and beyond.

Women express their agency in the face of oppression, war and genocide through many forms of defiance, including educational, cultural, spiritual and armed resistance, although it is often overlooked. This article proposes to identify and critically analyze a canon of “heroines,” women of courage, to challenge male-based narratives of heroism and prevent the misuse of the terms “hero” or “heroine” by illiberal governments. Using the examples of Edith Bruck, Hannah Szenes (and other Hungarian Zionist women), Zivia Lubetkin, Vera Laska and Josephine Baker, this article argues that gender studies makes a major contribution to explaining the Holocaust when critically analyzing relationships that are embedded in acts of intolerance or solidarity. These relations between women, men and women, or Jews and non-Jews, before, during and after war and genocide are key to survival and remembrance. Critical thinking and connectivity to others can offer ways to resist antisemitism and persecution. Their courageous actions and testimony contradict notions of Jewish and female passivity in the fight against Nazism and for dignity and human rights. Presented here in tribute to Andrea Pető, an advocate for academic freedom, their courage is a model for our own times.

German-British Jewish scholar, Dr Eva Gabriele Reichmann made significant contributions to the postwar historiography of the Holocaust, well before ‘Holocaust studies’ was established as a field. She was a prolific author on the history of antisemitism, German Jewish emancipation, and National Socialism; an early documenter of the experiences of Holocaust refugees, victims, and survivors; and a Jewish community activist within Germany during the rise of the Nazis and after her compulsory migration to England. Forced to leave Berlin in 1939 for London, Reichmann’s experiences as a German Jewish refugee woman devoted to communal defense, Jewish diaspora ‘as task,’ and interfaith dialogue shaped her work and intellectual legacy. Despite her publications and contributions to multiple fields, and although a contemporary of the renowned philosopher Hannah Arendt, her work as a producer of Holocaust knowledge has been neglected. This is in part due to her gender, her work outside the traditional academy, as well as the split between German (and German Jewish) historiography and Holocaust historiography. However, Reichmann’s contributions not only to scholarship on the political and cultural identity of German Jewry and National Socialist antisemitism but also to postwar Holocaust-related archives-building secure her rightful place in the historiography of the Holocaust.

In this article I describe the conditions for Jews and non-Jews living in Subcarpathia, especially in the village of Bilky, between the date when Hungary moved back into the region in 1939 and the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1941. My focus here is on Lili Jacob’s request for her birth certificate in 1939, on the comments that she and other Bilky survivors made concerning what happened in 1941, as well as on historical presentations by former residents of Bilky who were there or were personally affected by what happened in 1941. I describe conditions on a microhistorical level in the community of Bilky, and by doing this I hope to better portray how local people experienced what happened to them and their neighbors.