Ep. 70. Women in the Holocaust with Elissa Bemporad

How did women experience the Holocaust differently from men?  What do we learn from considering a gender perspective when we look at the past?  How did gender play a role in survival and oppression?

 For a long time, women's experiences (and a gendered approach to understanding them was absent from our study of the Holocaust.  In this episode, we have a far-ranging conversation looking at many of the questions listed above.

Elissa Bemporad is the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and is Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Bemporad, Elissa and Joyce W. Warren, eds. Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018)

Bemporad, Elissa. Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2020)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.75)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. Happy 2026. And today we're going to talk about women and gender. And it's a really important subject that a lot of historians didn't really recognize or treat earlier on, much earlier on in the history. But of course, everyone experienced the Holocaust differently. And one of the ways that people obviously experience genocide and Holocaust is from a gender perspective. And that goes for masculinity as well.

which is another form of gender, but we're not going to talk about that today because we're to talk with Alyssa Bumperod, who is an amazing historian who's worked on this topic, both in the Holocaust and other genocides. And I'm really excited to sort of dig into this topic with her. So Alyssa, thanks so much for coming on.

Elissa (00:50.561)
Thank you for having me.

Waitman Beorn (00:52.75)
Can you just start by telling us a little bit about just how you got interested in this particular topic or I mean it sounds it sounds kind of obvious, you know, but I mean, how did you how do you decide to focus on this particular area of of genocide of the Holocaust of Jewish history?

Elissa (01:09.195)
I guess that I started out as a social historian. I am a social historian, so I really focus on the ways in which society and communities within the context of society change over time based on events, upheavals, revolutions, violence, and...

Elissa (02:03.509)
the subject of gender and the question of women and how women responded to ethnic violence, how women were targeted in the context of ethnic violence, specifically Jewish women. And I do teach the Holocaust and I teach the history of genocide in modern times. So I've always been interested in this question of gender and

the intersections between gender and genocide. And so, you know, my interest in Jewish history and my interest in trying to understand the question of how women responded to ethnic, Jewish women responded to ethnic violence and my interest in the study of the Holocaust and genocide kind of came together and, you know, bridged this interest that I have in.

women, the history of women in the context of war and genocide and specifically this question of gender and how gender can help us better understand genocide and violence in general.

Waitman Beorn (03:17.006)
And so just for our listeners, some of whom I know are academics or academically minded, but others may not be familiar with kind of the shorter history of gender as a category of analysis. The fact that, you know, for a very long time, history itself was very much sort of the province of the great man theory in which the man was also a key element to that, and that people didn't even really consider

first and foremost, that women really played a role in history to a certain extent, and let alone sort of how their experience of history might be different. And so obviously, have and do participate in history and have always done so. But maybe you can tell us a little about sort of how history, the discipline of history caught up with that.

Elissa (04:07.895)
How we got there, yeah, as you said, mean, historical scholarship was largely treated as, you know, men's experiences are universal and women's experience are really marginal, peripheral. This is until really the late 1950s, 1960s, early 1970s when feminist historians really begin to challenge this model and

Waitman Beorn (04:09.677)
Yeah, yeah.

Elissa (04:34.199)
and recover in a way women as historical actors and give rise to women's history. Now their work of course was crucial, but it also became clear rather soon that just adding women to the existing narratives was not sufficient. know, making women visible within existing historical narratives, know, add women and stir.

was not sufficient. So this is when other scholars began to analyze gender as a historical category rather than as a biological one. So they suggested that we should understand gender as a historically contingent category rather than a biologically fixed one. And the most important scholar here and

for some of our listeners, of course. I'm sure her work is well known. For others, her work is not very well known. And I suggest everyone should familiarize themselves with her work. I'm talking about Joan Scott. And she wrote this essay in 1985 or 1986. Anyway, mid-80s gender, a useful category of historical analysis. And she argued that historians should examine

in their work how ideas about men and women, how ideas about masculinity and femininity are produced and how they shape identities, knowledge, authority, institutions over time. So again, gender is not just

descriptive, but it's very analytical and it can offer us this critical tool that is very useful for us to understand how society works, not only structures of inequality. And then of course, this analytical category, analytical tool was also incorporated, integrated into genocide studies.

Elissa (06:56.319)
by genocide scholars.

Waitman Beorn (06:59.394)
And I think this is, it's really important to recognize that, you know, that this kind of focus, right, isn't displacing things. It's adding, right? I mean, I feel like a lot of the pushback from more ignorant people is the, my gosh, now we're focusing on this instead of something else. But actually, I think you'd agree that this is, what it actually does is just, adds,

detail, it adds another way of examining and exploring and explaining, right? We ask new questions, but we also can find new answers.

Elissa (07:37.207)
Absolutely. mean, it allows us to get a better sense of the world we live in, of the world in which our forefathers and mothers lived in, right? And how this world and how society operates. And it allows us, as you said, to get much closer to the past.

in a way, and to understand how multi-layered this past is if we integrate this category, this analytical category of gender.

Waitman Beorn (08:18.958)
And one of the things that just sprung in my mind, was, last month or two ago, I was asked to talk about the Holocaust to my daughter's grade at school. And so I had a room full of 10 year olds. And I was talking to the Holocaust, trying to be age specific. One of the things I, my sort of happiest takeaway is I think I convinced them all that race is a social construct, which is pretty good for a room full of 10 year olds. I said, look, it races,

Race is not something that's real, but the fact that it's not real doesn't mean that it doesn't have very real consequences. Because people believe it and it makes people act a certain way. And I feel like in a certain sense, gender studies is that also because a lot of gender is constructed, right? I mean, it's the society's depiction of or conceptions of what it means to be a woman, be a man, be a normative woman, normative man, et cetera.

And again, while that is not something, you mentioned in beginning, that's grounded in biology or DNA, it does have real world implications for how people live their lives.

Elissa (09:28.087)
Absolutely. And it is, you know, it's very hard also as historians to move away from this, to take a step back from these, you know, these social constructs that are so deeply embedded in culture. It's very hard because if we are not able to take a step back from this, don't, it's very hard for us to get a

sense or a clearer sense of, again, how societies work, how communities work, how people interact between each other, both horizontally but also vertically, how individuals interact with the state, how the state thinks about individuals. So there are these

these categories that are artificial, they're constructed. And we have to consider them, but we also have to be very careful when we use them, especially when we craft our own narratives, because we don't want to superimpose them in a very deterministic way on our world.

and the world.

Waitman Beorn (10:57.102)
Well, and that's actually a really good segue to something that sort of just popped into my head that I'm curious, you know, because obviously when Joan Scott started writing, you when Second Wave feminism hit and when it started, when it hit the scholarship as well, you know, there was pushback from the old guard who sort of said, you know, this is useless or this is sort of a new fad that's not serious scholarship, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm curious just...

Was this something that happened in Holocaust studies as well? Were there Holocaust scholars that were sort of like, this isn't really important or this really isn't useful?

Elissa (11:38.017)
Well, mean, absolutely. I think that historians of the Holocaust were for a very long time uninterested in the ways in which women experienced persecution, genocide in the context of the Shoah, in the context of the Holocaust.

because of some gendered assumptions about society. Because, well, I guess the first reason is that early Holocaust scholarship privileged official documents, the records of perpetrators, political narratives, military narratives. These are all sources and topics that

largely speaking reflect men's experiences in forms of power, whereas women's lives were more often documented through personal testimony, memoirs, oral histories, which were treated as too emotional, too subjective, and not authoritative enough.

So that's one reason why the experience of women was largely marginalized. But the other very important reason, I think, that some historians argued that why should we single out the experience of women is because they saw the Holocaust as gender neutral, meaning that every Jew

old, young, woman, man was targeted for annihilation, which is a fact. So if that is the case, then why should we single out women's experiences? But then that ties into what we were talking about earlier, that in order to get a better sense, a comprehensive, as comprehensive as it can be,

Elissa (14:01.143)
idea, sense of how victims experienced or how Jews experienced the Holocaust, we have to also take into consideration the differences between how men experience it and how women experience the Holocaust. The other reason, of course, is why Holocaust historians did not take

you know, into consideration or were rather resistant towards integrating women's experience of, women's specific experience of the Holocaust is of course the question of, you know, cultural silences around sexual violence, around shame, the question of shame and trauma, which made women's experiences

difficult to articulate, even for scholars to confront. And one example that I want to bring here, and I'm sorry that I'm bringing in, it gets a lot of information here, but from the vantage point of women, victims and women who survived the Holocaust, from their vantage point, there was almost,

hierarchy of suffering, Quote-unquote, I only experience sexual violence and I'm emphasizing here quote-unquote, whereas they were killed, they were murdered. So there's this almost tendency, almost natural tendency to downplay their experience of victims of sexual violence, their suffering.

as victims of sexual violence because it is seen in the aftermath of the Holocaust almost as irrelevant compared to the experience of those who were murdered. So we have to be very careful here in, you know, keeping that in, know, considering this aspect.

Elissa (16:29.551)
of the ways in which women's place in the Holocaust has been treated historically. Because I would say, and then I'll finish and we can go back to other questions. I would say that most scholars of the Holocaust today, most scholars of genocide today,

who are serious about the ways in which they're thinking about different genocidal projects, whether it's the Holocaust or the genocide in Cambodia, in the former Yugoslavia, they are including the experience of women and they are thinking about gender. Most of them are thinking about gender.

Waitman Beorn (17:14.222)
you

Waitman Beorn (17:28.478)
Well, and this, you know, this course speaks to, I bring him up all the time, you know, Sol Freelander's exhortation to all of us to be able to write an integrated history, right? So like integrated is victim, perpetrator, bystander, but it's also men, women, gay, straight, everything, trying to do that all at once. And when you were speaking, I was sort of reminded of a couple of things. We can come back to some of these, you know, and of course, one of them is that

Elissa (17:38.123)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (17:58.125)
I think all of us, women included, nowadays have a different relationship with speaking about things like sexual violence than women in the 40s did, or even just speaking about sex in general. And so of course, that will be a change both for the historians, which we'll talk about maybe some more, as well as for the historical actors, which we definitely will. And I remember one of the first sort of

entrees for young waitmen into sort of this was I was reading an edited volume and it was one of those edited volumes where it was designed for students, right? So was one of them we were teaching and it kind of had the conceit of the two perspectives, you know, and it was, forget who the writers were, it doesn't matter, but one of them basically said women were better able to survive the Holocaust

And it made this argument about nurturing and community and this kind of stuff that was in a certain sense itself kind of gendered, right? And in a sense also kind of normatively gendered that women are by their very nature sort of caregivers. And then the potion said, you know, basically, no, it was different, but they weren't better able. And of course, we can talk about all those issues. And it was very sort of, it was presented in a very sort of stilted way because it.

The idea was to get students to think about the two sides of the argument. But in the added volume that women and genocide, but also in general, we've talked a lot about, without saying the word yet, this idea of intersectionality. Can you maybe give us a brief introduction and definition of what do we mean when we talk about intersectionality in general, but also in the context of genocide?

Elissa (19:53.089)
Yeah, so intersectionality is a very useful analytical approach, I think, that examines and helps us understand how multiple identities, overlapping identities that include gender, race, ethnicity, religion, political status, age.

So how these multiple and overlapping social identities shape our lived experiences. And if they shape our lived experiences, of course they also shape the experiences of genocide, of victims of genocide. and connected to that, I mean, if we consider...

the category of victims. Actually, intersectionality helps us break down this category. If we think about victims in an abstract way, we might think that victims are like a fixed category, like a homogenous category. But intersectionality helps us understand how the category of victims is multi-layered.

It is structured through these pre-existing social hierarchies. And it helps us understand these social hierarchies then determine who is targeted for destruction, for genocide, and how this violence is enacted. So.

In other words, what I'm saying here is that the victims' experiences of genocide are shaped at the same time by ethnic persecution, by gendered expectations that relate to the victim's sexuality, to reproduction, to family roles, but also by factors like, you know, motherhood or marital status or social position.

Elissa (22:15.987)
So the intersectionality approach I think is very useful when we think about genocide, know, for two, largely speaking, for two reasons. First of all, because it gives us a sense of how diverse, how different the victims' experiences were. I'm just thinking about, you know, you just mentioned Friedlander and he talks a lot about that, although he doesn't use...

the term intersectional, but I think his work and his approach is very useful for us. So again, this approach is important A, because it gives us a sense of how the variations among victims' experiences, and it allows us again to get closer to this full range of the victims' experiences within the context of the Genocidal Project A.

And B, because it shows us, it confirms how genocidal regimes exploit intersecting inequalities to maximize destruction. So because the experience of the victims intersects with multiple factors, again, race, ethnicity, religion, class,

and consequently determines the ways in which the victim lives through or dies from genocide in order to, I think, grasp the reality of genocide, have to consider intersectionality. We have to consider the intersections between, you know, Jewishness, class, age, you know, political,

Waitman Beorn (23:57.038)
Thank

Elissa (24:13.301)
beliefs and so on because all these aspects intersect and determine in many ways the experience of the victim.

Waitman Beorn (24:23.726)
And something just popped into my head because I wrote a book chapter on Slavs and POWs. And there's a great example from that of, you know, have all these Soviet POWs who have been captured, you know, of whom, you know, 2.3 million of them die. So they clearly are victims of a Nazi genocidal project. But there are multiple accounts of how, just to speak to what you mentioned a minute ago, of how

the Nazis would use non-Jewish POWs to identify Jewish POWs and single them out and then they were taken off and shot. And so they're just in one little snapshot. Again, that's predominantly men in this instance, but you have a group of victims within a group of victims, as well as a group of perpetrators within a group of victims, right? And it's because of these, as exactly as you say, these overlapping categories.

know, differentiate the experience for the people that are living through it. I mean, think that's really important to sort of to note. And even I suspect as we talk a little more, you'll find that even within Jewish communities of victims, not necessarily that there are groups of perpetrators, but that things like class still exist, and things like misogyny still exist, and things like hierarchies still exist. And so even within that, you you can

you can find people that are, if not victimizing you in same way the Nazis, but are making your life worse in the country's downside.

Elissa (26:02.485)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, with regard to this point that you just raised, I think, you know, there still is a lot that scholars can do to get to these overlapping identities and get to these structures of power that influence the ways in which

within a community of victims, so to speak, Jews in this case, or POWs, within a community of victims, there are structures of power that influence the ways in which certain individuals relate to other individuals. So within the ghettos, the ghettos in Eastern Europe, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done.

that takes into consideration gender, also other identities, multi-layered identities, with regard to the Judenrat, with regard to other structures of power and how women also play a role here. It's not only men, it's also women who play a role. And I think...

I think that although most historians, whether they use the word, the term intersectionality or not, they are applying it as an approach to the ways in which they are writing history today and to the ways in which they are writing about genocide today.

Waitman Beorn (27:50.095)
I mean, and you have to, I mean, because otherwise you have this victim's perpetrator bystander, which I always use it, but I don't like it as a sort of shorthand for the entire all encompassing experience of genocide. But if you don't sort of look for these wedges, for these different ways of seeing experience, you're gonna get a very flat sort of universalized.

depiction which is which is not super useful I think maybe that's my own personal bias but

Elissa (28:21.631)
and does not do justice to the victims and does not allow us to fully understand the dynamics of the genocidal project.

Waitman Beorn (28:31.31)
Yeah, I mean, and we'll probably talk about this later, but we haven't mentioned perpetrators, but ironically, that sort of has been the last bastion of not looking at gender in a certain sense was like not recognizing that women themselves can be perpetrators or Claudia Koontz's work much earlier on sort of even the fact of sort of providing a supportive household to their husbands that are going off and doing things is a mode of participating.

very gendered and very sort of hetero normative kind of conservative view of women's role, but it is a role nonetheless in sort of supporting genocide. But maybe we've talked a lot about it. We should get down to sort of how did women experience the Holocaust differently? I'm not going to use better or worse like the the sort of that the chapters I was referring to earlier, but

was their experience differently or better put perhaps how was their experience gendered?

Elissa (29:34.687)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, women experience the Holocaust differently. I like differently. Differently than men, not because they suffered more or less. But I would start by saying that their experience was different because Nazi persecution interacted with pre-existing gender roles, family structures.

biological realities in a very distinct way. And these differences shaped vulnerability of women, survival strategies of women, and forms of violence enacted upon women. Now, first of all, women faced, you know, just to get into the nitty gritty or more specific, what do we mean by different?

They faced gender specific forms of persecution, sexual violence. I'm not saying that men were entirely spared from sexual violence, but women were a more obvious target for sexual violence. Sexual humiliation, forced nudity, reproductive violence, which includes, of course, forced abortions, right?

Second, you know, if we think about a different experience or as you said, a gendered experience, family roles profoundly shaped women's experiences. Women were often responsible, of course, for children, for their parents, for elderly, for sick relatives. And this reduced their chances of survival during selections.

as they were fleeing and hiding. However, at the same time, we also have to take into consideration that these kind of caregiving roles that are gendered sometimes allowed them to survive through mutual aid, food sharing networks, emotional support among women in the ghettos in camps. So,

Elissa (32:01.009)
motherhood in a way could be at the same time, it's interesting to think, could be at the same time a liability, but even a source of resilience. And third, and you know, I guess maybe you touched upon it a little bit when you talk about the POWs and the Jewish POWs and these multilayered intersecting identities. But the third context is of course the labor

labor camps and camp regimes and you know how gendered they are as spaces, right? Men were more likely to be selected initially for heavy labor because of their bodies, their strength, and this would delay immediate killing but often resulted in exhaustion that led to death. Women were

more, you know, generally speaking, more frequently deemed unfit for work, especially if they were pregnant. And so this increased their vulnerability and early murder consequences.

Waitman Beorn (33:18.338)
Well, and even some of the labor itself was gendered. I just finished a book on Janowska. in that particular camp, it didn't have a women's camp until 1943. But once it did, the tailor shop and laundry was all women, which again, it's a very stereotypical gendered, the only women must be good at this sort of thing.

Elissa (33:31.03)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (33:46.243)
So we're not going put men in there. Well, of course, it's silly, but it's another example of sort of how pre-holocaust, pre-Nazi sort of gender misconceptions or stereotypes carry over into the event itself.

Elissa (34:01.633)
Yeah, absolutely, determine then the fate in a way or can determine the fate of the victim. I also want to mention, I'm sure that many of our listeners are familiar with the work of one of the pioneering scholars, I think, in the study of gender as an analytical category in the context of the Holocaust. And know, Marion Kaplan, especially in her work,

between dignity and despair. And this has really been central to shaping our understanding of how women experience Holocaust differently from men. And she, of course, she's focusing primarily on everyday life, family, emotion, as key historical categories in Nazi Germany before 1939, or at least before 1941.

And she shows us that gender really mattered most, she argues, before and during the early phases of persecution, when Jews still lived within their families and communities, and when these kind of, these traditional gender roles structured their daily lives and daily survival. So I just wanted to mention.

Waitman Beorn (35:21.454)
No, it's such an important point because one of the things that I always took away from Marion's work, which I always tell students, but it's something I hadn't thought of in the same way until I had read it many years ago, is that, again, and then we're working with non-holocaust specific, non-German specific, just sort of standardized, we could call it misogyny, we could call it standardized views of femininity and masculinity. But one of the things I remember striking me from Marion's

that particular book is that Jewish men were often sort of very distressed and uncomfortable and probably hard to live with in a certain sense because they were the first ones to sort of get cut out of their standard male role. know, breadwinner going out having a job, working a profession or whatever they were doing. And that was sort of one of the first things that was cut away in public life.

Elissa (35:57.303)
That's it.

Waitman Beorn (36:19.054)
And so you have women who are then forced to take up the roles of not only their standardized normal, I'm using a scarecrow as well for our listeners, but their normal role is mother, household manager, et cetera, et cetera, but also had to go out and get food and all this other stuff. And the men really couldn't do any of that stuff or didn't want to or whatever else. And again, that's something that's

Again, I suppose if you look in the grand scheme of the Holocaust, that's not the worst thing that happened. But it's yet another stressor and another way of being victimized. It's sort of, guess, unintended consequences, I suppose, because the Nazis weren't really doing it on purpose. But it's a great example of how a gendered perspective reveals the lives of victims in a way that

Elissa (37:02.967)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (37:14.284)
that you wouldn't have thought of if you didn't look at it. So I think it's a great shout for her book.

Elissa (37:16.055)
Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes.

Waitman Beorn (37:23.118)
Yeah, I mean, it's great. mean, and again, you where you mentioned, you mentioned sort of the arriving at camps, you know, and you could even be a very fit and appearing to be very fit, you know, 20 year old woman, but if you had a child, they would send you to the gas chambers simply not to cause a fuss. You know, so there are very real ways in which being a woman, you know, lessened your chances of survival.

just off the top. But I wanted to come back something that struck me as well when you were speaking earlier, which was that the Nazis themselves didn't view Jews just as Jews, as a sort megalithic thing. They had specific gendered visions of Jewish women as well. And I think that's important. Can you maybe talk a little about that? Because in a certain sense, they view Jewish women as in some ways more dangerous from a

Elissa (37:53.015)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (38:21.304)
from a Nazi racial perspective. And there all these things about the dangerously seductive Jewish women, and as well as the fact that Jewish women in a certain sense carry the race forward in the Nazi worldview, right? Because they're the ones that can have children. So maybe you could talk about how the Nazis themselves had a gendered view of what they were doing.

Elissa (38:47.465)
Absolutely, I and I would say that this is typical of most genocidal projects. This idea that, you know, women are, you know, the symbol of the group. It's actually not only the symbol of the group, but their body represents the future of the group itself. So that's...

So that's one point that we have to absolutely keep in mind when we think about the experience of women within the context of genocide and within the context of the Holocaust. I mean, you were referring to women as dangerous, Jewish women as dangerous, and this grows out of this trope that becomes rather popular in the second part of the 19th century about

Jewish women as exotic and as hypersexual. So I think that that is at play, but I would say that in general, if we compare, you know, if we gender or if we put on gender glasses, Nazi gender glasses, so to speak, I think that the real danger

was actually Jewish men, not so much Jewish women. The fear, if we think about Nazi ideology and the fear of racial contamination via sexual relations, via blood, the fear was

You know, the real danger of Jewish blood ran through the veins of Jewish men, not so much Jewish women. That's why we have evidence of blood transfusions that are done in the camps, meaning that blood is being taken by Jewish women for

Elissa (41:13.527)
German soldiers, but not from Jewish men. that, you know, even the blood in a way is gendered. So I think, I think there are two, you know, again, to your point is a very interesting point about hypersexual and dangerous Jewish women. But if we, then if we put this in conversation with

Nazi ideology and if we think about how gendered anti-Semitism was in Europe in general in the 19th century, but especially in the interwar period and in Nazi Germany, think the real threat is the Jewish man. And if we think about Mein Kampf, the black-haired young Jew who is...

who is this potential rapist of any Aryan woman is, in my account, is a very powerful image in Hitler's.

Waitman Beorn (42:24.59)
Well, I was going to say, mean, that's also, you know, it's part and parcel in, you know, anti-black racism as well. These other, know, the, and it's gendered, right? Because the victims or the imagined victims, right, are women of the in-group, right? And so that's again, that's again, part of it. I mean, I guess, we're talking a little bit about sexual violence, because, you know, it's such an important element.

of the Holocaust and of genocides in general. And I feel like in a lot of the scholarship, particularly early scholarship, there was sort of this idea that, well, that's not something that could have happened because the Nazis had this prohibition against sexual contact with Jewish women. But of course, of course it did happen. And of course, the history shows us that that didn't really slow anybody down.

Not least because one of the quote, and music scare quotes again, one of the quote benefits for a Nazi rapist is they could murder the victim, you know, and nobody would ever know about it. And so we have scenes at Treblinka, for example, or you're not even in that specific, but at Treblinka of like mass rapes going on because the women are then be sent straight to the gas chambers. So can you talk a little about

about sexual violence during the Holocaust and sort of how do we explain it, how do we understand it, and how did women experience it and deal with it.

Elissa (44:02.337)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is, you know, a very important topic. And as you said, it's a topic that has been, that has remained rather marginal in scholarship and in testimony until, I would say rather recently. Let's say sexual violence was real, was widespread, was structurally embedded.

in the Nazi genocidal project, would say, even though it was not documented explicitly. And by the way, when we say sexual violence, I just want to go back to that. It's not only about rape, sexual assault, sexual humiliation, but it's also about forced nudity. It's about coerced prostitution.

It's about, and I mentioned it earlier, reproductive violence, so forced abortions, sterilizations, of course, the murder of pregnant women. So such violence occurred in the ghettos, in the camps. As you mentioned, Treblinka, it occurred at the site of the mass shootings.

Waitman Beorn (45:17.098)
in hiding, mean, like, you know, all kinds of places.

Elissa (45:20.181)
Yeah, yeah. of course, survivors, and I mentioned this earlier, were often silent about this, not only because of the stigma within their communities, but fear of disbelief, but also again, this preconceived notion of hierarchy of suffering, right? How can I recount my experience of forced nudity or coerced prostitution when I survived, but they were murdered?

right in the aftermath of the Shoah. But it's difficult to explain to students, especially undergrads, how do you make sense of this apparent contradiction with Nazi prohibitions against sexual contact with Jewish women under the Nuremberg laws and racial ideology and

sexual violence and how widespread it was, right? And in, you know, I think that the context of war, the context of, you know, Operation Barbarossa, June 1941, when Nazi Germany decides to attack the Soviet Union and when the systematic killing

of Jews actually begins in the context of the Holocaust by the bullets. This is when we see the breaking down of all taboos, know, women and girls being raped, you know, right before execution in the summer of 1941. And I want to mention here Helen Sinreich, who's a very important scholar who

Waitman Beorn (47:12.366)
Thank you.

Elissa (47:15.529)
I would say she's one of the first ones who has really insisted that sexual violence should be integrated into Holocaust history. was not marginal, it was not exceptional, meaning that historians before her have mentioned instances of sexual violence, of rape, even mass rape, right? She shows how...

rape, sexual violence was not marginal. It was not exceptional. And of course she's working primarily with documents that relate to Eastern Europe during the phase, as I said, of the mass shootings during or during the roundups and the ghetto liquidations. And she demonstrates that sexual violence was systematic and is deeply intertwined with the genocidal project.

Waitman Beorn (48:12.31)
Can we talk?

Elissa (48:12.387)
even when it wasn't ordered, right? We don't have orders about, you know, let us now rape these women who will be killed anyway. I also want to mention that while there were laws in place about racial defilement, the rassen schande, Nazi laws, these prohibitions

were not really enforced in the context of Eastern Europe, in these killing zones, especially in Ukraine and Belarus, where the large majority of Jews lived. So the perpetrators, you know, acted, as you mentioned earlier, Treblinka, acted with basically near total impunity.

right? Because these women are marked for death anyway. We are in the midst of this killing zone of this war of extermination. So, you know, we can do with these women and girls as we please. Regardless of ideology. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (49:26.798)
This is something that I wanted to touch on as well because obviously the edited volume that I'm talking about, but other work, it's about different genocides and this idea of systematic, systematicness. I'm thinking about the work of Regina Muehhauser and about the extent to which sexual violence and I guess the way I distinguish it.

For me, sexual violence is kind of a forced sexual act and sexualized violence is all the other stuff that you were talking about. So when I say sexual violence, I really mean sort of forced sexual acts. The extent to which sexual violence was employed consciously as policy, and I'm thinking of it perhaps in contrast to places like Bosnia or potentially Rwanda, where the idea kind of is that you

you rape women in order to literally create a baby who is of a different race to kind of breed people out of existence, which is certainly not what the Nazis were intending to do. What was there? What do you mean by systematic in the context of Nazi sexual violence?

Elissa (50:46.743)
Systematic, systematic, would say systematic, I would say that it was not as marginal, it was not as marginal as we would, you know, as we would be inclined to think based on these prohibitions, right, these laws against racial defilement.

Waitman Beorn (50:47.638)
Or do you mean that the system itself allowed it?

Waitman Beorn (50:57.976)
Sure, yeah.

Elissa (51:12.565)
that as you mentioned did not exist in other contexts, in Rwanda, and in the context of the former Yugoslavia and Serbia. But what is, to go back to this question of the role of sexual violence and genocide, is sexual violence always part of genocide?

or sexualized, okay, but you know, let's stick to the question of sexual violence. Is it inherent in genocide? I think that to some degree it is because women are targeted by the genocidal project as, you know,

not so much the symbol, but the bearers of the group's existence, the group's continuity. Their bodies are the sites of the biological future of the group. So their bodies become, in the genocidal context, become the site of biological and symbolic destruction of this group.

So sexual violence is, I think it's a crucial feature of genocide because it targets not only the individuals, but really the social and biological foundations of the group. And the goal of the Genocidal Project is really to destroy the people as such. And sexual violence is very effective at advancing this goal because it operates on

bodies on the kinship, on the question of reproduction, on honor simultaneously and it terrorizes and then eradicates the community by attacking social reproduction and group continuity.

Waitman Beorn (53:21.198)
Well, and I would only just add maybe another piece, which I think you've already sort of hinted at, which again, it's interesting because it builds on sort of misogynistic ideas. there is, I think, certainly if you think about, for example, Chris Browning's Strykovitsa book, where he shows that there were public rapes of women, which were at least partially aimed essentially at shaming and humiliating

Jewish men because they quote couldn't protect their women. It's yet another sort of, and again, what's fascinating about this is that's building on obviously just pre-war existing ideas of gender roles and power dynamics. But this idea that women are helpless and in need of protection and if people are raping them, it's yet another symbol of degradation and the fact that you have no power.

in the system anymore that these people can do what they want with them. Which I think is to which I'd only add one more piece, which is also that above, in addition to all of what we just mentioned in the context of genocides, you have the inevitable moral corrosion of the fact that that things that are generally considered to be wrong are now OK. And so that the sort of sexual violence comes right along with that as well. That, we're murdering people

We're stealing from people, we're abusing people. So, you know, it opens the door to yet another sort of form of violence.

Elissa (54:57.419)
Yeah, absolutely. But again, for me, the most striking aspect here in these dynamics of violence is that violating the body, the body of women, women's body, really becomes a way to violate and really disrupt and destroy the family, the, you know, lineage.

the future of this community, the future of this group. yes, I mean, as you said, in certain contexts in war, and we have this, for example, in the genocidal violence,

during the pogroms of the civil war, which is the spirit that goes from 1919 until 1921, when the Jewish civilian population is targeted by different armies in this very chaotic and violent period that follows the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. And the Jewish communities in Ukraine suffer immensely in terms of ethnic violence, but the

the bodies of women, you know, we have for the first time mass rape against Jewish women perpetrated by different, you know, soldiers and different fighting groups. But it's not only about, you know, violating the bodies per se, but it's really about disrupting the continuity of the existence of this community in this place.

We are going to eradicate this community by using the female body as a laboratory for this genocidal project.

Waitman Beorn (57:02.99)
Maybe we'll move away a little bit from sexual violence for a minute. Can we talk a little about misogyny during the Holocaust within the Jewish community? In the ghettos, other places? I had Chad Gibbs on here earlier talking about Treblinka and networks, and he's done a lot of looking at the...

survivor testimony, and one of the things that he mentioned that was really fascinating was that, you know, there were women in Treblinka, but that the male survivors almost never mentioned them, never recognized that they were there in survivor testimony. Of course, that's testimony, which can be a different conversation. But because we know that misogyny and sort of negative gender values, if you want to put it that way, predate the Holocaust.

How did they function within Jewish communities during the Holocaust?

Elissa (58:06.967)
Why wouldn't they function within Jewish communities during the Holocaust? You know, it goes back to, you know, all kinds of prejudice. Why would Jews, you know, operate, behave differently within the context of the Holocaust? You know.

Why would they be super partes, so to speak? Just like if we think about, for example, Jews within the Holocaust and racism, Racial prejudices that Jews who were in a way the major target for extermination from the Nazi vantage point.

Many Jews did experience, did have ideas, very negative ideas of the Roma population in the context of Eastern Europe. If we think about the Lodz ghetto, the Łódz ghetto, one of the most important ghettos in Eastern Europe, there was a section within the ghetto that was

you know, only for gypsies, only for the Roma. And we know from work that has been done mostly by some art historians who have analyzed some photographs that exist of the Roma within the context of the Lodz ghetto. We know that Jews had, you know,

nurtured prejudicial sentiments vis-a-vis these other victims. So it's not like they're looking to bond with other victims of the Nazis, right? It's not like the Roma and the Jews are trying to create

Elissa (01:00:29.011)
bonds to defeat of the Nazi or to challenge or resist or to be resilient by the same token, why would men and women necessarily create bonds? in other words, to answer your question, of course, there was misogyny, just like there was racism. on the other hand, it is difficult to kind of

you know, write about this because these people, most of these people, most of the Jews, especially in the Eastern European context, were exterminated. So it's very hard then to revisit their experience of, for example, misogyny, which is a negative, you know, emotion. It's something negative that we don't want to associate with victims necessarily, or racism.

don't want to necessarily address it, but it was part of the ways in which they experienced the genocidal project.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:33.856)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (01:01:41.583)
Well, and I'm thinking again, you know, again, it's not necessarily in terms of judgment, right? I mean, we're not necessarily sitting in judgment of these people from the future, but from an explanatory sense, because I had Amy Shapiro Simon on talking about her work using Yiddish diaries, for example. And, you know, one of the things she's very upfront about, you know, is that she doesn't have a lot of examples of women, you know, and this, think, is

a structural result of the fact that these women were busy doing other things that were sort of foisted upon them, you know, of caregiver, of household, you know, managing household, et cetera, et cetera. And also probably if we think like longer structurally, perhaps a function of education and, you know, class and everything else. But, you know, these things are, I think are important because they help us understand and explain

some of the things that we encounter when we're looking at the past and why they are the way they are. Why there aren't so many women, as you mentioned earlier, on Judenrots providing leadership roles, or at least sort of public codified leadership roles. don't want to at all suggest that women did not provide leadership, because they did in all kinds of different ways, but not in the ones, as you pointed out at very beginning, sort of that are the standard visible members of the Jewish Council making

decisions kind of thing. mean, obviously there are exceptions in other places where they were, but as a rule, I think that represents again, you know, sort of inherent misogyny that men are the ones that provide leadership.

Elissa (01:03:23.497)
Of course, I mean, we also have to remember that the Nazis themselves, the Germans did not want women on the Jundrat, right? I mean, the Nazi system is a very, is unlike the Soviet system, you know, unlike communism at the same time, is a system that is, that is, you know, that fosters this kind of traditional gender role in place.

And so, you know, the Nazis did not want Jewish women on the Judenrat. However, there were instances of women who played a very important role, if not as official members on the Judenrat, but they were secretaries. So we do have women who are, quote unquote, taking advantage of these, possibilities of structures of

power within this genocidal context. I mean, it's something that has been studied more in depth in the context of Rwanda, for example. But so it is something that I think scholars, know, something that we still need to explore within the context of the Holocaust. But these women did make choices and did and did play a role. They were not

100 % in charge, they had agency. We do also have wives of Jewish policemen. And in some cases, there seem to have been some women who were members of the Jewish policemen within the context of the ghetto. you know.

There is, I think, a lot more work that needs to be done in terms of really flashing out the different roles that women played within the Holocaust, within this genocidal project.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:33.359)
And before we leave, don't want to let the perpetrators off the hook either because gender applies universally. And so one of the things that I think, again, I'm thinking of Wendy Lauer and other folks, that has been a pretty recent phenomenon, has been recognizing the role that women play as perpetrators in genocide. Maybe you can talk a little about that and sort of how do we

How do women participate in genocide? Is there a particular way that they experience genocide as gendered?

Elissa (01:06:10.775)
Yeah, mean, again, if we think about the historiography on the topic, and you mentioned Claudia Kunz, but, you know, women for a very long time appeared in genocide scholarship primarily as victims, sometimes bystanders, but definitely not as perpetrators. And this framing, of course, where does this come from? Again, it reflects some broader assumptions, you know, what we've been talking about, broader assumptions about gender.

that kind of equate violence, authority, ideological fanaticism, fascism with masculinity, Whereas women are really constructed as inherently passive or at least nurturing, but the nurturing aspect of women is considered more like something that is passive.

But, and one more thing actually, when women did participate in genocidal systems, right? When scholars began to write about women participating in genocidal systems as camp guards, as informants, as, you know, agents of propaganda, their actions were treated as anomalies or they were explained as having been caused by coercion.

being the result of a deviant individual of pathology rather than being analyzed as real political choices, as real ideological choices, right? And also we could also bring into the conversation the fact that post-war testimonies and legal processes reinforced in a way this invisibility, right?

courts, journalists in the post-war period, or even survivors, struggled to recognize women as being capable of genocidal agency. And actually, you know, I was thinking about this. If you think about it, in a way, it's scary to confront the fact that an individual

Elissa (01:08:36.385)
who because of her biological identity can give life, right? Because of her biological nature can give life is also capable of taking life away, right? It is psychologically in a way easier to blame the genocidal violence entirely on men, right? There's that kind of psychological.

explanation that is in place. But anyway, new scholarship has shown that women just like men can be swayed by genocidal ideologies and can act as criminals, can act as perpetrators, can encourage their husbands to carry out the genocidal project.

or they themselves like Wendy Lauer, who you just mentioned in Hitler's Furies has shown can be true believers in the genocidal project, in the genocidal ideology and hence act upon it even though this might mean rejecting this invented femininity and embracing

ideas of masculinity, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:10:04.814)
I mean, I think it's interesting too, because it's almost like sort of a photo negative of like pioneering women who break the glass ceiling, you know, because you have even within genocide, particularly the Holocaust, but I think other ones as well. It's man's work. This is a career path for men and women. It's not for women. And so someone like Erna Petri or, you know, other folks

Elissa (01:10:14.423)
Mm-hmm.

Elissa (01:10:25.313)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:33.196)
they have to, in a weird way, they're confronting the same misogyny, you know, that Marie Curie or any of sort of famous women who have achieved things is confronting as well. It's just, this is context of genocide rather than science or business or education or the arts, but they're still confronting, you know, or they're being shunted into supporting genocide. I'm thinking of Rwanda here, for example, where you have women at home encouraging their husbands to go out and kill

you know, or they don't get to come home and have dinner or whatever, you know, and you know I'm saying, like the misogyny, the sort of standardized social negative stereotypes function to even sort of corral and limit what women can do.

Elissa (01:11:17.589)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, mean, I absolutely, I have first encountered, you know, this idea and also thinking about women as agents, as conscious agents of violence, whether they do it out of belief in the ideology or whether they're challenging the status quo, right, as you seem to be.

I've encountered this first in my work on the pogroms on ethnic violence against Jews in Eastern Europe and primarily in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian lands during the period of the Civil War when we do have instances of women who are leading these, you know, groups of bandits or groups of, you know,

peasants against the Jewish community, not only with the purpose of looting, but also with the purpose of killing. you know, it is, it still is unsettling. You know, for me, I admit it, you know, despite the fact that I'm fighting against all, I'm challenging these gender norms, it still is unsettling.

when I read about women who engage in killing.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:50.766)
I mean, think this is one of the fascinating things that's come out of this conversation, but also the scholarship, because we talked about intersectionality in terms of like personal identities, but we could almost talk about intersectionality of ideas as well, and ideologies and the fact that, again, that misogyny as an example from before the Holocaust overlays society in the same way that it does.

during the Holocaust in a certain sense, I mean, I think about the example that I sort of use sometimes I'm talking to students, you know, when I was working on the UNOSCA project, I found a document that was basically detailing the SS renting out prisoners from the camp. And of course, you know, it costs more to get a man than a woman. So even, you know, even in the context of the Holocaust and genocide and slave labor, right, there's this glass ceiling.

in terms of like the economic value that's placed upon men and women. so I think this is another really important thing for our listeners, particularly if you're not sort someone that sort of sits around thinking about this all day like we do, I suppose, is to recognize that, you know, these much longer-durée social ideas of gender, of masculinity, which we haven't talked about, but also femininity and gender roles, I mean, all these things.

they sort of, they come before and they function right through and then they function right through into the post-war and they continue, they're sort of like zombie ideas, they're very difficult to kill because they continue to function almost as sort of the foundational background against which everything else is taking place. But you wouldn't know that if you didn't look at it and confront it and study it and ask the questions of like, you why.

Why are these things happening the way they are to individuals, right? Because that's how this works.

Elissa (01:14:52.727)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:54.638)
I've taken a lot of time already, so I don't I'm cognizant of that, but I don't want to you go before I ask what I normally ask, which is sort of what is one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend for listeners at this particular moment in time?

Elissa (01:15:09.783)
Okay, yeah, this particular moment in time, there's an excellent book that just came out in English by Anna Haikova, her new book, People Without History or Dust, Queer Desire in the Holocaust. And I think that it connects very nicely with some of the themes that we have discussed. This is a very important book because it brings back

the voices of those who were persecuted, not only because of their race and their Jewishness, but also because of their sexuality and their queerness. And I think that by bringing these stories back into the narrative, this book questions the normative accounts of the Holocaust, right? And it reveals how societal norms

shaped experiences and narratives. And it's, I think it's the work of the historian at its best because it confronts and resists this, the erasure of marginalized stories, like those of queer people during the Holocaust. And it brings them back to life, their voices, their, you know, restoring their voices, their identities and their choices to history.

So I had to recommend.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:35.438)
And I am exceptionally proud to say that I have that book sitting on my desk and she will be coming on the podcast as soon as I read it. So that's a great example, a great recommendation. And Anna will be coming on as soon as I get to the book. So listeners, you can stay tuned and she'll be on here as well. Alyssa, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us. And for all of our listeners, again, I appreciate you.

We are now going into the second, I guess third year of the podcast, which is exciting. I hope you're finding it engaging, useful. You're learning something. It's thought-provoking. Obviously, as I always say, it'd be great to hear from you. Leave us a comment, leave us a like, subscribe, all those cool things. And again, Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today.

Elissa (01:17:26.891)
Thank you for the fascinating conversation.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:29.839)
Thank