Ep. 71. Queering the Holocaust with Anna Hájková

An important part of researching the Holocaust is recovering the stories of the diverse group of victims of the Nazi genocidal project.  For a very long time, queer victims have been marginalized or overlooked in this process.

In this episode, I talked with Anna Hájková about her work in queering the Holocaust, that is in writing the experience of these people into the history.  We talked about the queer Jewish experience but also about the value of this kind of work for teaching us about the doing of history.

Anna Hájková is an associate professor of history at the University of Warwick.

Hájková, Anna. People without History are Dust- Queer Desire in the Holocaust (2025)

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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 (00:00.999)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today we are talking about whose history gets told and what the significance of people being written out of history is. In this case, we are talking about queer victims of the Holocaust. And I am super excited to have my friend and colleague, Anna Hikova, to come on and talk about her amazing work and her new book on this topic. So, Anna, thanks so much for coming on.

Anna (00:31.232)
It's an honor and a privilege.

Waitman Beorn (00:33.447)
Can you start just by, you know, telling us how you, I guess, got interested in this topic or specifically how you got started on this particular book?

Anna (00:42.094)
So, dear listeners, you may not be aware, but Dr. Baron and I were writing our dissertations at the same time at the North American continent. I in the North, he in the South. I in Canada, he in the US. And now we are both in the little island. And I think, Waitman, you were there when I started living dangerously and started writing about sex shit in the Holocaust, particularly sexual barter in the Holocaust. And I got...

a lot of, you know, enthusiastic academic reactions and some less enthusiastic reactions from the survivors who accused me of very, very difficult things. And once my upset about it abate, I realized that some of the approaches I got that implied I was doing this ethically challenging work because I was a lesbian and therefore sexually wrong. I mean, it is quite hurtful to get a letter like that. Let's be very clear about it.

I thought it would be worthwhile to systematize it and to think more consequently through the production of stigma connected to sexuality in the shore. So then I finished my PhD in 2013, in 2015 to 2016, I was a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Aarhus with Kristianne Kuller and I was supposed to write a book about century European communists.

But I started cheating on the project with sex-shit in the Holocaust, in particular thinking about same-sex desire in the Holocaust and homophobia. Around that time, my colleague Inza Eshiba, who was then the director of the Ravensbrück Memorial, published a German language anthology about homophobia in the camps. I thought it was very ambitious of her. Maybe we will get to talk about why these topics are so taboo, especially if you are part of the German Memorial culture.

But she got it out, it was quite successful in academic circles. mean, it's a Metropole volume who Metropole volumes have a limited readership. And I started thinking about it. thought, you know, I will write maybe a piece for German newspaper and give a talk or two. And that is the rabbit hole into which I fell. And fast forward 10 years later, here I am with a book out. And in your podcast.

Waitman Beorn (02:58.055)
I mean, it's great because the way I wanted to start, you mentioned sort of, we were coming up at the same time. And one of the great mentors that I had at the University of North Carolina was a guy named Konrad Jarosz, who is an amazing German historian who he just, he cranks out books that are great. But one of the things he would do in one of the most valuable seminars I ever had as a graduate student.

is we would literally spend like 15 minutes on what we decided to title our papers. And he really wanted to sort of find out why did you choose the titles that you do for your work? Because he thought that was really important. And I thought that was really neat because, you know, oftentimes we kind of sort of throw something on a paper. And so I wanted to talk about your title, the book, the subtitle of the book.

I mean, the people without history is amazing. Our dust is amazing already. So that's great. We don't talk about that, but the, we'll talk about that later in substance. But the subtitle is, is queer desire in the Holocaust. And I want to ask you sort of what you mean by queer, because, you know, it's one those, it's one those words that I, I have to sort of train myself to say, because when I was a kid growing up, that was an absolute epithet.

It was an absolute sort of slur. so even though I know it's accepted in the context we're to be talking about and everything else, still every once in kind of get a little subconscious cringe that I'm saying it. Can you talk about... But it has a meaning beyond reappropriating a term and everything else. It has a particular meaning in your book that I think is important beyond the sort of representation and beyond the reappropriating slur. What do you mean by queer in the...

context of the people that you're talking about.

Anna (04:43.022)
I should fall from there is quite a good story about the main title of the book as well, but we will get to it. You are right, the term queer is programmatic here. Of course, my first language is Czech, it's not English. So I did not grow up with the term queer as a slur, but we have other terms in Czech that were say normal when I was coming of age and coming to terms or realizing that I'm attracted to women.

That's today my research assistant who is 25 years younger than me. When I say deptly in front of her or warm, she says like, Dr. Heiko, you mustn't say that. So I learned new tricks too. And then the term buzerrand is today being quite appropriated in Czech too. And of course, language changes. But more importantly, one of the biggest innovations of queer history of the last 20 years.

is the invitation to stop looking for hard sexual identities and to instead settle on what Jennifer Evans and Laura Doane have called accent practices. What does it mean? First of all, in a number of countries, dependent on the time, people that are attracted to same sex or they're not cisgendered or they're averted

they are different from the others to cite the 1980 movie. But they did not have a name for it or the way how they conceptualized it. Not only did they have a different war for it, say, Urning, but also it meant for them something different than today. And Michel Foucault and others have written about how basically we have in Germany the invention of the modern homosexual at some point in late 19th century. However, do you think

random people in the German countryside will be reading Magnus Herschfeld or the others, of course not. And we know from Laura Doane that this penny drops much later in the UK only in the 1950s. In fact, even Alan Turing just before he commits suicide, he doesn't conceptualize himself as a homosexual. He says, man like me. But that's not a, that's just not a hint. He just generally doesn't have a word for what he is.

Anna (07:02.336)
So that is one part of it, historicizing sexual identity. The second part is most of the people I write about did not engage in same sex before the war or if they survived after the war. But they are part of queer history. And so I use similarly to many other people before me, queer as an umbrella category where I include people who self-identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, but also people who engage

in same-sex practices or gender nonconforming practices.

Waitman Beorn (07:36.154)
It's, mean, it's a really powerful approach, actually, I think, because, you know, it avoids us having to, as you point out, of put people in boxes, based on what they quote, believe or feel, because you can just sort of say, well, here's what they did. And this is sort of this practice, as you say, is queer, right? It's not, it's non straight. But then what that means as the book actually does a really good job of illustrating is there's a wide spectrum of places.

that people are, but also temporally too, right? So it's, know, where people are in terms of how far they go to one side or the other, but also when they're doing that. And so I think that it's really useful. And then the second part that's interesting is also in the title is queer desire, right? So you're not just writing about queer people, it's this desire piece. Can you talk a little bit about how you chose that?

Anna (08:34.582)
Wait, when I'm a very pragmatic person, I knew that I had a good main title. And then I was looking for something short, but also more, in Germany would say, like hands on what the book is about. Because people without history are dust can mean just like existential piece about history. So I looked for something that would be as possibly all encompassing.

And you know, I don't always write about desire. I also talk about sexual violence. So in that sense, can we subsume it? Sexual violence is a desire that would be questionable. You will not have a perfect title that will encompass everything and will be readable. But I believe in readable titles. So that was my choice.

Waitman Beorn (09:20.493)
I mean, it's a great one because it actually puts the reader already kind of in a different mindset when they start the book, you know, because I've read some on this topic. you know, in full disclosure, I added a new chapter to my Holocaust, Nice and Europe book that's coming out, that came out, that includes LGBT people, you know, and I

I did the best I could trying to do that. I came up, I probably come up with a lot of some of the challenges that you're gonna talk about in terms of, you know, finding about these people, you know, particularly in the context of Eastern Europe, because I wasn't looking at German or Austrian or even really Czech people. I was looking at it further East than that. And that was even more sort of a desert of.

of trying to find anything, any reference. And many times the only place you would find them is if they happen to interact with a German, which again, privileges certain perspectives and certain sources. And I mentioned that because I think one of the things that you are alluding to in your work is that a lot of the work, and it's good work, on the treatment of LGBT people, queer people, is sort of...

what are the Nazis doing to them and what is the Nazi policy toward them rather than what it was like for them or what it was like for them amongst their fellow victims, prisoners, et cetera. And so I think the desire piece is actually a really nice way of of hinting and showing that you're not, this isn't sort of a post-mortem of Nazi anti-homosexual policy. This is something much different.

Anna (11:03.862)
Yeah, and if I may say that something that I think is really interesting to think about is how can we skin a cat in a number of ways? How can we look at the same set of sources, but what other stories can we read from it? And just like you say, of course, I stand on the shoulders of giants and I could not be doing this work without the predecessors who often, you know, did quite unsung work. They did not get chairs. They are going from contract to contract.

let's not name names, but the classical piece about persecution or about queer men or queer women in Nazi Germany would basically be a retelling of the file from the viewpoint of perpetrators, which is informative, but first is sometimes a bit dull. And second, ethically, it is a bit challenging to speak about persecution from the viewpoint of the perpetrators. I mean, we don't have to...

revisit the whole show, free-lander debate, but it's quite important. And I remember three or four years ago in the aftermath of teaching a Holocaust seminar at the University of Vienna, where was visiting professor, one of my students wrote a piece for the seminar about gay Jewish Viennese owner of a brandy shop. He was not very good in running the shop because he always invited his friends who were all gay and they drank all the brandy.

So the ship was not doing so well, but before he could go bankrupt, he was arrested by the Gestapo and he got away. And when Svannia Kalmar and I were writing up the piece, I said, let's change the narrative and let's not say what happens one thing after the other, but let's cross check the file about what we know about the Jewish history of the Holocaust, about sociability, about who are their friends, about swimming in the old Danube and whatnot. And it came out in our chest about three, four years ago.

So I do not think the piece really tells us something very new about Jewish queer life in 38 Vienna, but it contributes exactly to the point you are saying about how can we break the narrative and think about other ways of telling the stories because narratively, that's the interesting challenge.

Waitman Beorn (13:15.335)
Well, and also I think one of the things that you're doing in this perspective is most of the people that you talk about, I think almost all of them actually, none of them are really being persecuted directly by the Nazis because they're queer. Because when you try to murder a whole entire group of people, you get everybody. And so they're being wrapped up in that.

And if you are sort of privileging the Nazi perspective, then you're now engaging in this idea of homosexual gay people as criminals and everything else and being persecuted as such. But in this context, in a certain sense, the Nazis are kind of of secondary importance because they're kind of like the natural disaster that everyone is trying to survive through. And then there's other people, these queer people that you talk about are trying to

navigate that in terms of their own identity, they're not really, the book really isn't about them, you know, dealing with Nazis or trying to sort of, Nazis per se in terms of homosexual policy. Go ahead.

Anna (14:06.456)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Anna (14:18.094)
Exactly. The book is not about why these people were persecuted. It's about Jews persecuted as Jews who were deported to concentration camps, ghettos, who went into hiding, who engaged in same-sex desire, or, you know, became victims of sexual violence and grooming.

but I do not tell it as a perpetrator-centred history and therefore it is about subjectivities and experiences. And I think trying to understand the history of the Holocaust only through the logic of persecution is ethically problematic, but it also shields our eyes from some further insight. in short, this is what Queer Holocaust history does. It looks at queer experiences among people persecuted as Jews.

Waitman Beorn (15:09.979)
Yeah, I mean, and this is great too, because it's also for our listeners, know, if you're not a sort of Holocaust professional or grad student or someone who's interested, I mean, this is also a lesson for history in general, you know, that there are people whose story isn't told for variety of reasons, both structural and ideological and everything else. And this is a great example of sort of.

you know, what we can learn when we include those in those stories. And I wanted to shift and to talk a little bit about that, about how you do that. Because as I, as I suggested, you know, I did read, I did write this, this chapter, which again, I hate the fact that it was kind of an other victim's chapter in a, a book about the Holocaust, but there are sometimes that's just how the way you have to phrase it to include different, different groups. So I did, I did take pains to note the intersectionality and the fact that, you know,

these categories overlap. But when I was doing the research, particularly for the LGBT section, it was exactly, it was sort of your usual suspects were the only people that sort of show up and these sort of celebrity examples of gay people in the Holocaust. it was, what's that? Who?

Anna (16:17.326)
Hossenske? Hossenske?

The gay Polish guy who has sent a service over Matsoja.

Waitman Beorn (16:25.947)
I don't know if I had him. mean, I did reach out to Johanna Ostrowska and she was amazing and giving me her book in German. so I did the best I could to sort of mitigate. But the point I'm making is that if I wanted to look at literally any other subsection slice of victims, if it was old people or children or...

you know, women in general or people from a certain region, there's, you know, a plethora of sources. But when you come to this particular topic, there are not only a dearth of sort of secondary work that we're obviously getting a lot better at that, but the primary source stuff, at least that is identified as such and easily recognized as such.

is really hard to find. And that's something that you talk about. So was wondering if you can talk a little bit about the challenges there because you have a lot to say about institutions, but also homophobia and just overlooking from a historical perspective, these people.

Anna (17:27.438)
Mm. Mm.

So you are right, we need to kind of start top down and first we need to ask why do we have so few testimonies of people who engage in same sex desire in the Holocaust. And the reason is quite an overwhelming homophobia in the prison or community that continues in survivor testimonies that influenced the historiography that really continues to this day. How come was the society in the camp so homophobic?

It's not a continuation of pre-war homophobia. can't say before 1972, before Christopher Street Day and whatnot, everybody was homophobic. Sometimes I hear, you know, Anna, back in the day, they were not homosexuals. Gay people did not come on the ocean like Venus out of home. There have always been queer people.

And there has been queer activism much earlier. And of course, you you had the wonderful Laurie Marhoffer, so you talked with him about those topics too. But Inza Eschebach, Uta Routenberg and others pointed out that the incarcerated society comes to terms with hunger, with fear, with violence, with death, and with chaotic information and constant fear by being much more

conservative in terms of observing and negotiating gender and sexuality. I've written a fair bit about the first topic in my book about Theresienstadt and the second topic means that people witness and observe same-sex intimacy happening next to them and say this is deviant, this is monstrous, this is disgusting. If you put it into the context of heterosexual sexual violence, people are actually more upset

Anna (19:18.702)
by observing or witnessing same-sex intimacy than they are by sexual violence of men towards women. They take the latter almost as a fact of life and Monica Flaska has written a famous piece about it, only pretty women were raped. So that is the overwhelming social discourse that then frames what can be recalled and what can be narrated. Now, of course, bearing testimony is a social construction. And if the world tells you that you are a monster,

It's very difficult to say I was in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. This is where I met my current partner. We are living happily ever after. We are not monstrous at all, on Thursdays. So what I did for quite a bit in 2015, 2016, 2017 was going systematically through the bigger all-history collections with our local survivors, the visual history archive, fortune of USHMM and on and on.

And pretty much without fail, 99,9 % of mentions of same sex desire are homophobic statements, just like I pointed out. Yes, you have the six gay gentlemen who were persecuted for part of 175 in the Visual History Archive, but it's quite interesting, it's also very telling that they managed to interview 52,000 survivors.

And I know for a fact that among them were people who either engage in same-sex conduct or self-identify as gay and lesbian, but they never spoke about it openly. And in fact, often you have the interviewers who will ask leading questions such as like, and in the camps, you meet any horrible lesbian couples? And it's difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, when you are asked a question like that, it takes a lot of courage to say, I haven't met any horrible lesbian couples, but I'm a very delightful lesbian myself.

So that is the social setting that made bearing testimony very, very challenging. And how do I do the work is I decided that in order to find any testimonies, I need to frame my work as publicly accessible as possible. That is to step out of ivory tower, you know, and not to write, you know, academic texts that will be read by six colleagues of whom seven will take the time to send me an email to tell me where I'm wrong.

Anna (21:39.704)
but to give public talks, to talk on the radio, to write for mass media, and to do all of that. And I did that in number of countries and that eventually paid off and lots of colleagues and also just people from public audience reached out to me and said, I have heard about your work. I had this, my father's cousin look into her papers or this is something that I found in the archive. I'm not going to write about it, you know.

the very, very generous colleagues who said, you know, these are lemons, but haiková would be very happy. And I got some amazing sources that way. And one of the most fortuitous and generous moments was after giving a talk at a Hebrew university with Amos Goldberg at Moshe Sluchowski. Moshe Sluchowski talked about my work to Anne Crichton, whose wife, Linda Hojman, contacted me in fall 2017 and told me, I heard about your work.

me and my partner who are a lesbian couple went to visit my relative Margot Hojman. Not only did she survive the camps, but she also mentioned to us that she is a lesbian. It was just after Margot's moving to Arizona and coming out to her family as a queer woman. And that's how I was introduced to Margot, who agreed to being interviewed. And I was the first person to whom she told her whole life story. And what was quite relevant here

is not only that I came and asked the questions and you know, Vyta, you and I have known each other many, many years, know, that I'm straight-laced person and I don't mince my questions. But also because I am a third generation of Holocaust survivors and I'm a lesbian woman myself. So in our conversations, Margot over and over made herself aware of those facts.

Waitman Beorn (23:30.183)
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned in the the VHA, the Visual History Archive, for those that aren't familiar, sort of started by Steven Spielberg and there's 55,000 plus, I think, survivor testimonies and then a bunch of others from various other genocides. And it's a great example, I think, in a certain sense of, know, Michel Trujot's silencing in the archives, you know, where you have a structure.

that either intentionally or unintentionally is not accepting or the way that it's built makes certain people sort of invisible. I had...

you know, Ari Yaskovitch is on here to talk about the Sinti and the Roma, you know, and it's a similar thing, you know, where they appear in archives almost despite themselves, you know, they appear in archives, for example, that designed primarily for and by Jewish Holocaust survivors, you know, but there isn't really a, there isn't a Shoal Foundation for Sinti and Roma, right, as an example. But, you know, this issue of coding,

is really important because a lot of us look for these code words, these keywords, which are eminently helpful, but they're also eminently human. And if you don't have gay or queer or lesbian as a keyword, and if the only examples of it are homophobia, you know, you...

you can't find those people, which are already difficult to find anyway because they're people of a certain generation, which is kind what you were talking about, where this is a big umbrella. There are people who don't talk about sex anyway because this is sort of like, you know, the 1940s, 50s generation, but then let alone, you know, the sort of queer piece of it makes it really difficult.

Anna (25:16.408)
Mm-hmm.

Anna (25:25.358)
You know, wait a minute, I thought maybe because I'm such a blunt person, I find that people are actually quite eager to discuss all kinds of things and people are happy to talk about sexuality and sexual violence. Lauren Cantion wrote quite an impressive PhD at King's College about how surviving women quite bluntly and matter-of-factly discuss sexual violence in their testimony. In my experience, I task people, both survivors and

their relatives, so the generation of our parents, people born in late 40s and 50s about sexuality or other taboos topics such as a communist party. You will of course have something like 30 % of people who will say, I don't feel comfortable talking about it, but other people will tell you all kinds of things. They will tell you things that you never wanted to hear.

Waitman Beorn (26:15.058)
I mean, guess the point, my point is more that they have to be asked in a certain sense.

And if you're not asking the questions, which is why, you know, on a variety of different topics, the Shoah Foundation can be maddening for an historian because, you know, most people are dead that they're interviewing and you can't, no matter what you're looking for, you know, you can, you can often see someone's beginning to talk about something that you want them to talk about. And then the interviewer guides them in a different direction or, or whatever. And you can't influence that because it's done. But if you're actually, if the person's alive and you can talk to them.

But the question has to be asked, because as you point out, the interviewer is not going to say, so tell me what it was like to arrive in Auschwitz. I'm not going to say, I got there, and also by the way, I'm gay. It's something you'd have to, as you say, when you talk to Margo, you're able to establish a personal rapport and a recognition of what's important and elicit from them.

make them comfortable talking about their sexuality or about their choices. And I think that just something that's really important for all of us who are doing history in general, especially those that are able to interview their people is that part of it is willingness to talk. But part of it is someone has to ask, be willing to listen and be interested in the answer, which is part of the problem with

with a lot of these institutions that are in some ways were artifacts of their time and of what people were interested in. And a lot of the stuff that we've had to do to look at the past in different ways is to reverse engineer.

Waitman Beorn (27:56.636)
with what we have because we can't go back and ask different questions. as you, you're very, it's very nice to see that you mentioned in the book that you actually reach out to them and say, you know, like these are some problems and can you, you know, can you go back and figure out a way to code these, you know, code different elements in the testimonies? And I think that's important because archives.

should not be a sort of one way menu of like here's the menu what's on the offer and we can't do anything about it. So I mean thought that was interesting.

Anna (28:27.502)
If I got a pound for every email I wrote to institutions in this context and did not get an answer, I would be living in Malibu.

Waitman Beorn (28:37.895)
I mean, it's, you're doing that work, which I think is great. I, every once in a while I'll see, for example, a photograph that's mislabeled, you know, I'll write, okay, this is not, this could not be this thing or this person, you know, and it, you know, hopefully they get around to fixing it, you know, but the point being it doesn't get fixed if nobody asks about it, you know, and if people aren't asking, you know, where can I find,

queer stories in your archive, then oftentimes, unless you have an archivist or a director who is interested in that topic or recognizes the importance of that topic, they're not going to sort of go search for that, I think is the point. But let's talk about the actual history, because there's some really, really, really important and interesting things in here. Can you talk about how did these people navigate

homophobia, how do they experience homophobia amongst their fellow victims, survivors, etc.

Anna (29:46.19)
So we have relatively few testimonies, first-person testimonies of surviving Jewish queer people from the camps. And it is only really Magdhojman whose testimony comes to my mind that she mentions when she was in Neugraven, a satellite camp of Neugame in the winter of 1944-45. She and her girlfriend, Dita, shared a bunk bed. They would kiss, they would hug, they would have intimacy at night.

And one day they overheard fellow prisoners saying something, that's not natural. And of course I asked her the very same question, what did you think? And she was like, ha, we just laughed about it. And that's pretty much the only thing we have. I mean, of course she was 17 and she had bigger fish to fry. And also, you know, in the bigger scale of the Holocaust of everything that happened to her, this was a relatively minor thing. But of course it's a different question. How would she talk about it?

had I somehow, if I had the magical time traveling device and arrived in March 45 and asked little Margot Hojman back then if I could interview other prisoners. So here what I can do is write about the sources that I have. And as you know, better than me, wait a minute, there are some very important ethical debates about how can we write from the perspective of the voiceless.

We have Saidiya Hartmann and Herb Venus in two acts. And I feel a little bit uncomfortable with what Hartmann is doing, as important as the provocation is, because in some ways I find it leading the reader into one direction. And I don't think that's my job as a historian. think historians should write based on what we find in the archives and what we know about historiography in the context and not come up with things.

that we just do not have any evidence for being there. We may ask those questions, but to take the reader there, we should not do. And I am a little bit uncomfortable about some of the tendencies in bigger postcolonial history about writing these redemptive histories of sexual violence and enslaved women. What do they understand where they're coming from? But to...

Anna (32:09.664)
make bare the discomfort, the difficulty, these heartbreaking histories and the fact that they ask, to 99 % of them there is no happy end. I think this is our job. We should not try to prettify or sentimentalize these histories in terms of redemptiveness. So the homophobia to go back to your question is there. I lay it bare. I say what it means and I let the reader sit with this discomfort because let's be very clear-eyed.

to show that survivors of the Holocaust, people who we take with so much respect, said some very hackling things about same-sex desire. And as we know from Juskovic's work, also about sentient trauma, that is upsetting. And I don't think that penny has quite dropped in wider Holocaust education.

Waitman Beorn (32:54.151)
I mean there's a great quote, wanna, Johanna Ostrowska's book, she has a great quote from, I'm just gonna read it, cause it's really good, I think it sums up a of it. It's from Mary Antursky, who is a very famous, you know, sort of Auschwitz survivor. And it's only two sentences, but he says, I myself have only fragmentary memories from my relatively short imprisonment in Auschwitz-Birkenau of the prisons with the pink triangle. I'm ashamed to admit that it is a memory that I would call marked by rejection, even by scorn.

Anna (32:58.211)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (33:21.895)
And I use that in the chapter because I think it's exactly what you're pointing out, which is that, and I think maybe I don't want to put more words in your mouth, but it's the idea that the Holocaust is not an ennobling experience. It's not like taking your medicine. It doesn't make people better having gone through it. People enter it as they are.

and they go through it as they are, you and that includes being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, et cetera, et cetera. Not everybody, obviously, but you know, it doesn't like, it's not, it's not a sort of, it's not a, you know, it's not Victor Frankl's sort of, you know, character building experience kind of argument, you know, like which, which I have issues with Victor Frankl anyway, but you know, it's not, it's not the sort of like, well, what can we get out of this? Right. And I think, you know, that's one of things that

I thought was interesting and maybe you can talk a little about this, you where you talk about some of the people in your book who are almost having to like, they have an additional level of difficulty in sort of the Holocaust because then only are they trying to survive along with everybody else.

but they still have to kind of guard their sexuality from everybody else and do all the things of being in the closet and being in hiding in that sense, which must be sort of an additional level of stress in an already kind of stressful environment. Or maybe not, or maybe I'm completely wrong, which is possible.

Anna (34:50.158)
Again, would say let's work with what the sources give us. And we don't have people saying, you know, I'm in the camps, I need to be in the closet, I need to be extra careful. Usually the sources we have are third-person testimonies who tell us about same-sex desire, often tamed with homophobia. And my job is then to unpack it and to ask how can we from these judgmental sources reconstruct a life.

Waitman Beorn (34:54.182)
Okay.

Anna (35:14.894)
And I guess there is a dimension, a political dimension to my reconstructing these lives and telling the stories because that's the bulk of the book, right? Is to include these histories into the bigger Holocaust history because they have been systematically excluded. Also a significant part of same sex desire and queer intimacy in the camps are prisoner functionaries who have access to sex.

And because largely they are kept in monosexual camps and that's often the male couples, they keep the so-called people. know that Robert Zoma and Bill Jones and Joanna Ostrowska have been writing about those topics and of course Dorota Glovacka. And these are violent, aggressive relationships that often are initiated with grooming and rape. And yes, they can develop into form of sexual barter.

But it's impossible to talk about consent in the situation of concentration camps where the people, the sexual slaves are teenagers, they are Jewish, they often on their own. And they have very, very limited leeway how to navigate these situations. But there are many reasons why couples engage in these relationships. It's one of the very few forms of pleasure that you have in the camps. But also they have these relationships sometimes surprisingly publicly because it's a

form of exercising public power. Camps become society of their own and how you can navigate power and show that you are the boss as a prisoner of or as a capo, being sexually active is one of them. Having said that, what it means to be public and what it means to be very careful about it, you really need to calibrate your

viewpoints to understand the vault of the camps at night. Lapziger, who was coerced into one such relationship in Pfünsteichen by his couple Janek, tells us quite a lot about it because people in the barrack, that this sexual violence takes place, of course know about it because when you have sex it makes noises. When somebody's in pain, he or she makes noises. You hear the thudding of the intercourse. But this is something that is going to be hidden from the SS.

Anna (37:35.342)
unless the SS tolerates it. And I'm really looking forward to the forthcoming book by Will Jones about male and female sexual violence in the camps because I think they are really looking at this topic closely. I drinks with them just on Sunday and I'm very excited it's coming out with Oxford.

Waitman Beorn (37:50.92)
Yeah, no, mean, and I am at them as well. I saw the lesson, the legacies that I'm looking forward to this. It's really great. And I think one the things I wanted to touch on, because one of the things that I admire in this book in particular is that you sort of this unflinching.

gays that you're able to apply. And one of the areas you just mentioned, so we can sort of go down that road for a little bit, is this idea of sexual violence and grooming and child molestation, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, I say this knowing that this idea that gay people are grooming children and are child molesters, et cetera, et cetera, is an absolute sort of anti-homophobic trope and has been for very long time.

still is, you know, the idea of drag queens and everything else being sort of, know, whatever. with that said, right, and knowing that these people would still represent the vast minority of queer people anyway, there are, it is quite prominent in the book, you know, people who are coercive in some way, shape or form, both

both in the camps, but then also with, for example, you talk about some youth leaders and stuff like that before the camp, which are sort of your absolute stereotype of the homophobic stereotype of sort of the child molestation piece. How do you navigate that? And what is the sort of history? What do the archives tell us about these kinds of behaviors?

Anna (39:24.078)
I love that question because it is something that really was the passion that drove me in the last stages of the writing of the book because you know I've been writing about same-sex desire and the Holocaust for the last eight or ten years at some point you just do not see the forest for the trees and in the last two three years the calls for writing the whole history of some people and the fact that yes they were imprisoned for pink triangle and

this is wrong, but they were not only arrested for Paragraph 175, sex with men, they were also arrested for, I'm blanking if it's Paragraph 174, 176 of the German criminal code, sex with children, right? And these are not 17 year olds, these are 12 or 13 or 14 year olds. And the activists and historians who have interviewed the survivors who went to the archives that looked at their files came across these stories and chose

sweep it under the carpet. That is, among others, history of Karl Goddard, quite a well-known, perhaps the best-known, German gay survivor of Auschwitz because in 1980s he went with gay activists from West Germany to Auschwitz Memorial. And I was very disappointed when I learned that friends of mine like Lutz van Dyck knew this history, published about him, and cut it because that's just not good history. Our job as historians is

Waitman Beorn (40:49.977)
And just really quickly, is the story of his behavior that wasn't published?

Anna (40:55.694)
Kal Gaurav did not only have sex with grown-up men, he also had sex with children.

I actually next year, if all goes well, I go on sabbatical and I have a plan of going to Brim and looking up his file because it was very difficult to get Lutz, who I like and admire, to whom I owe much to tell me what exactly happened. And Lutz was really, really reticent to get to talk about it. And that was not helpful because then he was attacked by Alexander Tsin and everything that Alexander Tsin touches just turns.

A bit toxic. So I think we need to have the hard facts, but to go back to my work and at the time there was also the exhibition in the gay museum in Berlin, Schulesmuseum, about the youth movement and sexual violence against children and boys. And I thought it's really important to look, to have a very sober look at some of the histories that I'm talking about. So it comes up, I think, in three aspects of, or four aspects of the book.

first one about Gadbek and his resistance group, where Gadbek not only engages in sexual barter, often in quite violent and difficult sexual barter, but some of the Jewish boys whom he helps go into hiding, are younger than him, and Gadbek is pretty young at that point, these are boys who are 17 or 16, have to pay the sex for going into hiding, but it's extremely traumatic for them. And Gadbek, he's a bon vivant, he makes fun of everything.

Maybe also he takes it so lightly because he's traumatized. Some of the questions I show up. So I tried to show in the chapter about Godbeg that to all the lightness and fluffiness in Godbeg's memoir, there's a very, very dark underside and we should pay attention to that. And at this moment, I want to give a shout out to my anonymous reviewer. I had two amazing peer reviewers for the book and one said, you need to include Godbeg chapter. And I'm so grateful that they said that it made the book vastly better.

Anna (43:02.67)
The second part where I touch on that is the section on the clown humble and non-binary person and Freddy Hirsch, two German immigrants, one to Czechoslovakia, one to Denmark. Freddy Hirsch was a much loved Zionist leader, very athletic man. He liked to photograph himself with his shirt, also that you see all of his muscles. Anyway, if you guys have seen Heated Triangle, that's a little bit Freddy Hirsch.

Waitman Beorn (43:28.698)
There's a picture in the book. He's a good looking guy.

Anna (43:31.534)
Yes, yes, even you and I can appreciate that. And there have always been stories about Fredi Heres that he was attracted to boys and that youth care workers in Theresienstadt never left him alone with the boys. And for the longest time, wait a minute, I thought that's just a homophobic narrative like you are saying. And then I had a real aha moment when I wrote up about Fredi Heres and his first partner, Jan Mautner, a physician.

and was writing about one such accusation for tablet for the Jewish New York Magazine. And Matthew Fishby in the editor said, Anavia post me too, if you believe all women, you also need to believe this boy. You cannot say this is just a homophobic accusation because here you have a first person survivor who talks and that is latest at this moment, we should have a trigger warning that Freddy Harris put his hand into this boy's.

underpants and touch his genitals at 12 years of age. Yeah, this is sexual assault and according, you would go to prison for that in the UK and I believe in most other countries for quite a long time.

And I reached out to the son of that guy, of Thomas Vantel. I apologized for not taking it face value. And I'm very glad that Jan Vantel agreed to using his father's full name. And I think it's also like hear me showing my blind spots and how I basically interpreted these accusations only as homophobia rather than believing the survivors. And what I want to show here with the example of Freddie Hershey's

You can be a hero who is a very, very dedicated sports worker and youth care educator who accompanies the children to Auschwitz. And even though he had to offer of the resistance in Auschwitz to survive, stayed with the children and died under unclear circumstances. But you can also be a child sex abuser. People are messy. People are difficult. I'm not here to, you know, damage Hedershie's reputation, but I think

Anna (45:37.526)
it needs to be part of the history that we are writing. And finally, in the last part of the book, I tell, guess, the most difficult story that of Nate Leipziger, who as a teenager was sent from Sosnowiec to Auschwitz, from Auschwitz to the satellite camp of Wunschichenches outside of Grossrosen and Wroclaw and becomes a people of a Polish gentile carpo called Janek. And Janek is a prisoner himself.

He's a victim himself. Nate was not the only prisoner whom he abused. I reached out to the Grossrosen Memorial in Rogoznica, asked if they are able to figure out who was Janek, because of course Janek, that's Jan, that's John. It will be very hard to find out. There were about 5,000 male prisoners in Fünfeichen. So it is not able to find out who that was. But that is my approach, to show it and then maybe have the pedagogical voiceover and say,

Waitman Beorn (46:19.099)
Yeah.

Anna (46:34.584)
the readers. not saying it to say that homosexuals are horrible, but to show that these are difficult histories and we need to make space for these difficult histories because especially in the current age of, we can't even really say rising populism, the populism is here and full grown. I don't know, maybe in two weeks we will be dispatched to Greenland to fight against American invasion because of fascism in the States.

I think we need to make space for these difficult histories in order to keep our democracy alive. I will be so pathetic to say it out loud, but I think, and I know, Waitman, we are on the same page here very strongly, Holocaust historians have an ethical duty of doing our best in these times that are going downhill by the minute.

Waitman Beorn (47:23.931)
I mean, think, I think also in this, this is the kind of book that, that, that were I teaching sort of American style, you know, graduate level classes. this is a book I could also assign not only for its topical relevance, but precisely for what you've mentioned, which is that people are people and, and people are messy and, you know, people have, things that are not so great about them and that, you know, we're not.

whatever they happen to be, you in this case, sort of it's the, it's as we pointing out, sort of this problem of the stereotype being true for some of these individuals, right? And that, you know, that's not great because we don't want to reinforce homophobic stereotypes about people. But if they did the thing, they did the thing, right? You know, and.

And the point is that, you know, sort of, geographical histories are not, are not super helpful. Right. And I mean, it could be anybody. could be the founding fathers, you know, who did great things, but also own slaves. mean, you know, people are not, are not perfect individuals. And very rarely do you find someone that is sort of ticks all the boxes of, of being perfect. Obviously, you know, child molestation is horrible. But as you point out, you know, that, doesn't prevent people from, from also doing.

doing good things, in the same way that there are Poles who saved Jews and did it for the money. And that's not great, but ultimately they still save people, even though they were doing it for sort of awful reasons.

Anna (48:57.058)
Maybe this is a good shout out that I understand that maybe you will have Gregor Rosso and Skaliba on the podcast.

Waitman Beorn (49:02.021)
I will, I will. I'm still, I'm DeGroiter, I'm still waiting for the book. Yeah, it should be, I hope it'll be here soon. We can talk about that. We can talk about that afterwards. But I think it's important, As you're essentially adding complexity. And I think that's a lesson both for this topic and the Holocaust in general, but also in everything. know, Martin Luther King, great guy.

Anna (49:07.0)
Jesus.

Waitman Beorn (49:30.311)
also had problems with cheating on his wife and everything else. mean, it doesn't take away sort of, it's just, it's a whole person kind of approach. But I want to kind of shift gears a little bit, well, in two different directions. So I'll go in one first, which is one of the things that I thought was really, really interesting is you need discussion and more generally of agency and sexual barter. Because that's a term that I've adopted from you.

You know, and I've used that term as well. I've also used the term instrumental sex, meaning like doing sex to get something in return. And I guess, you know, my perspective is that.

you know, yes, you can't say you can't say yes, if you can't say no kind of thing. So the consent is a consent in the modern sort of date rape concept is not really something that is is super useful. But I think we're on the same page in the idea there's this there's some kind of limited agency, you know, where we're faced with a situation that is by definition abnormal. You know, people, be they men or women have, for example, women, you know,

Anna (50:34.872)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (50:40.827)
They have something to offer to straight men, guards or whatever, that men don't, and they can make a choice, in a certain sense, they can make a choice to take advantage of that with the understanding that in a normal life, normal society, they would never ever do this sort of thing. So it's not saying they have agency in the sense that they have absolute control, but in a certain sense, there are some...

levels of choices and how do we navigate that in this context?

Anna (51:14.574)
So I'm with you on the page that consent is not a salient category in the Holocaust because in the way how we define consent and know, lots has been written about it, not least in the aftermath of the Jesus, what's her name, the Leon lady, the French woman who spoke again.

Waitman Beorn (51:38.064)
right. I know you're talking about who was was drugged and raped. yeah, I'm forgetting. Yeah.

Anna (51:41.812)
What was her last name? Pellicot. In the aftermath of Pellicot trial and you know there's the French author who published A Living with Men and you have lots of other things and I guess the bottom line of how we understand consent today that you can say no and leave with no consequences and you cannot do that in the concentration camps because you definitely need that piece of bread. You can be put on a worse labour detail. You can be put on a draft abet.

and that all will negatively influence your survival rates. And people know that very keenly. Now, of course, operate in these myriads of dependencies and hierarchies in our situation too. It's easier to be in a relationship. People are nicer to you. You have a plus one. The bedroom is warmer at night. You have two incomes to pay, especially in London where I live.

But it's not as brutal as it was in the concentration camps. But agency is definitely a meaningful category because people make choices all the time with how to go on transport, with whom to be friends, what work detail to try to get into. Are you going to try to fight to live another day or are you just going to give up like, you know, the Muslim and the homo sacre and

Waitman Beorn (53:01.733)
Well, and then there's an example that actually, you know, with Margot, that you talk about the book, she actually kind of chooses to go to try to go with her girlfriend with Dita rather than with her family.

And you point out in the book that it's not really, it's not a survival choice. It's more of a relationship choice, right? So even, you know, there are these situations where people make choices, you know, based on their feelings that aren't necessarily just always cold sort of utilitarian, you know, rationality.

Anna (53:14.786)
Yeah, definitely.

Anna (53:35.468)
No, no, no, they definitely aren't. It's the same choices that we do. They are very rarely called rational and utilitarian. But similarly to my first book, I argued that in order to understand the society of the people in the camps, we need to take these choices seriously. They may not have influence whether they survived, but they were meaningful in the situation in which they were.

Waitman Beorn (53:58.012)
Yeah, I mean, I agree completely. And I think that it's a useful corrective because sometimes people who aren't perhaps as familiar think that the concentration camp is this sort of all encompassing oppressive environment, which of course it is in a certain sense. But people are making choices every day and survivors in their testimonies will often.

be very explicit about, you know, I always, I always went to this sink or I made, I made sure to go to walk in for example, the Inosca context. I made certain to walk behind these barracks because I knew if I didn't, I could be shot by the house on the balcony. Right. So, so these sort of micro choices or whatever, but, their choices nonetheless, you know, and people are making them, you know, and, at times they have sort of a chance to make a larger choice that has sort of a larger implication, but

You know, it's not agency in the sense of what an activist might consider to be agency or ability, but it is agency in the sense that, within a constrained environment, you can make certain choices that impact your daily life.

Anna (55:03.756)
Wait a that's exactly it. think to look at the agency of the Holocaust victims through the prism of an activist would be completely unhistorical. In fact, I would say these are not micro choices. These are very meaningful and large choices for the people in the camps. So we really need to look through the lens of what is important to the people in the camps. And for Margot, for the first time, to say to her parents that she's not going to stay with them in the family camp in Auschwitz.

and go to the gas chamber, but instead go with data because first she loves data and second data is smart enough to figure out that they're going to force labor and they're going to make it. That is giant.

Waitman Beorn (55:44.134)
Yeah, I mean, it's a massive choice, you know, and it's a really, really, you know, fascinating story as well, as is, know, to be very clear, the post-war story of those two, you know, it's very fascinating because, you I think I remember correctly, you know, Margot goes to New York for a while and has like the gay old life in Greenwich Village, you know, is being, you know, having a great time being sort of out and et cetera, et cetera, to the extent that you can in the 50s or whatever.

Anna (56:02.947)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (56:12.823)
but then because of the way society, you know, views views homosexuality, she goes into a marriage to have, have kids. And, and so she, she has that, but then also on the side, she has her actual sort of romantic and relationships with other women, you know, and then, and then Dita sort of goes all the way down, you know, sort of never sort of acting on.

on her queer desire again, right? I mean, it's a really neat and a very short presentation. It's a very neat sort of discussion of an entire historical arc of homophobia more generally, but also gender relations and expectations of people. And again, it's a great example of the sort of unboundedness.

of in both time and activities that sort of queering the history which you talk about actually lets us do. I want to talk a little bit more about a moment that I think is really important probably and for our listeners probably interesting as well, which is Anne Frank. And Anne Frank's

queer desire can you can you give us a little deep dive into into that because some of the sorority may not be quite as aware of i wasn't even as aware of how explicit she was about i heard about it but i wasn't aware of how explicit she was about about that

Anna (57:39.19)
Yeah, so Anne Frank is of course interesting because she I think is to this day the best known Holocaust victim and her diary is the best known testimony that we have from the Holocaust. And I guess the best known is her passage from 6th January 44 and if I may I'll read it out loud in translation not in Dutch. I already had these kinds of feelings subconsciously before I came here because I remember

One night when I slept with Jacques, that is Jacques Lindfamalsen, I could not sustain myself. I was so curious to see her body, which she always kept hidden from me and which I have never seen. I asked Jacques whether as a proof of our friendship, we might feel one another's breasts. Jacques refused. I also had a terrible desire to kill Jacques and that I did. I go into ecstasies every time I see the naked figure of a woman, such as a Venus.

in the Springer history of art, for example. It strikes me sometimes as so wonderful and that I have difficulty not to let the tears roll down my cheeks if only I had a girlfriend. So that's the best known thing that comes up every so often in queer media, but has never made it into the bigger research on Anne Frank of very, very rarely.

And you know, in a situation where so much about Anne Frank is commemorated, the chestnuts, the betrayal, whether she died in February or March 45, and that fills, you know, the Times and New York Times and Washington Post and whatnot. And this has basically made it maybe into the pink news, but that's about the extent of it. This is also not the only mention. She comes up with a couple of other things in the diary, like

When boys hit on her just before she goes into hiding, she enjoys the flirtation. But when they try to kiss her, she says, are with me at the wrong address. And by the way, this is not my research. I'm building here on the work of Cziril Han from Dalhousie. And then is the bigger question. Why did we not pay attention to the queerness of Anne Frank? And Cziril Han has a very useful answer of pointing out that it's largely male voices from the Holocaust that are seen as legitimate and, you know,

Anna (59:58.786)
significant knowledge, whereas women's voices are seen as important for gendered knowledge. Anne Frank is an exception because she's still a girl and she's not yet sexualized. If she were older, if she started having sex, she would be seen as a woman and she would lose some of her legitimacy. But if she was seen as queer coded, she would be doubly sexualized and her voice would not carry that legitimacy at all and therefore her queerness is rendered invisible.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:27.665)
I mean, it's a great point because, and there's a, was looking at the image as an illustration in the book from a graphic novel, which I now have to get of the diary, where it shows, I'm gonna describe it very quickly. It has the parts of the quote that Anna just read, and she's walking down the sort of outdoor alley with statues of, you know, Greek naked women kind of.

classical naked women. But then again, that's it. Yep. And then that's used again at the end of the book, right? As sort of an outro to Anne's diary with the idea sort of what would, who would Anne Frank have become? You know, had she survived?

I think that was really poignant in the sense of, and it goes back to why you talk about queer rather than gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, whatever, because we don't know what, you know, if Anne Frank was asked to categorize herself, you know, in 1970, you know, what she would have said because she didn't survive. And so what we do know is, as you point out, what we have from the sources.

where she certainly is expressing very unambiguously some queer desire in the diary. Can you talk about the reception and when we started to know that? Because the Anne Frank Diary is actually also has been quite at times censored and curated, not just for that, but also for

menstruation and things that sort of were deemed uncouth or inappropriate by publishers.

Anna (01:02:16.494)
Hmm.

Anna (01:02:24.184)
So I'm not the first one to start analyzing Anne Frank. It's more that I thought I'm writing this book. It's a crossover trade book. want also white audiences and young people to reach this book. I need to write about Anne Frank and I want kind of the things that hits the tabloid, the queer media to get done in a proper academic way that is still accessible to white readership. Amy Elman, Alan Ellenswijk,

Cheryl Hahn have written about these topics on me and I really put it to the end that some of my analysis but I definitely don't want to pretend here that I've rediscovered the wheel. Now, it is not Otto Frank who did otherwise censor the diary who removed for the first time the queer remarks. Otto Frank was upset that his teenage daughter fought with her mom, edit and removed some of those mentions. Later, some of the discussion of her period were removed.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:03.409)
Sorry.

Anna (01:03:22.36)
but it was the first Dutch publisher who actually removed that part of the 6th January, 44 entry. Otto Frank was not pleased and he fought for those mentions to be reiterated in the English and US American editions, which they were, and since then they are pretty much there, sometimes abbreviated, sometimes whole, but as you say, even the abbreviated ones, when she talks about wanting to touch someone's bosom is pretty clear, right?

But then the censorship continued quite surprisingly after 2018 when the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel in Switzerland asked Arev Vollmann and Polonsky to issue that graphic novel, which by the way is a beautifully done, very tasteful, very smartly done edition. If you are guys looking for a birthday gift, recommend it. I also don't get commission. I paid them 200 euro to be able to include that picture.

And maybe because it was now an image as opposed to text, the penny dropped and now people started realizing that there is queerness in Anne Frank and enters American right-wing populism, Moms for Liberty, library bans. First they banned the book about gay penguins, then they banned Spiegelman's Mouse, and they also went after the graphic novel of Anne Frank because they called it...

pornographic and disgusting and graphic. You know, there is nothing pornographic about it. It's tasteful and people stay completely dressed. If I really were to think about a book to recommend to my 13 year old cousins, that's what I would recommend to them. And I put a lot of thought into trigger warnings and age appropriate readings. And of course you are fired of a young daughter, you'll certainly give it even more thought.

So the library ban started banning this book too, which meant that in significant parts of the US American South, but also sometimes places like New Jersey, if you were a kid under age of 18, you could not get your hands at this book in public libraries. And it was in 2023 that somebody realized it is actually even in the right, in the correct, in the original diary. And there is at least one county, I think Escambia County in Florida,

Anna (01:05:41.912)
that banned the original Anne Frank diary. In September 2024, the US-American pen and two large publishers have sued the state of Florida about the library bans. And I'm curious how it will pan out. I've been in touch with Andrew Lapin at the GTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has been covering it. I was able to interview him for the book. yeah, he's just as surprised and also, you know, outrageous as I am.

But in a way, the story of these queer library bans is one of the many stories of canary in the Coal Mane. Lots of straight readers and straight Holocaust historians said, you know, queer victims, they are the others. I will write a footnote about them or I will have a paragraph. And now we are in a situation that you see you should have paid attention to the queer library bans. You should have paid attention to trans people being hunted on the streets.

because now they're going after much bigger groups. I just say Minneapolis, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:06:42.107)
Yeah, no, mean, for sure. mean, and it's always shocking and it's also kind of in a weird way, I'm kind of, laughing because Anne Frank is the, it's just like, she's like the lowest hanging fruit in.

in secondary school education about the Holocaust. Everyone goes down. Again, I have nothing against it. You know, but that's the book, right? If there was one sort of book that every American middle school kid has probably been exposed about the Holocaust, it's that one. And the fact that these few mentions of her queer desire are stuff that's going to make it completely invalid is just another example of sort of the.

the crazy kind of homophobic, you know, bent that we're on. And I guess as we're talking about that, I did want to ask the question, and I'll preface this, because we've all probably had this, you know, often when I'm, if I'm in a cab or whatnot and someone asks me what I do and I say I'm a Holocaust story, the next question is, you Jewish?

And so my point here being you don't need to be anything to research anything, you know, and in fact, it's good to be that thing and not be that thing because both have advantages and disadvantages in terms of how you approach the topic. But what is your own identity as a lesbian? What does that enable you to do? What are the challenges that that gives you in researching this particular topic? How does that change the way you approach it?

Anna (01:08:22.121)
Mmm.

Anna (01:08:27.0)
think it gave me the outrage not to take it as a given and to do something about it. And I'm a historian and that's what I do. I also saw it rather than seeing it as kind of lesbian invisibility. And it's often the queer readers who actually see the things, or straight readers just glance over them, right?

But I think not all of it is about me being a lesbian. Part of it is of me being hopelessly stubborn and that I'm like a bulldog who has a bone that I can't let go of it. And now the book is out. Now I can move on to greener shores.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:04.391)
Well, sure. mean, again, I want to be very clear. I'm not suggesting that one needs to be affiliated with their topic. Because I certainly don't need to be a Nazi perpetrator to write about Nazi perpetrators or anything else. But I I think it is interesting. And of course, it makes sense that people are invested in different ways. And I appreciated your mention earlier that

Anna (01:09:19.341)
Luckily

Waitman Beorn (01:09:34.088)
you know, that you were at first reluctant with Gadbeck, you know, and other people to sort of, to lean into the potential for, for, molestation because you're very, you're very cognizant as it was, all, we all should be really, but of the, of the stereotype, right. and, that that, you know, that's something that, that we need to keep into and keep in mind as we're doing this. but I mean, again, I think it's

The book is a great example of the value. And again, what I really like is of course it's important because of the topic and the unknown quantity or the fact that we don't have in focus on this particular topic, but also more generally, it shows that queering the Holocaust, queer studies, queer perspectives is not just something for the queer community.

That's, I think that's the best take, one of the best takeaways from the book is that, you know, we all can learn something about not only those people and their specific instances and their specific histories, but also history and, the doing of history. Um, it's, sort of like, you know, a Venn diagram from sort of the queer desire experiences to the Holocaust, to, to gender, to history in general. Right. And, and in all those areas, it's an important.

It's an important observation that when we don't look at, when we omit people's right, we are not only losing those particular stories and their particular experiences, but also we're losing perspectives on all kinds of different things, like ourselves, like our archives, like our institutions, you know, and that it's a great, it's sort of like.

what you get from your peripheral vision of focusing on something specifically, right? And so I think that, you again, that's something that's been really, really valuable. I'm going to ask this question, even though you said it wasn't something that you were covering in the book, which is absolutely true. So this is not a question that I'm expecting Anna to be, you know, sort of the final answer on, or even to have done research on.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:50.044)
But it is something that struck me and it may be something that's actually impossible to know. But I'm curious about the other side of this, is the idea of gay perpetrators. Or we should say queer perpetrators, perhaps that's a better example. And this could be...

Anna (01:12:08.91)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:12.721)
problematically could also potentially include people like Yannick as well, or people that are hiding as well as sort of your, again, this is another stereotype, right, which is sort of the lesbian SS guard who, you know, is going around molesting people, which I think is also in some ways, part of the homophobia that comes out of this prurient interest in perpetrators, right, the Ilsa Cox of the world and that kind of thing.

Anna (01:12:28.878)
Mm.

Anna (01:12:42.104)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:43.013)
But I'm curious if there is work to be done on perpetrators who were queer and not necessarily even people who were queer in the sense of victimizing people in that sense, but just who their identity was and then how that might've impacted their behavior. Sorry, I know that's not, it's way off the topic listeners,

Anna (01:12:46.126)
Mm.

Anna (01:13:00.172)
Yeah. Yeah. So, no, no, I'm happy to talk about it. So first I would say I don't see Janek as a perpetrator. I see him as a victim who victimized others, right? I am actually like one of the few things I feel very keenly about is that we need to go maybe half as quickly on judging couples and the tough things that they did.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:14.054)
Right, OK.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:27.857)
Short. Short.

Anna (01:13:29.55)
Some of the most exciting current work is on the so-called asocial and criminals. I am ovary due to finish my review of the beautiful book of Andreas Kranebiter about the so-called habitual criminals in Mt. Osen. That is the one point. And of course, wait, men, you know about my work about Anneliese Kolman, a lesbian guard who was drafted to work in Noingamme in fall 44 and engaged in acts of sexual violence towards one of the Jewish prisoners. I wrote an article about it and

I'm writing a book and I'm in Shalana this year. I will send it off. But she was not the only one. And in my work, I came across about six or seven other women guards who engage in acts of sexual violence towards Jewish prisoners. Some of the guards actually believed that they had in love. Some of these course relationships continue after the war when the liberated Jewish women, at least one of them, Elie Uelzon, brought

that woman who used to be her guard with her to balance it. have a relationship for another year or so until the relationships is really spectacularly bad breakup. And if you are curious about that, I spoke about it in Dublin and it's, I think there is a podcast, which if you Google, you will find because people are better at Googling it than myself. There is also very exciting work about guards.

who engage in these relationships or somehow otherwise breached the SS rules and end up as prisoners in the camps themselves. I think Uta Rautenberg writes about one of them, think her name was Elfriede Petzold in her forthcoming book. And then of course, shout out to my favorite Samuel Huneckes, forthcoming book also with Toronto. We are all the Toronto crowd. University Press is like the press to be, not least because of the...

wonderful Steven Shapiro, one of the editors that I was privileged to work with. And Samuel Hunecke writes about a number of stories that are not feel-good stories about women who are persecuted by the Nazis for their queerness. But the reason why they're persecuted is because they coerce dependence into relationships. So that's something that I wanted to also mention. These are not feel-good histories, but they definitely help us understand Nazi Germany much better.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:49.938)
Yeah, and I imagine that querying that history as well. mean, we could talk about sort of querying perpetrator history too, which is probably an important approach because again, and again, the use of querying rather than gay straight by is a great sort of approach to it, think, because there's always that question, I suppose, of is this a target of opportunity kind of thing? You're a guard, but yet, but if you're the guard, know, the...

Anna (01:16:11.608)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:15.745)
you could theoretically be gay with a civilian outside of the camp. So it's not quite the same as this is your only option, but it is an opportunity, and particularly in a victimization sense, you know, to, and it speaks to one of the things that I think is, I'm always fascinated by, and I have a project that at some point I'll do on this, which is sort of the lives perpetrators after the war.

Anna (01:16:24.536)
Mm-hmm.

Anna (01:16:41.09)
That would be great.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:41.811)
And not like the big ones, but like the little ones, know, the ones that go to jail for like seven years or not at all. You know, and, you know, are these women, these, what do these Nazi women, for example, or take an archetypal, you know, fictitious female guard who has queer experience, sexual experiences in the camp, coerced or otherwise.

Anna (01:16:43.982)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:04.933)
you know, what does she do afterwards? You know, is she, is she, is she, she gay? Is is she a lesbian? You know, does she, because they're going to survive, right? So they're going to have a longer lifetime trajectory of like, you know, what do they do after the war? And, and what, how do you, how do you square sort of

Anna (01:17:12.974)
Hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:22.983)
the the the gay liberation movement against against oppression right as a former guard who who was queer right mean like i think it could be a really really fascinating a really fascinating microbiography of somebody to sort of see like you how do they do this

Anna (01:17:27.725)
Mm.

Anna (01:17:35.884)
I have looked into that and the answer is the fact that we know about these guards is because they had a court proceeding usually with the allies after the war, right? That's the only way we know. And women don't bounce back from being war criminals as easily as men. And in a way, that's the story that Tomas Jardim tells in his biography of Ilse Koch. I feel bad I haven't read Priyerembelle's book, which is probably really, really excellent because she's the first one who wrote about Ilse Koch.

So Jesus, I'm coming out of not reading Przerembrals book. She will be very upset with me, but Jardim's book is excellent. There you go, there you go. Yeah, Toma said, I not only went to same graduate school, we used to be neighbors in our little Portugal in Toronto. Yes, yes, yes. It was the hipster center back then. But that is the story of Anneliese Coleman. That's also the story presumably of Elfriede Petzold.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:11.919)
And just for our listeners, he was on this podcast as well, talking about that book. So you can, you can check that one out as well.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:22.014)
nice, nice.

Anna (01:18:33.752)
who is just untraced syllabus for the archives, all I could find out is the date of her death. Whereas when you look at the stories of the male perpetrators, some of them bounce back surprisingly successfully. And the point is like, I don't want happy lives for the perpetrators after the war. I sound like too entertained, I'm not entertained. But I guess one of the really heartbreaking moments when you start thinking about it, looking into the archives and reading the literature.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:43.929)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Anna (01:19:03.89)
is that you lose expectations of justice reading about and in the Nazi trials. They are imperfect. And I'm sometimes a little bit frustrated by the writings of the, not all, but some of the German legal scholars because they still operate with the hard notion of justice. And I was writing the trials chapter for my book about Coleman. That's really that I had to.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:12.404)
for sure. Yeah.

Anna (01:19:31.566)
throw it out of the window and then explain to in the chapter why our expectations of hard justice are just not going to work. Because you can put one person on trial for killing a person, but how are you going to put on trial complicity and genocide by being a cook or a guard or somebody who delivers bread? You can operate with Fritz Bauer, but I think this is

As Svenja Betke has shown in her book about criminality in the courts and ghetto courts, justice is a social production of our society, so it will be just as flawed as we are.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:09.063)
I mean, that's one of the things that, I mean, this is slightly off topic, but we're coming to the end anyway. But one of the things that I've always found so annoying about post war justice is in some ways not the institutional, because there are all kinds of reasons. It's not an excuse, but there are all kinds of reasons why court trials didn't work out that well and justice was failing there. But it's the social.

It's the social justice failings, right? So like there's a, as an example, one of the SS men from UNOSCA, know, really bad guy, did all kinds of horrible, horrible things, gets convicted of those horrible things at a trial, spends seven years in prison for that, which again is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but in the grand scheme of Nazi trials, that's pretty good.

But then, you know, he goes back to his community and he's like the local community. He's in a local community organization. And I've seen a, you know, a community newsletter that talks about how he was expelled from the East and how terrible his story was. You know, he's a complete upstanding individual and it's not like he was hiding because he went to prison. So everybody knows. I mean, like, you know,

It's not like he's hiding his Nazi past. He went to prison. That's a fact. And his family knows, everybody else knows. But so for me, sometimes it's the fact that they're not canceled in their sort of social circles that is in some ways more disconcerting than the failure to convict them in a legal sense. But that's off the topic, but it's something that I would like to explore more as well as sort of like how this works.

Anna (01:21:47.256)
Well, the discussion of cancer culture and how healthy it is, think that would be a whole different percussive issue to do because at the latest in 7th of October I have some very hard critical thoughts about cancer culture and also my unfortunate role on being judgmental on social media.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:54.183)
you

Waitman Beorn (01:22:04.647)
Well, yeah, we'll leave the social media conversation. But I do before we go, I do want to ask the question that I normally do, which is what is your one recommendation for now? It could change tomorrow, but a book recommendation for our readers, our listeners on the Holocaust.

Anna (01:22:25.758)
I love, love, love, Numbered Days by Alexander Karabarini. I read it as a young graduate student. It's a beautiful, profound, analytical, rich, concise, generous book about Jewish victims of the Holocaust and how they kept diaries. And she shows us how to read diaries, not to find out what has happened and if they had turnip soup.

for breakfast on Monday or Tuesday, but she shows us how to understand people's subjectivities, experiences, fears, not knowing, coming to terms. She helps us understand writing for your family and writing on your own. She puts Holocaust into the bigger context of Jewish history, but also into the history of European educated middle-class and journal keeping.

of trying to documenting in spite of all, and most heartbreakingly, but also very, very bravely, she goes there, there and tries about people who eventually realized that everybody has been killed and they too will be killed, but they are not dead yet. And they continue writing, but something in them breaks. And it's this great empathy, but not ever pulling her punches that she wrote that book. if I may add.

getting all flushed up. I read the book and I fell in love intellectually and I wrote to Professor Garbarini and I told her what a great admirer she was and I'm very lucky that we met, we became dear friends and I texted her the other day that I'm so excited of coming on your podcast and speaking also about my love for her book. Dear listeners, if you haven't read Garbarini's number, please drop everything around to the nearest bookshop, read it, you will thank me.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:16.549)
And that's a great, that's a great shout for potentially another guest on the podcast. I can, I can have her call them to talk about it. for everybody, thank you for listening again, if you're finding this to be useful, engaging, educational, please give us a like, subscribe, all those social media buzzwords. and you know, let, let me know if you want to send me an email, if you have guest suggestions or whatever. we appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Anna (01:24:20.098)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:43.239)
And to Anna again, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your project.

Anna (01:24:47.598)
Thank you.