If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust

For Holocaust scholars who are conversant with feminist and gender approaches it is quite obvious that while interest in women and female perspectives is steadily growing, there are still not enough publications and research in the area. Quite often, gender-oriented research on the Holocaust is seen as the domain of women scholars, and, as such, it is relegated to the margins. This is especially true in the case of Eastern Europe, with the recent political pushback there against women breaking traditional social barriers and politically motivated attacks against the very concept of gender presented by political leaders as an ideology.It is in this political climate, amplified by the social and political dynamics and legislation connected with Covid-19, that those scholars who took part in the 2019 “XX. Century Conference: If This Is a Woman” worked on the book concerning the same topic. The title of this conference, with its strong reference to Primo Levi's seminal work Se questo è un uomo, translated into English as If This Is a Man, suggests not so much any connection with the thoughts of Primo Levi as a need to refrain from seeing the Holocaust exclusively through the experiences of a man or a genderless “prisoner.” As a tireless advocate for feminists and gender-oriented views on the Holocaust in the context of Eastern Europe, Andrea Pető states in her foreword to the book that it is not only necessary to include more voices of women in the research and studies of the Holocaust, but most of all, a new theoretical framework that will allow (feminist) scholars to present and discuss issues connected to the Holocaust in a way that includes views presented by women as equal to the male perspectives. This is what If This Is a Women: Studies of Women and Gender in the Holocaust, a collection of essays edited by Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik, is about.The book consists of six parts, with a total of thirteen essays, each discussing different issues and presenting different challenges to the patriarchal canon of texts, questions, and topics commonly connected with the Holocaust. Part 1, “Theoretical Reflections on a Gender Focus in Holocaust Studies,” consists of two texts, each of them tackling a different question and discussing different aspects of the discipline. Dalia Ofer presents the issue of the voices of women, and the inclusion of women's voices over the last forty years, since the beginning of feminist and gender-oriented research on the Holocaust. What is especially interesting here is that the author of the essay pays special attention to women in roles traditionally connected with men—journalists, doctors, and activists—discussing specific women and narratives that enrich our understanding of life in the Warsaw Ghetto along with the situation of the Jews in Auschwitz (and labor camps, toward the end of the Third Reich). When discussing women in those “male” roles, it is important to pay attention to different views and models, including both the commonly used “disruptive framework,” “continuity model,” and—as argued by Ofer and Lenore Weitzman—the “sequential model.” By bringing to the reader's attention the very fact that there are multiple models, the author lays the groundwork for this book's audience's understanding of various positions and frameworks presented in the entire book.The second theoretical essay, Natalia Aleksiun's “A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship?” brings up two important issues. By adding a question mark to the title of her work, the author signals that creating and constructing a theoretical framework is a work in progress—that, unlike in traditional, patriarchal framing of knowledge, feminist and gender-oriented approaches do not see knowledge as given and complete, that various approaches can generate different answers to the same questions, and that neither of them will be final and complete either. Second, Aleksiun tackles a very difficult question about the events known as the Holocaust in that they affected every person individually, but at the same time also had an impact on communities (and nations) as a whole. The family, as the smallest social group, as a social unit connected with the private (and thus symbolically female) space, was impacted by the Holocaust in several ways, and there is a strong connection (or obvious intersection) of gender and family that needs to be taken into consideration. With the number of memoirs about the stories of their authors’ families and their prewar lives, as well as the changes that the Holocaust brought to family dynamics, Aleksiun advocates for the recognition of what she calls the “familial turn” in Holocaust scholarship.While the theoretical part directly addresses Andrea Peto's quest to reframe gender-oriented research, the consecutive sections follow thematic preoccupations, discussing issues of gender, women, their lives in the ghettos and camps, and their roles as community leaders and resistance fighters. With a strong focus on women, their roles, and experiences, the book, however, also includes essays about men and masculinities with an interesting chapter by Agnes Laba, “Masculinities under Occupation: Consideration of a Gender Perspective on Everyday Life under German Occupation.” Following Aleksiun's arguments, the “familial turn” has to include a study of the challenges the Holocaust presented to both genders, thereby making this as well as Floryan Zabransky's work, “Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” important parts of this collection of essays. Moreover, each of them presents interesting theoretical approaches to gender and masculinities, seldom presented in works focusing on the experiences and voices of women.The essays in this book also show different perspectives on women, beginning with a focusing on gender expectations (Eva Skorvankowa's “New Slovak Woman: The Feminine Ideal in the Authoritarian Regime of the Slovak State, 1939–1945”), through to an essay discussing how they were seen by their children (Denisa Nešťáková, “‘Our mother organized it all’: The Role of Mothers of Sered’ Camp in the Memories of Their Children”) to showing women as leaders and partisans. By the same token, the authors and the editors recognize different social identities and roles women took on alongside the challenges they had to overcome when in conditions that required them to deal with unprecedented situations.The closing section includes texts that address questions of sexuality and sexual violence, with an interesting essay entitled “Listening to Women's Voices: Jewish Rape Survivors’ Testimonies in Soviet War Crimes Trials” by Marta Havryshko. The book was published in 2021, a year before the Russian attack on and war in Ukraine; it would seem that recent history adds yet more interesting context to academic work discussing how the Soviet tribunals dealt with rapes and sex crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. This is not the only text in this timely collection worth careful reading, however. This book will be an interesting addition to many courses about the Holocaust and genocides, but academics and a general readership alike will also find it interesting and enriching.