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

I really appreciate having been invited to contribute to an open forum in honor of Andrea Pet.Reading and rereading someat least to meunknown publications by Pet, I gained important insights into post-war Hungarian politics and the competition of memories.Combining history and post-war memory, Pet shows the instrumentalization of resistance fighters, victims and heroines by the communist and post-communist governments.She demonstrates how women who contradicted concepts of gender were eradicated from Hungarian history by those governments.Like Dalia Ofer, I was especially interested in her case study The Forgotten Massacre (published in 2021), the events of which took place in Csengery Street in October 1944.Using a variety of sources, Pet analyzes the antisemitic motives and active role played by mostly lower middle-class women of the far-right Arrow Cross Party in the looting of Jewish property.I hope that this study will serve further research projects as a model of how to analyze why women were attracted by far-right and fascist parties, and how they turned into perpetrators during the Holocaust.In my following remarks, I would like to express some thoughts provoked by Lori R. Weintrob's interesting contribution Voices of Courage: Women and Heroism in the Holocaust.Exploring heroines in the Hungarian, Austrian and Polish contexts, she suggests using a broad concept to analyze resistance.Expressed in her own words: "The courage of women in fighting for freedom from oppression and brutality, and for a return to democracy and liberty, is often portrayed as secondary to diplomatic undertakings or Allied military battles.Yet individual voices of courage and dignity stand out and merit our attention too."According to her approach, resistance is not limited to organized and armed resistance movements, but also includes individuals and their various strategies to resist the aims of the oppressor.Based on my own research on Austrian Jewish and non-Jewish women who supported left-wing resistance movements and Jewish and non-Jewish female concentration camp