Holocaust Survivors and Their Families
Jewish Survivors of Sexual Violence
(Incest, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, Professional Sexual Misconduct)
Disclaimer: Inclusion in this website does not constitute a recommendation
or endorsement. Individuals must decide for themselves if the resources meet
their own personal needs.
Recidivism of Sex Offenders (U.S. Department of Justice: Center for Sex Offender Management)
Surviving Incest in a Holocaust
Family.
by Lilith Goldberg
Lilith Magazine - January, 1993
On Friday nights, I light the Sabbath candles and recite the ancient blessing of thanks to God. I am alone in my contemplation of the spirit, eating in a shrouded silence. Through the loneliness of this weekly ritual, I mourn the loss of my family - the loss of my biological connectedness. Like my par ents before me, I am a Holocaust survivor, unwittingly exposed to intense human evil. It is an irony of my life that there are some memories, that keep me alive, just as others challenge my desire to keep breathing, moving, feeling, existing.
I remember Nazi uniforms, barbed wire, gas ovens and bloodied carcasses. These horrifying images, scenery of an earlier era, were implanted upon me as a child. My father often forced me to act as the "humiliated,"introducing me to Jewish bondage in a Nazi world, child bondage in a grown-up world. I was raped many times as a child - the penis hard, pressuring, pumping, burning my throat, ripping my vagina, my anus, breaking my heart, my trust in any adult.
I sought out explanations for my world, but none were available. Jewish families were depicted only as the haven, the refuge, the place of safety when one was confronted by antisemitism. I could never figure out where to run when the Jewish father raped his Jewish daughter...
When I finally gathered the courage to leave home at age 17, my father called me the worst name he knew: TRAITOR. The accusation was perfectly consistent with my father's Holocaust orientation. After the loss of all but two of the one hundred mem bers of his extended family, anyone who left the fold voluntarily could be considered nothing less.
Intellectually, I understand that my father - by doing to me exactly what had been done to him in the camps - was expressing cathartically his own pain and degradation. He was able to relive his experiences in a situation where he had control. Instead of being the child prostitute for the Gestapo, he was now the master himself....
While my father was truly a victim I still cannot forgive him his violations upon my body. I am filled with rage that I was made to suffer as I did.
There was a time when I assumed that my father was a rapist because of the Holocaust. From my discussions with other children of Holocaust survivors, I learned that many men in situations like my father's lived through the camps and did not sexually abuse their daughters. I can therefore no longer accept the Holocaust as an excuse for my own victimization.
It is true that after six years of slave labor, my father had an obsessive need to control. Because he is a male adult in a male dom inated, adult oriented society, he was able to exercise his privilege over us, his young female children. Had we lived in a society that empowered women and children, perhaps my father's deep seated need to control would have fond a different "socially appropriate"outlet.
I often have flashbacks of specific childhood moments. When I'm having sex, I remember scenes from early rapes; I have many nightmares; as I simply go about life, reading, shopping, eating, I frequently have momentary auditory or visual memories. I cringe at the sight of uniforms, at the sound of police sirens. To this day I am always early for meetings, wanting to check things out, make sure that I will not be in danger once a large group of people gather. Analyzing the parallels of incest and Holocaust survivorship, I recognize how my father and I are mirrored reflections of one another. Because my father survived genocide, he feels incredibly guilty. What was it about him that caused him to live, while his relations perished? Similarly, whenever I think of my sisters still living at home, I shudder and feel burdened by an enormous weight. How did I manage to escape the prison that holds them still? Why have I not tried harder to rescue them? My father and I also share a sense that danger is imminent, that it's not safe to give oneself up fully to the present. Vigilance is ever with us. The very fact that my father lives is a threat to me. Even if I choose never again to attend a family get- together, still, knowing that my father is alive and well means fundamentally that I am never at peace, always at risk. Another similarity between my father's ex perience and my own is that we both lacked models of resistance. My father did not know, nor did I until recently, that Jews fought back in the ghettos and concentration camps. As an incest survivor, I too knew nothing of valiant girls or women who fought back, who killed their violators. Finally, both Holocaust and incest survi vors cope with "revisionists"- those who deny that our experience was real. Neo- Nazis insist that the Holocaust is a hoax. My mother tells me that my sexual abuse is in my imagination. These two Hells are so horrific that not only oppressors and oppressed, but sometimes observers as well obliterate all memories.
Betrayal is another Holocaust/incest similarity. Holocaust survivors often talk of being betrayed by other Jews. Incest, of course, is frequently a betrayal of the most intimate human relationship, of parent to child. If those responsible for our well being choose to harm us instead, then to whom should we turn for emotional support? If not to our own mothers and fathers, then to whom?
So, you see, because of the traumatic events that both my father and I lived through, our psychological patterning is eerily similar. We forget; we deny; we remember; we relive; and then, we forget again. And, of course, it was easy for me to "forget"on a daily basis, because no one at school, or at synagogue, not even social workers, really wanted to hear about incest. Though I desperately sent out distress signals, I was told, over and over, in ways both convert and overt; `This doesn't happen in Jewish families.
There was no one who would listen to the secrets of my soul. On my own, with no sympathetic other, I could do no better than "forget". By the time I was an adult and had retrieved memories of the perversities I'd endured, I could not bring myself to describe these horrors to anyone. Even in an incest survivor's group, I deliberately withheld details of my childhood traumas. It was too painful to be the "worst case", to receive the pity of those only slightly less abused than myself.
Recently I joined a group of daughters of Holocaust survivors, and to my surprise I encountered a number of women who were raped by their fathers in contexts very similar to mine. Together we examine and re-examine; we journey towards our deeper selves in great trepidation. Because of the support I feel from these women, I am slowly discovering the power of speaking out, of writing about my experience. I still often feel awash in my own shame when I articulate my pain. I still feel guilt ridden, immersed in the suffering of an earlier era, but even as I write this, I move towards recognizing that the agony that my parents endured does not negate my own agony.
And weekly I light the Sabbath candles and recite the ancient words, continuing to bless whatever that spirit is that keeps me moving feeling, existing, alive.
The author of this article was born Chava (Eve) but she changed her name to Lilith in 1975 at the age of 17.
Dance: 'Incest' At Eden's Expressway
By JENNIFER DUNNING
New York Times - April 20, 1987
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE4DC133EF933A15757C0A961948260
THREE years ago, Wendy Yuni Hoffman began to have memories of having been molested as a child by members of her family. Out of those memories came ''Incest,'' a theater-dance piece performed on Saturday at Eden's Expressway in SoHo.
Put together by incest survivors, as they call themselves, ''Incest'' incorporates music, dance, an acted script and some dimly projected film of family scenes and world atrocities to capture the physical and emotional horror of incest. Three women share the roles of several generations of family members and a chorus, with Ms. Hoffman playing the child throughout.
Strangely, given the emotionally loaded theme, this shifting of roles offered few insights into anything but the simplest of family behavior. And with the exception of an aunt torn by her loyalties to the adults and the children in the family - a part played poignantly and with subtle nuance by Shelly Beach - the world of ''Incest'' is peopled by a victimized child and cardboard figures of evil. The piece makes a persuasive point about the way we perceive children as possessions. And there are undeveloped hints of deeper insights into the victimizing characters.
But for the most part, ''Incest'' is an oddly unevocative, one-dimensional work of theater. Its aim is to teach, which it does for the most part with blessed simplicity and stylization, though Ms. Hoffman's appropriation of such atrocities as the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima as equivalent experiences does not strengthen her case.
The piece also seeks to offer incest victims or survivors, and the rest of us, a chance to confront a subject that has long been considered taboo. And a convincing point is made that silence and a refusal or inability to face the problem makes it even more crippling. ''Incest'' comes into its own in the discussion period that follows the performance, in which the audience is encouraged to talk about the piece and about individual experiences in one of those workshop situations that seem in part to fill the need for extended families in today's rootless urban society. Ms. Hoffman and her fellow performers are skillful, pragmatic discussions leaders, and the evening becomes newly informative - and moving.
The cast was completed by Melinda Levokove and Quimetta Perle. Written and choreographed by Ms. Hoffman, ''Incest'' had music by Ms. Levokove and film by Roberta Cantow
Holocaust child survivors and child sexual abuse.
Journal of Child Sex Abuse. 2005;14 (2):69-83.
By R. Lev-Wiesel R and M. Amir
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15914411&dopt=Abstract
Department of Social Work, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, 84105, Israel.
This study utilized a qualitative analysis of child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during World War II. The research study aimed to give this specific group of survivors a voice and to explore the impact of multiple extreme traumas, the Holocaust and childhood sexual abuse, on the survivors. Twenty-two child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during the war completed open-ended interviews. The data was qualitatively analyzed according to Tutty, Rothery, and Grinnell's (1996) guidelines. Three major themes were found: issues relating to the sexual abuse trauma, survivors' perceptions of the abuse, and survivors' general perspectives towards life. The identity of the offenders, Jewish or non-Jewish, determined the survivors' feelings towards themselves, the perpetrators, and about the worth of life.
PMID: 15914411 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
The Unremembered: Searching for Women at the
Holocaust Memorial Museum
by Andrea Dworkin
First published in Ms. magazine, Volume V, Number 3, November/December 1994.
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/TheUnremembered.html
In early September 1993 I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to do research for a book on scapegoating, especially of Jews and women in anti-Semitism and woman hating. In November I went back to the museum because Ms. asked me to write about it. I consider myself not-a-civilian in the world of Holocaust memory, no stranger. A survivor's knowledge of the women's camp and killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau was passed on to me by an aunt having flashbacks-- graphic, detailed. of rapes, murders, tortures--when I was ten, a child without intellectual defenses. In a tiny room in Camden, New Jersey, I saw what she said was happening--what she was seeing--as she reexperienced her captivity. I still see it. Many of my teachers in Hebrew school were survivors, and they were different from everyone else. In the 1950s, closer to the real events, they lived more there than here: they shook, they cowered, they suffered--beyond understanding, in silence, without explanation. They lived in terror.
For me, the Shoah, the Hebrew word for "annihilation," is the root of my resistance to the sadism of rape, the dehumanization of pornography. In my private heart, forever, rape began at Auschwitz; and a species of pornography--sexualized anti-Semitic propaganda--was instrumental in creating the hate. My adult heart knows that Julius Streicher, who joined with Hitler in 1921, was executed at Nuremberg for his part in the genocide of the Jews because he published the rabid, pornographic, Jew-hating tabloid Der Sturmer, which was used by the Nazi party, then Hitler's regime, to fuel aggression against the Jews. Streicher was convicted of committing a crime against humanity.
* * *
Inside, the museum building is purposefully uncomfortable to the eye, to consciousness. Prisonlike elements are part of the design: cold, institutional brick walls made colder by exposed steel girders; windows obscured by metal bars or grates or louvered slats. There is a visual eloquence that does not let the mind drift, because the eye cannot find anywhere not prison-inspired to land. The interior, developed by the architect to suggest physical elements of Auschwitz, is ruthless: it demands alertness and suggests both danger and oppression.
The permanent exhibition is on three floors of a five-story building. One takes an elevator to the fourth floor: Nazi Assault 1933-1939 (Hitler's ascendance and the German conquest of Europe). The third floor is dedicated to illustrating and explicating the facts of the Final Solution 1940-1944; and the second floor is the Aftermath, 1945 to the present.
Standing in line for an elevator, I am encouraged to take a card on which is a photograph of a Holocaust victim, his name, his biography. Other women fingering through the cards ask each other, where are the women? Why aren't there biographies of women? They express a muted outrage--not wanting to call attention to themselves yet unable to accept that among the hundreds of cards there are no women. A museum employee (a woman) explains that the cards of women have all been used. We are supposed to be able to pick a biography of someone like ourselves and, with interactive computer technology, find out what happened to our person at various stages of the exhibit. The card machines were not in use (and have since been discontinued); but the absence of women's lives from the biographies was part of an old program, a familiar invisibility and absence, a simple carelessness to get more cards printed or a more malignant indifference.
I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with questions about women. Where, how, in what numbers, were women raped? Where, how, in what numbers, were women prostituted--the brothels in forced labor and concentration camps, where were they, who were the women, who used them? Where, how, in what numbers, were women used in medical experiments, and with what results? Who were the inmates in Ravensbruck, a camp for women from many occupied countries but that earlier in Hitler's reign held German political prisoners, prostitutes, and lesbians--how did they get there, what happened to them? What exactly was done to Jewish women at Auschwitz-Birkenau or to the Jewish women held at Bergen-Belsen in 1944? How did the hatred of Jews and women intersect, not abstractly but on their bodies? How was the sadism against Jewish women organized, expressed?
There were no answers to my questions in the permanent exhibition's story of the rise of Hitler or the genocide of the Jews or the mass murders of the Poles, Gypsies (Roma), and other stigmatized groups; nor in the "aftermath," what happened in Europe when the Nazis were defeated. Although there were films and photographs of women, often naked, terribly brutalized, and there was first-person testimony by women survivors, there was no explanation or narrative of their persecution as women; nor was there any coherent information in the computers in the Wexner Learning Center, intended to be an electronic encyclopedia of the Holocaust; nor in any side exhibits. (One temporary exhibit, for children, is on the fate of a young Jewish boy. Another documents the efforts of a brave male intellectual to rescue mostly male intellectuals from Nazi-dominated France. In both, the romance of male significance mobilizes feelings and attention.)
I was given research materials that demonstrated the museum's commitment to documenting the egregious persecution of homosexuals; included were biographies of eight gay men and one lesbian. The museum's first conference--held in December 1993 on "The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined"-- eliminated women altogether by disappearing the one lesbian. There were talks at the conference on "Nazi Anti-Homosexual Policies and Their Consequences for Homosexual Men" and "The Pink Triangle: Homosexuals as 'Enemies of the State.'" There was scholarship on "The Black Experience in the Holocaust Period"; but nothing on women--not on Jewish women or Gypsy women or women political prisoners; not on female perpetrators, S.S. volunteers, for instance, some of whom were convicted of war crimes; not on Hitler's social policies on women's reproductive rights; not on the relentless early suppression of the feminist movement in Germany. Women were apparently neither known nor unknown, a common enough condition but no less heartbreaking for that.
In the museum, the story of women is missing. Women are conceptually invisible: in the design of the permanent exhibition, by which I mean its purpose, its fundamental meaning; in its conception of the Jewish people. Anti-Semites do not ignore the specific meaning or presence of women, nor how to stigmatize or physically hurt women as such, nor do those who commit genocide forget that to destroy a people, one must destroy the women. So how can this museum, dedicated to memory, forget to say what happened to Jewish women? If this genocide is unique, then what happened to Jewish women was unique; attention must be paid. If not here, where?
Genocide is different from war. In a genocide, women and children are primary targets, not accidental victims or occasional combatants. This museum, governed in its narrative choices by a courteous, inclusive politics of sensitivity to ethnic and political persecution, leaves out the story of the Nazis' hatred of women. The role of misogyny in the organized sadism of these men must be articulated: because women's lives were destroyed by careful plan; and because that sadism continues to contaminate and compromise what it means to be human. The Nazi invasion of the human body--the literal and metaphoric castration of subjugated men, the specter of the sexualized, tortured. emaciated "Jewess," mass plundered, mass murdered--is still the touchstone for an apparently depoliticized social sadism, a fetishized rapism that normalizes sexual humiliation and mass dehumanization. Sex tourism is one contemporary example--Thai women and children kept in brothels for the use of male consumers from developed countries.
This is what it means to pay attention to the sadism of the Nazis in the context of the Holocaust museum. Germans with disabilities were the first victims of secret, systematic murder--from October 1939 to August 1941 at psychiatric clinics. Groups of 15 to 20 would be gassed in carbon monoxide chambers. In the permanent exhibition, there is a photograph of children being killed by lethal injection, their awful steel beds, the restraints. Behind this photo is another--smoke comes out of the chimney of Hartheim, a storybooklike castle near Linz, one of the clinics.
There is a photo of a naked girl, probably adolescent, "mentally handicapped," taken before she was killed. She is standing up, facing the camera, full-frontal, but she does not have the strength to stand on her own--her rib cage is all bones--so a nurse in a conventional white uniform holds her up by force; the pain on the girl's face is horrible. The photograph itself is Nazi child pornography--no breasts, no hips, not enough food for that, no paint or makeup, just a naked body and pure suffering; child pornography for real sadists, those who do not want their victims to smile. And there is a photo of an eight-year-old boy, also "mentally retarded," also naked, also full-frontal, this too child pornography Nazi-style, the camera complicit in the torturer's pride, his monument to memory.
Concerning disability, so-called Aryans turned in their own, not a dreaded racial "other." This was the first place where murder could hide behind doctors who would legitimize it. I heard a woman say, "It makes you wonder about Dr. Kevorkian." Yes, it does; and also about oneself--how complicit am I in devaluing those with disabilities, how much fear and prejudice are part of that complicity? I asked myself a lot of hard questions. I was able to ask them because the museum told the story. Those who don't see that pornography is, at its core, the appropriation of another person's body, identity, life, might also begin to have questions.
The museum uses words, photographs, documents, films, and artifacts to create a discourse vivid with detail. Archival film and photographs from the period have been transferred to videotape for display. Some exhibits feature photographs mounted on walls. There are more than ten thousand artifacts, ranging from concentration camp uniforms to leaflets confiscated by the Nazis to children's drawings and paintings made during the years 1932-1944. The artifacts are startling, often beautiful. In telling the story of how the Nazis persecuted and murdered the Gypsies, there is a wagon, with a violin. "Yeah, this is the kind of wagon I saw going along the Danube in 1935," said a man behind me. The violin belonged to Miodrag Djordjevic-Tukalia, a Roma musician executed by the Germans in October 1941. Each time a name is attached to an artifact, one is made to remember that everything happened to someone. It is as hard to remember the individuality of the victims as it is to take in the mass nature of the slaughter.
There are clothes and ornaments that belonged to Roma women; photographs of Roma prisoners being deported to Poland; and a film of Roma children used in so-called racial research. They are clothed and still vibrant, many smiling. Almost all of the Gypsy children at Auschwitz were killed.
Approaching the concentration-camp area, I stop thinking. None of it is unfamiliar to me; but here is a real boxcar used to transport Jews, a real barrack from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Film is not easier. There are films of the mass killings by mobile killing squads: a line of naked women standing in front of an already-dug mass grave, naked women shot, falling, piled on top of each other, ravines filled with misshapen bodies. Months later, this will be what I wish I had not seen.
Before one enters the boxcar, there are artifacts from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Passover 1943: a 1929 Mauser rifle, fuses for the two unused Molotov cocktails, two 75mm artillery shells, a pistol. Near the boxcar, to its side, is a workbench that concealed a hiding place for Polish Jews in the house of Stefan Petri near Warsaw; a handcart used to transport heavy loads and dead bodies in the ghetto; a manhole cover, from Warsaw, because Jews hid in the sewers.
There is a wall of photographs of Jews and Gypsies being deported, from internment camps and ghettos to concentration camps and killing centers; still photos of the trains that transported them, all preface to the actual boxcar. Now one must choose to walk through it or around it. The boxcar is set up this way so that Holocaust survivors do not have to walk through it.
The freight car is clean now. I wonder if they had to scrub it out. It is smaller than I could have imagined. It is dark inside. There is nowhere to sit. Aunts and uncles and cousins of mine were here.
There is a wrought-iron gate to a camp, with its wrought-iron arch, Arbeit Macht Frei ("Freedom Through Labor"). In front of it are piles of things taken from the victims: scissors, can openers, strainers, graters, mirrors, toothbrushes, razors, clothes, hangers, hairbrushes, shoe brushes, knives, forks, spoons; and a photo of confiscated suitcases, duffel bags, prayer shawls, canes, leg braces, and artificial limbs. One walks under the arch--through the gate--to a real barrack from Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the more than 200. This barrack held Jews from Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia.
There are benches to sit on, before going in. I sit. The bench is peaceful, the floor a hard, smooth, shiny stone surface with lovely pastels in it. Then I see the identification of the very floor under my feet: "A path connecting Treblinka killing center with a nearby forced labor camp was paved with the crushed remains of tombstones from Jewish cemeteries. Below is a casting from a section of the path; Hebrew letters are visible in several pieces." Behind me there is sound: a glass-enclosed room, also with benches, with photos of the physical plant at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and from speakers in the floor come the voices of survivors of Auschwitz saying what happened to them there, the small details of degradation, narratives of humiliation, torture, and overwhelming loss. I walk on the casting of the crushed tombstones from Treblinka into the Auschwitz-Birkenau barrack where, had I been born earlier, I might have been with the majority of my family on both sides. The bunks are wood, almost slats--but then, they didn't have to bear much weight, did they? I have seen photos with the inmates stacked-in lying flat, but the eye plays a trick: one thinks the bunks must have been bigger to hold so many. There is no smell. This too must have been scrubbed down.
In the center of the barrack; are cement walls about four feet high behind which are video displays of some of the medical experiments: photos of dismembered bodies and of bodies and body parts preserved in vats: films of skeletal boys used in medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele, known in Auschwitz as "the Angel of Death"; photos of skeletal girls with bruises and open sores all over them. There is a Ravensbruck woman; a single man at Dachau being used for experiments at extremes of air pressure; a Gypsy man being injected with seawater right into his heart; a Jewish dwarf who was subsequently stabbed to death to study his bone structure; a Jewish woman used in sterilization experiments. The low walls are supposed to conceal these videos from children.
There are bowls the prisoners ate from; Zyklon B canisters that were used in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek; a scale model of Crematorium 11 at Auschwitz-Birkenau that shows how vast it was, and also where the victims undressed, were gassed, were cremated.
You pass an exhibit on why the U.S. War Department, when bombing military targets only five miles away, refused to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz to stop delivery of Jews. Though Jewish groups in the U.S. repeatedly begged for this bombing, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy said it "would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources." You pass through a steel passageway with a glass floor and the names of victims etched in glass panels on the walls. You move into an area with brick walls and a steel floor. You round a corner and there is a smell, strange and bad, thick and heavy, almost suffocating. But you walk onward and then on each side of you there are shoes, thousands of shoes; to your left and your right, the shoes of the dead brought from Auschwitz to be on exhibit here. "We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses," says a poem by Yiddish poet Moses Schulstein inscribed on a wall. It is almost unbearable. Then there is a wall of photographs--just arms with tattooed numbers. The arms face a wall with smaller photographs of emaciated prisoners.
Covering another wall there is a huge color photograph of the hair they cut off the women at Auschwitz, a mountain of human hair; adjacent to it, a black and white photo of this hair as it was baled for sale. Facing the mountain of hair are photographs of Hungarian Jewish women with their heads shorn. There is a casting of a table on which gold fillings were removed from corpses: castings of crematorium ovens from Mauthausen; a stretcher used to move bodies, a crematorium poker.
When the war ended in 1945, two thirds of Europe's Jews had been murdered. According to Deborah Dwork in Children with a Star, "a mere 11 percent of European Jewish children alive in 1939 survived the war; one and a half million were killed."
The museum honors the "Rescuers," those who tried to save Jewish lives: a whole village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France, that saved 5,000 refugees, including several thousand Jews (the Bible of its pastor, Andre Trocme, is on display); Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who worked relentlessly to rescue the Jews of Budapest; an underground Polish group code-named Zegota that provided money, false identity papers, and hiding places for 4,000 Jews; and the Danes, who refused en masse to collaborate with the Nazis. On display is a boat used by the Danes to smuggle Jews to safety in Sweden. According to the museum, "Among the Nazi-occupied countries, only Denmark rescued its Jews." The Danes raised over $600,000 to help the hunted escape; 7,220 Jews were saved; nearly 500 were deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto--and all but 51 survived.
And there are sadder stories of resistance. In Lidice, Czechoslovakia, on May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, former chief of Reich security police, an architect of the genocide, was shot (he died later). In retaliation, all the male villagers were murdered, the women sent to concentration camps, the children jailed in Lodz Ghetto or, if blond enough, put in German homes. The two Czech resistance fighters who killed Heydrich committed suicide rather than surrender. The Nazis, never camera-shy, photographed the executions of the villagers.
There were 32 parachutists trained by the British in Palestine and sent to Hungary and the Balkans as saboteurs. These fighters also wanted to rescue Jews under German occupation. None was more committed to this cause than the poet Hannah Senesh, a Zionist who emigrated from Hungary to Palestine as a teenager. Commissioned as an officer in the British Army, she fought in Yugoslavia with the resistance. On crossing the border into Hungary, Senesh was arrested by the Nazis as an enemy soldier and jailed by the Gestapo in a military prison in Budapest. The Nazis also jailed her mother, Catherine Senesh, who was still living in Hungary, in the same prison, and threatened Hannah with the torture and killing of her mother. But it was Hannah, who never broke, whom they tortured and, after five months, executed on November 7, 1944. Her last poem read in part: "I could have been twenty-three next July;/I gambled on what mattered most,/The dice were cast. I lost." The museum displays her words but does not tell her story.
There was the White Rose, students identified by the museum as the only German group to demonstrate and leaflet against the genocide of the Jews. The leaders, Sophie and Hans Scholl, sister and brother, were beheaded in 1943. (I keep a remembrance of them--an enamel white rose raised on a background of black and gray beads--in front of the German editions of my books.)
The permanent exhibition ends in an open amphitheater, on the screen survivors, in good health, strong, fleshy, spirited, with stories of agony and unexpected uplift. They speak with calm and authority, only one with the constant nervous tremble I remember in survivors when I was a child. This is a triumph: to have forged a way of telling. It is impossible to overestimate how hard this must have been. The Nuremberg trials, the historians, gave the survivors some ground on which to stand; but they had to find both words and the will to speak. Many overcame their shame--the internalized humiliation of anyone so debased, in captivity. But many have not spoken, maybe because here too men have established the standard for what can be said.
In the last two decades, feminists have learned how to talk with raped, prostituted, and tortured women--what they need to be able to speak, how to listen to them. This museum was in formation for the second of those two decades, a ten-year period of research, investigation, discovery--finding artifacts, deciding which to use and how, which stories to tell and how. No use was made of feminist work on sexual abuse or bodily invasion and violation--neither the substance of this knowledge nor the strategies used to create the safety in which women can bear remembering. I know Holocaust survivors who have not spoken out: women who were raped or sexually hurt. This museum did not become a safe place for women's testimony about the sadism of sexualized assault. One rationale for building it was that soon the survivors would pass on, and the burden of memory would be passed from them to all the rest of us. But because the museum did not pay attention to women as a distinct constituency with distinct experience, what women cannot bear to remember will die with them; what happened will die with them. This is a tragedy for Jews and for women, with miserable consequences for Jewish women. The conceptual invisibility of Jewish women is the kind of erasure that is used--indefensibly, with a prejudiced illogic of its own--to justify yet another generation of second-class status for women in Jewish communities and in Israel. The torment of women in the Holocaust was not second-class, and it cannot translate into second-class rights. Acknowledgment and respect are necessary; the conceptually invisible have neither.
Perhaps the threat of seeking this knowledge is that some of the sadism is familiar, even familial; not confined to camps or genocide. Better to avoid any crime against women that men who are not Nazis still commit. Or perhaps women are conceptually invisible because of the continuing and belligerent sexism of the men w ho run Jewish institutions now--but the blinding arrogance of sexism has no place in this museum. I want the suffering and endurance of women--Jewish or not Jewish, in Auschwitz or Ravensbruck, Bergen-Belsen or Dachau, Majdanek or Sobibor--reckoned with and honored: remembered. I want the rapes documented, the brothels delineated, the summary murders of pregnant women discussed. I want the medical experiments--excision of genitals, injections into the uterus--explained, exposed. I want the humiliation rituals--forced nakedness, cutting and shaving of hair, punishments of hundreds or thousands of women standing naked in the cold for 12 hours at a time--articulated. I want the beatings, the whippings, the forced hard labor and slave labor, narrated. I need to know about those who resisted and those who escaped; there were some. I need a heritage on the female side. I want this museum changed so that remembrance is not male. I want to know the story of women in the Holocaust.
Study: Molestation strongest Holocaust
trauma
Ynet News - Jan. 26, 2006
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3207173,00.html
According to new study, sexual abuse traumas have greater effect on survivors than any other experienced during Holocaust years. 'Abuse still causes incessant thoughts, nightmares,' researcher says Ahiya Raved
A new study conducted at the Haifa University reveals that Holocaust survivors who suffered sexual abuse during World War II were much more traumatized by molestation than by any other of the horrifying experiences they went through during that period.
The study, the first ever to focus on the subject, is set to be presented next Sunday in the framework of a conference to mark the international Holocaust Memorial Day at the university.
Prof. Rachel Lev-Wiesel, who conducted the research, said that although the survivors experienced other traumatic events during the holocaust, including the loss of parents, physical abuse and hunger, the memory of sexual abuse remained etched in their minds more than anything else.
"This abuse still causes incessant thoughts on the subject and nightmares," Lev-Wiesel said.
'Survivors told stories with clarity, precision'
The study consists of interviews with 22 men and women in Israel and the United States, who were willing to share with the researcher stories about the abuse they underwent during the war.
Lev-Wiesel said that some people who offered to take part in the study were rejected, because she believed they would not be able to cope with the burden of memories and the self-exposure involved with the interview.
The average age of the interviewees stood at 68 years, and Lev-Wiesel said all have told their story with clarity and precision, in contradiction to how people usually speak of a traumatic event.
This is proof, Lev-Wiesel said, that the survivors retell the story in their heads over and over again, reliving the past daily.
All the survivors interviewed for the study have spent the war years on the run from the Nazis, some at hiding in the houses of Christians, others moving from place to place with the partisans, an easy prey for menacing adults along the way.
According to Prof. Lev-Wiesel, this fact does not eliminate the possibility similar incidents took place at ghettos as well.
Abuser usually close to victim
In some of the cases revealed in the study, the abuse was carried out by relatives or other Jews, which alleviated the trauma and embarrassment among survivors.
In one of the cases the abuser was a man who helped smuggle children from one place to another, in another it was a father who sexually abused his daughter, and in several other incidents – mothers who molested their sons.
Prof. Lev-Wiesel stressed that situations of stress and war do not create pedophiles, but that they enable such people to operate more freely.
by Ellie Levenson
Guardian - Tuesday March 13, 2007
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2032551,00.html
How does a deeply religious artist explore sensuality? With fabric, photographs and a pomegranate, reveals Ellie Levenson
In the Hassidic Jewish community of Stamford Hill in north London, artists are as rare as women who work outside the home. So to find a woman artist living here is particularly unusual. But then, by her own admission, Gitl Wallerstein-Braun is "unorthodox orthodox". Now aged 57, she graduated from London's Central Saint Martins last year and is already achieving international success with her photographs of her sculptures.
Braun moved to Britain in 1973, but didn't speak any English until 12 years ago. She only took language lessons after a row in the community over whether to involve the authorities in a child abuse case. Her family, who backed bringing in the authorities rather than letting the community sort things out internally, were shunned by many. Braun, who spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish, found that the people she had relied on for communication would no longer talk to her.
This silence was not new for her. The child of Holocaust survivors (her father was in the Bor labour camp in Yugoslavia, her mother in Auschwitz), silence was the overwhelming feature of her childhood, some of it spent in an orphanage. "My parents didn't talk about the past," she says, "but it was very present. It was a silent upbringing. You didn't question, you didn't ask. You just obeyed."
Braun then took an art foundation course, first drawing landscapes of Israel from memory, then moving on to the Kent coast, using thick paint and pastels, playing with senses and texture by mixing scent and other materials into the paint. These pictures impressed Central Saint Martins enough for her to be offered a place. Was art college a culture shock? "No," she says. "I was already familiar with 28 different cultures from my English class. I felt this is who I am and I am proud. It's like a mirror. If others see you are proud, they refer to you in that way. Anyway, in a place like London, which is so multicultural, people don't question anything."
As part of her studies, Braun looked at the work of renowned Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac, who captured Jewish lives in 1930s Germany, publishing the shots that hadn't been confiscated or destroyed in a book entitled The Vanished World. "I looked at those, and at my husband's collection of art depicting life in the Jewish ghetto, and I thought to myself, 'It's not vanished.' So I started taking pictures of my community, of my neighbour's children and then weddings. I was documenting Jewish life - but present life, not past."
Braun's current work involves photographing fabric, in a style she calls photographic sculpture. Fabric is used to create folds and lines, which are then photographed. The results are extremely sensual, at times erotic, depicting both landscapes and the body at the same time, allowing Braun to explore sensuality without compromising her position as a religious woman. "There's more freedom in the ambiguity," she says. "You can be much more explicit. In fact, fabric has always been a way for women in the community to express themselves, with embroidery being used as coverings for challah (bread) and, in the synagogue, for the Torah."
The material also gets across the silence that Braun has often felt. "The fabric has become my language," she says. "I started to become aware that photography is like fiction. You can see the expression of a second, but you cannot tell the whole story. So I started to find my voice beyond the photo. I had a photograph of my womb that the doctor took for me after my hysterectomy. I wanted it because it's a kind of loss, as I had so many children [10, two of whom died]. It was Sukkot [a Jewish harvest festival], and we had hung up a pomegranate. I looked at the photograph of my womb and the pomegranate and saw a resemblance, so I covered the pomegranate with fabric and photographed it. Eventually, I removed the pomegranate and kept the fabric, which is how my work with fabric as a metaphor for the body came about."
For Braun, this is just continuing a tradition best expressed by painters like Caravaggio. "I was looking at his painting Doubting Thomas, where the fabric folds mirror the folds of the skin. I saw how the fabrics mirror the body in many paintings." Her photographic sculpture of fabric formed the centre of her graduation show, which led to an exhibition earlier this year at the Riccardo Giaccherini gallery in London.
Two shows in Israel are in the pipeline, the first at the Wolfson Museum in Jerusalem this November, the second at the Israel Museum in 2008. But it is perhaps a planned exhibition next month at the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre in London's East End that is most remarkable, the centre being situated in Whitechapel, a predominately Bengali area. The aim is to bring out the similarities between the Bengali and Jewish communities, and their shared history as immigrant communities in east London.
Braun is particularly pleased about this: "The higher purpose of art is to bring people together." This belief is particularly ironic, given that it was her being shunned by her own community that spurred her into developing her talent. "I was interviewed by a journalist for a Jewish paper, and they asked why I started to create art. How could I say that you made me do it, you forced me?" Braun's resilience has, however, allowed her to build bridges. "You have to struggle against the system to make it," she says, "but when you make it, they want you - because you are an asset."
By Lexi Landsman
Australia Jewish News - June 8, 2007
http://www.ajn.com.au/news/news.asp?pgID=3431
Dr Simonne Jameson with her eldest son, Jean-Christophe Burckhardt.
SHE was only 12, but she can still recall the rotten smell of the wood, the musty dry air, the dust, the perpetual darkness and the rats.
More than six decades later, Dr Simonne Jameson, who now lives in Melbourne, still cannot shake the memories of her three years living in hiding in an underground cellar of the National Library in Paris during the Holocaust.
She tries to forget about the daily rapes, the small food rations, the loneliness and the unwavering fear.
Instead, she focuses on the books, which she says "kept my sanity and gave me a refuge from reality".
Dr Jameson's parents chose her out of their three children to send into hiding, after a police commissioner convinced them that he would "protect" her.
Her parents fled with her younger brother and older sister to Bordeaux to escape deportation, leaving young Simonne behind.
Within days of hiding in the rat-infested cellar, the rapes by pedophile police began and continued daily for three years.
"I remember the books and the rats," she recalls. "The books kept me alive. They gave me an escape from the pain and abuse, and gave me some hope and optimism."
Dr Jameson says she always had a feeling that she would survive and so she found solace in the philosophical books, which were kept in the cellar. A particular favourite was Candide by French philosopher Voltaire, which she credits as helping her survive.
It was during those three years of living in captivity that Dr Jameson discovered her passion for psychotherapy, art and books.
Since then, Dr Jameson, now 79, has taken that passion and become a renowned psychotherapist, child psychologist, art critic, philanthropist and author.
She vowed from the moment she left the confines of the cellar that she would dedicate her life to helping children of abuse. And in 64 years, Dr Jameson has gone far beyond her word.
In 1981, she founded the Children's Rights Foundation (CRF), which provides free therapeutic services to disadvantaged families, and later the Arts Sans Frontieres, an art gallery where all profits go towards helping abused children.
In 2003, she released a memoir of her experiences called Men or Rats. The book will be made into a Hollywood film later this year. Directed by Mark Medoff (producer of Children of a Lesser God and City of Joy), the film will star Thomas Haden Church, Anna Paquin and Alfred Molina. The role of Dr Jameson has yet to be cast.
"It's good that people will be able to know that you can survive anything. I hope that the film will send a positive message."
DR Jameson was born in 1928 in France in the annex of the National Library, where her father worked.
Twelve years later the place of her birth would become her prison.
"I had a very rich life before the war. I met lots of authors at the library and I was always a positive, trusting person. I was always optimistic," she recalls.
Dr Jameson slept between two bookshelves in the library on a metal military bed. She was fed a small ration of bread and water each day. Some days she went without any food at all. The only human contact she had was with the French police officers who sexually abused her. And apart from the abuse, she was also fearful of the rats.
"The rats were very big and I feared that they would attack me one day but they never did. I think in some way, the rats adopted me as one of their own."
In her first few months in the cellar, Dr Jameson became critically ill. She recalls overhearing a conversation between the officers discussing what they would do with her dead body.
"I never thought about escaping," she explains. "One of the officers had shown me a bar of soap and he said that it was made of the fat from the Jews in Auschwitz. He told me I would become a bar of soap if I tried to leave. It haunted me."
At one point, Dr Jameson considered giving up.
"I remember taking a piece of the mirror and thinking that I would cut my wrists, but something kept telling me that I would survive. So I didn't."
In the last six months of captivity, an elderly police officer was sent to feed her and started crying as soon as he found her. He let her out into the courtyard for the first time to get fresh air.
But, one week before she was freed, no-one came to feed her. She was starving and close to death.
When she was eventually freed in September 1944 by the elderly officer, Dr Jameson weighed 38 kilograms, had tuberculosis and couldn't walk.
After being treated by a doctor and spending time in a sanatorium, she went back to the library where her father worked.
"I went back there with hope, and when I knocked on the door, it was my father who opened it. I couldn't believe it. My family had been told that I had been deported. It was overwhelming to see them."
Dr Jameson says that writing her book six decades after being freed was cathartic.
"I wrote my book at a time that I was not well I wanted it to be like a will that I would leave my children. It was very therapeutic."
Last year, Dr Jameson went back to the cellar with the film crew who are expected to go into production later this year. She says she was shocked to find that nothing in the cellar had changed.
"I thought going back wouldn't affect me after so many years. But it did and it brought back a lot of traumatic memories to see the books and the archives just as they had been. I stood there and I was 12 years old again."
In her clinical life, Dr Jameson has developed an impressive curriculum vitae.
She studied psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, psychotherapy with Carl Rogers, psychology with Dr Jolande Jacobi and philosophy with Salvador Dali. She has diplomas in nutritional medicine, orthomolecular nutrition, clinical hypnosis, criminology and biofeedback.
She is a doctor of homeopathic medicine and alternative medicine. She's studied the effects of alcoholism and drug addiction, as well as terminal illness, cancer therapy, meditation and palliative care.
She can speak five languages – French, Italian, English, Spanish and German. She's won numerous awards, including the Gold Medal of France for services to humanity and was a nominee for Australian of the Year in 2006.
She's currently the director of both the CRF and Arts Sans Frontieres and at 79, she shows little signs of slowing down.
She's lived her life with a philosophy of forgiving and not forgetting, and focuses always on helping others move forward, instead of looking back.
"To be positive is the most important thing in life. If you don't want to become sick yourself, you must forgive," she explains. "If you hate people, you are not damaging them, you are damaging yourself. Forgiving and love are two very important parts of life."
Later this month, she will give a series of talks in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide about her life and experiences with Carl Jung, Salvador Dali and Dr Jolande Jacobi. She will also hold an intimate all-day seminar in Sunbury, Victoria, next month.
Dr Jameson's studies with the renowned theorists, particularly Dr Jacobi, were immensely influential.
She formed a special relationship with Dr Jacobi, a Jewish psychotherapist and founder of the Jung Institute, who Dr Jameson says got her through a difficult time.
"I learned a lot of psychology from Dr Jacobi, who was very compassionate woman and very similar to me. She was also a Jewish person who had suffered a lot. Without her I would not be who I am today."
But Dr Jacobi was not only her tutor and therapist, she became her companion and fulfilled a maternal role.
"I had difficulty forgiving my mother for leaving me behind, but I did. I couldn't understand why you would leave someone behind. I felt rejected by her and I felt accepted by Dr Jacobi. She changed my life in many ways."
Dr Jameson says her lectures this month "pay homage" to Dr Jacobi.
Dr Jameson now lives in Melbourne and has five children, one that she was counseling and later adopted, and seven grandchildren. She says that her family "have played the most important role in [her] life".
"They brought a lot of love into my life. It's like a boomerang – when you give love, that's what you get in return."
And despite all the trauma she's suffered, Dr Jameson's message is one of optimism and faith in humanity.
"I am a very positive person. I believe in forgiveness I believe in the human race. Life is too short not to look forward. Life is beautiful, it's important that we live to the fullest with a lot of passion."
For more information visit www.simonnejameson.com.au.
Rachel Shtibel's story of horror during the
war is one of six published by Azrieli Foundation
By Debra Black
Toronto Star - November 22, 2007
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/278831
MICHAEL
STUPARYK/TORONTO STAR
Rachel Shtibel, with her husband, Adam, plays the violin that her family buried near their home in Kolomyja, Poland before they went into hiding. She and other Holocaust survivors read excerpts of their stories last night at a launch of their memoirs published by the Azrieli Foundation, a Toronto-based charitable organization, at the Bloor Cinema in downtown Toronto.
Rachel Shtibel, now 72, spent two years of her life living in a bunker – 3 metres by 3 metres – underneath a barn in Poland during part of the Holocaust. "There were ten of us," she said. "We were lying like sardines. When one had to turn all of us had to turn." The men went out at night to get food. By day they all remained as still as possible. Her father had smuggled her out of the local ghetto in a sack of garden tools, warning her to be dead silent or they would be shot.
During the time she and her parents and others hid in the bunker, a family friend – a doctor molested her. Even after the war was over she never told her parents about the sexual abuse, fearful they wouldn't believe her. She speaks of it now as if she were another person. "I was mourning this little child," she said. "I felt so sorry for her – helpless."
Shtibel's story is one of six Canadian memoirs of Holocaust survivors published by the Azrieli Foundation, a Toronto-based charitable organization. She and other survivors read excerpts of their stories last night at a launch at the Bloor Cinema in downtown Toronto.
The books are to be distributed free of charge to libraries across Canada as well as Holocaust memorials around the world. Individuals can go online and order them free of charge shortly. The Azrieli Foundation has close to 170 such memorials it plans to publish.
Shtibel's message is one of hope – hope that the Holocaust will never happen again. The horror and the terror of not knowing whether she would live or die was just one of the burdens she shouldered as her fellow Jews were slaughtered.
But for Shtibel the shame of being molested wasn't the only secret in the family. After the Holocaust, Shtibel inherited her uncle's violin – which had been buried near a walnut tree near their old home in the Jewish ghetto. With it were old pictures of herself as a baby and of her uncle and another unknown woman. Her parents encouraged her to learn to play the instrument.
Fifty years later she found out – after her parents died – that her biological father was in fact her uncle – the violinist. And the unknown woman in the picture was in fact her biological mother and the love of her father's life. Today, she still plays that violin – now more than 100 years old – and cherishes it for both its music and the secrets it holds engrained in the wood.
Still the Holocaust hangs heavy over the survivors. "I wanted the world to know (what happened)," she said. "We are the last generation to witness the Holocaust."
Research
The effects of multiple trauma: An exploratory study of daughters of Jewish Holocaust survivors who themselves experienced childhood physical and/or sexual abuse
By Sandra Maxine Lynton, PsyD
School of California School of Professional Psychology (Berkeley/Alameda - 1998
PUBLICATION NUMBER AAT 9836015
PAGES 189, ADVISER Curtis-Boles, Harriet; Goldman, Daryl
ISBN 0-591-89506-4 SOURCE DAI-B 59/06, p. 3065, Dec 1998
SUBJECT PSYCHOLOGY, CLINICAL (0622); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453); SOCIOLOGY, INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY STUDIES (0628); PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENTAL (0620)
The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of multiple trauma, specifically the intergenerational impact of the Holocaust and child abuse. A sizeable body of literature focuses on the impact of various types of child abuse on later adult life. There are also numerous publications focusing on the impact of the trauma of the Holocaust on survivors and their offspring. More recently the issue of violence in Jewish families in the U.S. has appeared in the literature. However, there has been no prior research about child abuse in Jewish Holocaust survivor families. This exploratory study gathered information from ten daughters of Jewish Holocaust survivors who experienced child abuse, giving voice to their personal experiences. A qualitative case studies design was used to gain an understanding of the world viewpoints and experiences of a few representative individuals from this population through the use of in- depth interviews. All of the participants discussed having been impacted in a negative way as a result of being daughters of Holocaust survivors and having experienced childhood physical and/or sexual abuse themselves. They all had symptoms of anxiety and depression as children and adolescents. They all had strained and conflicted relationships with their parents, yet felt protective of them, or felt anguish for them because of their Holocaust experiences. They were all on extreme ends of a continuum between trust and mistrust. Another common theme was having difficulties with intimacy and intimate relationships. The common characteristics of women who have experienced child abuse and those found to be experienced by offspring of Holocaust survivors overlap greatly. What is specific to this population are the cumulative effects of experiencing both types of trauma in question. Silence and isolation are serious problems. The voices of the women in this study suggest that finding a safe place to talk openly and process both the Holocaust and child abuse is critical for healing.
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Last Updated: 11/28/2007
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