Fate of Jewish women during the Holocaust. The National Socialist state did everything in its power to destroy European Jewry, female and male. More women than men died during the Holocaust, however, revealing that both race and gender played important roles. From the initial period of ghettoization, when most European Jews were crammed into small and filthy quarters in several Eastern European cities, to the horrific world of the concentration and extermination camps, Jewish women suffered unique abuses at the hands of perpetrators. Jewish women also learned to survive in the ghettos and camps in ways that men could not.
The roots of women’s strength and leadership during the Holocaust stem from their involvement in the youth movements popular in Europe before World War II. Many of the groups with a large Jewish membership were socialist and stressed sexual equality, preparing many young women to assume leadership roles during times of crisis. German Jewish women organized self-help groups after anti-Semitic laws passed in Germany stripped Jews of civil rights and economic security. Nevertheless, several sociocultu-ral factors contributed to the higher death rate of women during the Holocaust. Unwilling to leave their families, especially older relatives and small children, fewer women emigrated to safer countries than men. Women were also less likely to convert or marry non-Jews than Jewish men. This meant that women were less likely to have Christian spouses to protect them during the forced movement of Jews to the ghettos and eventually the camps. Finally, men naturally assumed official leadership positions and made decisions that benefited them.
In 1939, the Nazis decreed that the Jewish communities in occupied territories be administered by a Jewish Council of Elders. The councils, although entirely male in composition, employed female secretaries, many of whom were influential behind the scenes and active in the underground. Dr. Dietl Orenstein, the only woman to be named to a council, led an 11,000-woman-strong Women’s Employment Service in Theresienstadt, the one concentration camp open to international inspection. The unique female labor service managed multiple industries and ensured that the women of this unusual concentration camp were fed properly until the camp was liquidated in the final months of World War II. In most ghettos, however, the Jewish councils decided that able-bodied men should be given the best chance for survival. Consequently, young men received the lion’s share of the ghetto’s food and resources. After the Nazis dissolved the ghettos in the autumn of 1942, the fragile Jewish communal structures disappeared, and voluntary, informal communities took their place. It was under these desperate conditions that women demonstrated strength and adaptability while facing what many scholars believe to have been even greater hardship than male inmates.
The Nazi View of Women
"It was the Nazi view of all women as cell-bearers that condemned the Jewish ones. Even within the lowest life-form—the anti-race—women ranked lower still, for spawning it. In Hitler’s cliche, ‘Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people.’ Because women in their biology held history, one gestating Jewish mother posed a greater threat than any fighting man. To be a father to a child had no impact on selection. To be a mother in fact or in future—that was the final sentence."—Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 207.
Women had proved themselves resourceful in the ghettos, and those lucky enough to flee the German invasion were valuable assets in the partisan movements in the occupied Soviet Union. Only a small percentage of women escaped the concentration camps. Female inmates were subjected to gender-specific burdens and cruelties but also created valuable relationships and adapted to the merciless environment. Almost every female survivor described being humiliated when first arriving at the camp. Women were stripped nude before SS personnel and male inmates alike. Pregnant women and women with small children were often killed within minutes of arriving at the camp. The German goal was the annihilation of the Jewish people but not before extracting hard labor from them. Children were nothing but burdens in the German scheme. The Germans reserved one of their most infamous cruelties for women with small children. Those women who could work in the camps were forced to witness their children’s murder. All Jews were dehumanized before being exterminated or worked to death, but women suffered exceptional brutality at the hands of perpetrators.
Selection process at Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, ca. 1944. A German soldier stands with Jewish prisoners, identified by the yellow stars sewn on their coats.
Significantly, women used their traditional gender roles and biology to survive. Women demonstrated a greater biological resistance to starvation, were more aware of the importance of hygiene in the camps, and tended to form social groups more easily than men. Women sent to some of the larger camps became camp sisters, small groups of unrelated inmates who formed quasi-family ties and maintained a group identity in most aspects of camp life. These women had similar schooling and tended to come from the same cities or regions. As in the ghettos, food sharing was the key to survival. The extended family of camp sisters reserved most of the collected food for the young and sick. The SS did not appoint women to the internal administration of the camps, which would have ensured them a source of food and some preferential treatment. Female inmates were forced to pool their resources and maintain a strong network. Women were also forced to use sex as a commodity. Both male inmates and SS personnel traded food for sex. Given the German need for labor, the absence of women in official leadership positions, and the burdens pregnancy and motherhood placed on female inmates, it is not surprising women’s survival rate was much lower than men’s.
Jewish women suffered primarily for being Jews but were treated with exceptional cruelty for being women. Women also had unique strengths that facilitated their survival in the ghettos and camps. They were socially conditioned to act as mothers and protectors for other inmates, even when the inmates were unrelated. Women were generally more religious than men and were compelled to freely assist strangers. Finally, one of the ironies of the Holocaust was that so-called women’s work, such as preparing food, cleaning, and caring for the sick, was the only meaningful labor during such a trying time. By surviving and helping others to survive, Jewish women practiced a form of nonviolent resistance. The Holocaust claimed a diverse group of victims representing dozens of nationalities, but more than half of the 6 million victims that perished in the Holocaust were women.
