Women of the Holocaust

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Women of the Holocaust

Shannon S

Women in the Ghettos

• ghettos much like forced labor camps
• used to dehumanize Jews, however women organized "civilized" cultural activities and secret schools
• women took care of families; sometimes gave family poison to escape ghettos
• full of disease such as typhus and dysentery
• women had constant fear of humiliation
• often hanged young girls in front of forced audiences
• struggles in ghettos tore families apart; women helped keep them strong

Resistance

• surrounded by murder/torture; underground organizations arose
• pretended to be Aryan w/false documents; carried notes from ghetto to ghetto
• usually only single women resisted
• Palestinian Jewish women joined British Army; dropped into enemy territories by parachute
• used seduction/beauty to their advantage

Resistors
Ona Simaite

• visited ghetto to deliver secret info and supplies
• Yoheved
• * Jewish girl who escaped from Bedzin ghetto; hid in "Aryan" part of town
• * Sent by underground org. to be maid in Gestapo officer home
• * spied; was caught, sent to Auschwitz, to be executed next day
• * recognized by Yossel Rosensaft who collected enough valuables to bribe SS
• *guards into sending her to a women's camp

Luba Tryszynska

• 1944--deported to Belsen
• saved children who were left to die

Angel of Belsen

Camps/In Camps

• Arrival
• separated from men
• valuables taken, given clothes and tattoo number
• w/ small children--sent to gas chambers together so as not to cause a scene
• Rolls within camps
• may work in Kanada sorting goods confiscated from other Jews
• outside work--mowing hay, cleaning ponds, moving rubble, picking crops
• wanted to work in kitchen, or private factories where it was safer
• Barracks
• tried to make them feel like home
• many women piled one on top of the other
• called each other "sister", "mother", "aunt", "grandma"
• Ravensbruck
• established in May 1939
• between 1939 and 1945 over 130,000 women passed through the

camp

Medical Experiments/Death

• Prof. Carl Clauberg--sterilization experiments
• injected substance into them causing great pain
• lived in fear of sterilization and other experiments
• On last days of death marches--
• drowned in rivers
• killed in mass shootings

Liberation

• Nazis abandoned them, hoping they would die
• often so sad about loss of family- couldn't be happy
• when allied forces found them- like skeletonsin critical condition- taken to hospitals
• many felt guilty that they had lived

What Happened Next?

• roads of Europe filled with people going home
• allied forces encouraged them to go back to homes
• 3/4 of them returned to native countries ----
• when returned home--homes filled w/ strangers
• neighbors were hostile--some even killed returners
• thought only safe place was Palestine
• made new communities there

Women of the Holocaust
Aubrey Cassel

• Every women, man, and child defined as "Jew" was to die or be killed.
• Jewish women carried the extra burdens of sexual victimization, pregnancy, childbirth, rape, abortion, the killing of newborns, and often seperation from their children.
• In Poland, it was a crime punishable by execution if you or anyone in your family was suspected of aiding a Jew.
• A baby carriage was a good place to hide food, currency, and passports for Jews.
• Many Jews thought that the Nazi's would mainly hurt men and spare women and children. Instead the Nazi's would go for the entire Jewish population.
• The men did the jobs and women stayed at home. When men went to war, the women had to do the jobs.
• The Nazi's targeted both men and women for persecution.
• They had camps specifically for women.
• Ravensbruek was the largest concentration camp for women.
• In ghettos and camps, the Nazi's captured women for forced labor.
• Nazi doctors often used Jewish and Gypsy women for sterilization experiments and other unethical humen experimentation.
• Some women were leaders or members of ghetto resistance organizations.
• Women, especially those with small children were often the first to be sent for gassing at extermination camps.

Women of the Holocaust
Cassie C.

Women in the Third Reich

• women played a very important role in Adolf Hitler's plan to create an ideal German community called Volksgemeinschaf
• Hitler's belief was that a larger, racially purer population would enhance German's military strength
• he wanted "racially pure" women to bear as many Aryan children as possible
• a program was created called Lebensborn where every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock
• this program was not promoted aggressively. instead the Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage where there was increased punishments for "racially pure" women who had abortions

Were women spared?

• neither women nor children were spared from Nazi mass murder operations.
• women of all ages perished alongside men in German-occupied Soviet territories
• women, especially those with small children, were often the first to be sent to extermination camps for gassing
• women were not spared from beatings, rape, submitting to abortions, forced labor, sterilization experiments, etc.

In the long run...

• millions of women were persecuted and murdered