Damairus Law

2/8/15
Mrs. Werz-Orbaugh
Weekly Writing Response 4
For this assignment, I read Sexual Violence during the Holocaust the
Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto by Katarzyna Person. The
article provides a lot of information from multiple sources about how life was
like in the ghetto for females and what happened to them after the Holocaust
and them being forced to prostitution. She makes notice of the in equalities
that existed between the males and females during the Holocaust and how
the female perspective is not looked at as much.
The writer makes notice that most of the stories that we hear about
the Holocaust are centered around the idea of men and women do not get as
much attention. She later tells the story of some of the women that were
involved in the Holocaust and how sexual abuse and prostitution were
thrown under the rug yet women were scrutinized for what they had to do to
survive in the Holocaust. She makes notice that a lot of these stories have
never gotten much attention and I could validate her claim in that I have not
been able to find many other websites or sources that mentioned stories of
sexuality and women in the Holocaust. She calls this the split between
gender and the Holocaust. She uses a lot of sources for her writing and they
are all relevant.

I felt that the article was informative yet it was very drawn out. It had a
lot of information about how the women felt after the Holocaust and how it
was centered around men, yet I had to wait for a while of reading to actually
see something about what happened in the Holocaust for women that were
prostitutes. I feel that this is a good perspective article for people that want
to hear the stories of some of the women having to face gender inequalities
during the Holocaust.
Person makes a quote from Joan Ringelheim saying that we avoid
listening to stories that we do not want to hear, when referring to the
women of the Holocaust and their trama. I think that for most audiences it is
a hard concept for them to deal with that women just like their mothers and
sisters had to resort to prostitution in order to provide for their family and
were often times abused. When you put yourself in the perspective it
becomes uncomfortable and even hard for me to type at this moment. I think
this may contribute to why it did not receive as much attention as othe
stories of the Holocaust since it just got bunched into all of the other chaos
and tragedy of the Holocaust.
Though the article was not exactly what I was looking for I did find
some use out of it in finding a new perspective. I had first though she was
being a bit biased in thinking that the Holocaust stories revolved around men
since the first story we think of when we hear Holocaust is Anne Frank. This
made me start to wonder, what were the lives like for people based on
demographic features? Would any of them contribute to a specific type of

treatment that others did not receive or was it all the same for everyone?
What did gender truly mean during the Holocaust?
The article overall had a bunch of filler given the topic I had in mind yet
was useful in the end. Since it is difficult to find a lot of information on my
topic I feel that nit picking at articles similar to this one will help me to be
able to find enough information to be able to write a paper on it.