Damairus Law

Professor Werz-Orbaugh
UWRT 1102-09
04/15/15
Research Review: The Holocaust Sexual Sins
For the research review I looked up information on prostitution and
sexual obscurity within the concentration camps. It is a story not often told
full of shame, self-hate and means of survival. The Holocaust was a
traumatic experience to the Jews that lived in Germany in that time period.
We have all heard the stories of famine oppression and killing yet not many
have heard the stories of the corrupt SS officers raping women and forcing
them into prostitution. Two articles that I found useful in my writing were
Sonja M. Hedgepeth. and Rochelle G. Saidel. Sexual Violence against Jewish
Women during the Holocaust and Steven T. Katz Thoughts on the intersection
of Rape and Rassenchande during the Holocaust.
One of the things that stuck out to me in Katz article was the sense of
hopelessness that the women had in the camps had turned into a means of
survival. A woman from Dessau that was interviewed that remains nameless
was rapped on a nightly basis by a man whose face she could not see. She
absolutely hated him knowing the monster that he is. After a few months she
was able to get use to him. He kept her out of the gas chamber and gave her

food. In the interview she states, I lived one day at a time. Whatever I did
was my way of surviving [295].

One of the things that I found most

tragic about this event is that she never had her chance of coping or
grieving. She had to switch to an instinctive mindset of live or die knowing
that she was all on her own and that no one would help her.
Katz also enlightened me of how the woman were left feeling less than
human. The woman that were raped had siblings and other family members
that could hear them being raped, an event that in America would cause the
family to attack the rapist and the rapist would be sent to jail. In the camps,
the rapist did not have a police force to fear for their actions, they were that
force. Katz goes on to say that the rapist uncontrolled sexual satisfaction
was a power confirmation that the bodies of the women were there to be
ravaged by whoever would take them [296]. The words that got me were
whoever would take them. This made the woman seem like as if they were
no longer human, they were just some worthless objects of sexual pleasure.
This helped me to understand more of why females did not want to be
interviewed or say anything that happened to them while in being forced into
sex. It would only put them back in the mental state of the time they were
considered less than human.

Hedgepeths article focuses more so on the women who were forced to

work in the brothels. Hedgepeth brought up an idea that seemed ironic to

me, The women were regularly screened for sexually transmitted diseases
[51]. The reason this seems strange to me is that they wanted the Jews to
die yet they gave them constant STD screenings, yet they would not give the
people contraceptives that would stop the Jewish population from increasing
and decrease the amount of STDs that were spread.
Hedgepth also brought up another idea that helped to expand
upon what I had learned in previous readings. He goes on to say that women
were considered to be a reward to the hardest working workers that were in
the camps [46]. I thought that this was incredibly stripping of dignity that
they would treat the women like as if they were just some prize to be won for
the hardest working male. The thing that confused me about the situation is
there connections with the people there and how the prisoners that attended
the brothels were no better than the officer rapist.
Person takes on more of the view of a feminist in her writing yet makes
some good points. She says that the story of the Holocaust was at that
point, and to a large degree still is, the story of men. The life stories of Elie
Wiesel and Primo Levi or Tadeusz Borowski were analyzed and incorporated
into scholarships by almost exclusively male scholars[104]. I never really
noticed that in all of our classes we generally learn about things through the
perspective of a male about what goes on in the camps. I at first thought
Anne Frank is all that we hear about while reading about the Holocaust,
what could she be talking about? but we never hear the story of Anne within
the camps, only her life before the camps.

Person also brings up a reason that we know little about prostitution in

the camps or any sexual violence that occurred. She say that the rape
victims silence was further reinforced by the attitude of the researchers,
who could not, or perhaps for various reasons did not want to, ask directly
about sexual abuse [104]. She later adds that we avoid listening to stories
that we do not want to hear [104]. I found this to be a bit of an eye opener
for me. I know that women were afraid to be interviewed for fear of same yet
it never came to mind that the people interviewing them were trying to
sensor the questions that they ask them to keep their feelings in mind.
Though I found this to be considerate I feel like this could lead to back
tracking. In saving the survivors feelings we are also cutting out a gruesome
part of the story we call the Holocaust and making seem like as if their
struggle did not matter or even happen.

Sources:
Modern Judaism, Thoughts on the intersection of Rape and Rassenchande
during the Holocaust Vol. 32, No. 3 (October 2012), pp. 293-322
Sonja M. Hedgepeth. and Rochelle G. Saidel. Sexual Violence against Jewish
Women during the Holocaust.Waltham: Brandeis University Press,
2010. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Person, Sexual Violence during the HolocaustThe Case of Forced

Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto,