Practicing the Inner Exile: Quests for Moral Truth and Sisterhood in Holocaust Affect

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and the Holocaust, Session 2

Abstract

The impact of memory on society is critical to understanding cultural trauma and recovery. However, select memories influenced the practices that privileged certain representative bodies over colonization of marginalized ones, which were virtually forgotten and buried with localized events of genocidal intent. Along with recovering memories of women’s victimhood, a deeper investigation into the clinical and military nexus known to field practitioners further illumines intersectional aspects of the cultural and situational dynamics that operated, concurrently and crossing boundaries into the eastern as the western theatre of war. Just as propaganda was instrumentalized for genocidal processes to take root in civil societies, the unexamined role of international collaboration and “rebuilding” efforts enabled complicity and resistance to prevailing forces in the systematic dehumanization of women. Exploratory questions about women’s agency, migration, and diasporic encounters thus prompt greater engagement with inner exiles and the lifeworlds that women inhabited.

Abstract:

Re-membering the voices of women offers a window into their everyday resilience, sense of agency, and survivor community. From Nazi fortresses to the Russian Far East, this could be seen through nursing deployments or reconstructions of kinship in their places of confinement. Exploring survivor legacies and the intercultural demands of post-conflict recovery thus opens wider conversations on gender, diasporic memory, and trauma survival in comparative perspective. Working through the lens of exilic distress, pandemic-era practical theological fieldwork offers additional insights into women’s responses to morally injurious events. Following trajectories of persecution, essential to women’s continuity were life transfer strategies and moral paths to post-traumatic growth achieved by survivors after the Holocaust.

Author

• Lily Kim, Asia Pacific Peace Museum