How Yiddish Dealt with Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: From Pipels to Kuzinkes

• In Event: Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Language, Body and Power

Abstract

During the Holocaust, the body seemed to stalk speech. Hunger, disease, slave labor and torture all created a type of hyperawareness around the body for ghetto and camp prisoners. Judging by the case of Yiddish, this over-embodiment changed the way that language worked from the victims’ perspective. Khurbn Yiddish (Yiddish of the Holocaust) is saturated with new terms for excrement, for hunger and, most prominently, for sex. This paper will make new Holocaust-era Yiddish words for sex and sexual violence its focus, treating these neologisms as archives of sexual experience, desire and abuse.

Specifically, I will focus on two camp practices and the words for them: The first is KUZINKE, which literally meant “female cousin,” but, especially in the Skarzysko-Kamienna Camp, came to refer to women who bartered sex for food and privileges. The term ironically echoed traditional Jewish values placed on extended family and communal networks. It fascinated the Yiddish writer Mordechai Strigler especially, who articulates a complex narrative of camp sexuality around it. The word, as he tells it, was invented as a tool for men to hide their extra-marital sex, but became a way for women to assert their economic and sexual agency.

The second term of focus will be PIPELS/PUPELS, a term primarily used in Auschwitz, to refer to boys made to serve Kapos in many ways, including sex. In its Yiddish usage, the word constituted a gender and lingual hybrid: a combination of German and Yiddish in form, and, in content, a boy perceived to be effeminate, thus a combination of male and female. This term and this practice became a preoccupation of writers such as Ellie Wiesel and Filip Friedman. In addition to fear and anguish over pedophilia, the PIPEL may have evoked particular revulsion and horror for male commentators because they saw it as a forced feminization of the male body. If the woman’s body is the site of cultural, moral, and lingual vulnerability in traditional Jewish texts, then the PIPEL represented the frightening possibility that Nazi oppression could penetrate the male conscience and the male body to an equal extent.

Author

• Hannah Pollin-Galay, Tel Aviv University