The Language of Women’s Experience in Small Ghettos in Occupied Poland

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

Abstract

My paper will discuss testimonies of women who, during the Holocaust, were incarcerated in small ghettos in occupied Poland. I will demonstrate how in their postwar testimonies, in particular oral history interviews, they often could not find appropriate language (and were not asked questions) allowing them to talk about the specific experience of being a woman in a small ghetto as well as gender-specific violence they were subjected to. That included violence coming both from Jewish men in position of privilege and non-Jewish local population. The women whose voices I gathered in my paper were marginalized in postwar scholarship, both as women and as inhabitants of small ghettos, the experience of which did not fit the “master narrative” of places like Warsaw of Lodz ghetto.

Small ghettos, classified for the purpose of this paper as those located in towns and villages with Jewish communities of under 5000, formed the majority of ghettos in occupied Poland. According to the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos there were 579 ghettos set up in communities numbering under 5000 Jews in September 1939. These included 237 set up in settlements numbering under 1000 Jews, which will be the focus of my paper.

My paper will begin by discussing these communities at the outbreak of the war, working with findings from fast growing research on the Polish countryside in the interwar period. I will then offer a sociological depiction of who these women were: their internal communal stratifications, mobility, and differences, as well as their sense of homeland. This will lead to a discussion of the societal impact caused by the outbreak of the war, how it differed from experiences in large cities. This will all lead me to compare the particularities of gender-based violence in small ghettos versus big cities and how (and in which language) this violence was expressed in postwar testimonies.

Author

• Katarzyna Person, Warsaw Ghetto Museum