Consideration of Jewish women's lives and experiences during the Holocaust became a priority only late in the 20th century. Scholars focused on women's roles as homemakers, wives, breadwinners, supporters and resistors, with little, if any, attention paid to their reproductive or sexual lives. Many considered that the Rassenschande laws shielded Jewish women from the worst horrors of rape and sexual abuse leading to little investigation of this issue. Women were reluctant to speak of such intimate events, and researchers were hesitant to ask about them for fear of causing further hurt. Concern for the sensationalizing of women's experiences also inhibited investigation of this aspect of women's lives. Significant acts of emotional, sexual and physical abuse of women, were, however, perpetrated by the Nazis and others against men and women, Jews and non-Jews, including humiliating nudity, rape and physical abuse. This article focuses on Jewish women's sexual experiences as expressed in diaries, memoirs and testimonies. It explores the variety of interactions that occurred, ranging from loving relationships that emerged despite extremely difficult living conditions, to sexualized humiliation, sexual exchange, rape and sexually related brutality.


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SHE was just a girl when she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. While in Auschwitz she had a degree of privilege, including extra food rations and warmer clothes, but that came at a huge cost. When the camps were liberated in January , Cilka was charged as a collaborator by the Russians and sent to Vorkuta, a brutal prison camp in Siberia. For ten years, Cilka endured horrific conditions, including more sexual assaults. After her release in , Cilka, who became known as Cecilia, returned to Czechoslovakia , where she found love with Ivan Kovac, who had also spent time in a Russian gulag. For the rest of her life, until her death in , Cilka lived quietly in Kosice and rarely spoke about the hardships she had endured. It was in , while working as social worker in a Melbourne hospital, that Heather met Lale Sokolov. Heather learnt that her new friend was a Slovakian Jew, who fell in love with a woman called Gita at the most notorious concentration camp of them all. It has sold more than three million copies — two million in the UK alone. The book is being adapted into a six-part TV miniseries.
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A documentary film premiering Wednesday evening on Israeli television sheds light on a dark corner of what is already the blackest of historical events. For the first time, Holocaust survivors who were raped or sexually abused as children and teens in the ghettos and concentration and labor camps speak on camera about what happened to them and how this sexual violence has scarred their lives over the 70 years since the war ended. It took Sarnat a significant amount of time to locate survivors who were raped or sexually abused as children or teenagers. Sarnat and her creative team decided to make the film using only the first-person testimonies of the survivors. There is no third-person narration and there are no talking heads providing historical context or psychological analysis.
Published: April 11, A new exhibit in Germany reveals that more than German teens became pregnant at the Nuremberg rallies. They were members of Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth rallies were an orgy of hormone-charged hijinks in addition to a heaping, helping of hate, a new exhibit reveals. Both were established in and all German children aged 10 to 18 were obliged to participate. The idea was to provide wholesome activities to build character. All German children between the ages of 10 and 18 had to join Nazi youth movements. And also to brainwash the 9 million children involved, who made dictator Adolf Hitler their rock star.