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Maeve Korengold is half-Ashkenazi on her father's side; this article highlights her perspective on the importance of observing Yom HaShoah.
The time between sundown on April 7 to sundown on April 8 marks Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for the approximately six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, commemoration of Jewish resistance and resilience, and recognition of the ways in which Jewish communities are still hurting due to the actions of Nazi Germany and its accessories. Jewish women and their efforts during this time period were instrumental in the preservation of Jewish solidarity, strength, and hope.
The familial role of women is an integral part of Jewish culture. According to Halacha, biblical Jewish law, Jewishness is passed down matrilineally. Women carry the traditional lineage of the Jewish people, a split from the patriarchal ways in which the majority of the world has historically functioned. Mothers are described as lionesses who “rear their children” in the Tanakh. They are regarded as sacred beings with deep character, as seen in a poem written by King Soloman about his wife titled Eshet Chayil, Hebrew for “woman of valor,” with one line reading: “she opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” This poem is often recited by religious Jews on the Sabbath to honor the women of the household.
When the antagonism against the Jewish people reached a breaking point, and these matriarchs were sent to concentration camps, women were ripped away from their families and their many traditions. Jewish women's instincts to protect their children and each other intensified greatly as a result.
Some women succeeded in passing their children off to non-Jewish women and their families to be hidden, and some came to the camps holding small children or pregnant. Young children weren’t allowed in the camps and were killed upon arrival; in many cases, their mothers were as well, due to the strong connection between them. Women who were pregnant when they arrived were murdered, and often attempted to induce abortion or give birth in secret and carry out infanticide - to spare their children the suffering and save their own lives. Jewish women in the camps were all connected by the roles they held in their families, communities, and in greater society, and were aware of how heartbreaking being separated from their children was, whether it was temporary or forever.
Gisella Perl was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, and forced to work as a member of the nine-person hospital team. Dr. Perl took care of many prisoners who had been abused and wounded with the little supplies that she had access to. When there was nothing that she could do to heal their wounds, she comforted her fellow prisoners by speaking to them about their lives in the past, and offering hopeful words about the future, as a mother or sister would. She used her medical expertise and valuable knowledge about lead doctor Josef Mengele's top-secret plans for the prisoners to maximise her patients' chances of survival. A female survivor of Auschwitz later testified at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that Dr. Perl was “the doctor of the Jews” at Auschwitz because of how fervently she worked to look after her patients.
Eventually, Dr. Perl was ordered by Josef Mengele, the lead doctor known as the “Angel of Death,” to report every pregnant woman that she treated, because they were to be murdered. When she learned of this, in order to save these women’s lives, Dr. Perl vowed for there to be no more pregnant women at Auschwitz. She, as well as other Jewish doctors such as Lucie Adelsberger, performed abortions at night in the camps, and saved countless women’s lives. They risked their own lives by secretly helping these women, doing all they could to lessen the harm done in the death camps.
Pregnant Jewish women and children were specifically targeted for extermination, because they were believed to be a menace to the “pure” fully Aryan future that the Nazis wanted. Women in ghettos and camps were forbidden to give birth because the Nazis knew that the connection between them and their children was extremely powerful. As Dr. Perl later stated, “the greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant,” because of the threat that Jewish women and their children posed to the genocidal ideology of the Nazis. Jewish women continuing to give birth within concentration camps would give prisoners hope, which would be detrimental to the Nazis' desire to dehumanize their prisoners.
Women living in concentration camps began to form family-like groups in order to cope and exchange support. Some women in these groups knew each other before the war as sisters, daughters, mothers, cousins, aunts, or friends, but many met in the concentration camps. These women labeled their groups as Lagerschwestern, meaning “camp sisters” in German. These sisterly groups were unique to women and the bonds that they formed during their time in concentration camps, and embody the way that women across different societies form relationships based on their shared experiences.
In addition to their efforts inside the concentration camps, Jewish women also held leadership positions within underground Jewish resistance groups. Young women known as "kashariyot" or "courier girls" distributed important documents, money, and weapons, as well as news of developments in the Nazi agenda across Jewish communities living in ghettos. These women served as a connection to the outside world as well as a source of hope for families who were pushed into isolated ghettos.
One of the best-known kashariyot was Frumka Plotnicka, the Polish leader of the Hehalutz youth movement. She was affectionately known by the Jewish communities that she brought supplies and relayed information to as Die Mamah, Yiddish for “the mother.” Plotnicka provided for the Jewish communities that she took care of with the resourcefulness and the compassion that is associated with motherhood. The kashariyot carried communication between groups of Jewish people, much like Jewish women’s carrying of their lineage through children.
The sisterhood that women establish with each other due to our unique experience in a patriarchal society connects every single one of us. We’re linked by every sexist side comment, every frightening stare from a strange man across the room, every sketchy follower late at night. The empathy and trust that we have for our sisters because of the situations we handle as women make for an incredibly powerful ability to affect change together and create community; the kashariyot, Lagerschwestern, and other Jewish matriarchs exemplify this.
Much like the outside world, women in concentration camps experienced violence because of their gender. They were frequently subjected to beatings, forced to undress in public, and touched inappropriately. Rape by German soldiers and mobs that were let into concentration camps were also common. The permeation of misogynistic culture and the sex-based violence that came with it from the outside world and into the camps is not surprising.
Most women living in concentration camps eventually stopped menstruating due to the extreme malnourishment and stress that they were under. There was a lack of safe and sanitary material that could be used as sanitary products within the camps, and menstruating women were often beaten for cutting scraps out of their clothing. However, having a menstrual period was often regarded as positive because it was a marker of health, and meant that survival and motherhood in the future could be possible.
When women lost their menstrual periods, they were embarrassed and worried that they wouldn’t be able to bear children. They felt that no longer being able to menstruate meant that they had lost the last shred of their identities as women who hoped to start families in the future. Numerous women’s drive to survive came from their desire to start families during their lives.
The goal of the women who experienced losing their periods was to live long enough to be liberated and become mothers, and this gave them a fierce determination to keep themselves alive. For women who were lucky enough to still have regular menstrual periods, their fertility was a sign of hope for the future. After the concentration camps were liberated and women began to heal physically and mentally, many women who had lost their menstrual periods during their time at the camps began to menstruate again and were ecstatic to have the ability to carry children. The ability to menstruate began to symbolize the agency that women who survived the Holocaust now had over their lives, bodies, and futures, the strength that was necessary to survive the atrocities that they experienced during the Holocaust, and the potential to continue Jewish lineage and survival through their children.
The Jewish people have faced unimaginable adversity throughout history. From the crusades, to pogroms, to the ghettos, to genocide, to the continued prejudice, scapegoating and violence against Jewish people, the “world’s oldest hatred” is pervasive—but we’re still here, and our resilience as a people is the reason that we are. The tragedies that we have withstood make our community and the bonds within it stronger, and it’s vital to examine the circumstances that were specific to Jewish women during the Holocaust to honor them fully.
Jewish women managed to find community in ghettos and concentration camps based on their womanhood and Jewishness and did what they could to save lives and support their peers. Their endeavors and unique experiences because of their gender are often left out of discussions about this time period, but their contributions are invaluable to the survival of many, as well as our understanding of their time in history.
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