“Different Horrors, Same Hell”: Women and the Holocaust with Myrna Goldenberg

Your scholarship has consistently emphasized the importance of women’s voices, if we are to fully understand and witness the Shoah. In taking up the histories of women, what do we learn about the distinctiveness of their experiences of the Holocaust? How do we understand in new ways, when women’s voices are taken into account?

To begin with, both men and women were targets of the Nazis. Why would you omit half the population of a prison population if you were studying that population? Further, if you omit women, you assume that biological difference is immaterial and that all the prisoners were alike physically. Such an assumption is erroneous, especially in a population whose single major shared characteristic was its religion or that each member was born Jewish. In a population of nine million, there is no uniformity across other characteristics, for instance, cultural identity, physical attributes other than sex, language, values, intellect, artistic ability, even ancestry. For that matter, the Jewish religion was neither practiced nor valued equally or similarly among the Jewish population targeted by the Nazis.

But when we think of emblematic accounts of the Holocaust, with the exception of Anne Frank, most of the writing that we turn to was written by men, notably Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi. Their accounts are critical to understanding the Holocaust. I assign their work to my students. But they do not tell the whole story. Women experienced the Holocaust in distinctive ways. The title of my co-edited collection with Amy Shapiro (2013), Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, captures what a feminist understanding of the Holocaust seeks to do: document the different horrors that women faced in the hell that they shared with Jewish men.

For decades after World War II, the Holocaust women’s experiences were not told. And yet experiences in the Holocaust were not the same for women as they were for men. Not knowing the true nature of what they had to face, women prepared for the death camps, for instance, by organizing food, clothing and toys for children and for the household. Women in the concentration camps menstruated and gave birth. They suffered sexual violence. Women from religiously orthodox households, for whom modesty was extremely important, suffered specific kinds of humiliation in the camps, when they were stripped naked and treated maliciously.

We can begin with these facts to ask new questions. Some women were pregnant when they were deported. Did that matter in the ghetto? If so, in what ways? Did their pregnancies matter in the camps? Again, if so, in what ways? My scholarship and the contributions of other feminists has been to ask and answer these and similar questions.

Our argument is that we need to understand the full story of the Holocaust and to do that, we must include women’s realities.

Now, in 2024, we can look back on decades of scholarship about women and the Holocaust. This is very different from when I began decades ago: then, I could read everything in English that had ever been written on the topic. Research on both women and men has increased beyond expectation. This work must continue, and with special urgency. We need to honour women’s histories to remember the whole realities of the Holocaust.

Your scholarship includes a number of edited collections, among them, Before All Memory is Lost: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust. In the preface, you write, “The women whose memoirs comprise this anthology must be viewed in their particularity.” How does sharing these twenty women’s voices help us to grasp what is singular to each experience and what they might have in common, as they fought for survival?

We each deserve to be heard because our experiences are specific and distinctive. Each experience helps to illuminate what happened. Each is worthy of an audience. We learn from such particularity. All the women in Before All Memory is Lost came from eastern Europe but each experienced the Holocaust and Nazi brutality differently. Their voices are like a tapestry, each voice a thread woven into a whole. Our knowledge is richer and more authentic because we included so many individual voices. 

For these reasons, it was very important to me to ensure that each of the women’s voices comes through. The reader should hear them and hear them in their own voice. This was a challenge, because none of women spoke English as a first language. They were translated, but by people for whom English was not their first language. This meant that I had to re-translate their experiences to make them readable, always taking care to respect their own, unique ways of expressing themselves.

The women experienced loss, horror and fear and remembering was an emotional, existential experience. There is the story of one woman, Koine Schachter Rogel, who stands in a tree, for hours, one foot on top of another, “as if I were crucified.”  She is afraid that she will fall out of the tree or that someone, a Nazi soldier, in the garden will look up, and that she will be discovered. And she watched as one of her friends was discovered by a soldier and raped. She could not cry out. She could not make a sound.

I remember one survivor telling me about the experience of reliving those moments and trying to explain how visceral and intimate it felt. And she told me, “It is like reading a script from the inside of my eyelids.” Even a half century or more later, that is how intimately these experiences are relived. They are difficult stories, but sharing them and sharing the distinctive voices of each of the woman is very important, if we are going to understand the full reality of the Holocaust.