Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges ed. by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska

Abstract

WOMEN AND THE HOLOCAUST: NEW PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES Edited by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska. Warsaw: Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, 2015. 268 pp.Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges is result of an interdisciplinary conference carried out in Warsaw in November 2011. As organizers of conference stated, it was their intention that the 'return' to Europe of former communist countries shall neither be effected by highlighting differences nor by glossing them over, but by providing a carefully crafted corpus of studies that allows parallels between 'East' and 'West' without dismissing (national) dissimilarities. This is very important. Research on role played by gender, age, or social background in experience of camps and ghettos (as opposed to universal experience of men as quintessential experience of Holocaust) is now an autonomous, well-established field in Western Europe, Israel, and America, but as volume demonstrates, while little known to an English-language audience, advances in scholarship are also taking place in Central and East Central Europe.The volume opens with an article by Leonore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, which, by discussing authors' sequential theory of women's responses to Holocaust, provides a convincing theoretical framework for collection. By demonstrating multiplicity of femininities appearing in their readings of personal documents, Weitzman and Ofer call for research into details of individual experiences. This call finds its embodiment in following study by Bozena Karwowska, in which she uses case of what prisoners considered to be luxury objects to discuss an intersection of gender, class, and race in concentration camps personal documents.Other papers follow this lead. Among them, in a section on Filling Blanks, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel discusses intersection of age and gender in previously understudied testimonies of female survivors of Strasshof transports, which took Hungarian Jews from Hungary to Austria. In further studies, discussing impact of communist historiography on forming memory of Holocaust and gender and simultaneously introducing new sources of research, Monika Vrzgulova discusses women's testimonies from Slovak Oral History Archive, while Hedvig Turai looks at intersection of erasure of gender issues and Holocaust memories in postwar Hungary. …