Nazi Ghettos Research Articles

Women’s Experiences of Life Force Atrocities in the Baltic Ghettos, 1941–1944

Abstract This article focuses on Jewish women in the Nazi ghettos of German-occupied Latvia and Lithuania. It uses testimonies and memoirs of survivors to develop a narrative about life force atrocities at these sites, highlighting ways in which being a Jewish woman shaped the experience of the ghettos, where gendered risks were ubiquitous. Being a woman in the ghettos meant being both exploited and undervalued as a source of physical labor, targeted as a potential or actual bearer of children, and violated as an object of racist and sexist ideology and rage. Life force atrocities have physical and symbolic dimensions, targeting bodies, bonds, and norms of the community. This work considers what women’s accounts tell us about the presence – or ubiquity – of life force atrocities in the Baltic ghettos. It draws on the concepts of the universe of obligation and social death to highlight key roots and consequences of these atrocities for women. In testimonies and memoirs, we encounter themes of pregnancy, forced abortion, the wrenching loss of loved ones, sexual violence, and decisions made in the desperate hope of saving oneself or another. Survivor accounts are key to revealing life force atrocities as defining features of the Nazi ghettos, and the gendered risks faced by women prisoners in Nazi-occupied Riga, Daugavpils, and Kaunas.

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in <i>The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories</i>

Svenja Bethke, Dance on the Razor’s Edge:Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos [Gabriel N. Finder

Svenja Bethke, Dance on the Razor’s Edge:Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos [Gabriel N. Finder

The Aleksander Kulisiewicz Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: An Introduction

Envisioned by its founders as a storehouse of historical evidence — material artifacts, written and oral testimonies, photographs and films — the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC is the repository of a significant archive of music salvaged from the Nazi ghettos and camps. This paper focuses on the Museum’s single largest music collection, that of the Polish camp survivor Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918—1982). A native of Kraków, Poland, who spent over five years as a political prisoner in Sachsenhausen, Kulisiewicz in later life grew obsessed with documenting the repertoire that his fellow Poles and an international cadre of musicians, authors, and artistes created and performed while captives of the Germans. The collection he amassed during his final decades consists of hundreds of songs, choral works and instrumental pieces gathered from survivor memoirs, manuscripts, and multiple recorded interviews with former inmates. Approximately 70,000 pages of documentation encompass music-related artworks, biographical details of camp poets and composers, and copious additional corroborating material. Apart from providing an overview of the collection, the paper will discuss Kulisiewicz’s cultural and intellectual background in interwar Poland, and postwar career as a performer, activist and author. Music illustrations will be drawn from Kulisiewicz’s archive of sound recordings, including selections from his own series of autobiographical songs written in Sachsenhausen. A final set of musical examples demonstrates the collection’s utility as a resource for musicians and programmers seeking overlooked, yet revivable repertoire, and for composers inspired to create new works based on “rescued” music preserved in the Museum’s archive.

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 264 pp, ISBN 978-0295746548. In the path-breaking book School Photos in Liquid Time, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer provide a novel study of school photographs. Unlike family photo albums and archived photographic records, school photographs have received minimal scholarly interest (p. 26). To this end, the book is commended for offering a full-length study devoted to school photos and for directing academic attention to a genre of vernacular photography that has received only a paucity of scholarly and historical investigation. The book offers a sustained focus on school photos taken in 'times of extremity' (p. 16), for example, of Jewish children in Nazi ghettos, and black children during the colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Significantly, for this group of school photos, Hirsch and Spitzer develop a '"liquid" and multitemporal reading' (p. 13) that seeks to underscore how the meaning of photographs can develop 'in unforeseen directions when they are viewed and re-viewed by different people in different presents. In "liquid time" they are not fixed into static permanence; rather, they remain dynamic, unfixed, as they acquire new meanings, in new circumstances' (p. 13).

Jewish Spaces? Defining Nazi Ghettos Then and Now

Abstract During World War II, the Germans set up some 350 ghettos for Jews in Generalgouvernement Poland alone. In doing so, they defined ‘Jewish living quarters’ quite different from what was previously the case. Although initially not part of an extermination plan, they later became gathering centers prior to deportation and genocide. This article discusses how Nazi perceptions and classifications of ghettos changed over time. This is then contrasted with historians’ findings and the discourse on Nazi ghettos after 2002. At that time, German government officials, judges, and Holocaust survivors disputed interpretations because it was relevant for newly introduced German pensions for labor in ghettos. With government and pension funds unwilling to make any payments, historical research became crucial—and controversial as it supported a much more generous understanding of the law. All these definitions of ghettos meet with the memory of Eastern European Jews only coincidentally. For the latter, a specific labelling hardly mattered as much as it did for those analyzing history or dealing with its financial consequences. The concept of Jewish spaces will help one understand these proceedings, as it aims at the difference between mere geographical Jewish places and spaces in which Jewish activities are or were actually performed. In this respect, Nazi ghettos truly are Jewish spaces without Jews.

Shaping and reshaping memory: the Łódź Ghetto photographs

This article raises questions about the ways that photographs from the Łódź Ghetto have been variously interpreted and contextualized over the years so as to reinforce received — and problematic — paradigms and narratives of Holocaust memory. It considers a subset of photographs taken by three individuals variously positioned vis-à-vis the ghetto and Nazi authorities: the two Jewish professionals, Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who shot both official and clandestine images, as they worked within and beyond Łódź’s singular Judenrat-sanctioned archive, and the Austrian amateur, the Nazi accountant Walter Genewein, who was apparently building a self-promoting portfolio. After the war, these images appeared and reappeared in memorial albums, academic publications, and even a novel — The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald — as well as in documentary films, notably Alan Adelson’s Łódź Ghetto and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator. In taking as its central focus how, and with what preconceptions and assumptions, these scholars, writers, and filmmakers “frame” the Łódź Ghetto photographs, this piece contributes to scholarship on visual Holocaust representation as it pertains specifically to the Nazi ghettos.

Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered

When Sonia Zalesskaia returned from summer camp to her family in Minsk in June 1941, she found her mother incapable of caring for herself and four children--Sonia, Tsilia, Abram, and Roza: She had a nervous breakdown when the Germans came; she was completely indifferent, paralyzed. When we had to move to the ghetto, I had to organize everything. I was the oldest sister. When they moved us to the ghetto, Mother did not know what was going on.... I found a peasant who drove our belongings to the ghetto on his cart. I figured I had to give him something, so I gave him our sewing machine and some fabric. That meant we had nothing left to trade with. (1) Zalesskaia gives a sense of the multiple dimensions of breakdown that Soviet Jews experienced when German troops occupied the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) and, within a few weeks, established a segregated residential district for Jews surrounded by barbed wire. Zalesskaia also highlights the role of age and gender for the subsequent period of violence, displacement, and starvation. Many adults were paralyzed by the speedy invasion and regime of terror-as were the Soviet authorities; many were arrested or immediately killed. Adolescents often found themselves in charge of supplying whole families with food and other necessities. In the Minsk ghetto, Soviet Jewish adolescents thus faced profound scarcity and violence alongside the breakdown of familiar relationships of support and care. The narratives of child survivors of the Nazi genocide in the German-occupied USSR help us better understand the distinct features of ghettos in the area that were killing sites rather than transitional spaces of internment. Their accounts draw special attention to the diversity of experience of the Nazi genocide, to how age and gender determined the ways in which people lived under conditions of violence and displacement. Among the 800,000 Belorussian Jews killed by Germans and their collaborators were parents, grandparents, and other relatives of thousands of young Jews who thus became orphans and struggled for survival on their own. (2) This situation, however, often goes unacknowledged in studies of the Nazi ghettos, the so-called Jewish districts established by the German Wehrmacht or occupation administrations in Nazi-occupied countries. Deborah Dwork's 1991 study is the only significant monograph focusing specifically on the lives of children and adolescents in the Nazi ghettos, but it omits ghettos in the occupied Soviet Union. (3) Leonid Smilovitskii is one of the few who devote a chapter-length study to children in Belorussian ghettos. (4) Yet age did matter for everyday life within the ghetto. Adolescents were the most vulnerable group in the Nazi ghettos, suffering unduly from hunger, violence, and the psychological impact of terror. They were also highly mobile within the ghetto and able to maintain relationships with peers and adults--such as classmates and teachers-outside the ghetto, suggesting that they were an especially resourceful group. Gender was an additional factor that affected individual survival strategies under German occupation. Specific skills resulting from gendered socialization, access to various forms of employment due to ascribed gender roles, or vulnerability to forms of sexualized violence determined how Soviet Jewish youths were able to respond to discrimination and violence, how they accessed food and related to people in positions of power. War, terror, and pogroms often destroyed familial bonds, putting children and adolescents in the positions of guardians or breadwinners for remaining parents, grandparents, and siblings. Everyday life in the ghetto thus redefined roles that children as well as women and men took on within families. The ways in which these distinct groups were able to fulfill their tasks largely depended on their age; youths over the age of 14 (male) and 16 (female) were considered employable and thus had access to daily food rations, meager as they were, but younger ones had to find other means of subsistence. …

Nazi Ghettos and Concentration Camps: The Benefits and Pitfalls of an Encyclopedic Approach

Nazi Ghettos and Concentration Camps: The Benefits and Pitfalls of an Encyclopedic Approach

Ghetto Pensions

Under the Nazi regime, tens of thousands of Jews lived in ghettos, working more or less normal jobs. Some of these ghettos had their own employment centers, and some employers even paid into retirements funds. Legislation known as “German Pensions for Work in Ghettos,” or by its German acronym, ZRBG (Gesetz zur Zahlbarmachung von Renten aus Beschäftigungen in einem Ghetto) was passed in 2002 to grant pensions to some of these former laborers. But more than ten years after its passage, its implementation is still subject to considerable conflict. For many years, former laborers in Nazi ghettos have been fighting to get the pension that this law ostensibly guarantees them, but the vast majority of their applications have been rejected. Since 2002, around 70,000 survivors have invoked the ZRBG. However, over ninety percent of these applications were initially rejected by German authorities for various legal and practical reasons. This essay is an attempt to summarize the major steps in the implementation of the law. It begins with an overview of the historical background, and then will shift focus to the judicial, diplomatic, political, and practical problems with the implementation of the ZRBG.

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (review)

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (review)

Book Review: Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Book Review: Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

THE existence of music in the Holocaust seems incongruous. Is it not incomprehensible that music, commonly regarded as the most sublime expression of the human spirit, could function in an atmosphere of mass murder and destruction, and even play an active role? Yet musical activity flourished in the ghettos and in the camps, initiated officially by the Nazis and clandestinely by their victims. Shirli Gilbert offers the first detailed, scholarly account in English of the role of music among the communities imprisoned under Nazism, and, as she clarifies in her Introduction, she focuses not just on the Jewish plight, but also on the non-Jewish victims. The book documents the wide scope of activities in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, ranging from institutionalised music-making—orchestras, choirs, theatres and chamber groups—to a wide range of informal and spontaneous music-making by inmates and the creation of a large number of songs and pieces. On a deeper level, the book is a social history using music as an accessible medium to study the lives of individuals and communities. As Gilbert states: ‘Music opens a unique window onto the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time’.

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (review)

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. By Shirli Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xxii, 243 p. ISBN 0-927797-4. $45.] Index, bibliography, appendix, music examples, illustrations. When one takes into consideration the weight of testimony and analysis of events pertaining to the Nazi attempt to obliterate European Jewry during the Holocaust it comes as a surprise to find that Shirli Gilbert's Music in the Holocaust is one of the few available works in English that attempts to discuss and analyze the role of music in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. Much of the available literature deals with music and musical personages in two widely different concentration camps, Auschwitz, which primarily functioned as an extermination center with subcamps designed for forced labor, and Terezin (Theresienstadt), which functioned as a holding center but whose active cultural life was permitted by the Nazis for public relations purposes. With the exception of these two areas, researchers working in the field of music and its use in ghettos and concentration camps need to access diverse sources in order to obtain information. I hoped that this volume would present a consolidation of information, and many of my hopes have been realized. However, the title is perhaps a bit misleading as the actual content of the book is more restricted than the title would lead one to believe. Gilbert divides the book into four main sections, each illuminating the multiple layers of function that music filled within the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. Appendices list tides of newly created songs in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, the contents of German political prisoners' songbooks in Sachsenhausen, newly created Polish songs in Sachsenhausen, the repertoire of the Orchestra in Sachsenhausen, and newly created songs in Auschwiu. There is also an extensive bibliography. As is clear from Gilbert's material, even though there were commonalities, each situation, be it ghetto or concentration camp, had its own unique issues, pertaining not only to artistic personages, but also to historical contexts and the actions of political leaders such as Jacob Gens in Vilna and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz. For example much music from the Warsaw ghetto arose under horrific conditions, not the least of which was the confinement of over 400,000 people in a minute portion of the city. There was great social stratification resulting in profoundly startling levels of inequality as people from many strata of society were brought in and confined. In contrast to this situation the ghetto in Vilna was relatively underpopulated with only about 20,000 individuals confined. However, their confinement was preceded by the indiscriminate murder of two thirds of the Jews of that city and as a result the level of anxiety and insecurity there must have exceeded that initially found in Warsaw. Gilbert provides substantial information which illustrates how the individual social stratification found within the ghettos resulted in different types of music making, ranging from orchestral, chamber, theater, cafe music, and house concerts to street songs (some of which were sung for the purpose of begging for food, while others expressed anger at the social discrepancy within the ghetto and still others voiced criticism of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council). A final type of song, those of resistance, came from members of partisan organizations. In some ghettos these were in direct conflict with the policy of the selfgoverning Jewish councils who thought that passive acquiescence and participation in labor useful to the Germans was the best option for survival. Information is quite detailed at times. For example the orchestra in the Warsaw ghetto performed approximately forty times between November 1940 and April 1942 with a repertoire that included works by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Grieg, Borodin and Saint-Saens (even though regulations proscribed the performances of such 'Aryan' composers, p. …

Shirli Gilbert.Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps.:Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps.(Oxford Historical Monographs.)

Shirli Gilbert.<i>Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps.</i>:Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps.<i>(Oxford Historical Monographs.)</i>

Music in the Holocaust: confronting life in the Nazi ghettos and camps

Reveals the role of music in Nazi concentration camps Examines orchestras, choirs, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, amongst others Shows how music contributes to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time. Contents Introduction: Redeeming Music--'Spiritual Resistance' and Beyond 1. 'Have compassion, Jewish hearts': Music in the Warsaw Ghetto 2. Vilna: Politicians and Partisans 3. Songs Confront the Past: Life in the Sachsenhausen 4. Fragments of Humanity: Music in Auschwitz Epilogue Appendix: Repertoire Listings

Women, Evil, and Grey Zones

Gray zones, which develop wherever oppression is severe and lasting, are inhabited by victims of evil who become complicit in perpetrating on others the evils that threaten to engulf themselves. Women, who have inhabited many gray zones, present challenges for feminist theorists, who have long struggled with how resistance is possible under coercive institutions. Building on Primo Levi's reflections on the gray zone in Nazi death camps and ghettos, this essay argues that resistance is sometimes possible, although outsiders are rarely, if ever, in a position to judge when. It also raises questions about the adequacy of ordinary moral concepts to mark the distinctions that would be helpful for thinking about how to respond in a gray zone.

Yiddish Writing in the Nazi Ghettos and the Art of the Incommensurate

Yiddish Writing in the Nazi Ghettos and the Art of the Incommensurate