By Mohammedhassan Alsheraa
For International Women’s Day, Katie Chaka Parks gave a talk at the Zekelman Holocaust Center about the untold stories of women during the Holocaust and the importance of including the varied perspectives of women in history. Testimonies of the Holocaust are often told through the lens of men and their experiences, overshadowing the experiences of women. Even books about the foundational reflections on the Holocaust exclude women from the narrative. The question that Parks asks is: “Where are all the women?” She explains that so much of this question has guided a significant amount of her research and passion that she has for Holocaust Education.
Women experienced every facet of the Holocaust, from the laws that discriminated against Jewish people and kept them in the ghettos to having their abilities to reproduce forcibly taken from them. Women struggled to survive through the different means of resistance and endured the worst crimes against humanity in the concentration camps. However, some women were perpetrators of these crimes and took part of the Holocaust willingly. Parks believes that it is important not to look at history with a two-dimensional lens and to acknowledge that just as men were capable of aiding genocide, so were women.
In her talk, Parks examines four different case studies of women in the Holocaust and their different experiences to see what can be learned from their individual stories. Although learning about four specific women out of the thousands of stories out there cannot teach us everything about women’s experiences in the Holocaust, it can give us an intimate idea of the reality of genocide and its atrocities.
Ida Abraham was one of the women left behind when thirty thousand men were taken in Kristallnacht. She worked tirelessly to move her husband and brother from the concentration camps to Shanghai. She used her domestic talents of sewing to work and provide for her family and other people. Selma Van de Perre worked in the resistance movement and used her position as a woman to conduct her work for the resistance because the opposing Germans were far less suspicious of young women as they were of men. Irma Grese was a female camp guard who was notorious for being viciously brutal to the prisoners in the concentration camps. Her role in killing, torturing, and raping prisoners led historians to regard her as one of the cruelest women in all of the camp structures. This shows that women were a part of creating the culture for death and destruction and that they were integral in the Nazi killing machine just as their male counterparts were. Dr. Gisela Perl was a gynecologist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and was compelled to secretly perform abortions and infanticide to prevent pregnant women from being killed. She was forced by her circumstances to use her abilities of delivering life into the world into ending the life of fetuses in order to protect the mothers so that they may live to hopefully have children in the future after the Holocaust was over.
There are countless other stories about how women helped each other in the concentration camps and outside it, how they took care of each other and and risked their lives for each other. There are also stories about how women were actively complicit in propagating genocide and Nazi ideologies. History should not be a token nod to women. Women are an integral part of history and make up half of the story that is many times overlooked. If we leave out the stories of women, no matter how uncomfortable they may be to some people, we neglect half of the people who experienced it. Learning about the Holocaust not only teaches us about the past but helps us enact change in the present, to hopefully never experience something like this again.
This was the first in-person event that the Zekelman Holocaust Center hosted since the COVID-19 pandemic. The talk was followed by a reception and attended by around 400 people. The recording of the talk is now available at https://youtu.be/-X7eCr3Itkg
