Motherhood During and After the Holocaust: Testimonial and Fictional Perspectives

Abstract

Hitler stated that ‘one gestating Jewish mother posed a greater threat [to Aryan purity] than any fighting man’ and claimed that ‘every child that a [Jewish] woman brings into the world is a battle [...] for the purity of race.’ These pronouncements point to the fact that the Nazis made annihilation of Jewish mothers their strategic objective. However, until recently, mainstream Holocaust historiography paid scant attention to the specificity of the mothers’ experience, instead adopting a gender neutral, not to say male-centered, position. In other words, historians – including some female ones – assumed that men and women experienced Nazi persecution in essentially the same way. Consequently, they ignored significant challenges presented by uniquely feminine experiences, such as menstruation, amenorrhea and the correlated risk of infertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. Jewish women were also exposed to enforced sterilization and abortion, and, whether in ghettos, camps, hiding or resistance groups were often victims of sexual assault. Finally, it was equally as a result of their biological role as child bearers and their socially constructed role as main child carers that Jewish women saw their survival chances drastically reduced. For instance, while in some ghettos, pregnancy was punishable with deportation, arriving in a concentration camp visibly pregnant or accompanied by small children usually meant instant death. For survivors, these experiences caused long-lasting traumas which, in the absence of a context propitious to their articulation, were particularly slow to heal. Even if the specific predicament of Jewish mothers still occupies a relatively small space in historical studies, it has found its way into literature, both testimonial and fictional. The aim of the present special issue of the Journal of Holocaust Research is to explore how mothers have been represented in narratives across languages and cultures. Offering readings of individual texts or favoring a comparative approach, the four articles collated in the present volume address a range of literary texts from a variety of perspectives. They also do so with reference to a wealth of theoretical studies concerning motherhood and, more specifically, the distinctiveness of women’s experience of Nazi persecution. The special issue opens with Carmelle Stephens’s critical examination of two testimonies that have by now achieved canonical status: Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: A Woman