Gender, Age, and Survival of Italian Jews in the Holocaust

Political scientists have examined the role of gender in genocide but have largely ignored the Holocaust in these analyses. Yet, the Holocaust is the largest genocide in human history and there is much we do not know about how gender affected individual experiences. Nor do we have a very precise understanding of the impact of age in survival, beyond the common wisdom that old and young people usually did not survive. Here we examine in more detail the impact of gender and age and their intersection among the nearly 7,000 Italian Jews deported to the east, mostly to Poland and mostly to their deaths. Unlike most previous work on gender that uses personal recollections as the data source, here we use individual data collected and published by Liliana Picciotto in Il Libro della Memoria. Examining survival rates and places of death, we find distinct gender and age differences and an important interaction between the two characteristics.