1

Leonard Martinez

November 21st, 2019

Dr. Toth – HST 495

Final Paper

Weathering Exodus: Defying Death Camp Expectations with Life in Sisterhood

Born and raised in Hungary, Isabella Leitner endured the Holocaust nightmare as a

healthy Jewish teen. Nurtured in a predominantly all female home, Isabella’s roots of culture

derived richly from her Jewish practice and heritage. Recording her experiences as one of many

rich memoirs in Fragments of Isabella, Isabella recounts life as a Jew through the environments

of her hometown to persecutions by the Nazis. Experiencing horrors such as losing pivotal role

models like her sisters and her mother to death or being shaved like naked monsters. Isabella is

deeply conflicted and challenged to strive to live on with major loss in her new home,

Auschwitz, the death camp. With the culture to strive and survive among Jewish people inside

Auschwitz’s barracks, the will of Isabella hits internal conflict as death seems more appealing

than the treatment endured. Isabella’s solution for an easy way out also contributes wanting to

live alone at times in isolation. Isabella’s character is rescued as she finds sisterhood, but also

realizes the agonizing thought of losing her community hurts far more than imagining her own

death. The treatment of her fellow sisters, whether by blood of friendship, was horrendous to

witness every day in forms of random selections and persecutions. Isabella states, “If you are

sisterless, you do not have the pressure, the absolute responsibility to end the day alive.”1. When

such acts were endured, Isabella describes in her memoir that there was comfort to strive for

1
Isabella Leitner, and Irving A. Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Crowell, 1978),
35.
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tomorrow when she found herself among her sisters. Not was there comfort, but Isabella

describes it as almost your duty to return alive. As a sister you were expected to return and with

such responsibility, in that specific female barrack, you carried a double life force to live.

Although much historical literature focuses on gender in the realms where male

experiences are easily categorized and examined due to the expansive amounts of data recorded

through that perspective, new information in the forms of memoirs and camp descriptions have

birthed interesting Holocaust studies worthy of revision. One argument is how Jewish men’s

experiences were not the same as Jewish women. Therefore, looking at the experiences of

females in forms of mother’s, daughters, activists, and rebels in all aspects of Nazi policy reveals

new perspective of the Holocaust experience entirely. Through these outlooks, the traditional

role of women in a household through 1933-1939 had shifted. With mass exodus and changes in

everyday life that impact the average Jewish households, women’s traditional roles are changed

to forms of survival and resistance.

As the Holocaust took shape, the Jews respectively faced mass extinction through

motivations fueled by anti-Semitism. With monstrosities of all sorts occurring during these

times, chances for survival or normal life were brim in the Jewish communities. Moreover, the

homosexual community, handicapped and mentally disabled, the Gypsies, Jehovah witnesses,

political opposition groups, and anyone who is of different color or ethnic origin of Aryan decent

all faced similar outcomes. Although such depiction seems utterly impossible to accommodate,

as history has shown, the agendas pushed fourth by the Nazi party shocked the world with mass

genocide and purifications. Making it one of the darkest eras known to mankind for those who

did survive, what was the narrative behind their story? Does the tale show the factors considered

that assisted their survival?

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Examination of numerous academic literature show that Jewish women who faced such

persecutions of their time adapted to survival and conquered adversities. Although these

hostilities come into argument when looking at gender experienced through Jewish males and

females, a debate for many years was that both sexes suffered similarly through their experiences

in the Holocaust. With the new century and more research to be analyzed, memoirs and evidence

suggest that there is half-truth in such statements. There were a variety of factors that assisted

men and women’s survival therefore showing that all Jews were affected by the Holocaust, even

Jewish children. Especially, in the greatest aspect of what assisted mass genocide, the

Concentration camps, and overall shifts in society, Dr. Anna Marie Anderson states in Jewish

Women in the Concentration Camps: Physical, Moral, and Psychological Resistance that “Jews

in the Holocaust resorted to unconventional forms of resistance to survive the attempted

annihilation of their race.”2. Dr. Anderson’s thesis searches these forms of unconventional

resistance to narrow the gender role switch and the advantages the female sex had when enduring

the Holocaust in all its realms. This thesis along with its research shows the importance of

resistance to the average Jewish woman as compared to men with expansive looks of resistance

among households, the communities, imprisonments, deportations and transports, as well as life

in various death camps.

Resistance is key to comparing such events between both sexes. Not excluding males and

their forms of combating Holocaust life but rather highlighting that in relation to speaking about

the traditional Jewish female in the time of Hitler’s regime, unconventional forms of resistance

are shown as well as impressive ways of adaptation. A major theme highlighted throughout the

2
Anderson, Anna Marie. "Jewish Women in the Concentration Camps: Physical, Moral, and Psychological
Resistance." Order No. 1523769, University of Houston, 2013.
http://login.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/docview/
1437024031?accountid=4485.
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Holocaust is the treatments endured by many peoples which shows how such treatments with its

level of inhumanity were specifically designed to break the human spirit and shatter identity. For

example, treatment of being stripped naked at death camps had a different impact for women as

compared to men as well as shaving of the heads or even rape. Resistance comes into play in the

Jewish female spectrum as women try and preserve some dignity and regain human

characteristics taken from them through Nazi treatment. With relation to old social norms and

gender roles, the old views and practices of traditional armed resistance are shifted to make

subliminal ways of resistance as well as new adaptions. Traditional household roles transform to

adaptations as Jewish men are arrested and women must fend for not only themselves but the

family economically and morally. Jewish women, through gender examination and environments

in deathcamps and societies, form resistance and adaptations in order to weather out the

nightmare of the Holocaust and keep spirits high.

Brief synopsis of this paper will encompass the sole focus of women’s forms of

adaptations and resistance for survival through the early stages Pre-Holocaust, to the shift in

societies once Nazi power became influence and women’s experiences, to the primary focus of

death camp life. Although before, the controversy of diving in such spectrum had historians

agree that gender difference studies tend to be new studies and are controversial, such

controversy is no more and research is encouraged. As much as scholars argue about women and

men’s experiences, Raul Hilberg states "The road to annihilation was marked by events that

specifically affected men as men and women as women”3. Heilberg’s thesis amplifies the

importance of looking at the separate sex experience in order to see that parts of the Holocaust

were uniquely fueled to effect males and females differently. Now scholars agree with Hilberg’s

3
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. 1st ed. (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.)
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statement and see that when we view the Holocaust (like this paper focuses on camps) through

its historical context, a healthy balance through similarities and differences in both sexes needs

to be accounted for to grasp the full experience of the Jew.

Historians such as Lawrence L. Langer are adamant about the risks of the inclusion of

women’s studies in the Holocaust and its ever-growing new studies. In his book chapter

Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies, Langer analyzes survivor testimonies

and warns that “isolating gender as a separate part of the Holocaust may lead to the favoring of

on groups suffering over another.”4 Although his statement holds some truth, when viewing

women’s experiences in survival and adaptations we are not researching to see who had an easier

or harder holocaust experience in both sexes but rather to avoid categorizing experiences as the

same. By this practice, the act of savagery the Holocaust is not diminished but rather enhanced

through separate sex experiences in all the communities affected. Langer’s thesis later loses

strength in his article as he contradicts himself by acknowledging that suffrage involved all sorts

of victims and emphasizes that there is nothing “crueler or more callous that the attempt to

dredge up from this landscape of universal destruction a mythology of comparative endurance

that awards favor to one group over another.”5 Further contradictions come as Langer focuses on

stories like one of a pregnant lady in a concentration camp and her pain in separation and murder

of her child during labor. Another is the experience a married woman had to endure after being

separated from her husband, having to fend alone and deal with losing her husband, only to be

reunited with him again after the war after much heartbreak. Such analyses by Langer focusing

on women’s stories only prove that not only is the Holocaust experience gender specific but

show that the Holocaust bears even more weight when looking through such lenses of separate
4
Lawrence L. Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies”, in Mitchell, The Holocaust, (New
York: Dushkin/McGraw Hill, 2001), 375.
5
Langer, Gendered Suffering?, 378.
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sex. For example, men did not conceive and do not know what it means to lose a child or having

to confine in your mother or sister since your husband was taken from you.

Although the narrative of Langer’s argument creates valid debates, historiography for

Jewish women’s experiences in the Holocaust became more substantial after the 1980’s till

today. Various feminist studies conducted by Marion Kaplan in her Keeping Calm and

Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939

really highlight the Jewish Women Nazi experience in Germany through their life and struggles.

Kaplan shows that not only does the study of separate sexes provide exceptional lenses for

viewing the Holocaust to emphasize the seriousness and reality of the event but gives shocking

information to view the character of Jewish woman as strong and adaptable to resistance. Kaplan

states “according to observers, women seemed more accommodating and adaptable than men

and they had fewer inhibitors.”6 Such statement shows that although Kaplan recognizes both

sexes as contributors in the experiences of the Jewish people, she observes in her thesis that

when the difficult times of testing will and adaptability to overcome obstacles in your average

Jewish family or communities, women stood out more due to their quick adaptability and

perseverance with calmness. Additionally, Kaplan goes further to speak about the gender roles

that were in place for traditional Jewish families and highlight roles reversals as a mean for not

only survival but resistance in her thesis.

Another observation in the treatment of both sexes and women’s adaptability is Myrna

Goldenberg’s “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women's Holocaust Narratives”. In her

book, Goldenberg highlights how women specifically were targeted to be broken by their

identity with proof of their treatments and savagery they endured. Goldenberg states, “Nazi
6
Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses
to Daily life in Nazi Germany”, in Mitchell, The Holocaust, (New York: Dushkin/McGraw Hill, 2001), 389.
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policy… was not gender specific, Nazi practice was”7 therefore showing that, like Kaplans thesis

and Langer’s contradictions, Goldenberg to some degree carries many similarities in her thesis

when it comes to looking into Jewish women’s experiences and agendas Nazis had towards this

gendered specific population. By analyzing camp survival in an all-women’s death camp known

as Ravensbrück and even Auschwitz (which had a heavy Jewish women’s population in its

barracks), Goldenberg investigates adaptability in relation to many other authors to be

mentioned. Daily life in camp barracks will be heavily examined to see how Jewish women

strove to survive as compared to men or other groups. Some examples of women’s adaptability

can be found in the roles of communities and sisterhood in camp barracks to combat emotional

and psychological trauma. Other means will focus on women’s daily health by improving

hygiene, nutrition, and how they combat violence8. Additionally, Goldenberg highlights how

women exploited social norms as they knew Nazi ideology treated women differently from men

due to patriarchy and racism. Such observations extend the conversation even more on the

importance of separate gender studies to analyze the Holocaust on a deeper level.

In all, when looking at deeper perspectives of the Holocaust, gender studies is not only

highly recommended, but separate gender analysis is just as important to capture the reality of

horrific acts that occurred through the lenses and hearts of those who were impacted.

Additionally, with analyzing adaptations and resistance, we see a common perspective of

traditional Jewish women in the old era challenged and shifted. In this paper it will not be argued

which gender suffered more but rather how women’s suffering shaped the way they coped with

the Holocaust. Throughout this paper, Jewish women will be analyzed on the inhumane forms of

separation and death, treatment, life in their communities, transitions, and experiences in
7
Myrna Goldenberg, From a World Beyond: Women in the Holocaust, in Mitchell, The Holocaust, (New York:
Dushkin/McGraw Hill, 2001), 365.
8
Anderson, Jewish Women in the Concentration Camps: Physical, Moral, and Psychological Resistance. 5-7.
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concentration camps, shaped their ways of adaptations and resistance during a time of heavy

oppression and anguish. Life in camps was different for each gender as they were stripped of

everything they had upon arrival and women, unlike the men, underwent different experiences

and still adapted. Doing so, survival rates were higher for Jewish women and old gender roles

were reformed. But at what cost did adaptations and resistance come to shape how identities as

wives, daughters, and ‘ladies’ were now viewed? Was such inappropriate female behavior for its

time inevitable? Why were men unable to adapt, or better yet why did men and women’s

experiences though camps and transitions in social life differ so greatly? What advantage did

women have due to gender roles that men did not in assisting with survival and resistance? Such

questions will be challenged, revised, and answered in this essay using a variety of credible

sources to show that this thesis goes beyond simple understanding and into better critical analysis

of the Holocaust through separate sex experiences observations.

Before comprehending main camp life survival and adaptations, one must understand the

extreme measures that were taken to remove Jewish women from their traditional roles in their

lives to where then ended up later in the Holocaust. In Brana Gurewitsch’s collection of female

first-person memoirs called Mother, Sister, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Survived the

Holocaust, shares Branda Small’s story through her memoir depicting life as a young engaged

Jewish girl, getting married, and having her daughter, Rose. One night as the Nazis did a sweep

in her neighborhood, Smalls had to hide herself and her child as they searched for Jews and her

husband was out working late at night. With her experience, Smalls records that numerous of

Jews were taken and since the neighborhood was occupied by Nazis, her husband was due to be

home.
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“….my husband was working for those Nazi murders. When they caught him on the street and
took him, I was left with my child. What could I do? No food, nothing for the baby. I need food
for the baby. I used to work at home braiding rags into carpets. I had to tear up old rags to
produce carpets to sell. Selling to the Nazis I had to produce three hundred yards, enough for a
ration card for soup. I shared this little bit of soup with my daughter. You can imagine what kind
of childhood a child could have at a time like this. She didn’t have much, I had no toys for her; I
played with her. I tried to give her whatever I could.”9

Branda Smalls experience, although traumatic, highlights a short snippet of the gender role

switch encountered by many women like herself when their husbands were taken away. As a Jew

following traditional customs of gender roles for a common home, her husband was the

breadwinner of while she was the stay at home wife maintaining the home and raising the

children.

Marion Kaplan speaks about such a transition in gender roles in his previously mentioned

book, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in

Nazi Germany, 1933-1939. Kaplan explains that Smalls story is not unique to her own

experience. Besides the separation from her husband, Kaplan speaks about how contributions of

women having to adapt contributed to how males and females got around in their communities.

Kaplan states females were more integrated in their communities according to their gender roles

rather than men. For example, since men were the breadwinners for a typical middle class Jewish

home, majority of the time was spent working and away from home as females did a variety of

activities (if they were not working) like in the market buying groceries or necessities,

socializing, being part of clubs to keep themselves entertained, and preparing things for when

their husbands get home10. Because of such outcomes, Kaplan explains that in his research he

9
Brana Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust, (Tuscaloosa
and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998), 87-88.
10
Kaplan, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm, 389-387.
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found that the “loss of friends and decline of sociability in the neighborhood evidently affected

Jewish women more than men since that is what they depended on in their daily lives.”11

As the Gestapo searched homes taking away the Jewish men and anti-Semitic feelings

trickled into society and influenced daily life, Kaplan further explains that Hostility grew

exponentially. with worsening living conditions for the men who had their breadwinner of the

house taken away, most of the times left with their own children, women had to adapt quickly to

“make things work” in the family.12 With morale at an all-time low in the traditional Jewish

home with the absence of the head of the household, women had to uphold an attitude of

optimism not only for their kids but for themselves to persevere. Many times with the pressures

of society in place and the Nazis taking away family business and restricting men from jobs, men

of the household drive themselves to depression as they could no longer cope. Kaplan states that

the role reversals that took place because of such absence was that “women found themselves

with new roles as the partner, breadwinner, family protector, and defender of the business or

practice.”13 Having to make ends meet on their own with their forced adaptations, we see

resistance be birthed like Branda Smalls story where women were starting to, at many time even

forcing themselves to , behave “unwomanly”.

Trying to make ends meet, such female behavior explained by Kaplan was stealing,

flirting with SS and Nazi agents, lying when interrogated, arguing and raising their voices to

Nazi soldiers, exploiting their bodies with sex to get what they want, foraging, manipulation,

negotiating and most of all, Bribery. The best example of such bribery can be observed looking

at Hannah Bannett who describes having to

11
Kaplan, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm, 388.
12
Kaplan, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm, 389.
13
Kaplan, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm, 390.