Beyond Survival: Navigating Women's Personal Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Holocaust

During the Holocaust and the subsequent process of what has become known as liberation, women constantly confronted convergent oppressive forces. Under the Nazi regime and its cohorts as well as during the liberation process, Jews faced torture and genocide. Jewish women constantly lived with an additional layer of oppression: threatened or actual sexual violence. Positioned at the vortex of intersecting oppressions, how can the identities of these women transcend their stature as victims? How do women creatively reposition themselves vis-a-vis the perpetrators and the traumatic events so they can maintain or reclaim their agency and dignity? Centering on narrative analysis of first-person testimony gleaned from memoirs and from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA), this investigation covers four narratively sustained modes of comportment toward sexual violence. First, mutual aid demonstrates an ethic of care. Second, degrading or minimizing the perpetrator or the sexual act retains the narrator's dignity. The final two angles offer complementary ways to avoid or repel assault: distracting an assailant by directing him toward more attractive targets, and rendering oneself repellent. Departing from the prevailing approach of treating Holocaust survivor testimonies primarily as responses to trauma, this project reveals how the narrators actively craft their identities through the storytelling process. This creative molding of identity through narrative, a process called autopoeisis, recasts survivors of these and other traumas as dynamically (re) negotiating their understanding of self and their relationship to lived experiences. Trauma stories thereby further tikkun olam-repair of a fractured world.