16 Friday, April 1, 1983 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Women's Survival of the Holocaust Subject of New York Parley By AVIVA CANTOR NEW YORK (JTA) — The first conference on "Women Surviving: The Holocaust" concluded an arduous and often tense two days of eliciting testimony from survivors in an at- tempt to ferret out whatwas particularly "female" about their experiences and be- havior during that trauma- tic era, revealing both the absence and the urgency of serious research on the sub- ject. The conference, held at Stern College, here, was sponsored by the Institute for Research in History and Programs in Public_ Philos- ophy under a grant from the New York Council on the Humanities. Close to 400 people, the overwhelming number of them women and a goodly number of them survivors and survivors' children, took part in the gathering, some of them traveling there from as far away as the South, Midwest and London. Dr. Joan Miriam Ringeiheim, a Kent Fel- low at the Center for the nancy Humanities of Wesleyan University, convened the conference after finding little research on the sub- ject, or indeed interest in it by scholars in the past several years she has been studying it. The his- tory of the Holocaust, she said, was incomplete without this information. The conference format was built around blocks of questions asked of survivor panelists by moderators as well as members of the audience. The moderator's ques- tions were rooted in the premise that women had experiences in or responses to the ghettos, concentra- tion camps and resistance groups that were different from those of men. Four major issues came up repeatedly in the ques- tions directed at survivors by panelists and partici- pants: .were women less or ulnerable during the vulnerable Holocaust because they were women? What survi- val strategies specific to women did they employ? What was the nature of women's resistance? What were relationships between and among women like? There was general agreement that women were more vulnerable than men in situations where they were in- volved with minor chil- dren. Dr. Sybil Milton, ar- chivist at the Leo Baeck In- stitute and one of the few scholars to make a formal presentation, on "Issues and Resources," at the confer- ence, said that "women went to their death with children" when they underwent a selection upon arrival at a death camp. These women, she added, were not necessarily the children's mothers, but also relatives, friends or anyone standing with a child at the time. There was some dif- ference among survivors as to whether the German "purity laws," prohibiting sexual contact between Germans and Jews, pre- vented the rape of Jewish women. One survivor said the laws prevented mass rape but not "sporadic cases." bonheirn ( aivrt.) 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Business Address City Phone State Zip Survivors agreed that women were less vulner- able under certain cir- cumstances because their Jewish identity could not be easily and immediately proved, as could the men's because of circumcision. Vladka Meed, who had participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, said it was "safer" for women to g o among Poles and work as underground couriers. Vera Laska, a non-Jewish Auschwitz survivor who had served in the Czech re- sistance movement, added that women were generally not suspected of under- ground activities because of the prevailing patriarchal views of women as innocu- ous. Considerable time was devoted to exploring whether women had em- ployed specifically female survival strategies. Milton said in her presentation that women in the Warsaw Ghetto survived starvation better than men because they knew from experience about cooking, nutrition and meal planning and, un- like the men, could conserve and manage food. Several survivors amplified this with stories of how their mothers had carefully rationed out the meagre supply of bread avail- able, so it would last. Milton also pointed to housekeeping skills and emphasis on appearance as survival strategies. Women's concerns for their appearances and for keep- ing clean, she said, was a factor in spiritual resis- tance that "enabled them to maintain some part of their former personality" in the concentration camps. This, however, as one participant said privately, was also true of men. Several survivors related the importance of their mothers' "feminine wiles" in distracting Germans from looking at their papers and under other circum- stances. While most survivors seemed to view all these as- pects of women's traditional role as positive and effec- tive, survivor Mira Ham- mermish pointed to its negative side. Having left the ghetto to her mother's distress, she said, she survived be- cause "my mother's mat- ernal power did not touch me. The qualities Jewish families em- phasized could be our undoing." Obviously concerned about the focus on these strategies as a key to survi- val, several survivors em- phasized again and again that they survived through luck and luck alone. Said one: "We are remnant of a 'hurricane; we survived through chance." There were a great many questions on relations among women, and whether "female bonding" contrib- uted heavily to survival, especially in concentration camps. Susan Cernyak- Spatz, a survivor of There- sienstadt and Auschwitz, said that friendships in the camps were based on one's work commando, which shared the same bunk. "Without the close sup- port of this group, you couldn't survive," she said. Laska added: "The bonds I formed in the concentration camps will last forever." Several survivors told of being saved in the camps by their mothers and sisters. What the men's relationships were like was not discussed nor, indeed, has it been a subject of research. Survivors pointed out that in resistance groups, the strong and intense bonds of friendship were not exclusive to women, and that all friendships in these groups were close. Helen Levine, a former partisan, said, "we were all like one family; we cared for each other." Meed added that, in the absence of a family in the ghetto and under conditions of loneli- ness, "I don't know if I would have survived without this closeness. Resistance in the camps often took the form of sabot- age, which survivors said was very widespread and pervasive. Laska told of people throwing pebbles into machines to stop prod- uction; another survivor told of putting good bullets into the pile of defective ones and vice versa; a third, of destroying clothes in camp warehouses so they could not be shipped to well as members of the audience. Many of the participants in the conference appeared to seek to draw on the Holocaust for their Jewish identity or want to believe that all women were brave and kind, or both. The moderators did not ask survivors about nega- tive aspects of women's be- havior, such as women be- coming kapos, and most survivors did not volunteer such information. The only exception was at the panel on concentration camps, where -two survivors told how other women had put them in danger out of fear of collective punishment. The most crucial omis- sion at the conference was of presentations by scholars to put the sur- vivors' testimony in his- torical context. In addi- tion to Milton, the only other Holocaust scholar to address the gathering was Prof. Henry Fried- lander of Brooklyn Col- lege, who spoke about "The Camp Setting." There were no introduc- tions along similar lines to the panels on ghettos and resistance. There was a virtually total absence of Jewish cul- tural and political context as well. There was no dis- cussion of the traditional roles of European Jewish women. Germany. Very little, however, was revealed about ghetto resistance, or women's role in it, be- yond the mention that the majority of couriers were women. Some panelists expressed the view that "just living from day to day" in the ghettos con- stituted resistance. "Everyday life in the ghetto was full of sac- rifice and heroism," Meed said. This tendency to glorify women's behavior and ig- nore possible negative as- pects of it was a characteris- tic of the entire conference and seemed to infuse state- thents by many survivors as AL KLINE "See me for a heimishe deal" Tagleish CADILLAC PEUGEOT 6161 Woodward Detroit, MI 48202 Just south of the GM and Fisher Bldg. 875 -0300 PEARL SCISSORS BUCKLES UNLIMITED SPECIAL LIMIT SALE BELTS slw ea . DRESS ONLY BUCKLES sP ea . PEARL SCISSORS "THE BUCKLE LADY" BERKLEY 2240 COOLIDGE 5 Blks. 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