Sexual abuse, sexual barter, and silence

ABSTRACT

Until recently, silence has shrouded the experience of sexual abuse of and sexual barter by Jewish adolescent boys during the Holocaust. Nate Leipciger’s memoir, The Weight of Freedom, published by the Azrieli Foundation in 2015, offers a rare window onto a phenomenon singularly absent from young Jewish males’ narratives and scholarship about their lives. This paper investigates Leipciger’s memoir closely, exploring the at once abusive and beneficial sexual relationships that Nate describes. And it reflects upon the silence — survivors’ silence and scholars’ silence — around these interactions, examining the prompts for it and shifting interpretations over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual abuse
• sexual barter
• Jewish adolescent boys
• male Holocaust victims

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On scholars’ silence, please see the article by Tommy J. Curry in this issue, “Thinking through the Silence: Theorizing the Rape of Jewish Males during the Holocaust through Survivor Testimonies.”

2 Leipciger, The Weight of Freedom, 27.

3 Ibid., 29.

4 Ibid., 31.

5 Ibid., 35.

6 Ibid., 39.

7 Ibid., 60

8 Ibid., 96–7.

9 Ibid., 91.

10 Ibid., 92.

11 Ibid., 93–4.

12 Ibid., 100.

13 Ibid., 100, 102.

14 Ibid., 92–3.

15 Ibid., 57.

16 Ibid., 93.

17 Ibid., 224–5.

18 András Garzó, oral history conducted by Debórah Dwork and Mária Ember (Magyarized form of Elsner), who translated Hungarian-English-Hungarian. Budapest, Hungary, 16 and 18 July 1987, transcript pp. 70–4.

19 Ibid., 75–8.

20 Ibid., 93.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debórah Dwork

Debórah Dwork serves as the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Graduate Center – CUNY. She is internationally renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history and the author of multiple award-winning books. Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field; she changed the academic landscape, envisioning and actualizing the first doctoral program specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. Dwork is the recipient of the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).