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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the diary of Molly Applebaum to explore how scholars have interpreted the rare diaries and survivor accounts testifying to sexual violence during the Holocaust. While historians, for example, have much to learn from these primary sources, we need to be sure that we do not impose our own concerns and preoccupations. We have to also be cautious about reading into them meanings that were not there and to think very seriously about the politics of what we are doing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Chatwood, “Schillinger and the Dancer,” 61.
2 Cited in Levenkron, “Death and the Maidens,” 20.
3 On this subject see Timm, “The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence.” I am grateful to Anna Hájková for alerting me to this important article. Cf. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe.
4 See Hájková “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide.”
5 Applebaum, Buried Words.
6 Ibid., 23.
7 Ibid., 25.
8 Ibid., 26.
9 First-hand accounts of male survivors of sexual violence are even rarer. See the essay by Debórah Dwork in this special issue.
10 Ibid., 84.
11 For more on this subject, see Na’ama Shik’s essay in this issue.
12 See Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” 377.
13 Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness, 231.
14 Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” 377.
15 Applebaum, Buried Words, 30.
16 Rochelle G. Saidel, cited in Ungar-Sargon, “Can We Talk about Rape.”
17 See Waxman, “An Exceptional Genocide?”
18 See for example, Beck, Wehrmacht und Sexuelle Gewalt; Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht; and Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen.
19 Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” 29.
20 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 58.
21 Cited in Seidman, “Elie Wiesel,” 6; see Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Zoë Waxman
Zoë Waxman is lecturer in Modern Jewish History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History of the Holocaust (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide. A board member of the British Association of Holocaust Studies and the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, she also sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. She is a trustee of the Wiener Library and a member of the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust galleries.