Saints and Martyrs: Popular Maternal Tropes in Holocaust Memoir

ABSTRACT

The present examination of idealized maternity in Holocaust literature opens by suggesting that Mark Anderson's observation about the disproportionate presence of child victims in popular representations of the Holocaust can be extended to mothers. The perceived vulnerability and innocence of women and children highlight Nazi brutality, placing the Holocaust within a reassuring narrative framework wherein the line between victims and perpetrators is unproblematic. Such a narrative has often been perceived as inappropriately sentimental and as potentially obscuring the complexity of the event. However, the present article demonstrates that in the texts it explores – Olga Lengyel's Five Chimneys (1946) and Isabella Leitner's Fragments of Isabella (1978) – the maternal ideal not only serves to illustrate the horrifying brutality of the Holocaust, but becomes an aid in the retrospective production of meaning in the face of overwhelming trauma. The article construes the deployment of the maternal paragon as a palliative device in Holocaust memoir. It also hints at the wider role motherhood assumes as a textual proxy, which facilitates the confrontation of the more challenging emotional and epistemological issues presented by the Holocaust.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• motherhood
• Holocaust memoir

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Carmelle Stephens was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Sheffield in May 2019. Her thesis explored maternity as a symbolic trope in Holocaust literature. Her main research interest concerns the evolution of the Holocaust as collective memory, with an emphasis on unconventional forms of representation. After the completion of her thesis, her research focused more specifically on how Holocaust memory is transforming under the influence of an increasingly dominant digital culture. Her current research examines the recent rise in irreverent representations of the Holocaust on the internet, postulating that some of these representations may be interpreted as potentially productive forms of memory play.

Notes

1 Mark M. Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): pp. 1–22, p. 2.

2 Last moments before the gas chamber, The Auschwitz Album, Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/images/last_moments/268_119.jpg (accessed February 12, 2020).

3 An organised act of racial violence committed by the Nazis. Most commonly referring to the execution or deportation of Jews.

4 Jewish women and children from Liepaja stand on the edge of a pit before being murdered, December 15, 1941, YVA, Photo Collection 1979/5 https://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/murderSite.asp?site_id=572

5 Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 128.

6 Joan Ringelheim, “Preface to the Study of Women and the Holocaust,” Contemporary Jewry, vol. 17, no. 1 (1996): pp. 1–2, p. 2.

7 Janet Liebman Jacobs, “Women, Genocide, and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research,” Gender and Society, vol. 18, no. 2 (April, 2004): pp. 223–38. Zoë Waxman, “Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories: The Representation of Women's Holocaust Experiences,” Women's History Review, vol. 12, no. 4 (September, 2007): pp. 661–77.

8 Richard Stracke, “Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows): The Iconography,” (2016) http://www.christianiconography.info/materDolorosa.html

9 Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), pp. 160–87.

10 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz (St. Albans: Mayflower Books, 1972).

11 Petra M. Schweitzer, Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life (London: Lexington Books, 2016), p. 103.

12 These issues are primarily described in the fifteenth chapter of Five Chimneys: “Accursed Births,” pp. 110–14.

13 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 113.

14 Zachary Braiterman, “Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory,” History and Memory, vol. 12, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2000): pp. 7–28, p. 8.

15 Sara Horowitz, “If He Knows How to Make a Child … : Memories of Birth and Baby Killing in Deferred Jewish Testimony Narratives,” in Norman J. W. Goda (ed.), Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 135–51, p. 136.

16 Esther Hertzog, “Subjugated Motherhood and the Holocaust,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 30, no. 1 (February, 2016): pp. 16–34, p. 17.

17 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 150.

18 Ibid., p. 141.

19 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 111.

20 Ibid., p. 111.

21 David Patterson, “The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul through the Murder of the Jewish Mother,” in Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (eds.), Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013): pp. 163–77, p. 172.

22 Ibid., p. 166.

23 Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Niddah, Folio 31a http://www.come-and-hear.com/niddah/niddah_31.html.

24 Patterson, “The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul,” p. 173.

25 Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), pp. 187–214, p. 191.

26 Ibid., p. 190.

27 Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” p. 173.

28 Judith Tydor Baumel, “Rachel Laments Her Children: Representation of Women in Israeli Holocaust Memorials,” Israel Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (1996): pp. 100–26 (p. 112).

29 “Weeping Women: Back to Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History,” The Guggenheim. https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/weeping-women.

30 Ilana Goor, Never Again, 1972. https://www.ilanagoormuseum.org/en/sculptures/never-again-2/

31 Sara Ruddick, “Woman of Peace: A Feminist Construction,” in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer E. Turpin (eds.), The Women and War Reader (New York: NYU Press, 1998), pp. 213–27, p. 216.

32 C. K. D. Patmore, The Angel in the House (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854).

33 Jason R. Rudy, “On Cultural Neoformalism, Spasmodic Poetry and the Victorian Ballad,” Victorian Poetry, vol. 40 (December, 2003): pp. 590–6.

34 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 17.

35 Ibid., p. 17.

36 Ibid., p. 13.

37 http://www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Basics/Confiteor.html.

38 Jewish Survivor Olga Lengyel Testimony, Part 1, USC Shoah Foundation, 17 May 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufxLw-xSEMM.

39 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 27.

40 Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 131.

41 “My Most Grievous Fault,” Catholic News Agency, 11 July 2011. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/my-most-grievous-fault-1772.

42 Oral History Interview with Isabella Leitner, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1992, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn509153.

43 Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), p. 21.

44 Ibid., p. 20.

45 Ibid., p. 1.

46 Ibid., p. 25.

47 Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 548 (November 1996): pp. 78–93, p. 80.

48 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, p. 9.

49 Ibid., p. 10.

50 Ruth Klüger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004).

51 Hertzog, “Subjugated Motherhood,” p. 16.

52 Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 11.

53 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, p. 1.

54 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3–13 (p. 5).

55 Victoria Aarons, “A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust,” in Jenni Adams (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 27–47 (p. 28).

56 Dana Mihăilescu, “Holocaust Child Survivors’ Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld's The Story of a Life,” Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 17, no. 3 (October, 2015): pp. 1–8 (p. 2).

57 Louise O. Vasvári, “Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing,” Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1 (March, 2009): pp. 1–12, p. 5.

58 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, p. 13.

59 Ibid., p. 6.

60 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 32.

61 Ibid., p. 54.

62 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, p. 79.