DOne and children constituted 60-70% of people sent to the gas chambers. But The story of the Shoah has long been mainly declined to male. The surviving women chose to write and tell only after decades from their return. And only recently rethinking their experience of persecution, captivity and return to normal from a truly feminine point of view. A point of view, between women and holocausts, which also focuses on themes such as motherhood, menstruation, modesty. At the beginning of the 2000s, the historic Daniela Padoan asked to tell about three witnesses in this sense. I am Liliana Segre, interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau at 13 years of age. In Goti Bauer, who arrived in the field at the age of 17, and Giuliana Tedeschi, who arrived thirty years old. The book was born, published in 2004 and republished this year by Einaudi, Like a winter frog. The title is stolen from the poetry placed at the opening of If this is a man. And it refers to the practice of bare putting, in the extermination camps. The moment when women, humiliated and outraged, is taught to try the modesty of the body.
Women and Holocaust: cycle and sterilization, motherhood and inspections
Already the historic Anna Bravo, in a 1994 conference, highlighted how The memorial works of the deportation signed by women are no more than 20 out of 149. In the historiography of the Nazi extermination, the women remained almost invisible for a long time: their presence, date for acquired, was superimposed and flattened on the male one. From the first release of Padoan’s book, other books have been published on the specificity of the deportation and female testimony. But Like a winter frog as nobody reflects on the constitutive character of the extermination of women as generators of what the Nazi -fascist ideology considered the “unworthy breed of reproducing”.
Liliana Segre and the violated modesty
In the book it is told how, At the time of entry into the field, women were stripped, deprived of their personal effects, depilated and scattered. They suffered medical visits that included a gynecological inspection and had to dress with rags or worn uniforms. Everything happened Dthe front of SS staffexposing the prisoners also to the male looks. «In the concentration camp I felt with great strength, violated modesty, The contempt of male Nazis towards humiliated women. I absolutely don’t think men tried the same thing »says Liliana Segre, deported to the female lager of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of thirteen, in the testimony collected by Padoan.
Women in the barracks of Auschwitz in a photo taken in 1945, immediately after the liberation of the field, by a Russian photographer (Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
Women and Holocaust: motherhood and sterilizations
The deportees who presented themselves with a small son in their arms were sent directly to the gas chamber. But motherhood continually returns to the stories of survivors, such as poisoning, despair, desire. In the fields, the historic recalls, they were carried out Experiments on the reproductive system. On the one hand to understand how to induce multiple parts in the Aryan -race women. But above all to perfect i Mass methods of mass sterilization of those “not worthy of reproducing”, in the Darwinist logic of Nazism. In the notorious Block 10 of the Auschwitz field, the German doctor Carl Clauberg led several experiments to find a way of making Jewish and Roma women infonctive: The interns thus became guinea pigs.
Impossible menstruation
Chapter to himself that of menstruation, which in concentration camps had to manage as they could, without water to wash, without clean linen. Many incurred in the amenorrhea, the interruption of the cycle due to denutrition and physical deterioration. “The spoliation of femininity, the shaving, the loss of menstruationwere a path common to all women, “said Segre. “I suffered a lot for menstruation and I remember that one of the first thoughts coming into it had been: and when the menstruation will arrive as I will do?”.
He also dedicated his studies to menstruation in the concentration camps of Nazi, also historical British Jo-Ann Owusu. In an article on History Today The story of Charlotte Delbo, a French partisan, deported, survived by Auschwitz reported.
In a room full of women at the time of captivity, women chat:
«It is shocking not to have the cycle … you start feeling older. Timidly, Irene asked: “What if they never come back afterwards?” Feeling those words, a wave of horror overwhelmed us all. The Catholics became the sign of the cross, others recited the shemà (a prayer of the Jewish liturgy, editor’s note). Everyone tried to exorcise this curse to which the Germans had condemned us: infertility. How to sleep after all this? ».
Women’s body care in the extermination camps
“Women are shirts: if one is lost, they all lose themselves”: this sentence, of Giuliana Germansopens to another important theme, which is the particular form of resistance of the internees. Their stubborn desire to defend life, and also beauty, even in horror. Padoan tells of the last «fragment of margarine passed under the eyes as anti -wrinkleor the lipstick bought with the very few money received in the wandering that followed the liberation, before being able to return home ».
Padoan then underlines how “women, more than men, were immediately sent to the gas chamber”. So much so that in a mixed concentration and extermination field like Auschwitz women were not even a third. While Birkenau, the heart of extermination, was feminine. Primo Levi himself noticed it: “The fumes of the Buna stagnated in the cold air, and there was also a row of green hills of forests: e The heart has tightened to us, because we all know that Birkenau is there, that our women ended up thereand soon we will end up too: but we are not used to seeing it ».
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