Femininity in Concentration Camps
Ravensbrück concentration camp and sub-camps within Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen housed women prisoners during World War II. During the last year of the war, thousands of Jewish women were transferred from Ravensbrück and Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen.
Femininity within the camps was incredibly complex.
Upon arrival at the camps, Nazis attempted to strip women of their femininity. Forcing them to strip naked, subjecting them to humiliating medical examinations, shaving their bodies, and giving them shapeless uniforms to wear were only a few of the methods used.
Menstruation
"Periods impacted on the lives of female Holocaust victims in a variety of ways: for many, menstruation was linked to the shame of bleeding in public and the discomfort of dealing with it. Periods also saved some women from being sexually assaulted. Equally, amenorrhoea could be a source of anxiety: about fertility, the implications for their lives after the camps and about having children in the future" (Owusu).
While the Nazis intentionally performed unauthorized and unethical steralizations on women prisoners, perhaps an untended method of defeminization was how stress, shock, and starvation resulted in many women (especially young women) would cease menstruating. "[I]n addition to the fear of becoming infertile, the prisoners’ uncertainty over whether their fertility would return if they survived made the loss of menstruation a ‘dual psychological assault’ on female identity" (Owusu).
All of these forces combined with dramatic weight loss, particularly in the hips and breasts, caused many of the women to question their identities.
"When reflecting on her time in Auschwitz, Erna Rubinstein, a Polish Jew who was 17 when in the camps, asked in her memoir, The Survivor in Us All: Four Young Sisters in the Holocaust (1986): ‘What is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’" (Owusu).
At the same time, however, women felt shame and humiliation at getting their periods while in the camps. It was hard to avoid or hide, and there was a lack of rags and opportunities to wash.
"Trude Levi, a Jewish-Hungarian nursery teacher, then aged 20, later recalled: ‘We had no water to wash ourselves, we had no underwear. We could go nowhere. Everything was sticking to us, and for me, that was perhaps the most dehumanising thing of everything.’ Many women have talked about how menstruating with no access to supplies made them feel subhuman. It is the specific ‘dirt’ of menstruation more than any other dirt, and the fact that their menstrual blood marked them as female, that made these women feel as though they were the lowest level of humanity" (Owusu).
Still yet, periods provided moments of bonding and solidarity, and "many survivors talk with great openness about their periods" (Owusu). Young teenagers who were in camps without their families were scared when getting their first periods, unaware of what was happening to them. Older women prisoners would help them, comfort them, and teach them about menstruation.
After liberation, many of the women were able to start menstruating again. "Menstruation became a symbol of their freedom. One survivor spoke of it as ‘my womanhood returning’" (Owusu).
Women guards
Women SS guards, on the other hand, contradicted all stereotypes of femininity in the worst ways imaginable. Women were perceived to be nurturing, caring, empathetic. Women guards who were "too kind" were often dismissed from duty. The SS wanted women guards to be as cruel and heartless as the men guards, and many of them were.
One guard in particular, Irma Grese, maintained a very feminine appearance. Spending hours styling her hair, prisoners "dubbed her “the Beautiful Beast,” “the Blond Angel,” and “the Blond Angel of Hell.” She had natural blond hair, and blue eyes and wore expertly tailored uniforms. She was also fond of many rare and expensive perfumes, which she wore to torment the prisoners under her command" (Southern).
Depsite her appearance, however, Grese was remembered more for her cruelty. Her favorite objects to punish with were her heavy boots, a whip, and a pistol.
In her book, Playing for Time, Fania Fénelon, a member of Auschwitz’s women’s inmate orchestra wrote, "The women had learned to dread the penalty of her attentions, the least of which meant a whip lash on the nipple". Gisella Perl, inmate and women's doctor at Auschwitz, discusses in her book, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, how women developed infections in their breasts from these injuries, and Grese would require operations on them with an 'unsterilized knife' and no anesthesia. (Southern).
In March 1945, she was transfered to Belsen where her cruelty reached new levels. She "was known to make prisoners kneel for long periods of time. Prisoners also had to hold heavy rocks over their heads during long roll calls. They were also often forced to stand for hours in snow, ice, and rain from 3:00 am to 9:00 am. If someone did not stand up straight, she would beat the prisoner with a rubber truncheon until the prisoner was unconscious. She also greatly increased the death counts by ordering selection parades as she had in Birkenau" (Southern).
On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated the camp and arrested Grese. Although her time working at the camp was only in those last few weeks, "she was so cruel that the prisoners dubbed her 'The Beast of Belsen'" (Southern).
At the trial for her war crimes, Grese "used the typical Nazi defense that she had only been following orders and that she 'regarded the inmates of the concentration camps as subhuman rubbish and saw nothing wrong in her wartime actions'” (Southern). She was found guilty on November 17, 1945, and sentenced to death. On the morning of December 13, 1945, Grese was hanged. She spent the night before singing Nazi songs. At the age of 22, she was the youngest war criminal executed.
Empathy and survival
Much of the Holocaust scholarship argues that the camps "broke human solidarity" (Owusu). In women's camps, however, one way in which the women maintained their humanity (and, in a sense, their femininity) was to show empathy for and take care of their fellow prisoners.
At Ravensbrück, 75 women (dubbed 'rabbits') were victims of unethical medical experiments performed by camp doctors. Other women in the camp took great risks to help the women; “secretly bringing them food, water, and even medications to help them survive” (rememberravensbruck.com).
On February 4, 1945, they learned the SS were coming for them in the morning.
“Overnight, as the Rabbits stayed up writing good-bye letters, the inmates came up with a plan to grab and hide the Rabbits in the predawn hours, during roll call – and right in front of the SS. And it worked.
The Rabbits were successfully hidden that morning – and then kept hidden for nearly three months - until liberation. And the international group of inmates in Ravensbrück gave them food and water, protected them from the constant SS searches, and devised ways of getting them out of the camp. Amazingly, not one of the 63 Rabbits was ever betrayed. As one surviving “Rabbit” put it, ‘You could say that the entire camp helped us, hid us, protected us.’” (rememberravensbruck.com).
At Auschwitz, Dr. Gisella Perl was a prisoner assigned to work in the hospital. She was ordered by Dr. Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, to report any pregnant women in the camp. He stated they would be sent to another camp for proper nutrition, however, she soon learned the women “were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium” (Brozan).
Some women arrived pregnant, however, others would become pregnant in the camp as a result of rape or sexual exchanges. "Within the camps, women’s bodies and sexuality were objects that both SS officers and, sometimes, male prisoners, felt they had the right to possess and use" (Holland). Dr. Perl would warn the women that the SS would kill them, and in the middle of the night, she would perform abortions "without any tools, anesthesia, bandages or antibiotics on the dirty floors and bunks of the barracks" (Holland).
If a women happened to reach full term, Dr. Perl "would perform the births, and when requested, would silently take the breath away from newborns in order to save the mothers" (Holland).
In her autobiography, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, Dr. Perl discusses how she felt helpless without tools and medicine, so she “treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day we would have birthdays again, that one day we would sing again.”
Dr. Perl and her daughter were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. She later became a U.S. citizen where she was encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt to become a doctor again. She worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and eventually, opened up her own practice "'making it her sole mission to bring life into the world'" (Holland).
"She was in practice for 43 years, delivering approximately 3,000 healthy babies. Every time she entered the delivery room, she recounted in her autobiography, she would pray, “God, you owe me a life—a living baby” (Holland).
Recognizing the women prisoners of the concentration camps and their empathy, survival, and sacrifice for one another is evidence that, as hard as the Nazis tried, they were unsuccessful in taking away the women's humanity and femininity.