Xander and Curtis

Xander and Curtis
Our little men

Friday, March 11, 2011

Women's Resistance in the Holocaust

The third session I attended was not the one I chose.  I wanted to hear from the person who had survived the Holocaust along with 100,000 others by fleeing to Shang-hi, China and living in a ghetto with the Chinese people.  However, due to popular demand and the fact that the district didn't get me approved to go until later I couldn't go to that one.
The session I went to however was very interesting.  It talked about how the gender role of women played a part in resisting the Nazis.
Germans had very strict gender rules so of course a woman would be incapable of carrying intelligence information, maps, and other supplies to various partisan groups or Allied troops who had crashed behind enemy lines.  Women were under less suspicion than men and were more free to do certain activities as a result.
Women also had the physical advantage of being smaller than men, women could hide in places where men couldn't fit and were even used as snipers on the Russian Front in the Nazi controlled areas.
We talked about a few specific women, a dancer who avoided the gas chamber by stripping for an SS man thus taking his gun while he was distracted and killing her guards.  She didn't make it far before they gunned her down.
The average Jewish woman resisted by simply keeping her family together, the Nazis separated families and put family members in different camps.  Women keeping their children, sometimes in secret, was a form of resistance.  Women were also the primary teachers of Jewish law and tradition to the young children which was another form of resistance since the Nazis were trying to wipe this out.
One woman who was not Jewish was Mrs. Schindler who repeatedly yelled at SS officers for their inhumane treatment of people and got them to change several of their policies.  This woman simply walked up to high officials of the SS and screamed at them and for whatever reasons the SS was afraid of the woman and did what she said.  They would just shoot men who tried to tell them such things in a much nicer way.
It was an interesting topic, how physical traits and social gender rules played a part in women being able to resist the Nazi regime.

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