Women in the Holocaust?

Jewish Women in the Holocaust

As we all know the Nazis field was a system that originally began as a system of repression, directed against the political opponents. During the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazi were imprisoning mainly Communists and Socialists. But what we don’t know is how where women treated in this article were going to explain how women were treated, what they went through and what were their expectations and thoughts about the Holocaust. 

At the beginnings of 1935 the regime started to imprison whoever was indicated like racial or biological inferiority, specially the Jews.

The Nazi regime treated all Jewish people the same, so the world could say that the Jewish women’s suffered as much as the Jewish men. The Nazis had a special concentration camp for women. The largest camp was Ravensbrück, which opened in May 1939.

Originally, the Nazis only recruited Jewish men but over the years, they decided that all Jewish people should be exterminated. The Jews were divided by age, class, gender and origin. Women were forced to perform humiliating tasks such cleaning streets in their   underwear and being forced to undress in front of groups of German soldiers. The difference with Jewish men’s treatment was that women suffered sexual harassment and although it was taboo for a German to have sexual relations with a Jewish in the concentration camps; rapes also became really common. 

But the most terrible thing was what Jewish pregnant women suffered during the Holocaust. They were often victims of many brutal medical experiments. One of the cruelest experiment the Nazi “doctors” did was to women who just gave birth to their babies: they taped their breast together so they won’t be able to breastfeed the babies. The purpose was to show the strength of the mother and the baby, this experiment most of the time made many children die from starving. Painful experiments were planned to try them in women and obviously pregnant women were often the first to be selected. Pregnant women or with infant kids, were selected for immediate killing or to making them suffer a lot. They were sent to the gas chambers, because they were unable to do hard slavery work.
If a woman was still in the early months of pregnancy, she might escape detection and be selected for slave labor. If somehow they managed to survive and delivered the baby secretly in the camp, the woman and the child were in risk of immediate death. That’s why many women started aborting, to avoid having themselves and the newborn babies sent to the gas chambers. 

Jewish women that lived in the holocaust were great human beings, because they had to support the humiliation, abuse, not only physical but also mental, mistreatment and worse than everything; to see their children and love ones being killed. Many of them knew what was going too happened to them. But they just kept on going, sometimes to prove to their children that everything was going to be great, after the war was over. Or maybe to trick their minds, instead of being worried about their future. 

Ultimately these women kept on dreaming that, maybe one day the nightmare would end. Unfortunately for many of them it didn’t end as they expected and just a few of them were able to finally get out of that horrific situation.

Written by: Eileen Gallagher