Snatched from families, forced to abort, raped, exhausted and treated as a second-class population. Fighting typhus and tuberculosis. Foreign women in their own country.
The first Jewish ghettos were established in December 1939. During the occupation, hundreds of them were established in Poland, and later also in the Soviet Union. Although they were very different, they had one thing in common - compulsory segregation from the rest of the population . Women quickly began to play a significant role in their functioning:they raised funds for charity, worked in house committees negotiating evictions, and helped those in need to get food and clothes.
No more Jewish children are to be born
Jewish women who ended up in the ghetto found themselves in a particularly difficult situation. An order came from Berlin which prohibited marriage and childbearing. Hitler sought to annihilate the entire Jewish nation. Women in their third month of pregnancy were to undergo surgery . According to the Nazi ideology, Jewish children could not make any contribution to the economy, and could constitute a future for the hated nation. Abortion decisions were especially difficult for devout Jewish women, because the highest value in Jewish law is to preserve life. The women were also afraid that the procedure might end in permanent infertility.
However, not all women were aware of the prohibitions and the consequences of not following them. Some of them were also unaware of their pregnancy. Exhaustion, malnutrition and stress caused menstrual cycles to be irregular or disappearing, and women often thought they were unable or unable to observe pregnancy symptoms.
One of the gynecologists working in the ghetto recalled:
Women, without knowing it, reached the late stages of pregnancy (...) According to the ordinance of July 1942, pregnancy meant a death sentence in the Kaunas ghetto for the mother, father and infant (...). We had to start doing thousands of abortions (...)
The hospital in the Vilnius ghetto was used mainly for abortions. Some women made such decisions on their own, others were forced to do so by the police. Fear of the consequences and the most understandable reluctance to raise a child in terrible conditions meant that in some ghettos women sought trusted doctors on their own.
I had to lead three young girls to the procedure, who, after all, could pay with a disability in the next life. Especially since I couldn't provide them with anything other than the procedure itself. No convalescence conditions. But it had to be so. (...) I had to hold them by the hand and make sure they did not scream.
Births in the ghetto
Women often made dramatic decisions about carrying on pregnancies. The reasons were different - it could be related to the dream of a new life or the desire to keep the memory of the late father of the child. One of the women quoted in the book Women of the Holocaust explained:
Now (...) when I see what is going on around us, I want to have as many children as I can.
In the pages of the book, Women of the Holocaust, we can read a shocking description of the birth under the ghetto walls, which was witnessed by a 14-year-old girl at the time:
The woman is crawling on all fours. His hair is tangled, his clothes are dirty because he is dragging on the ground, his eyes are wide open, his face is contorted. Her swollen belly rests against the ground. Covered in sweat, she stops every few minutes and the animal pricks up its ears:is there danger coming from somewhere? (...) All night, curled up in a ball, exhausted, writhing with pain, she felt that she was about to give birth. It rains in the middle of the street, very close to the entrance to the ghetto, and crawls along the sidewalk so that no one runs over it. He won't get up anymore. She rolls over from side to side, the pain feels like convulsions, she twists like a snake. She is shaken by tremors and death interrupts her suffering at the same moment that a little girl comes into this world full of pain and darkness . (…)
Street trade flourished in the ghetto. The photo shows women and children at a street cigarette stand.
Children born in ghettos often starved to death in front of their mothers. Adina Blady-Szwajger explained: Children are always born. even in shelters and basements. They only die frequently and cannot be saved. One of the women who witnessed the death of her cousin's son recalls:
He lay shrunken and wrinkled in the cradle, arms and legs pressed against his body and head arched backwards, drooling and exuding the scent of death.
Sexual violence
Sexual violence against Jewish women was also a grim reality. In the book Women of the Holocaust, there are several very drastic descriptions that show these realities:
The Germans searched the men, took all the money they found, and ordered the women to strip naked (...) kept them naked for over two hours, holding revolvers to their breasts and private parts and threatening to shoot them all.
gang rapes by gendarmes in ghettos were the order of the day . Healthy and young girls were sent under the pretext of working in the kitchen or bakeries. They came back raped and infected with venereal diseases. They committed suicide very often. There have also been murders if the girls tried to defend themselves or run away. A Jewish doctor from Warsaw recalled:
You constantly hear about rapes committed against Jewish girls in Warsaw. The Germans break into the house and rape fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girls in front of their parents and relatives.
It is worth noting that not only Germans or gendarmes of various nationalities were the torturers. Jewish women also became victims of their fellows.
The realities of life in the ghetto were unimaginable. but the real nightmare was just about to come. The deportations have started…
Source:
The article is based on the book Women of the Holocaust by the Poznań Publishing House.