Anna Hájková

Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto

Conditions in the transit ghetto of Theresienstadt, which existed between 1941 and 1945, generated a system in which female sexual and social favors were deliberately traded for food, protection, and symbolic capital within the inmates’ society. Scholars analyzing the sexuality of Holocaust victims have so far only focused on sexual violence (including forced prostitution) or romantic relationships. Love and sexuality have been understood as either a refuge mechanism or a form of oppression. Using Theresienstadt as a case study, this essay calls a third form into focus: consensual sexual barter. Based on extensive archival material, this study examines the wide range of exchanges: many of the interactions did not include sex acts but rather sexualized or social favors. Suggesting the concept of sexual barter rather than the narrow definition of prostitution points to changes in social practices and patterns: commodification of sexuality and relationships, and sexualization of the ghetto economy. Analyzing bartered sexuality identifies gender values as well as social hierarchies in the ghetto society. Moreover, the findings reveal the gendered character of power mechanisms and the underlying structures of the prisoners’ society. Close examination of sexual barter in Theresienstadt highlights the communication within and status of various national groups of Jews from central and western Europe as well as generational segments. Finally, this article discusses the importance of the postwar sexualized narratives.

Medicine in Theresienstadt

Illness was a defining experience for prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and ghettos, and yet their medical history is missing; a startling lacuna, given the extensive research into medicine and the Holocaust. This article studies the medical staff, patients, and diseases in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In examining medical care in extremis, it studies how the Central European Jewish doctors succeeded in providing comparably excellent health care for the inmates. The article studies the mentality, experience, and the gendered power mechanisms that characterized the medical staff, the agency of the doctors, as well as the hierarchies they assigned to patients. Finally, in exploring how the prisoner physicians made sense of Theresienstadt as a part of their medical career, I show what kind of historical protagonists are doctors.

Forum: Holocaust and the History of Gender and Sexuality

Historians of sexuality in the Holocaust go where most fear to tread: Lisa Heineman called the intersection ‘doubly unspeakable’. Why is it important to explore the history of sexuality in the Holocaust and what are the methodological, ethical and political issues at stake? In this Forum, five historians of gender, sexuality, Nazism and the Holocaust discuss what the field of Holocaust history gains from integrating sexuality and gender as analytical categories. By connecting Holocaust studies to the history of sexuality, the field gains, as we will argue, new theoretical insights, recognizing power hierarchies and societal shifts. As the scholarship moves to examining gender and sexuality in the Holocaust beyond a sole (if understandable) focus on sexual violence, topics like agency, love and prostitution, same sex desire and memory and subjectivity of both the perpetrators and victims come to the fore. What are we allowed to research? Why do we consider so many topics connected to mass violence and sexuality as taboo? How are we to make sense of them? The history of sexuality and gender not only introduces new topics to Holocaust studies; it also offers, more importantly, new perspectives on familiar themes.

Biedermeier Desk in Seattle: The Veit Simon Children, Class, and the Transnational in Holocaust History

Abstract This study offers a transnational history of the Holocaust based on a study of a well-known Berlin Jewish family, the Veit Simons. The authors use this tangled family history as a point of departure for a transnational history of the Holocaust. In particular, they show how to read the links connecting the protagonists to the wider world as a means of writing transnational history. Their history also shows the interconnectedness of perpetrators and victims. Moreover, they demonstrate the importance of the category of class for our understanding of the experience of Holocaust history. While the Veit Simons could hold off some of the persecution, eventually the Holocaust brought them to the ground, resulting in a story of illness, death and loss. Finally, the authors read the story from a feminist angle, offering an examination of the interplay of gender, class and persecution, examining how gender played out in coping while losing one’s former class.

To Terezín and back again : Czech Jews and their bonds of belonging from deportations to the postwar

What was Jewish belonging in Central Europe, and how was it influenced by the Holocaust? This article examines the ways in which Czech Jews negotiated their bonds with Jewishness immediately before, during and after the Second World War. Building on a theoretical framework of affiliation developed by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, the essay portrays the differentiation among the Czech Jews in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto. Much of the ideological differences between the groups of Czech Jews were informed by access to resources and also emotional ties which played a key role in the menacing environment surrounding them. Rather than producing common Jewishness, Terezín generated differences. In the immediate postwar, ties to Jewishness were arbitrary and often accidental, only rarely corresponding with ones previous affinities. The article argues that group belonging is situational and contingent on the social space.