Inferiority, sexuality, and motherhood: methods and representations of female Holocaust rescuers

Katherine Joyce Patterson

The Holocaust is a well-covered topic, the subject of thousands of books and articles. Up until the last thirty years, however, the focus of most of this history has been on Jewish survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Very few works analyze the actions of Holocaust rescuers, those who hid and/or fed Jews to protect them from the death camps, and the impact of gender roles and perceptions on rescue. Because gender shapes everyday life and rescue largely consisted of daily activities such as gathering food, to ignore it would be to miss a part of the stories of both survivors and rescuers. This thesis will begin filling this gap by identifying how gender influenced the efforts of female rescuers in the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and France. In Nazi-occupied Europe, the Nazis viewed women as inherently inferior and they treated them as such. They considered women to be an inconsequential political threat, which allowed women to more easily avoid detection than their male counterparts, a quality exceptionally helpful for rescue. In addition, traditional gender roles like mother, wife, housekeeper, and cook prepared women to for the day-to-day necessities of protecting Jews. Together, the influence of vi Nazi perceptions and benefits of training from gender roles significantly affected women's ability to rescue. This thesis examines the influence of traditional gender roles and perceptions on rescue in two ways. First, it analyzes the ways in which female rescuers deliberately used their compliance with accepted gender roles and manipulated perceptions of their inferiority, motherhood, and sexuality to better rescue those in their care. Second, it explores how these roles prepared women and gave these women opportunities to rescue. It argues that at the same time these women were acting in complete contradiction with their expected roles, they recognized the advantages to rescue that assuming such a role provided. The final chapter examines the representations of women in the recent upswing in films and documentaries about rescuers, in order to analyze the influence of gender on how popular culture understands Holocaust rescue and encourage further study of gender in rescue.

Inferiority, sexuality, and motherhood: methods and representations of female Holocaust rescuers

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