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Gender in the Dock: The Trial of Wiera Gran in the Postwar Polish Jewish Honor Court

Sun, December 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Amphitheater

Abstract

After World War II, survivors wanted fellow Jews who had aided the Nazis ostracized. In 1946, the Central Committee of Jews in Poland established an honor court to try Jews accused of collaboration with the Nazis before a panel of their Jewish peers. Until 1950, the honor court tried thirty-two Polish Jews, convicting eighteen, while acquitting twelve. (Two verdicts are missing from the case files.) Four defendants were women. The two who were convicted were both alleged kapos in concentration camps. (The verdict in the third case of an alleged female kapo is unknown.) The only woman tried in the honor court who wasn’t an alleged kapo was Wiera Gran (1916–2007). She was acquitted.
Gran, a cabaret performer in prewar Warsaw, was suspected of close ties with the Gestapo in the Warsaw Ghetto. During the war she was suspected of revealing the identities and locations of Jews in hiding to the Gestapo; in postwar Poland she was subjected to a whispering campaign among survivors. The legal bureau of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland indicted her “for collegial relations with . . . evident Gestapo agents.” The sexual innuendo in the indictment was buttressed by testimony for the prosecution. One male witness testified that rumor had it “[she] was the mistress” of a Jewish Gestapo informant. Insinuations that the two alleged female kapos had had sexual relations with non-Jews figured in their convictions. Gran, however, was acquitted on the grounds that the charges against her had not been proven. But in its verdict the honor court lamented that annihilation of the Jewish people was preceded by their “moral destruction,” an allusion to the breakdown of sexual mores in the ghetto.
The Holocaust didn’t alter how Polish Jews conceived a woman’s role in society. Using Gran’s trial, I argue, following Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, that the postwar honor court functioned largely to recodify the prewar moral order. Gran was acquitted; yet hers and the cases of the convicted female defendants evinced similar gender norms. This paper demonstrates, therefore, the role of gender in postwar Polish Jewry’s pursuit of internal collaborators.

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