Jewish Encounters with Sexual Violence at World War II Liberation: The Case of Parschnitz in Sudetenland

• In Event: New Approaches to Gender in Holocaust Studies

Abstract

The sexual violence facing Jews in the Holocaust did not end once German perpetrators fled the sites of persecution in 1944 and 1945. This paper documents the encounter between hundreds of young Jewish women released from slave labor in the Sudetenland and the Soviet troops who arrived in May 1945 to "liberate" them. Many soldiers sexually assaulted the newly freed prisoners, and others engaged in sexual bartering. Based on survivor testimonies in the Shoah Foundation's collection, and using an approach that takes into account the context of the testimony process, the paper uncovers the range of reactions on the part of the Jewish girls and women, and their modes of resistance to this new dimension of persecution.

Author

• Janine Holc, Loyola College