Abstract:

While there has been a plethora of analysis on diverse subjects within Holocaust studies,
there remains some reluctance to engage with women’s unique experiences,
which were largely subsumed under those of men in the decades following World War II.
This article examines how women’s specific experiences, both biological and social, are often denied
or suppressed in research and literature on the Holocaust, even in survivors’ own testimonies,
despite the fact that these are often clearly gendered experiences.
By revisiting key themes from the testimonies of female survivors,
such gendered analyses contribute to a fuller picture of the unprecedented
and relentless killing that the Final Solution’s anti-Semitism entailed.
Nicole Ephgrave
Journal of Women’s History Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 28, Number 2, Summer 2016 pp. 12-32
10.1353/jowh.2016.0014

Those who had ordered what had happened at Auschwitz and many of those who had actually perpetrated the crimes considered themselves to be free. They did it on their own will.
Their freedom was intact!
And they had chosen, freely, not only to diminish the liberty of other people but to actually defile them…

Individual freedom is something which depends, largely, on each of us. On how each of us ‘digests’ their previous experiences and chooses to operationalize what they have learned.
Social freedom, on the other hand, depends on how we, as a group/community, aggregate our individual choices.

In this sense, the latter one, freedom becomes a space.
A place – THE place, actually – where each of us can put in practice our own individually free choices.

Now, places have rules.
Each place being defined by the rules governing that place. Some of those rules are specific for each space while others come from the ‘previous’ spaces.
For example, we – humans – are both animals and something ‘higher’. As such, we ‘obey’ both the rules governing the biological realm and the laws of each of the countries we happen to live in.
One of the most fundamental rules evident to man is “no good deed goes unpunished”. Otherwise known as the law of the consequence. “Do not be deceived… A man reaps as he sows” Gal 6:7

Everything we do leaves a trace. Influences the future. Creates karma.
How we, each of us, chooses to exert their freedom creates the circumstances in which we, and our children, will have to exercise theirs. Their freedom!
The manner in which the ‘free nazi’ had chosen to exert their freedom – to kill other people – has shaped the future of Europe. And of much of that of the world!

The manner in which we choose to ‘digest’, to interpret, what had happened shapes our future.

Which brings us back to ‘dehumanization’.

Many of us consider that the victims have been dehumanized. Made less human.
Had their humanness obliterated!
By the abusers. By those who had abused both their freedom and their power!
By those who had transformed other humans into victims….

I beg you to reconsider this:
Who had undergone the process of dehumanization?
The victims or the bullies?!?

We, as free thinkers, have the ability to poke fun at whatever happens to us.
To relativize our experiences.
Hence ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. When the utmost importance of the subject begged for a way more formal wording…
Poking fun at things we cannot control is a survival gimmick. By doing this we can, individually, survive in dire circumstances. Specially in situations where our inner values are questioned. When we have to quell what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When we are forced – by ‘external factors’ – to do something we would not have done in ‘normal’ circumstances.

In this sense we can better understand the process of dehumanization.
The defiler actually needs to dehumanize the victim. To consider the victim something else but a human being. Otherwise, the defiler would no longer be able to defile the victim.
But what happens when a human being does not recognize (some of) their fellow humans as being their peers?

Who ceases to be human?