Renia could barely believe her ears. She was despondent. And terrified. Where could she go right now, at this very moment, to spend her night? At the train station, they would inspect her documents. The streets were endlessly dangerous. She knew no one else in town.
Dr. Weiss gave her some food for the road. She blessed her, tears in her eyes, and again, asked for Renia’s pardon. “I’m so sorry.”
Renia left her haven, clueless. “I just walked where my feet carried me,” she recalled.
She left the damned city and neared a sparse forest. Daylight faded to dusk once again; it was a luminous summer night. The moon sent its glow straight to her, the stars sparkled for her eyes. Renia had visions of her parents, her brothers, the comrades. She saw them as if they were right next to her, all their faces sad, distorted, altered. Suffering had left traces all over their bodies. She desperately wanted to embrace them, to turn to them and hold them to her heart, clutching with love. But the images began to dissolve, the apparitions disappeared like pictures fading on cinema screens. She could hold on to nothing.
Renia took stock of her life. “On whom did I place so many burdens? How great were my sins? How many people have I murdered? Why has all this suffering come to me?”
Suddenly she saw the image of a man between the trees. Who could it be, so late in the evening? The figure approached her. A frost ran through her bones. The man was drunk. He sat down near her. She moved away. He moved closer. His beady eyes were enlarged in their sockets like a predatory animal. He began to yell at her; the words blended together into a ball of anger, hostility, rage. Renia could not scream, nor could she run. She was nowhere, with no one to hear her. And he would just follow her, follow her and do whatever he wanted.
*
Sexual violation against Jewish women, ranging from humiliation to rape, was extant, even widespread, during the Holocaust. Though some of the earliest postwar memoirs mention sexual abuse and violence, these stories were largely silenced after the war. Interviewers for research rarely pressed the question, and information was rarely volunteered. Most victims did not know their tormentors’ names. Many women were killed after being raped; others were too ashamed to speak of it, fearing they would no longer be marriage material. Those who did raise the issue were often actively discouraged and many times not believed. They were shunned instead of comforted.
In concentration and work camps, the Nazis set up official brothels. Laws prohibited SS guards from having sexual relations with inmates, especially Jews, yet at least five hundred brothels operated in which Jewish women were “sex slaves.” Some Nazis kept personal sex slaves, particularly in the East. German camp commanders and Polish superiors molested and impregnated Jewish women; in one case, pretty Jewish women were chosen to be naked servants at a Nazi’s private feast, after which they were raped by the guests. Most were killed. One Nazi in Warsaw used to arrive at the ghetto homes of beautiful girls with a hearse—he’d rape and kill them on the spot. （A pretty teenager rubbed a paste of flour on her face to make herself less attractive.） Nazis raped women who were about to be murdered in killing fields. In the village of Ejszyszki, local Poles supplied Nazis with a list of all the pretty, unmarried Jewish women. The women were led to nearby bushes and gang-raped by Germans before being slaughtered. At a labor camp in Lublin, Jewish women of all ages were beaten, tormented, starved, and forced to work endless hours. When a work mistake was discovered, all the women from that unit were told to take off their underwear, and a Nazi lashed between their legs with a rod twenty-five times.
Sexual hierarchies existed among Jews too. In the Skarzysko-Kamienna labor camp, barefoot girls brought in from Majdanek were “objects to be purchased”; some women became “cousins” of the male camp elite and moved into barracks with them. As with the partisans, romances between middle-class Jewish girls and Jewish “cobblers” from the shtetl ensued for protection, and some even lasted after the war. In the ghettos, sex was a commodity to be traded for bread.
Chasia Bielicka related that at a camp near Grodno, Jewish girls and women whom the commandant deemed beautiful were given evening gowns and delivered to German parties. Each woman, in turn, was asked to dance with one of the men in front of all the guests. Then, at some unexpected moment, the commandant approached, pulled out his handgun and shot the woman in the head. “I only try to imagine the terror and the deathly chill that prevailed inside the ballroom dresses that clung to the women’s bodies when they were worn,” Chasia reflected decades later. “I try to understand how the women’s legs did not tremble or their knees fail as they were led to the dance floor. How their dread did not turn into a cascade of sounds that surged into the circle around the couple in motion.”