The procedure for entering concentration camps was itself sexually violating: women were pushed into shower rooms and forced to take off their clothes in front of male strangers and Nazi guards. In states of confusion and pandemonium, ripped from their children and families, smelling burning flesh, the new women prisoners were violated by SS men who made lewd remarks, commented on their shapes, poked their breasts with their crops, and let their dogs loose on them. Women’s heads were shaved and their bodily cavities were examined—including forced gynecological exams in which Germans searched naked Jewish women to make sure they hadn’t hidden jewels in their vaginas. Women were subjected to “medical” experiments ostensibly related to fertility and pregnancy. Some female SS guards engaged in sexual behavior with their boyfriends specifically in front of Jewish women while they were being forced to watch horrific beatings, tormenting those who had lost their loved ones—cruelty and debauchery linked.
Several Jewish ghetto leaders were complicit in sexual violence by providing Nazis with Jewish women in their attempts to stave off a deportation, and several women accused the ghetto heads of sexually abusing them. In one account, Rivka Glanz left work at the ?ód? Judenrat because the leader sexually harassed her; others have claimed that this megalomaniac attempted to harass them too.
Several Gentiles who protected and hid Jews sexually abused the women in hiding or required sex as payment. Schmaltzovniks could demand sex along with money, or instead of it. Anka Fischer, of the Kraków resistance, found an apartment and job on the Aryan side but was blackmailed: the greaser threatened to report that she was a Jewess if she didn’t perform sexual favors. She refused and, soon after, was arrested. Teenage girls in hiding complied with sexual orders to shield their younger sisters. Sex was the only currency they had, their only protection against murder, temporary as it was.
Finally, there was the sexual violence experienced by Jewish women on the run. Fifteen-year-old Mina Fischer decided one day she’d had enough of the ghetto. She fled from her forced-labor assignment and found herself wandering in the forest. After escaping from two farmers who had set her up to expose her, she ran farther into the woods. At night, she had nowhere to hide. Suddenly three men were upon her, gang-raping her. “I had no idea what they were doing to me, as I knew little about sex,” she recalled, “but during the terrifying assault, they actually started biting me like wild animals; they bit at my arms, bit off one of my nipples.” Mina passed out. They must have thought she was dead. But she awoke, shocked, pained, bleeding, unable to stand. Only years later, when she became pregnant and nearly died, did Mina understand the damage they’d done to her organs.
*
Despite Renia’s despair and exhaustion, despite the blackness of the forest, the young woman made sure she kept a clear head. The man inched closer and began barraging her with questions. Renia instinctively gave him foolish answers, acting like a dunce.
The whole time, she kept thinking that she could not wait. It was already one in the morning; every minute counted. She slowly began to distance herself from him, and then suddenly she launched into a sprint.
He ran after her.
With whatever energy she had left, she darted until she reached a house. She found an open door, clambered inside the building and into a dark corridor. She held her breath and crouched under the stairwell, waiting, “sitting like a chased dog.”
In the morning, Renia, tortured and weary, left for Warsaw.
Part 3
“No Border Will Stand in Their Way”
They are ready for anything and no border will stand in their way.
—Chaika Grossman, on the movement’s women, in Women in the Ghettos
Chapter 23
The Bunker and Beyond
Renia and Chajka
AUGUST 1943
To have no home. No physical abode, no spiritual shelter. No makeshift lodging, let alone bread. No family. No friends. No job, no money, no recorded identity. No country, despite your family’s thousand-year legacy. To have nothing expected of you, no one to wonder where you are. No one to know if you are even alive.