Chairperson: Verena Meier
Contact: verena.meier@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
The international group of scholars and educators from Italy, Sweden, Poland, Switzerland, Romania, Israel, and Germany creates educational material for high school and undergraduate university students on the topic of “resistance of women during the Holocaust: both rebellions and metaphysical/existential resistance.” At the center are different biographies of women who were incarcerated in the female concentration camp Ravensbrück. The material addresses Antonie Maurer, a Jewish communist woman from Germany, as well as Polish Christian womenwho were political prisoners and protested against medical experiments and relied on their experience in organized resistance from outside the camp. One of them was Krystyna Czyż-Wilgat, a member of an underground scouts movement and the underground army, Union of Armed Struggle. She was arrested at the age of 17 (in 1941) and imprisoned in Ravensbrück. In 1942, she was subjected to an experimental operation.
While in the camp, she participated in clandestine education and twice protested new operations performed on the Polish political prisoners. Along with several other women, for a year and a half, she carried on a secret correspondence in invisible ink (urine) with their families in Poland to alert them about the operations and executions in the camp. Olga Blumenthal, an assistant professor of German language and literature from Venice used her scopeof action to continue teaching after anti-Jewish legislation no longer allowed her to teach at public universities in Italy.
In October 1944, and the age of 71, she was arrested by the Germans and their collaborators, taken to the Giudecca prison, and eventually deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbrück via Trieste, in the Risiera di San Sabba. The Czech writer and journalist Milena Jesenska, who was married to the Jewish intellectual Ernst Pollak and, after their divorce, had an epistolary relationship with the famous writer Franz Kafka, had a close connection to her fellow inmate of Ravensbrück Margarete Buber-Neumann. Jesenska’s letters from the camp to her family and Margarete Buber-Neumann’s biography of her friend Milena Jesenska exemplify metaphysical forms of resistance.
The topic of art and writing as resistance, as well as early testimonies of female survivors, is also dealt with by looking at the Sinti or Roma women who were incarcerated in Ravensbrück and its subcamps. The biographies of Zilly Schmidt, Philomena Franz and Ceja Stoijka further illustrate other forms of resistance inside the camp system, such as escaping. The material is created collaboratively in an international group and, for the first time, focuses on women in the Holocaust and the multifaceted ways of resisting persecution of the Nazis and their local collaborators.