Daniel Morgan

Prof. Wertz-Orbaugh
UWRT 1102-003
10/26/2015
Weekly Writing for 10/26
This article focuses on the forced prostitution of women in the Ghettos during the
Holocaust. It starts off by discussing how the prostitutes have been brushed aside from public
view. Person cites a quote that indicates people thought it would not be proper to include the fact
the prostitutes were in the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising. She then writes about how horrible
it is to purposefully ignore objectionable experiences of the Ghettos. Even today, 70 years later
the topic is taboo to discuss, because people do not want to look at how bad the need to survive
became in the Ghettos. Instead of seeing these people as survivors of horrible events they are
written off as prostitutes, and their use of sex to survive is seen as a choice rather than their last
hope for survival. Shame and the need to portray victims a certain way kept these women silent,
erasing a large part of the real narrative of the Holocaust.
The first quotation that speaks to what I hope to reveal in my paper is: The sexual
crimes committed against the women and girls of the Warsaw ghetto were not included in the
postwar investigations. Instead, women who worked as prostitutes or entered into prostitutional
relationships were crudely tarred as collaborators and linked to those who abused them. I think
that this quotation shows how society has let its flawed perception of sexual violence go further
astray. Here we can see that the female victims of the Holocaust continued to suffer even after
being liberated from the camps. This ties into the act of victim blaming with regards to sexual
violence. Victim blaming removes some of the blame from the perpetrator of sexual violence by
stating that the victim could have done something different (i.e. dress differently, act more
assertive, etc.) to have avoided the situation entirely. In this instance I see the people recording

history looking at the prostitution and the sexual violence as choices made by these women.
These women chose prostitution to avoid death and to survive, but I have not seen choices
between death and life as real choices. Rather society and those who recorded history are saying
that these women ought to have chosen death over sacrificing their sexual purity. This is part of
intersectionality because it shows how these women suffered as women and as Holocaust
victims.
There are also quotations like: Women who were neither mothers nor fighters, but
manipulated sex for their own and their families' survival, remained an untold story of the
Holocaust. This quote shows how people kept the images of the Holocaust victims morally
clean, but that was not the case the Ghettos and camps caused in-fighting among family
members who were desperate for survival. In this case it is one or several members of families
sacrificing one aspect of themselves to try to save others from death. Their stories need to be
heard and the blame needs to be placed on the Nazis.
As will be shown further on, in the vast majority of cases women labeled by the ghetto
community as prostitutes found themselves faced with what Lawrence Langer termed a
"choiceless choice."18 What was referred to at the time as prostitution would now be defined as
sexual slavery or a form of sexual violence done by Nazis and by Jewish men in positions of
power. This quotation goes further into how the women who were called prostitutes had little
choice in the matter of their own sexualities. It also furthers the narrative of these women
suffering as more than just victims of the Holocaust because many of them suffered
circumstances unique to them as women who survived the Holocaust.
Works Cited

Person, Katarzyna. "Sexual Violence during the HolocaustThe Case of Forced Prostitution in
the Warsaw Ghetto." Shofar Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33.2 (2015):
103-21. Print.