Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust and Afterward

While the Holocaust is widely recognized as one of the most devastating human rights catastrophes in modern history, the sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women during this period has long remained underexamined. As Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel of Remember the Women Institute emphasizes, sexual violence was neither isolated nor unusual in the Holocaust.
There are resonances—though not equivalences—between the experiences of Jewish survivors and those of “Comfort Women” subjected to Japanese military sexual slavery. In both contexts, sexual abuse was overlooked for decades. After the war, many survivors felt shame and feared stigma, which discouraged disclosure; some worried they would be accused of “having sold” their bodies, while others were dismissed for supposedly lacking “hard evidence” of gendered war crimes.

This article also examines accounts of sexual violence associated with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. While global coverage on the conflict between Hamas and Israel has emphasized political, diplomatic, and military dimensions, the experiences of civilian victims—especially women subjected to sexual violence—have often received limited attention. Why do such atrocities against women persist, and how do they compare between the 1940s and today? With these challenging questions in view, this article calls for renewed attention to both the historicity and the ongoing relevance of wartime sexual violence.

Unearthing Unknown Stories – Sexual Violence Against Women During the Holocaust

When I began doing research about Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in the 1980s, I thought that sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust was a rare occurrence that affected only a small number of female victims. Any information I gleaned from the many interviews I did with Jewish survivors into the 1990s was minimal, almost by accident.^[1]

 In those days, interviewers seldom pressed the question, and such information was rarely offered. By now I have changed my mind completely. After decades researching and writing about this specific aspect of Holocaust history, as well as learning from victims, witnesses, documents, and other scholars, I no longer think that sexual violation was isolated or unusual. Instead, I am confident that in one form or another, to one degree or another, most women must have suffered from some form of sexual abuse during the Holocaust—from humiliation to outright rape. Just the entry process into concentration camps, requiring nudity and shaving and probing private parts, was a form of sexual abuse that all women suffered.

The sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust was virtually unexplored and shrouded in secrecy and silence for decades, even though more than 500 testimonies housed in the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education mention rape.^[2]

 These references include rape by Germans, in ghettos, in camps (including by other prisoners), by liberators, and in hiding. In addition to rape, there is another index term for “coerced sexual activities,” which brings the number of citations about sexual violence (including rape) to more than 1000.

Shame and Stigma Remain for Victim-Survivors

The most important Holocaust archives, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Israel, have eye-witness accounts that speak to the fact of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust. While both institutions recognize nowadays that Jewish women were sexually violated during the Holocaust, the information is not easily accessible or displayed. Studies about women and the Holocaust began in the 1980s,^[3]

 but the first book to address sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust was not published until 2010.^[4]

 Most often evidence is to be found in survivors’ testimonies rather than statistical hard data. By its very nature, throughout history sexual violation has not been accompanied by official documentation. In wartime, rape has always been part of the violence of enemy combatants, and this was no less true for Jewish women during the Holocaust. However, these horrors that women suffered as women were almost completely overlooked by Holocaust historians in the twentieth century. The silence was imposed both by Holocaust scholars and by survivors, and there were no DNA tests or rape kits. In a world where all-powerful Nazis and their collaborators could rape and then murder their victims with impunity, hard evidence was rarely available. Perhaps this is one reason that the fact of sexual abuse of Jewish women had at best been relegated to the edges and at worst completely left out of the history of the Holocaust for decades.

Even when included in memoirs, it is usually spoken of without detail, echoing the shame or modesty instilled in survivors when they were young women. These crimes ranged from sexual humiliation to sexual slavery, to bartering sex for food, to rape. The humiliation includes body searches, nakedness, and fondling. There was a broad range of sexually related crimes against Jewish women during the Holocaust, sometimes with variations that are ignored. For example, sexual slavery was not always in official brothels, but sometimes in the private homes of Nazi officers. Eyewitnesses have testified that beautiful young Jewish women were pulled aside on the way to killing pits to be used as sex slaves. After living for some time in the homes of Nazis serving in the East, they often became pregnant and then were taken away and murdered.^[5]

Even rape and prostitution have meanings within the Holocaust that may not be exactly the same as those we use in our everyday lives. For example, there is the question of providing sex for food. If a woman who would otherwise die of starvation allowed a man to have sex with her and then give her a life-saving piece of bread, is this prostitution? Or perhaps submitting to sex for food can be considered a form of rape, because surely the man could have given her the bread without requiring sex in return. And if a woman “volunteered” to serve as a slave laborer in a brothel to escape backbreaking outdoor slave labor that would kill her, does this make her a prostitute? Or can we consider as rapists the male prisoners, soldiers, or guards who were officially allowed to visit her one after the other?

There are accounts of rape and sexual abuse in hiding, while supposedly protected by a righteous non-Jew. Other forms of sexual abuse of Jewish women include forced sterilization or forced abortion in concentration camps, incorporated into “medical” experiments and used as an instrument of annihilation. By means of assault on their reproductive organs, those who were “not worthy of life,” as well as their progeny, were to be destroyed and forgotten.

Their Stories Coming forward

In 1995 at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professors Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman organized a seminar on women and the Holocaust, with the papers later published as Women in the Holocaust. Only one essay in the Ofer-Weitzman volume, survivor Felicja Karay's account of her time in the Skarżysko-Kamienna labor camp, has a section on “Sexual Harassment and Assault.”^[6]

Since 1999, there have been some papers that addressed sexual abuse at various scholarly conferences. Along with Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth, I organized the first conference panels dedicated to the topic in the United States (at Middle Tennessee State University, 2007) and in Israel (at the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, 2009). We have stated that we consider the disregard of Jewish women’s sexual violation during the Holocaust a form of Holocaust denial. Although the Nazis kept meticulous documents, there is virtually no Nazi documentation of rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women. (Accounts were kept for official brothels, but they did not knowingly “employ” Jewish sex slaves.) Nevertheless, there is a solid core of testimonies and memoirs by victims and witnesses that serves as evidence. As the rape victims were murdered in most cases, there can never be any hard statistical evidence about how widespread the victimization was.

The existence of laws against Rassenschande (sexual relations between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans”) in Nazi Germany prompts some historians to believe that Jewish women were not raped. This faulty reasoning would not be able to account for the persistence of rape in collaborating countries. Nazi guards could rape with impunity because their victims could not protest. Moreover, even if accused of Rassenschande, the perpetrator could simply deny his actions. The laws themselves are not specific, as they seem to be aimed at consensual sex, not rape.

Women who are raped tend to feel ashamed. This is no less true of Holocaust survivors. During survivor interviews, women often say that their friend was raped, and men are reluctant to admit that they were unable to protect their women. Sometimes women who survived the Nazis were suspected of having “sold their bodies” in order to survive and considered “damaged goods.” A survivor told me that upon arrival in Israel after the Holocaust, she was suspected of being “impure” by the family of a prospective husband. Feelings of shame have sometimes led to silence. Surviving victims or witnesses of sexual violence may choose to reveal, distort, or leave hidden aspects that are shameful, in order to cope or develop strategies for living a seemingly normal life after the Holocaust.

Remember the Women Institute and Its Activities

In 2018, I coordinated for Remember the Women Institute an international group art exhibition, VIOLATED! Women in Holocaust and Genocide, at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City.^[7]

 The exhibition illustrated that within the general Jewish population destined for extermination, women and men had different experiences. Among these differences, women suffered from sexual violation particularly designated for women. Judy Chicago expressed this early, incorporating the theme of sexual violence into Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, first exhibited in the Spertus Museum in Chicago in 1993. Our exhibition included Judy Chicago’s work, as well as artistic depictions created by victims both during and immediately after the Holocaust.

The VIOLATED! exhibition was a highlight of the nearly 28 years during which I have headed the Remember the Women Institute,^[8] a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation based in New York City. The Institute conducts and encourages research and cultural activities that contribute to including women in history, with special emphasis on the Holocaust. Through research and related activities, including the VIOLATED! exhibition and a Women, Theater, and the Holocaust project, the stories of women—from the point of view of women—are made available to be integrated into history and collective memory. The work of the Institute influences academic research and publications, as well as theater, fine arts, film, and popular culture, influencing such academic fields as History, Humanities, Holocaust Studies, Theater Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies. Remember the Women Institute has published books and organized groundbreaking panels and workshops on women and the Holocaust internationally.

For one of the books that Remember the Women Institute co-published, Holocaust survivor Judy Weiszenberg Cohen of Toronto shared her insights about sexual violence against Jewish women^[9]. Originally from Debrecen, Hungary, and now living in Toronto, she said that when women provided sex for bread or better work, “in a moral and ethical sense, it was rape.” She added that she knows two Jewish women from religious families who had liaisons with workmen in Auschwitz-Birkenau, providing sex to receive food. Sex for food trysts were likely to take place in the filthy latrines. She said there was “indescribable . . . hopeless hunger” in Auschwitz, and that “the fear of rape was always there.”

Judy Cohen provided a startling insight into survivors at the end of their lives: “The taboo in those days was so strong. . .. Women, of course, won't talk about it. I know someone who was working very closely with the aged Holocaust survivors before they died at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. I can tell you she was like the ‘Mother Confessor.’ They would tell her before they died, ‘I was raped.’ These were grandmothers and great-grandmothers. But ‘please don't tell my family,’ they added.”

Although there has been an impressive proliferation of Holocaust memorials and museums, sexual abuse has hardly been acknowledged as a theme. For example, in the Auschwitz memorial in Poland, guides discuss mass genocide, but Block 24a, the official camp brothel, is not mentioned. As Andrea Dworkin wrote:^[10]

 “If the forced prostitution of Jewish women had been documented and understood, why the erasure from the contemporary collective knowledge--and all the museums and monuments? In fact, every act of prostitution in the camps--Jewish, German, Russian, Polish, etc.--was rape; why isn't a raped woman the symbol of the Holocaust--and why isn't rape part of all the exhibits in all the museums and all the memorials?”

The October 7 Attacks and Violence Against Women

After the horrendous Hamas attack on southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, the rape of Jewish women was again negated or played down, rather than a central symbol of the atrocities. The horrific rapes and sexual assaults inflicted on Israeli women were not revealed by mainstream media in the United States, from The New York Times to The View on ABC television, for nearly two months. Most of the earlier reportage was from Israeli and other Jewish sources. The sudden interest in the United States and elsewhere was apparently the result of a special session at the United Nations on December 4, 2023, “Hear Our Voices,” organized by the Israel Mission to the UN and others. The purpose was to raise awareness and demand outcries about this sexually based violence, which can be defined as a war crime.

At the session in the UN, eyewitnesses testified, including Chief Superintendent Yael Reichart, from the Israel Police’s Lahav 433 unit. She shared graphic parts of testimonies collected during the unit’s investigation into sexual violence, describing girls and young women without clothing, people butchered and beheaded, and women and girls with broken pelvises because of repeated rapes. Shari Mendes, whose military reserve duty involves identifying female soldiers’ bodies and preparing them for burial, recounted the horrors she and her colleagues dealt with at the Shura army base, where dead bodies from the massacre were brought. She said that the atrocities included genital mutilation, cut off genitals and breasts, and decapitation. Other speakers included Sheryl Sandberg, who has since made one of several films about the atrocities. There was strong criticism for women’s groups that had not spoken out or whose statements had been late and tepid.

Just as the Jewish women murdered during the Holocaust could not testify, neither could those who were slaughtered on October 7, 2023. However, times are different, victimhood is less shameful, visuals are readily available, and survivors and hostages who have returned are beginning to provide information. On October 7, 2023, anyone watching television could see that one captured woman had been raped. She was thrown into a Hamas vehicle before our eyes and taken hostage to Gaza wearing blood-stained sweatpants. As of February 2025, she was released from captivity. I know her name, but I prefer not to state it without her permission. As I write this, I am waiting for her account to be made public. A raped woman might be the best symbol for an October 7 memorial, as well as a Holocaust memorial.