This article foregrounds the long-overlooked sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women during the Holocaust. It calls for fuller integration of survivors’ testimonies of sexual violence into our understanding of Holocaust history and prompts recognition of the ongoing reality of conflict-related sexual violence today.
The irony is that Germany, which is often hailed as a “model” country for past liquidation by providing compensation to victims of wartime forced labor through government-industry collaboration, did not even include women forced into sexual slavery in the category of victims entitled to such compensation and still does not recognize their legal victim status.
Notably, the Batavia Court Martial adjudicated a case involving the Japanese military’s exploitation of Dutch women as “Comfort Women.” This stood as the only trial that addressed perpetrators who abducted women for the purpose of forced prostitution among post-World War II war crime tribunals under international law.
This is where the validity of the questions posed by this tangible AI interactive testimony content to the viewer lies: bringing up issues again about what to ask, not what to listen to. That’s because asking well must be accompanied by the constant consideration of the questioner. This, of course, would be to restore asking within the process of listening, not a reconversion or return to asking.
Being simultaneously vulnerable, damaged, in the midst of anger, yet refusing to be consumed by that anger, courageous, and a fighter is the unique struggle of victims. Paradoxically, victims possess a special dignity in the minute possibility of becoming all of these beings at once.