RESILIENCE AND COURAGE: WOMEN, MEN,
AND THE HOLOCAUST
By Nechama Tec
Yale University Press, $35
Many Holocaust scholars are confronted with the limitations of writing about the event using survivor testimony. The main dilemma lies in the question of how much the stories of the "entirely unrepresentative few" (as Canadian author Michael Marrus calls them) who did survive can speak for those who perished. The overwhelming majority of victims have, as Marrus writes, "left no record of their own and will forever remain silent".
Nechama Tec's new book uses survivor testimony to tell many stories of the Holocaust. The emphasis is decisively on the interviews she herself conducted with survivors, although the spread of the oral histories and their fluctuating intensity is not always in context.
She states, rather curiously, that she uses "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" data. Yet, while it is true that the quality of data has dissipated over the years, given the shrinking fund of oral history and the vagaries of deteriorating memories, in a sense this misses the point. Her "hundreds" of interviews cannot possibly speak for 6 million victims of the Holocaust. Those who died in the ghettos or in death pits or gas chambers are there, of course, for how could they not be? But their voices are sporadic and pass through the prism of those who remain.
Tec's concern here is with gender as a factor that shapes Holocaust experience, an issue that was once only peripheral to her work. It now prompts her to write that although "the Germans were committed to sending all Jews to their deaths, for a variety of reasons women and men travelled that destination on distinct roads".
Her study investigates the transformation and influence of traditional gender roles, alongside other factors such as pre-war social status, in determining responses to Nazi terror. Survivor perceptions of gender differences are also examined, despite an initial reluctance by many respondents to discuss the issue.
Tec argues that men - predominantly those from upper-class backgrounds - became increasingly dejected as their ability to maintain traditional roles disintegrated with the imposition of Nazi rule. It was women who were better able to cope with Nazi persecution, and who became a "growing force" in the besieged Jewish community. In the first few chapters men appear, with few exceptions, in a state of psychosomatic paralysis - and "broken" is a word used repeatedly by Tec's interviewees.
Perhaps it is true, as Tec tries to persuade us in her chapter on the ghettos, that men were generally less adaptable than women to changing circumstances, but her tendency to either generalise with limited sources, or to allow one source to speak with a voice out of proportion to its influence or bearing, is problematic.
The one exception to this is the chapter on resistance, which suggests that as forest partisan groups became more structured, women receded into the background and became increasingly reliant on men. Yet even when Tec allows men to speak with strength and dignity, it is predominantly women's suffering that continues to preoccupy the author, and this is where the emotional impact of the book makes itself felt most profoundly.
The discussion of the camps is more sustained and compelling. Tec convincingly demonstrates, in this context, that both men and women derived enormous benefits from mutual co-operation and compassion within groups - a welcome alternative to the common view that in concentration camps inmates resorted to a form of primal egotism to subsist. Such misconceptions are also challenged by Tec's own history, for she is herself a child survivor of the Holocaust and her mother helped other Jews during the Nazi occupation, at great personal risk.
In fact, the image of the selfless, adaptable and courageous woman, personified by Tec's mother, is one that permeates nearly all depictions of women's behaviour and responses in the book. Men, on the other hand, are generally less resourceful and much more self-regarding than their women, leaving their wives to nurture and sacrifice while they succumb to hopelessness. The imbalance in the gender analysis is perhaps the book's greatest weakness.
There is no doubt, however, that Tec's book fills gaps in Holocaust research, for there are very few systematic, comparative studies of men's and women's responses during the Holocaust, and the book certainly provides powerful insights into the experiences of women at least. Tec is a sociologist rather than a historian, and her focus is mostly psychological. The most powerful sections of her work focus on the decisions of some of the (mainly female) victims: to have abortions in the ravaged world of the ghetto; to smother a newly born baby when its discovery could have cost many of their lives; to accompany children or elderly parents to the gas chamber rather than to live without them.
Tec also devotes an entire chapter to hiding and its concomitant decisions - but rarely could Holocaust victims hide with non-Jews. The regime spotlighted them, blunting survival instincts, rendering effete the practical power of resilience, courage, love, devotion and other positive characteristics that Tec celebrates here. So many of Tec's interviewees faced death and escaped it by miracle, skill or resource. Meanwhile, the black shadow of the murdered millions who were not so lucky hangs over the book despite its many uplifting messages. The German machinery of destruction caught millions of men, women and children off-guard, while they starved, and while they believed, as humans do, in hope despite the odds.
Tec's journey through the Holocaust involves a multiplicity of stories in one, crossing countries, conditions and time. Its strength lies in the power of personal narrative and it is, above all, a tribute to the human beings at its centre, to their multifarious, impossible experiences and, almost despite itself, to the millions who perished.
Agata Kula is at the University of Melbourne researching Jewish women in hiding in Poland during the Holocaust.
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