Heroines of the Holocaust

They were often the first to be killed. Some traded sex for survival. And many were the backbone of the Jewish underground resistance movement.

They were the women of the Holocaust. And educators say it’s time for their stories to be told.

“We always talk about heroes as men, and I tell [my students] we need to have female heroines,” said Bassett Elementary School teacher Sharon Baharouzi, whose Jewish cousin, a woman, was killed in an Auschwitz uprising.

Baharouzi is enrolled, along with nearly 60 other teachers from Los Angeles County, in a four-part training program titled, “Women in the Holocaust: Resistance to Perpetrators,” which began Thursday.

The program’s goal is to introduce a discussion of women in the Holocaust into curricula from elementary school through college.

Most of the teachers enrolled in the voluntary program are from public schools. The $25 class is sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

“We’re not taking away from the story of men in the Holocaust,” said Marci Meier, a coordinator of the program. “We’re simply making it more complete.”

The course deals with the period between 1933 and 1945, during the Hitler regime, when millions of Jewish men, women and children were exterminated under Nazi occupation in Europe.

The program is important because history books are still written from a male perspective, said Paul Norton, a 10th-grade teacher at La Mirada High School. He was one of the few male teachers who attended the first training session last week.

“It’s still a man’s world, unfortunately,” he said.

During last week’s session, Michael Berenbaum, a historian and author, taught that women with children were the first killed in death camps because they were seen as a burden. They were less able than men to do hard labor, so they were viewed as useless, he said.

When Jews were taken to concentration camps, some grandmothers posed as their grandchildren’s mothers. They said it would make them seem younger. Either the grandmothers believed they would be more likely to survive if they appeared younger, or they were trying to protect their daughters, Berenbaum said.

“They [may have] believed their daughters were safer without the children, because they could concentrate all of their energy on surviving,” he said.

Many women who lived through the Holocaust believed that their food was poisoned by the Nazis, causing their menstrual periods to stop. But evidence suggests there was no poison. Rather, it was the combination of malnutrition and mental and physical stress that caused their cycles to stop, Berenbaum said.

Often, women had sex with Nazis in exchange for necessities: food, clothes, even shoelaces, he said. But those who became pregnant in the camps were almost certainly killed, he said.

“In a very deep way, women were far more numerously victimized,” Berenbaum said.

Still, hope and love survived among women in the camps.

Their journals reveal not just tales of rape and suffering but also stories of friendship and compassion, Berenbaum said.

He cited the story of a Holocaust survivor whose mother gave food to her children when she was starving, telling them she was not hungry.

Women were also instrumental in the underground resistance movement, Berenbaum said. Unlike Jewish men, who were circumcised, Jewish women bore no indelible signs of their religion. If they obtained false documentation, they could often pass as non-Jewish.

Women could move more easily than men between ghettos without being discovered by Nazis. They were able to warn other Jewish families when Nazis were preparing to take them to concentration camps.

Holocaust survivor Gabriella Karin, 70, of Los Angeles was glad to hear of the course; it resonated with her own experience.

Her mother was one of the women who risked their lives to help other Jewish families, she said.

A German policeman who was a friend of Karin’s family provided her mother with lists of the Jewish families who were going to be sent to concentration camps. Her mother would travel at night to warn families that they would soon be taken away.

“She always took me with her, like a decoy, so people would not be so suspicious,” Karin said. “She would tell [Jewish] people to hide. Some [did], but nobody thought that within three to six months they wouldn’t be alive anymore.”

Karin is an artist, and most of her clay sculptures depict her experiences during the Holocaust or the bond between a mother and her child.

“[My mother] was a very strong person,” Karin said. “She always tried to help people.”

Roxanne Young, a teacher at Rancho-Starbuck Intermediate School, said women’s stories should be included to make Holocaust lessons more interesting and relevant to students, especially girls.

“We deal with a lot of issues like prejudice and tolerance,” she said. “Our school district is committed to making sure students know these things exist and making sure they understand we don’t ever want these things to happen again.”

The training session will take place Thursdays through Feb. 8. Experts specializing in the Holocaust will give presentations, and there will be interactive sessions to show teachers how to incorporate what they learn into lessons through plays, art, technology and readings. Holocaust survivors will also share their experiences with teachers.

The program is the 18th annual teacher training workshop presented by the Anti-Defamation League and the museum. For more information, call (310) 446-2000.