Lecture 2 - Gender perspective of the Holocaust

This second session of the Neshama project invites participants to take a step aside from more traditional approaches to teaching the Holocaust by exploring it through a gender perspective. Led by Lisa Pine, a specialist in Holocaust gender studies, the session examines how the experiences of Jewish men and women differed during the genocide, shedding light on an often overlooked dimension of Holocaust history.

Focusing on the specific case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the session provides students with a concrete framework to understand how gender shaped the realities of deportation, daily life in the camps, and chances of survival. Through historical analysis, personal testimonies, and survivor accounts, Pine highlights how women’s experiences, long underrepresented in historical narratives, offer crucial insights into the complexity of the Holocaust.

By addressing topics such as sexual violence, pregnancy, coping mechanisms, and social dynamics within the camps, alongside male experiences including forced labor units and solidarity networks, this session deepens students’ understanding of how gender functioned as a key factor in the lived experience of persecution and extermination.

Beyond its historical scope, this session also serves as an introduction to broader gender studies, encouraging students to reflect on how identity shapes individual and collective experiences of discrimination and violence.

Session date : 11/21/2025 - 11:00 am (Paris Time Zone)

LECTURE 2 : Gender perspective of the Holocaust

Led by Lisa Pine, a specialist in Holocaust gender studies, the session examines how the experiences of Jewish men and women differed during the genocide, shedding light on an often overlooked dimension of Holocaust history.

Learning objectives

By the end of the session, participants should have a clear understanding of why gender became an important category of analysis in Holocaust studies, along with the main arguments for and against a gendered approach. They should be able to identify specific experiences of women in the camps and in the face of persecution, and recognize how male testimonies and male-coded survival norms have shaped historical memory. Finally, they should be able to reflect on the value of including previously marginalized voices in Holocaust history.

Content

How has the study of gender perspective become established in Holocaust studies ? 

  1. Introduction to the gender perspective in Holocaust studies
    • How gender came to be studied in Holocaust historiography
    • The development of Holocaust studies alongside women’s studies
  2. Debates around the approach
    • Arguments against a gendered reading of the Holocaust
    • Concerns about interpretation, distortion, and historical focus
    • Why the gender perspective is now considered essential
  3. Historiographical developments
    • The pioneering work of early scholars
    • The growing importance of survivor narratives
    • The shift from a universalized view of experience to more differentiated testimonies

THE ROLE OF TESTIMONIES 

  1. Women’s and men’s voices
    • How women’s testimonies have broadened understanding of the Holocaust
    • Why male testimony should also be read as gendered rather than universal

STUDY-CASE : The gender factor in the differences in the concentration experience between Women and Men at Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

  1. Conditions at Auschwitz
    • Common camp conditions for all deportees
    • Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, violence, overcrowding, illness, and fear of selection
  2. Women’s specific experiences
    • Arrival rituals and physical appearance
    • Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth
    • Sexual violence and abuse
  3. Women’s coping and survival strategies
    • Resourcefulness, homemaking, and cleaning
    • Sharing food, exchanging memories, and creating substitute families
    • Adapting to camp life in ways shaped by gender
  4. Women behaving outside expected norms
    • Accounts of survival under extreme deprivation
    • Theft, competition, moral ambiguity, and the breakdown of social norms
  5. Sexual favours and prostitution
    • Sexual barter as a survival strategy
    • The role and impact of the brothel (Puffkommando)
  6. Pregnancy and birth
    • The fate of mothers and newborns in Auschwitz
    • The role of women doctors and impossible moral choices
  7. Male testimonies
    • Expectations of strength, autonomy, and emotional restraint
    • The importance of work and dignity in male narratives
  8. Bonds between men
    • Friendship, father-son relationships, and mutual support
    • Examples of male solidarity as a survival factor
  9. Sonderkommando narratives
    • The specific experience of men forced to work in crematoria
    • Moral ambiguity, survival, and later testimonies

 

Conclusion

  • The importance of including both women’s and men’s voices
  • How gendered analysis deepens understanding of Holocaust history

 

Lecturer : Lisa PINE

Function of the speaker : Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Lisa PINE

Lisa Pine is Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was educated at the London School of Economics and was awarded her PhD from the University of London in 1996. Her main research interests are the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. She is on the Academic Steering Committee of WHISC (Women in the Holocaust International Study Center). She is the author or editor of nine books. She has also published widely in journals and edited books on the history of gender and the Holocaust, and Holocaust memory and narratives. She is currently editing a new book Food and Food Policies in European Dictatorships for publication by Bloomsbury Academic. She is co-editor (with Peter C. Caldwell) of the book series German History in Focus (Bloomsbury Academic).