Wagner College Holocaust Center (Web)
Venue: Staten Island, New York
Time: 02.-03.06.2021
Proposals by: 15.08.2020
„Nobody taught us how to fight or to perform our duties. We learned by ourselves not only how to clean and use a gun, but how to conduct ourselves in combat and battle, how to blow up a bridge or a train, how to cut communication lines and how to stand on guard.“ Sara Ginaite, partisan, March 8, 1944, International Woman’s Day.
The activities of women during the Holocaust have often been forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or intentionally distorted. Jewish women and those of all faiths fought with dignity, compassion and courage to save others from the murderous Nazi regime in over 30 nations. Often overlooked, women as well as men played critical roles in uprisings against the Nazis in over 50 ghettos, 18 forced labor camps and 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Women were critical to the Jewish underground and other resistance networks both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false papers. Women played essential roles operating educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives. In other genocides, women also faced horrendous atrocities, yet distinguished themselves with resilience and acts of moral courage. This symposium hopes to create a new narrative around agency in the Shoah and other genocides, which may inspire transformative activism today.
From the groundbreaking 1983 conference on “Women and the Holocaust” at Stern College to the 2018 symposium on “Women, the Holocaust and Genocide” at Seton Hill University, research on gender issues has grown exponentially. Innumerable books, conferences, panels, films, journal special issues, and groups such as Remember the Women Institute, now document the inspiring lives of female participants. Yet, there remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pistol or pen.
The leadership strategies, networks of defiance and testimony of better-known activists, such as … read moren and source (Web).