Motherhood In The Holocaust

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The Holocaust is generally described as the genocide of roughly 6 million Jewish people during World War II. Some definitions include the mass murder of other groups as well including Romani gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, and more, and some numbers suggest that between 10 and 11 million civilians and POWs were murdered during this time period. It's important to understand that the genocide of Jews and others during the Holocaust didn't occur in one fell swoop. Instead, it was a process that occurred in carefully orchestrated stages, slowly leading up to the execution of the "Final Solution". It began with laws that demanded , Jewish people to be removed from the rest of the general population. These laws generally forced Jews and Romani …show more content…
Some of these intermittent themes are gender specific. It includes a focus on childbirth and motherhood during the war. During the Holocaust, liability for children placed a special burden on mothers, who struggled to maintain the family despite the genocidal pressures that made this hard. In ghettoes, the meager rations, demanding work details and wild epidemics complicated the act of mothering. In camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, mothers who arrived with small children or women who arrived pregnant were immediately sent to their death. Literature by women explores the impacts of these harsh circumstances on women’s lives and psyches. During the war years, and under the shadow of Nazism, Jewish women gave narrative form to their experiences, writing wartime diaries and journals. Diaries offer a unique perspective on the events of the Holocaust. Much more strongly than memoirs whose authors have survived Nazi atrocity and were able to supplement their subjective knowledge of the Holocaust with more expansive information, diarists convey the chaos and confusion of the time, the lack of dependable information and the hope—most regularly in vain—that the writer and her family would survive the …show more content…
Although Frank was eventually deported to Bergen Belsen, where she perished, her father later retrieved and edited his daughter’s diary, which was published posthumously. This abbreviated diary stressed the universal, rather than the Jewish, aspects of Frank’s sensibilities, omitting explicit references to antisemitism. Not until the 1990s was the diary published in its entirety. Evidence of a talented, thoughtful girl, Frank’s diary was the inspiration for plays and films depicting her life in
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