Girl Gets Raped by Dogs Stories

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Rape stories out of the Congo, Bosnia and Sudan became part of these disharmonize narratives
• Sexual violence during the Holocaust, though, has not been widely discussed
• It wasn't part of Nazi policy, but some say stories -- no matter how rare -- demand to exist heard
• Only the issue raises concerns amid others who'd rather leave the subject field alone

Editor'south Notation: This is the 2nd of ii stories focusing on rape equally a tool of war. The kickoff story looked at the office of interviewers of rape victims. Both stories incorporate graphic language; discretion is brash.

(CNN) -- The soldiers came for her at dark. They took the girl to a barrack and forced her to watch a woman become raped.

The drunken men so set loose a domestic dog to rip off the raped woman's breasts. Blood was everywhere. The woman passed out.

The young witness was next. 5 soldiers held her downwards and took turns raping and sodomizing her. They spilled alcohol on her. They laughed. They said they'd kill her. She didn't yet take breasts for the dog to attack.

Subsequently, her sister cleaned her up, but they didn't speak virtually what had happened. No one talked nigh such things. They didn't have to. Or maybe they couldn't.

The Congo? The former Yugoslavia? Libya? These allegations might take emerged from conflicts in any of these places.

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But this brutal testimony reaches back more than than 65 years to the Holocaust -- more than half a century before the United Nations declared rape a war crime.

Stories like this have the power to shock fifty-fifty those who think they know Holocaust history. The reason: They haven't been widely discussed.

Is that because victims didn't share these accounts? Did interviewers not inquire the right questions? Or have influences -- both inside academia and the Jewish community -- served to sweep such accounts under the historical carpet?

A growing movement wants to pare back that rug. Scholars are revisiting erstwhile testimonies and documents -- and seeking new ones. Authors have published works to inspire conversation. Psychologists want to aid survivors heal from their secrets. Activists, including feminist writer and organizer Gloria Steinem, hope these victims of the distant past can assistance shape a better time to come.

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But the topic of sexual violence during the Holocaust is fraught with controversy. Some observers believe information technology's a subject not sufficiently widespread or proven to warrant broad attending. Others fright it'south driven by a microscopic view that deflects focus from what needs to be remembered. And still others feel that by pushing the issue, it may harm survivors who've suffered enough.

What everyone tin agree on is this: When it comes to learning from those who lived through the Holocaust, time is running out.

Discussion and interruption

A spotlight on this dark subject was switched on with the tardily 2010 publication of a landmark book bearing a straightforward simply telling title, "Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust."

The interdisciplinary album touches on everything from rape, forced prostitution and sterilizations to psychological trauma, gender identity issues and depictions of violence in the arts. Co-edited by Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel, it is believed to exist the first book in English to focus exclusively on this subject.

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Hedgepeth is a professor of foreign languages and literature at Middle Tennessee Country University. Saidel is a political scientist, author, and the founder and executive director of the Remember the Women Found in New York Metropolis.

From left to right, are Rochelle Saidel, Nava Semel, Sonja Hedgepeth and Gloria Steinem in Brooklyn, New York.

These two women hope their volume volition spark serious word and exploration. But it resulted, at least in part, from an effort to continue them silent.

While running a workshop for teachers v years ago at Yad Vashem, Israel'due south official Holocaust memorial, the pair raised the subject of sexual violence against Jewish women. When Saidel -- author of the book "The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp" -- mentioned rape at that camp, a leading Holocaust scholar interrupted her.

"You can't say that. ... Where's the proof?" Saidel remembers the man saying. "He continued to echo this every fourth dimension I ran into him." Saidel declined to name him.

She and Hedgepeth had been coming together younger scholars tackling this consequence around the world, in the Usa, State of israel, Austria and Germany. They knew rape testimonies were on tape. They thought if some scholars objected to their piece of work, at that place likely were reasons they should continue.

When it comes to the Holocaust, what's acceptable for study has been "institutionalized," Hedgepeth says. "Certain topics are sanctioned and some are non."

Plumbing fixtures into a narrative

Yellowish stars. Ghettos. Cattle cars.

Concentration camps. Gas chambers. Crematoriums.

These are the images that typically come to listen when nosotros think of the Holocaust.

Of the estimated 15 million civilians murdered by the Nazi government during World War II, simply Jews were targeted for systematic extermination. This doesn't mean others -- including Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies") and homosexuals -- weren't victims, merely the "Final Solution" was devised to annihilate Jews.

By the end of the war, 6 million of them were gone -- or about ii-thirds of European Jewry and a third of the world'due south Jewish population. This is what became widely known every bit the Holocaust or, in Hebrew, the Shoah.

In the years since, fueled by the oftentimes-heard mantra "Never Again," historians have dedicated their lives to Holocaust studies. Museums and memorials sprouted upward across the globe. Documentaries and feature films about the Shoah have earned accolades. Best-selling memoirs and diaries became assigned school reading.

With all that's been learned and discussed, the caste to which sexual violence fits into the Holocaust story remains a point of contend.

To brand rape a significant role of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how oftentimes information technology happened.
--Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer

"I have no dubiousness that some women were raped," says Lawrence L. Langer, a preeminent Holocaust scholar.

Simply while rape is undoubtedly pregnant for those who are victimized, "the historical significance is very small in the context of the Holocaust experience," Langer says. "To brand rape a pregnant function of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. Nosotros will never know how frequently it happened."

Myrna Goldenberg, another scholar and author, agrees that stories of rape need to be contextualized and that their scope shouldn't be exaggerated.

"We accept to keep saying that this was still non the norm. This was not the Holocaust. It was the murder of Jews that was the Holocaust," she says. "Merely to presume the bailiwick is untouchable is wrong. Women were tortured and raped. Breasts were cut off. How do you non talk nigh that? How do yous not acknowledge that?"

Emerging voices

The path to this discussion has been paved past developments only seen with the passage of time.

Men made up the bulk of those who interviewed survivors in the get-go xl years after the war, Goldenberg says, and they may have been reluctant to raise the question of rape. Just after mass rapes during the Bosnian War of the 1990s came to lite, she says some Holocaust survivors began, when she asked them, to share their own stories -- in whispers and out of earshot from their husbands.

Other accounts surfaced over the years in writings.

Fifty-fifty if rape wasn't the norm, it shouldn't be ignored, says Holocaust scholar Myrna Goldenberg.

Diaries emerged in which soldiers and eyewitnesses documented rapes during pogroms. Details of Nazi actions confronting Jews were chronicled in books by Soviet writers -- earlier being suppressed by Joseph Stalin and rediscovered decades later on.

Included in these long-subconscious publications were tales of women being singled out to trip the light fantastic naked before being raped and murdered. Soldiers stormed homes and victimized girls in front of parents, wives in forepart of husbands. Mass graves were opened to reveal women with removed breasts.

Then, effectually the time when the world was learning near the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, the Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List" was released. Making this movie inspired director Steven Spielberg to create a foundation to get together stories of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

Now, nether the auspices of the Academy of Southern California, the USC Shoah Foundation Establish for Visual History and Educational activity houses near 52,000 video testimonies recorded in 32 languages and 56 countries.

More than i,700 testimonies include references to sexual assaults, an umbrella term that includes sexual harassment, abuse, molestation and rape, explained Crispin Brooks, curator of the institute's archive. Without revisiting each of the testimonies, Brooks said, he cannot say how many specifically mentioned rapes.

Only he was able to break down many of the testimonies to show where or how the incidents occurred. Amid them: 265 in camps, 21 during deportations, 272 in ghettos, 512 past liberators (often Soviet soldiers, he said), 12 during forced marches, 39 by those giving aid, 33 in hiding, vii in refugee camps.

Ane camp survivor spoke of a significant woman who was raped in view of others before existence tossed on a cart, never to be seen once more. Another showed scars from beatings an officeholder doled out when he took her to clean his living quarters and raped her. A tertiary saw her cousin taken away; the girl returned to the barrack haemorrhage, with a piece of staff of life clenched in her hand and a secret she'd never share.

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Against concerns

Saidel, Hedgepeth and others who share their passion know they face obstacles in bringing attention to sexual assaults during the Holocaust.

Co-editors Rochelle Saidel, left, and Sonja Hedgepeth sign copies of their book at a Brandeis University outcome.

They say some people believe that focusing on gender-specific experiences takes away from the overall human and Jewish experience. Others accept suggested that sexual violence confronting Jews wasn't a real issue because racial purity laws prohibited intercourse between Germans and Jews. And then at that place are those, they say, who are uncomfortable accepting testimonies as proof of occurrences.

Simply Saidel wants to know this: If historians are willing to look at how the Holocaust experience differed from country to country and camp to camp, why shouldn't they likewise examine how experiences differed between men and women?

As for the argument that racial purity laws protected Jewish women, she says, "That's absurd. That's like saying there are laws against rape so people don't become raped."

Such laws, she and others add, certainly didn't influence the actions of Nazi collaborators who weren't Aryan.

What this prohibition did do, they say, is prompt Nazi perpetrators to murder well-nigh victims after attacks. It too kept rape from being part of the official genocidal policy, a fact that distinguishes the Holocaust from what unfolded in places similar Rwanda, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia.

And Helene Sinnreich, a contributor to Hedgepeth and Saidel's volume, has a theory as to why testimonies aren't enough for some scholars. She is the director of the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies and associate professor of history at Ohio'south Youngstown State University.

"Some historians' reluctance to utilise victim testimony in their construction of Holocaust history may be a result of a prejudice among them to utilize only 'official documents' or to combat accusations of Holocaust deniers past existence able to demonstrate the facts through the words of the Nazis themselves," Sinnreich wrote.

'Branded by something that did not happen'

Some scholars would similar to hit the intermission button and force everyone to take a deep breath before continuing the rape conversation. Lawrence L. Langer is 1 of them.

He points out that the major camps had brothels staffed past prostitutes brought in from the outside to serve officers and guards. He also says that in death camps, women prisoners dropped to as piddling as sixty pounds and suffered from infectious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis -- and that the SS would take been careful to stay away from them.

"In the context of the Holocaust," the significance of rape is small, says Holocast scholar Lawrence Fifty. Langer.

Merely more meaning, he's been interviewing survivors for 25 years, and he says none of them have ever spoken to him well-nigh rape. He also says rape didn't come in the v years he spent screening Holocaust testimonies in Yale University'southward Fortunoff Video Annal, which at present houses about 4,000 interviews conducted as far back as 1979.

Langer doesn't purchase the argument fabricated by some that his being male might have kept women from telling him such stories. He says he hasn't straight asked the question, but he trusts survivors to share what they demand to share. He'due south heard the accounts of women who strangled their own babies, and in his mind talking nearly rape wouldn't be any more hard.

"I ever enquire, 'What'due south the worst thing that e'er happened to yous?' No 1 has ever said, 'I was raped,'" he says. "This doesn't mean no one was."

Both Langer and Myrna Goldenberg contributed to a footing-breaking book co-edited by Lenore Weitzman. "Women in the Holocaust," published in 1998, is said to be the first book of original Holocaust scholarship defended to women.

First and foremost, Weitzman shares Langer and Goldenberg's angst that people will get the wrong thought about the extent of rape during the Holocaust. She stood upwardly last month at a Washington consequence centered on the new anthology by Hedgepeth and Saidel to share her concerns.

She estimates that "less than a fraction of 1% of Jewish women" were raped, and says, "This book -- and the publicity around it -- give 1 the impression that it was common."

Just she likewise worries that this focus on rape inappropriately sexualizes and stigmatizes female survivors. She'southward interviewed hundreds of them, and she says she arrived at the Washington event having simply met with women who were upset about the attention given to this book.

Assuming rape was common "taints all women survivors," Weitzman says. "It is non that they don't desire to discuss something that was painful, it is that they do not desire to exist branded past something that did not happen -- not to them or to their sisters or to their mothers or to their daughters. The real horrors they experienced were horrible enough."

It's a 'shanda'

Like other scholars, information technology's not that Weitzman doesn't believe rape occurred on occasion: "Of course it happened," she says. "If you lot have 6 million people murdered, everything happened. Anything in the world we might imagine could happen to a person probably did."

Information technology is non that they don't want to discuss something that was painful, it is that they practise not want to exist branded... The existent horrors they experienced were horrible enough.
--Lenore Weitzman, co-editor of "Women in the Holocaust"

But is it necessary to talk about rape? Maybe women don't desire it discussed. Maybe victims, no matter how rare or prevalent they were, haven't shared their stories for a reason.

It isn't hard to imagine why a adult female raped during the Holocaust might stay silent. Irrespective of circumstances, when it comes to sexual victimization, there's fright, shame and business concern well-nigh existence blamed or viewed as "damaged goods."

In Yiddish, there's a discussion, "shanda" (pronounced shonda, like Honda) which ways shame or pity -- the sort that, if revealed, might cast one'south family or even the entire Jewish people in a bad light. Especially for older generations, it's considered a shanda to talk about certain things. Rape, molestation or sexual relations that kept women alive, whether they were forced or chosen, would be amid the stories many might say would exist better kept to oneself.

Add to this, survivor guilt: the anguish many carried of having lived while millions perished. Nonetheless alive, some might wonder, what right would a raped survivor have to mutter?

Plus, the mere championship "survivor" carries with it a weight, responsibility and expectation. It ways beingness function of a club that emerged from ashes to defy Hitler's Final Solution. What does information technology advise if one also attaches "rape victim" to the label? Isn't being a survivor already heavy enough?

Bringing back 'ghosts'

Perhaps nowhere has Holocaust soapbox been more than loaded than in State of israel.

A girl of survivors, author Nava Semel was among a generation of Jews raised past parents who didn't talk about the state of war, or fifty-fifty the years before it. They were strong, lived in a Jewish nation and were nobody's victim. They didn't look back. They rushed to learn Hebrew, then they could stop using their native tongues. They focused on edifice new families, not remembering the ones they'd lost.

"The Holocaust was part of our calendar and our collective memory, but it was never mentioned in the private sphere," Semel says from her Tel Aviv home. "Parents didn't want to share the horrific experiences. They were trying to protect their children from the threat of the by."

Semel would be in her 20s before she heard stories. She found out her female parent survived thank you to a "front whore" -- a military camp inmate in her barrack who became an SS guard's "kept woman" and thereby saved the others. As if that wasn't surprising plenty, there was a twist: The SS guard was a woman.

She fictionalized her female parent'south story in "A Hat of Glass," which Semel included in a drove of curt stories of the same name. She says this book, published 40 years after the war, represented the first Hebrew prose to focus on the experience of children of survivors -- and to use the term "second generation" to describe them. Her protagonists were all sons and daughters who sought out the truth in order to grow. It forced open up doors that were blocking conversations.

Survivors thanked her for giving them an entrée to talk. Many in her own generation, though, initially lashed out. They worried that she was "undermining the Israeli epitome," Semel says, by bringing dorsum "ghosts" from the Diaspora.

Some ghosts, though, stayed hidden in the shadows, stashed away with memories people weren't set up to confront.

Nava Semel reads from her novel, "And the Rat Laughed," which touched on sexual abuse of hidden children.

More than than 15 years after this conversation-starter came out, Semel published her novel, "And the Rat Laughed." It tells the story of a v-twelvemonth-old Jewish girl who was hidden on a Polish subcontract. In the potato pit where the family unit kept her, she was raped. Repeatedly.

But the girl grew up to exist potent, a adult female who survived her early-life horrors to become remarkable. Semel'south 2001 book, which was adapted for the stage and may soon get a flick, let survivors who had been sexually abused -- both women and men -- know theirs was a secret others had, too.

Post-obit the novel'southward publication, most a dozen survivors reached out to tell her she'd written their story.

One call came early, well-nigh 7 a.thousand. The sobs on the other end told Semel this was nevertheless another survivor.

The adult female on the line had never shared this part of her past -- not with her therapist or her hubby -- simply now allowed herself to feel. With the relief that comes from letting become, she unlocked the memory that had haunted her and was complimentary to face it.

"Memory is an evasive entity; it's threatening," Semel said. "The retentivity volition ever be a part of them. But if I can voice whatever they cannot, if I can be their corridor to liberating them, they feel -- and tin can die -- less lonely."

Stories that slip out

For more than 20 years, Paula David worked full time with Holocaust survivors equally they entered their terminal years.

The now-professor of gerontology at the University of Toronto was a social worker who coordinated Holocaust survivor groups, counseling and programs at Toronto'south Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care -- a facility she says had the largest population of Holocaust survivors living in one place.

She's made it her mission to study the impact of early-life trauma on aging.

In working with women survivors, she knew at that place were unnatural reasons why some had never been able to bear children. She surmised in that location were memories that left others cowering when they visited doctors, especially gynecologists. She realized there was a history that prompted some to lash out and hit people when they were touched.

Maybe they didn't talk about the past because they didn't take the tools, the language. Many women David worked with grew upward in shtetls, small villages, and in sheltered religious homes. Peradventure they lost their parents before they'd learned most sexuality.

For more than than two decades, Paula David was a full-time social worker for Holocaust survivors in their final years.

She congenital relationships with these women. She loved them. She didn't judge them if they told her they slept with men for food. "It wasn't sex, it was staff of life," she explains. She understood if they said they merely tolerated sexual activity with their husbands to create families. She tried not to flinch when 1 woman, who'd been saved past and fought alongside partisan soldiers, said she'd been raped multiple times every solar day for four years.

"What'southward there to say?" she remembers the woman answering dismissively, when David invited her to speak further. "You recollect they saved me because I was a Jew?"

She knew things these women didn't want their own children to know.

"I never had anyone at 85 or ninety say, 'I want to tell my kids,' " even if their kids were seventy, David says.

But as the women anile, and in some cases dementia set in, there were those who lost their power to self-conscience or to consciously choose what they shared. In the facility where she and others looked out for these survivors, she heard and saw stories of sexual violence slip through their lips, without control and in the presence of loved ones. She devised means to divert attending from what was existence said, not simply to protect the survivors only to protect those who were present and non able to become answers to their questions.

"Maybe (these women) never wanted to be sitting in a chair in a nursing habitation, giving a accident by accident of rapes they experienced -- while their grandchildren are sitting there," David says. "And it'due south so painful for a family member to hear. It'south exquisitely painful."

If survivors choose to share their stories, with clarity of listen and because it will assist them, and then wonderful. But she says they shouldn't experience pressure to open. If they prefer to accept their stories with them to the grave, so be information technology.

"How they've managed to live is by compartmentalizing," David says. "We all cocky-edit our life narratives."

Shaping the futurity

In the background a clock doesn't tick, it pounds. More than than 65 years later on World War 2, the untold stories of Holocaust survivors -- the dwindling numbers that remain -- will soon be buried forever.

Then if there are victims of sexual violence who want to talk -- to family members, therapists or in public -- now is the time.

Psychologist Eva Fogelman hopes survivors who were raped will speak upward so they tin can exist helped in their healing.

Eva Fogelman, a New York City psychologist who has worked with survivors and children of survivors for more than than thirty years, hopes for their ain sake that survivors with secrets will open up. She contributed to Hedgepeth and Saidel'southward album and says the book -- as well as the events and discussions around it -- tin can assist validate the feelings of those who were raped and offering them permission to voice their stories and seek professional help.

"They demand the validation for that particular pain and suffering ... to help them in their healing process," Fogelman says. And disallowment documentation, testimonies tin can provide "a more authentic sense of history."

Others say speaking upward or examining stories of rape during the Holocaust is not just nearly personal healing or filling out history books. And it'due south certainly non meant to take away from the overall horrors that were the Holocaust.

It is, they say, almost the greater good.

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"Mayhap we would have been better able to forestall the rapes in the former Yugoslavia and the Congo if we had not had to wait more than than 60 years to hear the truths that are anthologized in 'Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust,' " Gloria Steinem, pioneering feminist writer and organizer, wrote about the book.

Steinem stepped forward to moderate a book event this leap in Brooklyn that drew a packed audience. At the consequence were people like the Israeli author Semel, contributors to the volume and activists working on behalf of women and girls.

At one point during the evening, a Rwandan woman stood and shared publicly, for the first time, the story of her rape at fourteen.

Ane person on the panel was Jessica Neuwirth, a women's rights lawyer.

Jessica Neuwirth is amid those who believe sharing rape stories from the Holocaust may help women worldwide.

She's worked with the United Nations and served every bit an expert consultant on issues of sexual violence and rape equally a tool of genocide. She's been a policy adviser for Amnesty International and is a founder and current chair of Equality Now, an international human rights system established to end violence and bigotry against women.

Neuwirth envisions a day when Holocaust survivors volition testify in forepart of the U.North., sharing their stories alongside women and girls from unlike generations, races, lands and conflicts.

But she fears it may be too belatedly, that the victims who might have come forward are already gone. And of those who are still around, she worries such a time may never come.

"We usually have people dying to talk, and no one will listen," she says. "Now we take people dying to listen, but no one will talk."

If you have a story to share, your ain or one of a family fellow member or friend, delight email ravitz.feedback@cnn.com. Because of the book of e-mails, we may not exist able to personally reply to each i. If y'all want to annotate on the story, delight use the "soundoff" section below.

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Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/24/holocaust.rape/index.html

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