Visegrad Talk • Women in Concentration Camps: Memory, Trauma, Writing

Written in different times, diverse political climates, and in various countries, memoirs of female Auschwitz survivors tell a compelling story of concentration camp experiences specific to women, and allow for a reflection on what it meant to be a “woman” in a Nazi camp. This lecture will discuss selected memory-based works by women survivors focusing on expressions of gender in Holocaust-related narratives. It will also shed light on how women strove to preserve their gender roles in the camp, and how they had to overcome many cultural taboos in order to gradually develop a “clear” female voice in narratives that record traumatic memories of the Holocaust.

Bożena Karwowska is an associate professor in the Department of European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her academic interests include reader response and reception theories, feminist theories, and representations of the Holocaust. Among her four monographs and several edited volumes are Ciało, Seksualność, Obozy Zagłady (Body, Sexuality, Concentration Camps, 2009) and Druga płeć na wygnaniu (Second Sex in Exile, 2013). 

This talk is made possible by a University Studies Grant from the International Visegrad Fund.