The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust. Janine P Holc

The eponymous weavers of Trautenau were a group of approximately three thousand Polish Jewish girls and women, ranging from eleven to twenty years old, who were “recruited” by the Nazis to work at giant looms in factories in the Sudetenland (present-day Czech Republic). They became part of the Schmelt system, a forced labor system staffed by SS and Gestapo, and organized by Himmler. Because their labor was essential to the production of military-grade thread from flax, they were fed enough to survive and work. Because their imprisonment, which ended in May 1945, was not followed by a death march, these forced laborers survived in larger numbers than is usual for those who experienced the Holocaust. In turn, six hundred of them gave testimony, many to the USC Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, about their experiences, their hopes and dreams, and the peril that arrived with Soviet soldiers at the end of the war.

Dr. Janine P. Holc, professor of political science at Loyola University, Maryland, has created a remarkable history from these video testimonies, material from fourteen archives, extensive scholarly research, and consultation with other Holocaust scholars. “My hope is that this book brings the experiences of these girls and women into the historical record. I remain in awe of their tenacity, self-awareness, and simply their choice to speak when being filmed,” Holc states in her acknowledgments (p. xiii). Indeed, Holc has accomplished this ambitious goal.

Serious study of women’s experiences in the Holocaust was viewed with skepticism until the 1990s with the appearance of groundbreaking work by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, Marion Kaplan, Carol Rittner, Myrna Goldenberg, and others. The Weavers of Trautenau is an enormous contribution to this area of Holocaust Studies for several reasons. First, research on the largely female textile history of the Holocaust is in its infancy. Two other recent books in this area deserve mention here: The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive by Lucy Adlington (2021); Stitched & Sewn: The Life-Saving Art of Holocaust Survivor Trudie Strobel by Jody Savin (2020); and another book, on Holocaust survivors who knit, written by Tanya Singer, which is forthcoming. Holc’s book offers an important historical study to this new body of work.

Perhaps the most striking contribution of The Weavers of Trautenau is what Holc teaches us about grasping the nuances of both written and oral testimony. She deploys clips of testimony in an innovative fashion, juxtaposing quotations on the same topic from several girls and women, rather than focusing on just one or two weavers at a time. Such an approach reveals the differing attitudes, experiences, and memories of these survivors. By surrounding these excerpts with social and political history, Holc gives invaluable context to the quotations and illuminates them further for the reader. She also attends to the “absences”—what the testimony-givers could not or would not mention—hence, their narrative strategies. In Holc’s own words: “This study positions testimony-givers as producers of knowledge” rather than as “objects of study or damaged victims” (pp. 6 and 39).

Holc’s organization of the book is loosely chronological, tracing how changes in forced laborers’ statuses and living conditions impacted them as human beings. For example, when the forced laborers were initially taken from their families, the Nazis promised that their volunteering would protect their relatives from further danger. For many of these young people, that promise became a singularly important reason to follow orders and to survive: they believed they would return to their families at the end of the war. Of course, this was a false hope. While forced laborers were sometimes allowed to return home in the evenings during 1940, barracks were later constructed for greater control of the laborers and their production; by 1943, these barracks became essentially concentration camps organized under the direction of the Gross-Rosen camp.

The book’s chapters are each organized by a topic or theme, such as the prewar world of the young Jewish girl; the worksite as a social world and the role of objects therein; the impact of Hungarian women arriving from Auschwitz to the Trautenau factories in 1944, and the horrifying knowledge this brought the testimony-givers; the ethics of care for one’s self and others inside the camps; maleness and masculinity in the work sites; and narratives of liberation.

Yet a further contribution of this text is the attention given to the sexual violence experienced by these girls and women, some as young as eleven. Sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish girls and women was a taboo topic in Holocaust studies until quite recently. Astonishingly, some scholars claimed that the Nuremberg Laws, with their prohibition against sex between “Aryans” and Jews, would have prevented Wehrmacht soldiers and other Nazis from engaging in rape. Feminist research has now demonstrated that this is patently false and that countless Jewish women were subjected to depredations of a sexual nature.

Holc documents the types of sexualized violence experienced by the weavers, borrowing Brigid Halbmayr’s definition: “Violent acts can be understood as sexualized if they are directed at the most intimate parts of a person and, as such, against the person’s physical, emotional and spiritual integrity” (p. 153). These include forced nakedness, bodily manipulation and humiliation, sexualized touching, whipping with a belt, naked selections, bartering and bribery, and shaving. She analyzes how youthful naiveté relates to one’s vulnerability to sexual assault. She also identifies the perpetrators: men in the factories, Nazis who collected the women from their homes, and other men with whom forced laborers came into contact.

By far the most threatening violence to the weavers of Trautenau was, perhaps ironically, the arrival in May 1945 of those they viewed as their saviors: the Soviet soldiers who entered the factory yard and broke their way into the barracks. One survivor recalls:

It was happy [liberation] but some soldiers were very mean. Because they want to come to the camp. In the daytime they were okay. But at night they want the girls. “We liberated you and you don’t want to go with us.” We all were young. So we barricaded with tables, with chairs. Because if somebody was in front of the camp watching, so they could go from a different way, through the window. I don’t know how they…. And each night. Until they had more guards not to let them into the camp. They wanted to sleep with the girls (p. 229).

Holc discusses many other testimonies that explicitly acknowledge similar instances of rape.

Holc concludes the book with an excerpt from the moving and revealing testimony of Sala Kirschner, spoken just after she has described surviving a beating by the Lagerführerin:

I could go on like that for a whole year. If I would go into every little thing that happened. But so much I can’t talk about. There’s some things I won’t talk about. It’s very difficult. Too—even more difficult than that [the beating]. And there’s no, there’s no other way I can do it. Really, no other way (p. 253).

Considering both what can and cannot be said by those who endured the accounts featured in this volume, The Weavers of Trautenau is an insightful and complex study of heretofore neglected aspects of Jewish female forced laborers’ experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe.