Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust

alien job competitors. With few exceptions, this was reinforced for emigrant women by an ambiguous lack of support from male refugee colleagues and even within their own families, despite the dictates of economic necessity. Thus, the number of women domestics, cooks, and clerical workers increased dramatically among German-Jewish female refugees during the 1930s. ¹³² In one instance, Käte Frankenthal, a former doctor, supported herself as an itinerant peddler of ice cream during her periodic bouts of unemployment after arriving in New York. ¹³³

It is generally believed that although women and men faced similar difficulties in learning new languages and adapting to new milieus, women were faster and more proficient in acquiring new languages because they needed to communicate for shopping and child care. Female writers like Vicki Baum and Martha Albrand became widely known popular novelists in the United States, Helen Wolff a fixture in American publishing, and Lotte Lenya and Lili Palmer starred in English-language film and theater. ¹³⁴

The study of women and the Holocaust has barely begun, and the complexities and contours of the subject must be explored in future historical research. . . . This essay has focused on German and German-Jewish women. Future work must include horizontal pan-European studies, focusing on different female prisoner categories and camps across occupied Europe and integrating the literature on western and eastern Europe. There will also have to be new vertical studies on women in German jails, on their underground experiences and their odysseys as refugees forced to rebuild new lives abroad. I hope this essay clears away some misunderstandings and opens the way for future investigations by scholars from many disciplines. The complexity of the subject will keep historians and other analysts occupied for many years.

The author would like to thank Werner T. Angress, Henry Friedlander, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan, Walter Peterson, and Joan Ringelheim for their advice and constructive suggestions in revising this essay, which was first presented at Southeastern Massachusetts University in June 1982 and again at the Stern College, Yeshiva University, Conference on Women and the Holocaust in March 1983.

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