Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust

during the Holocaust. Both of those perspectives have much to do with feeling what is heard in Gertrud Kolmar's desire to raise her voice like "a blazing torch amidst the darkened desert of the world, and thunder: JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE!"

After Auschwitz justice may be harder to come by than it was before, for in anus mundi anything was possible and nothing was sacred. Where that situation prevails, justice can hardly be done. The episode at Budy proves it. But Budy is no longer filled with the screams of bludgeoned Jewish women, though their voices may still echo in the silence. Block 11's cruel punishment cells are empty, though their space is still full of interrogating questions. Perhaps time should have stopped before Auschwitz, but it did not, and after Auschwitz is where time is now. What can be done with post-Holocaust time? What should be made of it?

Such questions invite and insist upon reflection. When that reflection happens, well, it will grapple with issues about memory, responsibility, faith, hope, and the questions that inevitably remain whenever such grappling occurs. When that reflection happens well, it will also see that the particularity of thought and feeling gets its due. Movement in those directions will be found in the women's voices of reflection that speak in this book's third and final part. Autobiographical, dramatic, historical, poetic, spiritual, philosophical, even statistical--their approaches reflect different perspectives and traditions. Yet, in their diversity as women, they look, each and all, for ways to face the void created by the Holocaust. They seek to mend together the fragments of a broken past, and to revitalize the courage to care that can make women and men alike more just and thereby more truly human.

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