ories. As Anna Pawełczyńska cryptically states, the main purpose of sexual distinctions in the Nazi persecutions had the function of providing extra opportunities for torturing and killing prisoners. By uncovering some of the torments specific to women, one achieves something unintended but quite valuable: details of a specific experience give form and substance to the general experience because concreteness is more compelling than generality. Particularly with regard to mothers and children, the depiction of ordinary women forced to choose between their children's and their own immediate deaths must be among the most grotesque and painful experiences in Holocaust literature. The theme of amenorrhea shows the extent to which the expectation of genocide must have been present, with the widespread fear of permanent infertility to plague survivors.
Ultimately the feminist significance of women's Holocaust texts is that they are as representative of the general Holocaust experience as men's texts. Like the narratives of men, they represent the specific forms of suffering of one sex, the unique experiences of an individual, and universal aspects of the Holocaust experience.
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