MJH-Stories Survive- Imagining Jewish Futures in World War II Labor Camps: A Gendered Perspective

Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945.

Reconstructing their experiences from their own testimonies, this talk with Dr. Janine Holc, based on her book The Weavers of Tratenau, will explore how these teenaged girls and young unmarried women conceived of their future while they were held in these camps – how they supported each other and sustained their senses of themselves as Jews with a past, present, and future – while only gradually facing the reality of what had happened to Jewish life in Europe.

Dr. Janine Holc is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland. She has published on democratic institutions in Poland, reproductive rights in Eastern Europe, the politics of Holocaust memory, and antisemitism. Her most recent book is The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust, published by Brandeis University Press in 2023.

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