Amberniqua Iglehart

Composition 1023.10

Donna Souder

February 4, 2007

Tired but Still Fighting

            Throughout the years of education, students are enlightened about events that have occurred all over the world.  The Nazi people and the Holocaust is an event that is taught often in classrooms across the country.  Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl, is one particular person who always seems to come to mind when the subject is brought up.  She and her family were victims of Adolf Hitler’s plan to rid Germany of the Jewish people.  After learning so much about the issue, I never would have thought that there was much information that I did not know about.  However, in this case, as well as many others, there is more than one side of the story.

            Myran Goldenberg’s “Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust” clarifies what occurred in the concentration camps from a Jewish woman’s point of view.  The Jewish women were treated much worse than the Jewish men.  They were sexually abused by the SS soldiers, tormented, starved, and overworked.  Under several different occasions, the women were asked to get undressed and walk around the barracks or where ever they were being held at during the time in which they were asked.  “Each [woman] was issued a ‘ragged dress without any regard paid to length or size” (Goldenberg, 2).  If a woman asked for another piece of clothing they were beaten by “gypsy prisoners” (Goldenberg, 2).  The food that was provided to nourish their bodies was believed to be composed of chemicals that would prevent the women from being able to menstruate.  These chemical were placed into their food without the women having knowledge of the contents.  Some of the Jewish women were placed in holding cells which acted as their “new home”.  While others were having to adapt to much worse living quarters.  Goldenberg states, “In one camp, they slept in filthy, vacated dog kennels (2).  Through all this hardship, the Jewish women managed to stay strong and hold themselves together.

            The key fact to the Jewish women staying so strong was the strive and determination found in their hearts.  As an African American woman, I can relate to the discouragements and the emotional abuse the women received while living in the concentration camps.  Looking back at previous years, I remember being compared to the common stereotypes of unwed, teenage mothers and high school dropouts.  These limitations set for me by society were not going to yield me from achieving my life goals.  With their being so much ignorance towards race, sex, and religion, at times faith and strength of mind is all that women have.  Women have been underestimated since the beginning of time.  A person would think with all that has been accomplished by women, we have proven our equality to men and given more credit where it is due.  The women captives stayed focused on the common goal of freedom from the Nazi soldier.  With all the hatred that was endured, the Jewish women still found the will to go on.

“Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust” enlightened me on the emotional, as well as physical, abuse the Jewish women had to deal with.  Myrna Goldenberg illustrated how powerful faith can actually be with her detailed information of a real life situation which affected the world as a whole.  After reading the article, I began to question why I have never been introduced to this information.  It was possibly due to the fear of acknowledging the strength a woman naturally possesses.  Women as a whole should be able to learn from this occurrence and use it as a motivational tool to become all that one can be in life.

Work Cited

Bean, John C., Johnson, June, and Ramage, John D.  The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing.  New York: Longman, 2003.

Goldenberg, Ph.D., Myrna.  “Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust”.  Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Press, 1995.