After briefly discussing art in today's class, I decided to research art from the Holocaust. The art was meant to recreate the feelings the inmates in the concentration camps had felt- most art from the Holocaust period was created outside of the concentration camps. It is interesting to note that paintings done by men from the Holocaust focused much more on the horrors and painful parts of the Holocaust. The paintings done by women from the Holocaust were based much more on the domestic side of life at the concentration camps. In my research I read about how women in the camps tried to keep them tidy and clean. This allowed them to hang onto something from their previous lives. This therefore was well represented in paintings done by women from the era. I think it would be very interesting to read memoirs from a woman's perspective on the differences between the female and male camps.
SOURCES
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/art-during-holocaust
http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/holocaust/art.htm
Up until now, the female experience in Holocaust concentration camps has been relatively ignored; however, this lack of attention can be somewhat attributed to the fact that the most prominent Holocaust survivors, like Wiesel, tend to be men. Most memoirs, regardless of the author’s gender, contain graphic accounts of violence, but the accounts written by women portray the experience of a double victim: a woman and a Jew in a racist and misogynist society. Many memoirs written by female survivors contain examples of resourcefulness and social structures based on female values. Interestingly, female survivors felt that their feminist values of teamwork and care were the most important reason they were able to cope and fight through the emotional and physical damage of the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteFollowing up on the topic of male versus female camps, I found a few articles that focused on women’s experiences in the Holocaust, specifically in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The Ravensbrück camp was filled almost exclusively with female prisoners who worked together and nurtured each other. Women in Ravensbrück set up a social network that included language, geography, and music classes. The women also held small theater productions and even published an underground newsletter. Pregnant women were immediately gassed, or if they gave birth, nurses then killed their children. To some extent, women were dehumanized to a greater extent than men. Women had their hair shaved, and many women were put into brothels for other concentration camps. This degradation made many women feel a lack of both sexuality and individual identity. However, the survival rate of females was actually higher than that of men.
Sources: http://www3.sympatico.ca/mighty1/essays/lessons1.htm
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005199