Rochelle G. Saidel is an American writer and researcher. She founded the Remember the Women Institute in 1997 and currently serves as its executive director. [1]
Saidel is originally from Glens Falls, New York. She received her undergraduate education from both Queens College, City University of New York and Barnard College. She then received her M.S. in education from Queens College and her PhD in political science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. [2]
Saidel is the author of numerous books, with a focus on the Holocaust. Her first book, published in 1985, was The Outraged Conscience: Seekers for Justice of Nazi War Criminals in America. [3] She has since authored or edited seven other books about the Holocaust, mainly discussing the often untold stories of women. She authored Never Too Late To Remember: The Politics Behind New York City's Holocaust Museum, [4] Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl that Became a Nazi Concentration Camp, and The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp . The Ravensbrück book was named a National Jewish Book Awards finalist and was published in English, Hebrew, and Portuguese. [5] Saidel is also the editor of several books, including an expanded version of the memoir of Gemma La Guardia Gluck, the sister of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, entitled Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story. [6] In addition, Saidel co-edited with Sonja Hedgepeth the anthology Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. [7] [8] She co-edited four editions of Women, Theater, and the Holocaust Resource Handbook with Karen Shulman; [9] VIOLATED! Women in Holocaust and Genocide with Batya Brutin; [10] [11] and Teaching and Education with Gender Equality in Childhood and Adolescence: A Practical Guide for Teachers (in Portuguese). [12] Saidel has also been a correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She has written numerous articles for the Jerusalem Post, the Times of Israel, Hadassah Magazine, Lilith, and other periodicals. [13] [14] Most of Saidel's works focus on the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust.
Saidel has been the curator or coordinator for several important art and history exhibitions. She coordinated Bitter Hope: From Holocaust to Haven, [15] a permanent exhibition about the Oswego, New York refugee camp for the New York State Museum in Albany. In 2001, she was guest curator for the Florida Holocaust Museum's Women of Ravensbrück: portraits of courage, art by Julia Terwilliger exhibition, which later travelled extensively. [16] She also curated an exhibition about Gemma La Guardia Gluck for Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion at their New York City campus. She coordinated the 2018 exhibition: VIOLATED! Women in Holocaust and Genocide, Remember the Women Institute's international group exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. [17] VIOLATED! Women in Holocaust and Genocide with Batya Brutin; [10] [11]
Saidel has worked on several films and television programs, most of them related to the Holocaust. She was a consultant and made a cameo appearance for Rosemarie Reed's Where Birds Never Sang: The Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps (also known as Where Birds Don't Sing: The Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps). [18] [19] She was also a consultant for Ronnie Sarnat's Screaming Silence, a documentary about children who were sexually abused during the Holocaust, and for Return to a Burning House, a film about Holocaust heroine Haviva Reik. [20] Saidel also appeared in Triangles: Witnesses of the Holocaust, a film about LGBTQ Holocaust Survivors, and Living with Shadows, about sexual violence in the Holocaust. [21] [22] She produced and hosted a three-part television program called From Hitler to Uncle Sam: How American Intelligence Used Nazi War Criminals. This show was based on a book written by Charles R. Allen Jr., who Saidel worked with on other books about Nazis. [23] She also created, produced, and hosted a twice-monthly documentary telecast on subjects including the Holocaust: Heritage and Destiny on the Albany ABC Affiliate, on behalf of the Greater Albany Jewish Federation and Anti-Defamation League. [24] [25]
In 1997, Saidel founded the Remember the Women Institute, based in New York City. Under Saidel's leadership, the institute has organized and participated in numerous conferences related to women in the Holocaust. Her focus on sexual violence during the Holocaust has evolved to include domestic, or intimate partner, violence. Saidel, along with Sonja Hedgepeth, has worked with Gloria Steinem and other feminist activists on issues relating to sexual assault against women during genocides. In 2011, Saidel and Hedgepeth participated in a panel centered around their book, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Steinem led this panel. [26] The Women Under Siege Project, an initiative of the Women's Media Center founded by Steinem and others, was inspired by Hedgepeth and Saidel's book. [27] In the 1980s, Saidel was the Special Assistant to New York State Senate Minority Leader Manfred Ohrenstein. She advised him on issues relating to Holocaust remembrance and the creation of the New York City Holocaust Museum. [28] [29] Beginning in 1977, she was at the forefront of early efforts to deport Nazi war criminals from the United States. She co-authored an informational booklet entitled Nazi War Criminals in America: Facts...Action with Charles R. Allen, Jr.
Élise Rivet, also known as Mère Marie Élisabeth de l'Eucharistie was a Catholic nun and World War II heroine. Rivet volunteered to go to the gas chamber, in place of a mother, in the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück.
Nazi concentration camp badges, primarily triangles, were part of the system of identification in German camps. They were used in the concentration camps in the German-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and trousers of the prisoners. These mandatory badges of shame had specific meanings indicated by their colour and shape. Such emblems helped guards assign tasks to the detainees. For example, a guard at a glance could see if someone was a convicted criminal and thus likely of a tough temperament suitable for kapo duty.
Ewa Paradies was a Nazi concentration camp overseer.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Identification of inmates in Nazi concentration camps was performed mostly with identification numbers marked on clothing, or later, tattooed on the skin. More specialized identification in Nazi concentration camps was done with badges on clothing and armbands.
Gisella Perl was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, where she helped hundreds of women, serving as an inmate gynecologist for them. She worked without the bare necessities for practicing medicine. Perl survived the Holocaust, emigrated to New York, and was one of the first women to publicize the Holocaust experience in English, in her 1948 memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. She became a specialist in infertility treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York and eventually moved with her daughter to live in Herzliya, Israel, where she died.
In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordell) to increase productivity among inmates, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos, "prisoner functionaries" and the criminal element, because regular inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary of exposure to Schutzstaffel (SS) schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners' productivity levels, but instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs.
Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Elizabeth Ester Jaranyi was a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust and the memorist of The Flowers From My Mother's Garden.
Of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, two million were women. Between 1941 and 1945, Jewish women were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps or hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany. They were also sexually harassed, raped, verbally abused, beaten, and used for Nazi human experimentation. Jewish women had a sizable and distinct role in the resistance and partisan groups.
The Women Under Siege Project is an independent initiative of the Women's Media Center (WMC). The project documents online and through social media how rape and gender-based violence are used as tools in warfare and genocide. The project uses journalism to investigate and bring to light these issues which impact women throughout the world, but especially in areas of conflict. The director of Women Under Siege, Lauren Wolfe, has said that the first step to challenging rape is to stop victim blaming and to focus on the perpetrators and the cultures that produce them.
Martin Karl Hellinger was a German Nazi dentist who in 1943 was assigned to work at the concentration camp for women at Ravensbrück, with the duty of removing dental gold from those killed at the camp.
The Holocaust in Telšiai was carried out by the local Lithuanian leadership with occasional supervision by Nazi German units. The Jewish population in 1939 was 2,800 some 35 percent of the town's population. Further Jews found refuge in Telšiai following the 1939 German ultimatum to Lithuania. Telšiai was conquered by German troops on 25 June 1941. Jews were subjected to terror by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators and on 15–16 July all Jewish men were shot. The women were moved to a camp in Geruliai, and with the exception of 500–600 young women, were all shot on 30 August 1941. The 500–600 young women were moved back to a ghetto in Telšiai, and with the exception of some escapees, were shot on 30–31 December 1941. 64 Jewish women survived after they escaped.
Gemma La Guardia Gluck was an American writer, of Italian Jewish origin, who lived in Hungary and was a survivor of the Holocaust. Her autobiography, published in 1961, tells of her experience as a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, but also offers vivid memories of her childhood spent in America with her parents and brother Fiorello La Guardia, the future first Italian-American mayor of New York.
Anka Bergman was a Czech Holocaust survivor noted for giving birth to Eva Clarke whilst at Mauthausen concentration camp.
The Remember the Women Institute is an organization that researches and educates about women’s contributions and actions in history, especially during the Holocaust. It is based in New York City.
Human sexuality and the Holocaust is a topic explored in witness testimony, fiction, and academic research.
Margarete Kraus was a Roma woman who was persecuted during the Porajmos, imprisoned at Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. Her experience was recorded in later life by the photographer Reimar Gilsenbach.
During World War II, some Jewish men and women in concentration camps faced sexual violence, due to wartime discrimination, antisemitism, and genocidal conditions among other reasons. This discrimination happened both inside concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and also outside of the camps. This sexual violence and discrimination happened not only in Germany but throughout Europe in areas that the Germans occupied during the war. Outside of concentration camps, sexual violence happened in many places, including but not limited to Jewish people's homes, Jewish hiding spaces, in public, and at killing sites.