I realise that this title sounds horribly, horribly sensational, but hear me out: Naomi Seidman, in her article "Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage" (Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn, 1996), compares three different versions of the novel Night: the original Yiddish (Un di velt hot geshvign, translated as And the World Kept Silent), the first translation into French (Nuit), and then the translation into English.
The following passage from Seidman's article translates a small portion of Un di velt, the reason for the creation of this thread:
But even more radically transformed in the move to French than "the most important city in Marmorosh" was the image of the survivor. In both the Yiddish and the French, the narrator criticizes the other survivors for thinking of nothing but food, and "not of revenge." The following passage is taken from the Yiddish, but the French is similar:
The first gesture of freedom: the starved men made an effort to get something to eat. They only thought about food. Not about revenge. Not about their parents. Only about bread. And even when they had satisfied their hunger-they still did not think about revenge.
But the Yiddish continues: "Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled." In French this passage reads: "Le lendemain, quelquesjeunes gens coururent a Weimar ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits-et coucher avec des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace."' Or, in Stella Rodway's English rendition: "On the following morning, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes-and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign."
To describe the differences between these versions as a stylistic reworking is to miss the extent of what is suppressed in the French. Un di velt depicts a post-Holocaust landscape in which Jewish boys "run off" to steal provisions and rape German girls; Night extracts from this scene of lawless retribution a far more innocent picture of the aftermath of the war, with young men going off to the nearest city to look for clothes and sex. In the Yiddish, the survivors are explicitly described as Jews and their victims (or intended victims) as German; in the French, they are just young men and women. The narrator of both versions decries the Jewish failure to take revenge against the Germans, but this failure means something different when it is emblematized, as it is in Yiddish, with the rape of German women. The implication, in the Yiddish, is that rape is a frivolous dereliction of the obligation to fulfill the "historical commandment of revenge"; presumably fulfillment of this obligation would involve a concerted and public act of retribution with a clearly defined target. Un di velt does not spell out what form this retribution might take, only that it is sanctioned-even commanded-by Jewish history and tradition.
Is there any historical evidence for what Wiesel described in the original Yiddish version?
Part 1
This post contains material that is NSFW and might, as it involves the explicit description and discussion of sexual violence, be triggering
Ok, so a couple of things here:
After having read the Seidman article, it is imperative that she treats Night or rather Un di velt hot geshvign as a work of literature intended as a work to process the horrors of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, specifically a perspective not of acquiescence and suffering but of rage. The whole article is concerned with how the French or rather non-Yiddish version came to pass and what the changes, including a focus more on the silence aspect rather than the rage aspect in the theme of the book. Seidman even concludes that
A final question, and one that echoes and reverses the question that ends Un di velt hot geshvign: Was it worth it? Was it worth translating the Holocaust out of the language of the largest portion of its victims and into the language of those who were, at best, absent, and at worst, complicitous in the genocide? Was it worth "unshattering"the mirror the Yiddish Elie breaks,reviving the image of the Jew as the Nazis wished him to be, as the Christian is prepared to accept him, the emblem of suffering silence rather than living rage? In the complex negotiations that resulted in the manuscript of Night, did the astonishing gains make good the tremendous losses? It is over this unspoken question that the culture of Holocaust discourse has arisen and taken shape.
Basically, while informed by actual history, both versions of Night are still works of fiction that are infused with – different – themes of processing the Holocaust and not to be taken as a hundred percent reflection of the actual history but – as Seidman states explicitly – as a novel. I'll go back to the theme of bodily revenge shortly but there is a couple of other points that need to be addressed.
Secondly, I have written about the issue of rape and WWII before in this answer, as well as in this answer, and here, and here. The issue of sources and the structural dynamics of the crime of rape generally going underreported are still applicable to the post-war era in Germany and present some difficulty in researching things but one factor that needs to be pointed out here is that both the theme of a general prevalence of sexual violence exacted by Soviet soldiers as well as a narrative of Jewish DPs raping German women was very popular in Germany after liberation, among other things because it had ideological implications.
Discussing the issue of rape and racialized narrative in Germany after liberation, Heide Fehrenbach in her book Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America, she writes:
[A]lthough Soviet soldiers did not always distinguish between privileged Aryan women and persecuted ethnic minorities in perpetrating rape as they moved westward into Germany, West German chroniclers most certainly did, when it came to representing [sic] mass rape by Soviet troops. As a result, although Jewish women and other Displaced Persons were subject to "rape and sexual assault by their liberators", this [sic] form of racialized violence did not enter the annals of post-war German history. It remains both undocumented and uncommemorated by West Germany historians, media, and the state. Thus the victims depicted as deserving public sympathy and recognition were only some of those affected by actual rape.
These victims, who in the eyes of those writing about them are deserving of commemoration are, as she points out, white, non-Jewish, German women "implicitly embodying the Aryan ethnonational ideal", especially when the perpetrators fitted the category of "the other". Fehrenbach is quite adept in showing that the German post-war authorities were working under very strong perceptions when it came to sexual violence. She cites e.g. the files of the Stuttgart police force in the 1940s, which introduced special categories of marking perpetrators in their files as either "colored Americans", "colonized French" (including all of them, from Algeria to Indonesia), "Russian", "Displaced Person" and "other", the latter one being the catch all term for perpetrators of sexual violence that did not fit these categories. Working with those files, she shows that these categories are not justified by statistics as in there was no prevalence of the four specified categories over the catch-all category for white Germans, US Soldiers, French soldiers and so forth, which shows that the perception of sexual violence by those who were in charged of persecuting and stopping it, did indeed privilege certain narratives – that of white, German women being brutalized by people the Nazis had seen as inferior – over others like that of German women being raped by German men.
The reason, I am bringing this up is that the story of Displaced Persons, Jewish and otherwise, pillaging and raping in German cities and the country site became a popular narrative trope in post-war Germany as told by the Germans not only under the impression of still lingering Nazi ideological fragments but also as a narrative that imbued them with the morality that comes with a victim status and that could be used to fend off the various revelations about the complicity of German society and the German population in the crimes of the Third Reich.
Atina Grossmann, one of the most respected scholars on the issue of sexual violence, WWII, and the post-war era, goes into the historical reality behind this by writing in her book about the Western Zones of occupation Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany:
Germans feared, and complained about, rape and pillage by DPs as well as Soviet troops, but the culprits were generally identified as non-Jewish Eastern European slave laborers. Significantly, there is very little record of this kind of bodily revenge by Jewish survivors or soldiers.
Others have reached a similar conclusion regarding sexual violence perpetrated by Jewish survivors – or generally concentration camp survivors – being rare. One can also find this in Helke Sander and Barbara Johr: Befreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder, Michaela Freund-Widder: Frauen unter Kontrolle: Prostitution und ihre Staatliche Bekämpfung in Hamburg vom Ende des Kaiserreichs bis zu den Anfängen der Bundesrepublik, and Annette Timm's work on the subject of veneral disease in post-war Germany.
And this is hardly surprising given the physical and psychological impact imprisonment in a concentration camp had on the survivors, especially the Jewish ones who had undergone not just the imprisonment but also the death marches. People are generally familiar with this photograph that also depicts Wiesel after liberation and is a stark reminder of the desolate physical condition liberated prisoners were in. Both in descriptions of what the Allies termed "medical liberation" as well as in the recollection of actual survivors, the impact both the psychological and physiological torments of imprisonment had on prisoners and how that related to sexuality are described.
In Hermann Langbein's book Menschen in Auschwitz (People in Auschwitz) several survivors are cited that not only detail a complete lack of sexual urges due to not feeling human in the first place but also the desolate state of their bodies leading to physiological impairments – women who would stop menstruating, men with erectile dysfunction for a considerable amount of time after liberation. In the Allied description of medical care and of the Displaced Person camps for Jewish survivors, it is often mentioned that it often took months or even years for survivors to return normal patterns of behavior. Various medical personnel of the US Army in their zone describe their revulsion against DPs in camps because they would not go outside of their barracks to defecate at night for during their imprisonment that would have spelled potential execution, so DPs often simply defecated in the corners of their barracks, much to the dismay of the Allied soldiers guarding them. Similarly, while there are few cases before that, records from the DP camps show that both marriages and births only started to pick up and become more common by mid-1946. Basically, the sparsity of records of Jewish survivors perpetrating sexual violence against Germans or anybody for that matter, is strongly related to the state these people were in when liberated and when recovered months later, the situation in Germany was much different in terms of law and order and lawlessness being under control.
Hiya, folks,
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