Abstract
Looking at testimonies of victims, bystanders and perpetrators that report wartime theft and looting of Jewish belongings across East-Central Europe, this article focuses specifically on one aspect of genocidal dispossession which has so far received only tangential attention – the theft of the most intimate possessions: personal belongings, especially clothes. In doing so, it addresses the question of how this specific form of intimate dispossession facilitated genocidal policies by creating conditions for violence, incentivising collaboration, and providing a tool to inflict pain. The article lays out the ways in which genocidal dispossession accompanied, facilitated and constituted violence at different stages of Nazi-led anti-Jewish policies, including the phase of ghettoisation and hiding and the phase of mass killing. It also discusses particular measures, such as stripping down the victims and coercing Jews to sort victims’ clothes, as forms of torture. Particular attention is given in this respect to accounts of sexual violence that accompanied dispossession. The study is based on archival sources, including post-war survivors’ testimonies, post-war trials of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, yizkor books, victims’ and bystanders’ diaries, and oral history interviews, predominantly from the area of today's eastern Poland and western Belarus. It focuses on the experiences Jewish victims inside small towns (shtetls) that had a significant Jewish majority prior to World War II, and where the conditions for dispossession were particularly favourable.
When he first saw German troops plundering Jewish houses, Michał Głowiński was barely five years old. It was September 1939, and he was staying at the house of his grandparents in Pruszków, just on the outskirts of Warsaw. The intrusion of soldiers into his family's private space was his very first experience of wartime violence. One afternoon a truck arrived, with a group of people commanded by a gendarme called Rothimmel, who came to requisition bedroom furniture. He became the terror of the town from day one of the invasion—and, for me, the first epitome of a German. He was tall and usually he was yelling, mostly in German […] No one knew yet what the occupation was going to be like; the fact that some blokes arrived to unceremoniously carry away one's beds and night tables must have been a shock. For me, too, it was an important experience because, for the first time, I became a witness to German lawlessness. And this event etched itself into my memory, along with the gendarme's shouting […] The furniture from the bedroom of my grandparents was surely solid and bourgeois, but not exceptional in any way; it was needed to furnish a flat for some Nazi official in Pruszków. It is remarkable that he did not find it repugnant to get in contact with objects taken away from the Jews and tainted by the very fact that they had touched them.
1
Głowiński's recollection of these initial Nazi dispossession measures is interesting in that he notes both the psychological shock at the invasion into one's most private personal space – the bedroom – and the intimate dimension of this plunder. Beds, mattresses and bedsheets that had just been used by his grandparents were now to receive the imprint of a perpetrator's body. Głowiński ponders how a Nazi could have accepted this kind of mediated ‘touch’ and not think of it in terms of contamination. But his reflection also expresses the sense of violation that the Jewish victims may have felt at knowing that their personal possessions would be touched by someone else. It was this bodily, sensorial dimension of the plunder of private household possessions that made it such a disturbing and even traumatising experience.
Dispossession of Jewish property during the Nazi occupation of East-Central Europe was not only temporally and spatially adjacent to violence, but it also motivated violence against Jewish bodies and constituted itself a form of violence. This article, looking at the testimonies of victims, perpetrators and other beneficiaries, that report wartime theft and looting of Jewish belongings across East-Central Europe, focuses specifically on one aspect of genocidal dispossession which so far received only tangential attention – the theft of the most intimate possessions: personal belongings, especially clothes. In doing so, it addresses the question of how this specific form of intimate dispossession facilitated genocidal policies by creating conditions for violence, incentivising collaboration, and providing a tool to inflict pain.
The role of local non-Jewish populations as beneficiaries of the systemic Nazi-sanctioned Holocaust plunder, but also as active agents taking their own initiative in grassroots acts of appropriation, warrants a brief reflection. Following the shift in the definition of ‘bystanders’, as no longer ‘uninvolved’ and passive ‘onlookers’ of the Holocaust, as initially conceptualised by Raul Hilberg, 2 I define the category of actors this study examines as a community of ‘implicated subjects’ 3 that not only ‘surrounded perpetrators and victims’, 4 but were, to varying degrees, complicit in the violence and dispossession that unfolded. Here I build on Michael Rothberg's concept of the ‘implicated subject’, which allows one to zero in on long-term effects of genocidal violence on those who were entangled in historical wrong-doing, as well as other, similar, attempts to expand Hilberg's triad of victims-perpetrators-bystanders, to open the lens onto the experience of active ‘facilitators’ and ‘beneficiaries’, 5 via categories such as ‘entangled bystanders’, 6 ‘participating observers’, 7 or ‘occupied societies’. 8
The issue of dispossession during the Holocaust has been explored in a significant body of literature. However, much of this research has primarily focused on financial dispossession, emphasising the seizure of businesses, real estate, art, heritage sites, valuables, and gold. 9 Personal belongings, such as clothing, shoes and household items, if examined at all, have mostly been discussed in terms of their collection, processing, and eventual display in concentration camps. 10 Only a limited number of studies have specifically addressed the subject of Jewish personal possessions in East-Central Europe. 11
Most existing research on Holocaust-related dispossession has a strong emphasis on top-down, state-led policies of expropriation and the German beneficiaries of these actions. 12 This broader perspective, centred on the Third Reich and prioritising perpetrator records, state actors, legal regulations and macro-level financial gains, tends to overlook the social consequences of dispossession for local individuals. It also fails to address the micro-historical dimension and the long-term impact of genocidal expropriation on the ‘communities of implication’ 13 that directly profited from it.
On the other hand, the foregrounding of the most lucrative aspects of dispossession, such as financial transfers, confiscations of luxurious goods, and the takeover of businesses, has rarely brought into focus the way Holocaust dispossession was interlinked with violence. It was the loss of the personal items of small economic value, which in its extremity led to total spoliation and stripping victims of their clothes, that embodied the most brutal, traumatising and dehumanising aspect of genocidal dispossession. The intimate, bodily and emotional dimension of this kind of robbery, not its economic impact, defined its far-reaching and deadly consequences. Filling this gap in existing research, this article lays out the ways in which genocidal dispossession accompanied, facilitated and constituted violence at different stages of Nazi-led anti-Jewish policies.
Based on archival sources, including post-war survivors’ testimonies, post-war trials of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, yizkor books, victims’ and bystanders’ diaries, and oral history interviews, this article focuses on the experiences of Jewish victims and non-Jewish beneficiaries inside small towns (shtetls) that had a significant Jewish majority prior to World War II, and where the conditions for dispossession were particularly favourable. The sources quoted here relate to four administrative units of Nazi occupation: Generalgouvernement, Reichkommissariat Ostland, Reichkommissariat Ukraine, and Bezirk Bialystok (corresponding today to central and eastern Poland, western Belarus, western Ukraine and Lithuania).
Because of space limitations, this article presents a condensed overview of the most important intersections of Holocaust dispossession and violence against Jews, illustrating the pertinent stages of intimate dispossession with selected historical sources, but refraining from reconstructing a more granular image, which each of the phases undoubtedly merits. A further book-length publication that I am preparing on the subject will offer a more exhaustive micro-historical analysis in this respect. The present overview, however, helps to illustrate how robbery accompanied the Nazi occupation regime in East-Central Europe from the onset of the World War, and how it constituted a long-lived phenomenon that extended over the caesura of 1944/1945. 14 Focusing on particular, so far less intensively researched, forms of dispossession, such as the theft of clothes, and the related corporeal and psychological forms of violence, including stripping, humiliation and sexual violence, this article attempts capture and understand a particular mode of genocidal expropriation (intimate dispossession) in a diachronic perspective.
Dispossession in the phase of ghettoisation and hiding
Dispossession of Jews by the German occupying forces, their auxiliaries, and the local non-Jewish populations had a violent character even before the onset of systematic mass killing. The imposition of contributions on the Jewish population, hostage-taking, and extortion of ransom money, as well as arbitrary plundering inside Jewish apartments and, later, ghettos, were practices that not only wrought psychological terror and reduced the victims’ chances of survival, but were also accompanied by regular violence.
For Salomon Karashinsky from Prużana (Bel.: Pruzhany, 1941–44 located within Bezirk Bialystok) the very first contact with a German soldier was an experience of plunder. Three days after the Germans’ arrival in town, in June 1941, two soldiers entered his apartment and went straight to his wardrobe. ‘And then one of them took out four white shirts, […] clean ones, […] And they went away, just like this’.
15
How emotionally distressing such arbitrary pillage of clothes was, is well expressed by Esther Nussbaum, who recalls one such instance at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, when she lived in Bobowa, southern Poland: My family was well-to-do enough, they had nice clothes. […] One of the incidents that I remember especially is one time when a neighbour, a Polish young woman, who I remember by name […] came up, she was Volksdeutsche […]. And she came up with a German soldier boyfriend. She walked over to a cabinet and she took the nicest dresses of my aunt and they walked away with them. I know that, comparing to killing, this is not much. But I do remember how humiliated one can just feel when somebody can just walk in and take whatever they want and it is perfectly right. These are the things that bothered me at that time more than anything else.
16
These first acts of looting, though often not yet economically damaging, had a strong emotional impact on the victims. Unceremonious, violent entry into people's homes, and the invasion into the most intimate private spaces – bedrooms and wardrobes, constituted a violation of domestic peace, triggered shock, disbelief and trauma. Holocaust survivors often recall such seemingly small first incidents of looting in their post-war testimonies, despite the fact that their later biographies abound in far more traumatic events. The first realisation that Jews had now lost the right to their property went hand in hand with the discovery that the Nazi occupation regime had also deprived them of the right to privacy, physical inviolability and freedom. Violent searches, intrusions and looting of private belongings constituted at this point a vivid synecdoche of the new dehumanising policies of the Nazi state towards Jews.
Single random acts of robbery soon became more systemic, on a mass scale, and brutal. Describing the beginning of the German occupation in the town of Różana (Bel.: Ruzhany, Bezirk Bialystok) in the town's yizkor book, Hannah Kirstein notes how one day all town inhabitants, Jewish and non-Jewish, received the order to gather in a meadow behind the bathhouse while ‘the Germans were passing through the Jewish and non-Jewish houses and robbing anything they wanted. In the Jewish houses they found almost nothing, so they mostly robbed the Gentile houses, which actually contained quite a lot of [previously] robbed Jewish property’. 17
As plunder by the German occupying forces took on a mass dimension, the administration began to introduce violent forms of extortion, such as hostage-taking. Hannah Kirstein describes the procedure in detail, pointing to its brutal character: The Germans rounded up about a thousand men by the synagogue. [They] lined up the men to face the wall of the synagogue, while behind them a machine gun was aimed at them. The men thought that this was the end. The fear of death had fallen upon them. […] The Germans informed the Judenrat that there was an option to redeem the prisoners for the price of a certain amount of gold and money. I removed my ring and handed it over. I did not have any other golden items. Other people handed over money and gold, and together an amount [of valuables] was accumulated, which exceeded the needed sum. But we never saw our dear ones again…. The Gentiles told us that the Germans had taken the men outside the town, shot them, and buried them.
18
Systematic robbery, pillaging and extortion took its toll on the Jews in the Nazi occupied territories because these practices drastically reduced their chances of survival: the capacity to buy food, finance an escape or secure a place in hiding. The situation became critical at the moment of the ‘liquidation’ of the ghettos. The emptied Jewish districts became sites of mass plunder that benefited both the German authorities, who shipped their contents to Germany or auctioned them locally, and local populations, who would break in to loot them illegally. Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish policeman in the Otwock ghetto, who left behind one of the most poignant testimonies about the fate of Polish Jews in hiding, paid a lot of attention to instances of plunder and the impact these had on the Jews who were still struggling to survive. Remaining in the ghetto after the mass deportation of Jews on 19 August 1942, Perechodnik witnessed first-hand the mass looting by local Poles: In the morning, I leave my summer coat with Zygmunt Wolfowicz. When I return an hour later, it appears that an entire apartment has been wrecked and pillaged. The ghetto is still surrounded by Polish rabble. The Poles jump over the fence, break down doors with axes, and rob whatever they can […] I am not sorry about the coat, and I am not sorry about the money that it cost. Still, without a coat I will not be able to show myself in the Polish neighbourhood, where you have to appear decently dressed in order not to attract attention. The loss of a coat, in certain circumstances, may be the equivalent of a death sentence.
19
For Jews in the ghettos, work camps or in hiding, the loss of their personal possessions meant an imminent threat to their lives. Mojżesz Szpigiel from Tłuste (Ukr.: Tovste), who escaped the liquidation of the ghetto and, in July 1943, took temporary shelter in a small forced labour unit, harvesting the crops at a local manor, reported how repetitive raids by Ukrainian police and by Ukrainian peasants, who had robbed Jews of their valuables, clothing, and shoes, directly led to an outbreak of typhus: Ukrainian police were coming to the Lager every day. We collected money for them, but we did not have the larger sums that they had been used to. The reign of hunger and destitution began. People did not have clothes or underwear, because they had been robbed of everything. They had no shoes […] Because of this misery, we began to be plagued by disease […]. Jaremicz [supervisor of the manor] found out that there was a typhus epidemic among the Jews […] he led the Ukrainian [police] into the attic, where they found ten sick Jews … They brought them behind the stables and shot them dead.
20
The theft of clothes often meant a death sentence, because it made escape impossible. Jan Grabowski, who analysed the practices of ‘paid helpers’, pointing to the extortionist and exploitative aspects of what he terms ‘the business of help’, notes that large sums of money had to be involved to secure a hiding place on the so-called ‘Aryan side’. 21 Gradual and relentless extortion that at times accompanied this process also concerned lesser objects, such as clothes, whose loss posed an existential threat to the prospects of survival.
Ela Borenstein of Chełm, who spent the time of the Nazi occupation in the ghetto of Włodzimierz Wołyński (Ukr.: Volodymyr-Volynskyi), and, later, in hiding, reports that, in 1944, local Poles who offered him a hiding spot robbed him of his last remaining belongings, including clothes: I paid her [the Polish helper] generously [but] she noticed that I still possessed some valuable things. At night, her brother-in-law, Mikołaj Sudziło, came with two bandits and told us to get out of the hideout. They did not let us get dressed despite the frost and, to our protestations that we were naked and barefoot, he said that, in a moment, we will not need anything. Having heard this, I ran to the attic and I hit my head against the straw roof, breaking through it. I ran, wearing just my underwear, to the nearby forest […] They shot at me four times, but they missed […] I was wandering through the forest all night. It was only because of the snow blizzard that they did not find me. I found an empty hut. My feet were bleeding and I could not walk any more, I was crawling on all fours. I already wanted to hang myself, but then the thought of taking revenge gave me new strength. I wrapped my feet in straw, fastened it with a piece of wire. In the garden, I found a scarecrow and pulled down its rags, dressed like this, at noon, I ventured into the town. The people I ran into thought I was a madman.
22
Though Borenstein miraculously survived this chase, and managed to find another hideout and eventually lived to see the liberation by the Red Army, his survival hinged on being able to provide new clothing for himself. Not only incomplete attire but also poor-quality or tattered clothes could give away a Jew attempting to hide on the so-called ‘Aryan side’. Impeccable clothing was a necessary condition for passing as a non-Jew.
Stripping Jewish victims of their clothes, systematically used by the German authorities to prevent escapes, was, naturally, a deeply traumatising experience. Izak Sedenträger from Zwoleń, who was a forced labourer at a munitions factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna, opened his post-war testimony with a description of the anguish he felt when, in the camp, he was forced to wear paper clothes: I was all wrapped in pieces of paper, fastened with wires; getting dressed was the greatest agony; a colleague had to help me every time and tie me up with wires and strings. Getting dressed and undressed was a murderous struggle, especially in the bath, where we were forced to hurry up. Instead of trousers, I was wearing a sack.
23
Wrapped in paper after their own clothes had become completely destroyed during the hard work with poisonous chemicals, forced labourers of the HASAG factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna not only suffered from cold and injuries, but, during ‘selections’, inmates who were poorly dressed were also more likely to be sent to their death. 24
Looting during the phase of mass killing
Despoliation and stripping victims of their clothes was not only part of industrialised killing in death camps, which has been amply described in existing literature, 25 but also an integral part of the so-called ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Robbery and killing took place simultaneously here, and were choreographed to achieve maximum efficiency. The practices related to looting, just like the killing techniques, were perfected over time.
The war crimes committed in the Generalgouvernement by the Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg illustrate well the perpetrators’ learning curve regarding looting. During the first massacre they were commissioned to carry out – in Józefów Biłgorajski, on 13 July 1942 – they neither searched nor undressed their Jewish victims, and there was no official attempt at collecting their valuables. 26 This changed, just a month later, on 17 August, during the execution of the Jews of Łomazy, by which time the battalion had already designed a rudimentary infrastructure for intimate dispossession. One platoon oversaw a specially arranged area on the edge of the forest (Entkleidungsplatz), where victims were forced to undress and leave their clothes before the execution. A few policemen were specifically delegated to the task of collecting the victims’ valuables into a crate and searching their clothing. Additionally, one officer placed near the execution site was making sure the process was complete, inspecting the victims’ ear lobes, wrists and fingers for any remaining jewellery. 27 By early October, during an Aktion in the ghetto of Międzyrzec, members of Battalion 101 already carried out strip searches in a special barrack. Victims were separated by sex, which probably meant that gynaecological searches could be performed on women, and each piece of clothing was surveyed separately ‘with utmost care’ for hidden valuables. The search team, consisting of Ukrainian auxiliary policemen, was supervised and guarded by German gendarmes. 28 This process of optimising looting, and ensuring that the spoils fell exclusively into German hands, followed the Nazi logic of ‘total exploitation of resources’, 29 but it also responded to the actions of the ‘participating observers’ among the local non-Jewish populations, who had shown keen interest and resourcefulness in appropriating Jewish personal belongings themselves.
Personal belongings and clothing left behind during a ‘liquidation’ of a ghetto would immediately attract the attention of the surrounding population, often already waiting in anticipation of an opportunity to pillage. Abraham Weissbrod from Skałat (today's Ukraine), reports that after 3000 Jews were deported from the town on 22 October 1942, the pillage of their belongings began instantly, despite the late hour: ‘At 9 PM the transport moved out, leaving behind a bloody meadow, over which various items of clothing were strewn haphazardly. An army of peasants, with baskets and sacks, quickly attacked these “spoils”’. 30
Indeed, non-Jews living in the area where mass executions took place would create informal infrastructures of collecting, storing, mending and trading the clothes of the murdered victims. Local auxiliary forces, who would participate in the mass killing, would have privileged access to such goods, but they would quickly change hands, and trickle to the local non-Jewish communities at large. Such a well-organised trade network existed, for example, around Ponary (Lith. Paneriai, a mass execution site near Vilnius), where the trading would commence already during ongoing executions. Kazimierz Sakowicz, who lived in the immediate vicinity, noted in his diary on 21 November 1941: ‘In the course of the murdering […] a Lithuanian auxiliary left the [execution] site with a rifle in his hand and (since it was a market day, Friday) started selling by the side of the road some female clothing items: a few coats, dresses, winter boots’. 31 At other, smaller execution sites, it would often be the local non-Jewish inhabitants, who would collect and appropriate the clothing of execution victims – a fact that the German perpetrators were well aware of. Paul Fürstenberg, a member of Battalion 101, who participated in an execution of circa 100 Jews in Łuków, testified in a post-war trial that, as his unit was marching back from the execution site, they ‘were already passing multiple Poles on horse waggons, heading towards the killing site [to pick up the clothes]’. 32
Looting the victims’ clothes often went together with further violence directed both at the dead bodies, and those who were still alive. Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, who edited a major study on the Holocaust in the Polish countryside, quote multiple sources reporting this kind of brutality. One of them is the diary of Romek Międzyrzecki from Węgrów, who notes the story of a wounded woman, who jumped off the train to Treblinka close to Sokołów Podlaski and who was found by ‘Christian villains’ who ‘ripped off her fingers and ears because she was wearing golden rings and earrings’. 33 In Sadowne, located, likewise, along the Treblinka train tracks, a local Polish man was attempting to take elegant leather boots off the legs of an unconscious Jewish girl who collapsed, exhausted, trying to reach the village. When he failed, because ‘wet shoes stuck to the skin’ he ran to fetch an axe to cut her legs off beneath the knees. 34 Moszek Góra from Węgrów, who survived a mass execution, reported on the procedure of looting as experienced from the perspective of a victim: ‘When they started shooting, I fell over, next to someone, whose blood sprinkled my face. I fell on my back and I do not know how long I was lying like that. I just felt how someone came up to me, took off my shoes, my pullover and my vest. Then another one came, and hit me on the face with a shovel’. 35
Killing and looting were temporally and spatially interlinked and facilitated one another: killing enabled looting, but dispossessing victims of all their belongings also accelerated their death and simplified the process of killing, for example, by speeding up deportations, effectively preventing escape, and so on. Theft that took place in this context of ‘Holocaust by bullets’ was already linked to extreme brutality, but it also prompted further forms of violence, such as mutilation, gynaecological searches and necroviolence. This last form of violence against the Jewish bodies outlived the Holocaust period itself and continued long into the post-war decades, with the desecration of mass graves in search of hidden valuables and gold dental prosthetics, as well as metal detector searches in the vicinity of execution sites for jewellery that might have been cast away by victims prior to the execution. 36 The longevity of these practices and the continuation of violence against human remains, indeed, necessitate a revision of the standard time frame in which we study Holocaust dispossession (1939–1945).
Stripping down victims as a means of violence
Despoiling Jews not only had a functional, economic aspect, but it was also weaponised by the German occupying forces as a tool of humiliation, inflicting psychological pain and terrorising ghettoised populations and camp inmates. These acts often bore the characteristics of sexualised violence, or facilitated sexual assault.
Violent acts that included stripping the victims down occurred from the very onset of the German occupation. Estera Fefer, who witnessed the arrival of German troops in Kraków, recalls systematic plunder and sexual violence against Jewish women as the defining features of the first days of the German occupation. ‘For two days, we were not allowed to leave our apartments,’ she wrote in her testimony from March 1946. ‘If they noticed that someone so much as stepped into the staircase, they would immediately shoot. The gates had to remain shut. They carried out searches, taking everything that was of quality in the apartments, not to mention money and valuables. Women were forced to undress in front of mirrors and they were taking pictures of them. There were 200 deadly casualties of this action’. 37
Many sources mention that the element of stripping, so-called gynaecological searches, and acts of humiliation involving forced stripping or the abusive misuse of the victims’ clothes constituted a repertoire of measures that served to terrorise the Jewish population. Calel Perechodnik quoted the following instance in his diary: ‘They cruelly mistreated Jewish women whom they seized for labour in the barracks. For example, on a freezing January day, they forced them to wash floors with their own underwear and then made them put these dirty, wet garments on their naked bodies and walk this way in the street’. 38 Fajgel Gołąbek from Stawiski also reports how Germans, in the first days of the occupation, raped Jewish women and forced one of them to run naked in the main market square, her body covered in tar. 39
Depriving victims of their clothes would also be a form of torture performed on Jewish men. Josef Rosenbaum from Rzeszów, who was a forced labourer in a camp in Huta Komorowska, noted the following case: Meister Knott from Bremen became notorious for his sadistic tortures because of one episode: When one time a larger group of Jews arrived from Przemyśl […] all members of the intelligentsia, lawyers, doctors and so on […], he sent them to work without any explanations to fell trees in the forest. When the work they were doing was not fast enough, he forcibly undressed one of them and told him to sit down on an anthill, and for every movement that he made, he hit him with his fist. After a few hours the whole body of this man was black, covered with ants […] The torture continued for a whole day and a whole night, until the prisoner lost consciousness and then died on that spot.
40
Golda Teich from Puławy, likewise, recalls that undressing inmates was a routine punitive measure in the Bekleidungswerk Plage Laśkiewicz, where she was a forced labourer. ‘They found some money on my friend [during a search]. They called a general Appell. It was in the winter. We were standing there for half of the night and the whole day. They took away our pullovers, gloves and all other warm clothes. We had to stand at attention. Then the ‘culprit’ was hanged on the gallows’. 41
Stripping victims of their clothes also took place in the context of deportations to death camps – while most victims would have to undress on the ramp upon arrival to death camps, some transports arrived naked. 42 Depriving victims of their clothes was often adopted as a policy to prevent escapes. ‘It was enough to suspect that someone intended to run away,’ noted Perechodnik about a work camp near Karczew, where he was staying in 1942, ‘and then they took the shoes off the feet of such a person, took the clothes off his back, and confiscated his money. The unfortunate man in return received clogs to wear and a paper suit. In such a garb it was difficult to pretend that one was a Pole’. 43
In many cases, dispossession and the loss of clothes were also directly correlated with sexual violence. To be sure, sexual violence against Jewish women was a widespread, if still under-researched, phenomenon during the Holocaust and took place in different contexts, including forced prostitution inside ghettos, sexual abuse by helpers during the period of hiding, sex-slavery inside concentration camps and sexual violence preceding mass shootings. 44 As Helene Sinnreich already noted, the context of looting was particularly conducive to sexual violence against Jewish women and, as a ‘pattern of rape’, had been present in other genocides, too, including the Armenian genocide, the Rape of Nanking or ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. 45 This particular context deserves, however, a systematic scrutiny, especially because, in view of the reluctance of many Jewish rape survivors to share their experiences in post-war testimonies, the accounts about the loss of clothes may constitute a valuable source on sexual violence, complementing more direct references. Losing one's clothes constitutes, in many cases, a metaphor of sexual violence, which is decipherable to contemporaries, but provides the victim with a way of addressing their pain without the need to be explicit.
That the moment of looting presented itself as a convenient opportunity for sexual violence is confirmed by numerous sources. In Stawiski, where German troops set out to plunder the Jewish houses in 1941, some Jewish women, recognising the risk, took the precautions to protect younger women. Rivka Zilbersztejn reported: The German regiments pillaged the town. My sister and I wore long dresses and hid in the cellar, and my mother, of blessed memory would bring us some food on occasion. Moshe Niska, the wagon driver, returned to his home in Stawiski with his family. The German murderers captured his two daughters and tortured them all night. Oppressed and downtrodden, they returned home and took refuge in their grandmother Rodka's house.
46
In many other instances, sexual violence is only hinted at. Alta Rachel Pomerczik, who testified in a trial against German war criminals in 1967, noted a scene during a mass shooting in Dolmatowszczyzna (present-day Belarus) in February 1942, which she could observe from her hiding place. What Alta Rachel described was a situation in which the potential for sexualised violence was very pronounced: Behind the armed men stood peasants, many out of curiosity, others with a thirst for loot, in the hope of grabbing the victims’ clothes […] The victims first had to lie on their faces. The murderers made fun of them for a while before they tore the clothes off their victims. The civilians standing around, whose greed encouraged them, were also called in to strip the Jews. Then the victims, naked and lying on their bellies, were killed by a shot in the back of the neck.
47
We know from existing studies that the context of mass shootings, which were routinely preceded by stripping the victims of their clothes, created conditions for rape.
48
Since victims would be killed shortly afterwards, however, most such violence remained undocumented. Sources that describe situations in which women are being forced to undress in front of a group of men may therefore serve as important pieces of evidence about sexual violence, even if they do not openly verbalise what happened. Rózia Nasibirska, aged 14, who was evicted from her hiding place near Izbica (eastern Poland), ended up wandering through fields and forests for two months. In her testimony from 1948, she laconically recounts what happened to her in that time: I could not pass as Polish, because I was in tatters and everyone could recognize that I was Jewish [gdyż byłam odarta i każdy poznawał we mnie Żydówkę]. The firemen from the nearby villages robbed me, pulling my clothes off me, and left me just in a coat (they took away my dress and my pullover).
49
Although there is no mention of sexual assault in this testimony, the situation of a defenceless teenager being completely undressed in a forest by a group of men leaves little doubt as to what likely happened. The handwritten testimony has multiple additions and crossed-out words at this point, as if the young woman was struggling to find the appropriate words to describe her experience. The identity of the robbers is of relevance, too. Firefighter squads would actively take part in anti-Jewish violence, particularly in the phase of the so-called Judenjagd, when Jewish survivors from the liquidated ghettos would hide in the countryside. Firefighters, equipped to open hideouts and bunkers, were instrumental in the process of detecting Jews in hiding, and delivering them to the German authorities, which they often did on their own initiative; robbing victims of their belongings was part of that process, too. 50
Testimonies of non-Jews who witnessed the dramatic situation of Jewish women hiding in the forests complement our knowledge in this respect because they tend to be more explicit about cases of sexual violence. Stanisław Kisiel, who was a pre-war Communist and, under the German occupation, joined the Soviet partisan units in the area of Lida (present-day Belarus), penned a diary in 1946, in which he described several instances of rape on Jewish women who were hiding in the forests. One scene in his account makes clear how robbery and sexual violence went hand in hand in this context: Walking through the forest, I suddenly heard a woman screaming […] I went in this direction and I saw a girl trying, in vain, to free herself. She was held by the hand by a sturdy forest ranger, who was just about to rip a golden chain off the neck of the scared girl.
51
Kisiel then reports the exchange that he held with the forest ranger, who was clearly not going to stop at just robbing the girl. -What are you doing here, assaulting people? -Oh, you see, some Jews are hiding in the forest. -What's wrong with that? They are not stealing the forest from you. -Yes, but why are they hiding here? -You took the chain, leave the girl alone. -What do you mean, leave her alone? – he yelled. -I am telling you, calm down! -Jews should be liquidated. -You fool, what has the girl done to you?
The exchange goes on for a while, until Kisiel directly threatens the forest ranger and takes the girl by force with him, escorting her, alongside two other Jewish rape survivors, to the ghetto in Michaliszki. In this source, like in many others, it is only reading between the lines, that we find hints at sexual violence in accounts that ostensibly only recount theft.
On the morning of 11 October 1941, Chaja Fišaitė, who lived the Kaunas ghetto, filed a report at the Jewish police station about a robbery that she was subjected to the previous night: We were 5 women and a baby living in one flat, without any men. Yesterday, on 10 October 1941, at 10:10 p.m. 3 persons appeared at the door of our apartment – one in military dress and two civilians – and asked to be let in. They said that, if we did not let them in, they would start shooting. We did not let them in. They broke the window glass. Then our neighbour let them in through the door. The soldier had a pistol in his hand and demanded that we hand over the weapon. The soldier was drunk. First, they demanded gold and watches and started to search the whole flat. They took 1) 2 women's coats, 2) about 30 roubles, 3) shoes, 4) undergarments, dresses, etc. They also broke the furniture and threw everything. As far as we could tell from the voices, there were more men in the courtyard and a cart. They left around midnight. We also went to our neighbour Epelšteiniene. These three men were also in her house and took many things from her, undergarments, coats, suits, dresses, etc.
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The night-time visit of drunk plundering soldiers in two apartments inhabited only by women – a fact that the victim stresses in her opening sentence – is remarkable for two reasons. First, because of the amount of time that the plunderers spend there: two hours, which is much longer than sheer pillage would require. Second, the information that the plunderers moved over to an apartment of another single woman, and that they robbed both the women's dresses and undergarments, is also significant. Finally, we must consider that, given the limited powers of the Jewish ghetto police, and the perpetrators’ profiles, the case would, in all probability, not even be investigated. Very likely, Chaja Fišaitė's remarkable determination to file such a detailed report, despite all odds, could have been triggered by the fact that she had also been subjected to sexual violence. Filing a deposition concerning robbery might have been here a way for the victim to claim a sense of agency and voice protest, without subjecting herself to the stigma associated with rape.
Sorting victims’ clothes as a form of torture
Apart from physical violence, genocidal dispossession during the Holocaust was also accompanied by psychological violence. One of its particularly painful forms was coercing Jews to sort, mend and wash the clothes of executed victims. Work units delegated to such work were often, but not exclusively, composed of women, and existed not only in concentration camps, but also in ghettos and forced labour camps. 53 Small groups of Jews would also be appointed to gather clothes and shoes directly at execution sites. The rationale of delegating Jews to the labour of transforming ‘waste into resource’, as Anne Berg notes, related to the Nazi ideology, in which Jews came to be associated with filth, stench and garbage. 54 It had a denigrating function and followed the Nazi logic of, how Berg put it, outsourcing ‘all forms of ‘shit work’ to a biosocial underclass’. 55 Not surprisingly, this activity caused the victims the utmost anguish, principally because they would often recognise the items of clothing of their loved ones. This factor was clearly weaponised by the perpetrators, who would consciously select Jews for these tasks.
The collection of Jewish belongings, including clothes, provided a context that also enabled further violence. Israel Gajst from Biłgoraj was among a group of Jews forced to ‘clean up’ after the ‘liquidation’ of the local ghetto in January 1943: We were sitting at the back of a truck when Pinkowski, the thug, ordered us to get off and take boots off the massacred people. Michael from Frampol got off the truck as last, and, because he was not fast enough in taking the shoes off the dead people, [Pinkowski] shot him dead too. But the murderer was not satisfied yet and told us to continue to collect more shoes.
56
Iakov Sukhovolskii from Głębokie (Bel.: Hlybokae) recalls that the clothes of the victims of the mass shootings that took place in the spring and summer of 1942 would be processed in a warehouse adjacent to the ghetto: Jewish women were supposed to put these clothes in order. Sometimes a woman would come upon the bloodied shirt of her husband or son. The clothes were washed, ironed and stockpiled. Then they were sent to Warenkauf, the store for Germans, police officers and various German civil servants, and sold to them in accordance with their documents.
57
Abraham Weissbrod recalls a similar procedure unfolding in the Skałat work camp after the Aktion of 1943: All the clothes of the victims had been brought to camp for sorting, baling and transporting to Germany. The camp Jews experienced terrible moments in the course of this work. Often someone would recognize his child's dress, or the clothes of a brother, father or a dear friend. Although their emotions had long since been dulled, a bloodied garment could have a shocking effect on the strained nerves of an inmate. Who could say whether tomorrow, or the next day, some other Jew would be sorting his blood-soaked clothes?
58
At times, the proximity of the sorting to actual violence made the ordeal just an extension of the actual execution. Sala Feigenman survived the mass shooting in Bełżyce in May 1943 because, in the last moment, she was delegated to sorting the murdered victims’ clothing. In her deposition from 1946, she recalled: A car arrived. Zeiks [sic!, SS-Oberscharführer Reinhold Feiks] was walking around, looking at women, selecting them and ordering them to load onto a truck. He selected 82 women. The radio was playing loud dance music. The local inhabitants were staring at us. Zeiks [sic] told us all to undress completely. A dozen of men were digging the pits […] Every now and then a group of 10–15 women would be led away […] I was already [undressed] wearing only a shift, and I wanted at all costs to get to my child. When just a very small group [of women] remained, [Feiks] commanded us to go and sort the clothes, and to pile separately the underwear, regular clothes, coats and shoes. As soon we had finished, he resumed the shooting; only 18 of us were left alive.
59
Ela Borenstein reports a similar procedure adopted during the mass shooting of circa 14,000 Jews of Włodzimierz Wołyński (Ukr.: Volodymyr-Volynskyi), in September 1942.
60
Gathered together with 3000 other Jews in the yard of the local prison, and, awaiting the execution, Borenstein was selected by the local Gebietskommissar, Wilhelm Westerheide,
61
who thus created a unit of ten men responsible for gathering the victims’ clothes. We were already all undressed for death, when he selected me, told me to get dressed, and told me that I was young and strong and could still work. They told us to gather the clothes and shoes of the murdered and sort them. At night, we were kept in a prison cell. This is how I worked for the 14 days of the Aktion, watching as thousands of people were being murdered.
62
The experience of gathering the clothes of execution victims was deeply distressing for another reason. Execution victims would sometimes attempt to hide their babies in the piles of clothing, hoping they might survive. The ‘sorting commandos’ would be the ones to discover them. Kazimierz Sakowicz observed one such scene in Ponary: Despairing mothers were ‘saving’ their children's lives by hiding them under the heaps of clothes. They were counting on it that when the clothes were transported away, their hidden children might be saved. […] Only four men in their underwear remain on site. They are forced to collect the clothes. [They found] a child. The Lithuanian tells him to throw it into the pit. The Jew is carrying the child and suddenly starts running away with the baby into the forest. They are chasing him, some shots are fired. The Jew disappears among the bushes, more shots are audible. The Lithuanians come back. Did he make it?
63
The job of collecting and sorting the clothing of massacre victims was a psychologically draining activity, not only because those who performed it would come across familiar clothing of their own family and friends, or hidden babies, but also because it triggered a deep sense of injustice, relating to the fact that the total despoliation of Jews was to benefit their killers. Maks Perkal from Prużana (Bel.: Pruzhany), who was only 17 when he got deported to Auschwitz and forced to work in the Sonderkommando, describes in his diary what he felt when he was transporting the Jewish belongings from the trains and the crematorium to the camp storage (so-called ‘Kanada’): ‘As I was carrying the parcels from the already emptied trains, I was thinking: how much effort and how many years of work it all cost you to be able to afford [these things], and now they rob you of everything in just a few minutes’. 64 The deep sense of moral outrage that intimate dispossession caused at times triggered acts of resistance, through which victims tried, in however limited form, to voice protest or prevent the perpetrators from enjoying their spoils – which is a separate topic that deserves analysis in its own right.
Conclusion
To be sure, the loss of personal possessions, including clothes, constituted just a fraction of the violent measures adopted against Jews under the German occupation. It was, however, a practice that carried grave consequences, apart from its purely economic impact. It decreased the victims’ chances of survival, hindered escape, and made them vulnerable to starvation, diseases and selections. The context of dispossession also enabled more violence, including psychological terror, mutilation and sexual abuse. Depriving victims of their clothes was not only spatially and temporally, but also functionally intertwined with violence. The spoliation and the murder of Holocaust victims facilitated one another. While stripping victims of their clothes expedited killing – in helping the perpetrators to exert control over large groups of people, intimidate and humiliate victims, and limit their resources to resist – killing, in turn, enabled a total dispossession. It is in the history of this intimate loss: the theft of items of relatively low economic value, such as personal belongings and clothing, that the interlinked dynamics of Holocaust robbery and violence become most evident.
Seen in a diachronic perspective, the use of violence by the Nazi occupiers intensified over time: in the Generalgouvernement, there is a gradual progression from the first discriminatory policies introduced upon invasion, to the ghettoisation and industrialised mass killing. These temporalities are different in the Soviet territories invaded in 1941, with full-scale genocidal violence unfolding much quicker. As regards intimate dispossession, however, the brutality that accompanied this process escalated much faster: the invasion of Jewish private spaces and the theft of clothes began in the very first days of the Nazi occupation of the Polish and then Soviet territories. Body searches, stripping and sexual violence accompanied looting and requisitions from a very early stage, predating ghettoisation measures. To be sure, total dispossession took time and practice – that is clearly visible in the actions of the Battalion 101, gradually optimising their skills as extractors of valuables. But these lessons were learned very rapidly, and the ‘know-how’ applied in a ruthless and relentless way. The German military and civil administration were also not the only actors who employed these most brutal measures of expropriation. Local auxiliary forces (alongside with forest rangers, firefighters), Volksdeutsche, collaborating civilians, non-Jewish partisans and the population at large, all participated in the intimate dispossession of Jews, applying extreme violence.
Though Holocaust robbery was ostensibly a centralised, state-run (and bureaucratised) operation sanctioned by Nazi ideology, it was also ridden by many paradoxes and contradictions. On the one hand, intimate dispossession was congruent with Nazi ideological principles of the ‘totale Verwertung’ that stipulated that Jews should be expropriated and exploited fully and completely. On the other, the practices on the ground often stood in violation of Nazi norms. While unauthorised individual looting was forbidden, it remained widespread. While sexual contacts with Jews went against the laws of racial purity, sexual violence against Jews was a common occurrence. While the Nazi ideology associated Jews with dirt and filth, their private possessions and bodies were still desired. While the Nazi state attempted a total control (totale Erfassung) of, and claimed the exclusive rights to monetise, the expropriated goods; they were inevitably trickling down to the local communities, enriching German officials, soldiers and the population at large. These paradoxes expose the sinews of individual greed and desire behind the ideology of racial purity and alleged fight against Communism. They also reveal the importance of individual actors and grass-roots mechanisms in the process of Holocaust dispossession, and point to the uncontrollable, dispersed, and mass character of the phenomenon. Studying the testimonies of material loss gives us an insight into the way dispossession was part and parcel of the genocidal policies designed by National Socialists, and into how wide swathes of the occupied societies participated in the Holocaust plunder and benefited from the total dispossession of Jews.
Finally, testimonies of intimate dispossession, which focus on the body and the loss of clothes, are also particular sources that give us access into the most tabooed aspects of Holocaust history – sexual violence. Using robbery as a metaphor of rape is, in fact, not unique to Holocaust testimonies. During the wave of pogroms that raged in East-Central Europe along the frontlines of World War I and the ensuing Polish-Bolshevik war, female pogrom survivors often focused on the loss of their personal belongings as a less traumatising (and stigmatising) substitute to narrate their experiences of sexual abuse. 65 Accounts about the loss of clothes in the context of the Holocaust deserve, therefore, to be carefully examined as potential sources on sexual violence, too. Where testimonies are particularly scarce, such narratives may give us a new perspective on the scale and dimensions of these kinds of violence. The story of dispossession can, therefore, serve as a point of entry into much darker and still under-explored chapters of the history of violence.
