ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the manifold and gendered forms and functions in which sexuality continued to take place in the Holocaust. While sexuality in the Holocaust has long been a matter of fascination and stigma, deeper analysis is needed to consider the question of individual agency, including of the victims. Feminists tend to understand physical intimacy as a tool for dehumanization and domination in cases of sexual violence by perpetrators toward victims, or as a source of pleasure and assertion of selfhood for victims. This chapter argues that much of the sexuality during the Holocaust played out in the form of sexual barter, as a resource, and a tool of survival. Based on victims’ diaries, testimonies of Holocaust survivors, court records, published memoirs, as well as four decades of feminist historiography, this chapter demonstrates a number of perspectives that sexuality offers to deepen our understanding of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe.
