For eight decades, the experiences of women who resisted the Nazis at the death camp Treblinka were almost entirely erased from Holocaust memory. But in a seminal book published earlier this month, historian Chad S.A. Gibbs demonstrates that female prisoners played a pivotal role in resistance at Treblinka, the German-built extermination center in occupied Poland where 925,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

“Survivors and historians evaded discussion of women’s lives at Treblinka, at times, out of a desire to protect women survivors from the latter-day judgment of others,” wrote Gibbs, director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.

“These same surviving men and some of their peers also avoided the topic of women’s lives and what they endured at Treblinka in order to protect themselves from the psychologically damaging effects of retelling,” said Gibbs.

In “Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance,” Gibbs zooms in on the “gendered geography” of Treblinka. He is especially interested in how groups of prisoners — including women — “carved out places of resistance” underneath the perpetrators’ noses.

The book is filled with examples of how women “used various deceptions to take control of geography,” whether for the purposes of smuggling food, providing information, or preparing to offer medical aid in case of a revolt.

“Jewish women at Treblinka fought back in self-led, spontaneous moments of armed and unarmed resistance, organized to protect their own lives and those of others at great peril, and endured the eye of hell to arm an insurrection which they almost certainly knew might bring about their own deaths,” wrote Gibbs.

In the years ahead, Gibbs said Holocaust studies will see a “reevaluation” regarding “the less seemly sides of the lives of survivors whom we hold as heroes,” he told The Times of Israel.

A prime example of women’s history being erased at Treblinka was the previously undocumented camp brothel, wrote Gibbs. With male survivors omitting the brothel from their testimony, the heroism of Jewish women who clandestinely acquired weapons at that harrowing site has not been remembered — until now.

“As we enter the post-memory era — the years........

© The Times of Israel