James Young is professor of English and Judaic studies at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Young looks at the ways that women are figured in Holocaust museum
designs and memorials, monuments, and statuary. The types of images include the victim, in
which children and young women represent perfect innocence; the resistance fighter; and the
pieta, or mother and child. He finds that these monuments were basically concretizations or
fixings of national ideals, cultural ideals, even the ideals of the artist. These
idealizations are used as objects. "That is," Young says, "the women obviously have been
objectified, but their ideals have also been objectified in order to tell national stories."
Where are the experiences women had that nobody else had? Where are
the images of women being sexually abused, violated? Where is the childbirth, the
infanticide? The very difficult and unique experiences of women as women during the
Holocaust were nowhere to be seen. The lack of those kinds of particulars is particularly
apparent in Holocaust stories. Young talks about the appropriation of Anne Frank's diary,
first by her father, and then by Holland, to create a mythic figure, a revised Anne, who is
now the touchstone reference for thinking about the Holocaust, but who is presented without
much of her womanly identity, an identity that has been removed to enhance her symbolic
value as a "lost innocent."
Young describes a museum exhibition at Yad Vashem, which included
blown-up photographs of primarily religious, orthodox women from Hasidic families who were
forced to strip naked and stand in front of their executioners while photographs were taken
of these horrific moments. The museum curators sued for the right to exhibit these large
images when the Haredi community of Jerusalem said that this was a violation of these
women's modesty. "The women were objectified, first by being degraded sexually, this being a
violation of their sexual modesty, and then photographed in this degraded moment," Young
says. "This wasn't just a reproduction or representation of what happened; it was very much
an extension of the crime itself."
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