Treblinka Historiography

Secondary literature focused on Treblinka is nearly as old as the camp itself, but to-date very little work specifically addresses space or the lives of Jewish women prisoners. Working with Rachel Auerbach inside the Warsaw Ghetto, escapee Abraham Krzepicki was likely the first Treblinka survivor to complete a chronicle of his experiences at the camp.Footnote ⁴ Vasily Grossman's The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was the first account by an individual not personally present at Treblinka while it operated.Footnote ⁵

Grossman's work was completed in the immediate aftermath of events, and therefore had the advantage of the freshness of memory for the witnesses he was able to find, though this was a very small selection of Treblinka survivors and local non-Jewish Poles – none of them women. Later works, such as Konnilyn Feig's Hitler's Death Camps, Chris Webb and Michael Chocholaty's The Treblinka Death Camp (2014), Manfred Burba's Treblinka: Ein NS-Vernichtungslager im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhard’, and Witold Chrostowski's Extermination Camp Treblinka had access to far more survivor witnesses than were available to Grossman as the war still raged across Europe.Footnote ⁶ Alexander Donat's The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary (1979), Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness (1983) and Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah (1985), contributed analysis and, most importantly, gifted researchers with important new collections of testimony.Footnote ⁷

Historian Michael S. Bryant also uses Treblinka trial testimonies, though he does so in a quest to analyse the postwar justice process that spawned them, not the camp history they depict.Footnote ⁸ Likewise, Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness focuses on the mind of Treblinka's longest-serving commandant, Franz Stangl, not a dissection of prisoner resistance or the contributions of Jewish women. Her book does, however, yield excellent interviews with survivor witnesses she consulted to challenge the jailhouse statements of Stangl. Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess's The Good Old Days (1991) analyses perpetrator ideology and mindset rather than prisoners and their actions.Footnote ⁹ To this one can add The SS of Treblinka (2010) by Ian Baxter and its focus on the camp's German, and – to a lesser extent – Trawniki perpetrators.Footnote ¹⁰

The most important work on the camp remains Yitzhak Arad's Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Arad conducted detailed research on Treblinka, though his interventions are constrained by the need to give equal space to the history of two other camps in a book focusing on the broad history of Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) as a whole. Feig's Hitler's Death Camps is even more wide-ranging as it includes discussion of all Nazi camps with an extermination function, in addition to those of Aktion Reinhard.

The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance by Webb and Chocholaty is a strong, survivor testimony-based addition to scholarship. The authors conducted several new interviews with former Treblinka inmates.Footnote ¹¹ Their work is also useful as a reference for its inclusion of chapters listing victims, survivors, guards, and witnesses with biographical excerpts on those persons for whom the authors could find sufficient source materials.Footnote ¹² In all of this work, however, Arad still stands alone for his inclusion of a short, five-page chapter on Jewish women in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Source Scarcity and Parsing the Male Voice

Returning to the day of the 2 August 1943 revolt, sources generally indicate that some 200 Jews managed to flee Treblinka in the midst of the frantic melee following that first fateful shot.Footnote ¹³ Historians have long believed that only sixty-eight men and women who fled in those moments or escaped earlier managed to avoid recapture by Nazi forces and survive the remainder of the war. This number first emerged in the writing of Holocaust survivor, author, and publisher Alexander Donat. In his 1979 edited volume The Death Camp Treblinka, Donat included the names of Treblinka survivors and what information he could find for each. Though he does not imply that his list of survivors is complete, it has remained largely unchanged and unchallenged these past forty-three years.Footnote ¹⁴ The museum at the site of Treblinka today uses Donat's work, with the addition of some recent recognitions for a total of eighty-five survivors.Footnote ¹⁵ In the case of Treblinka – where almost no perpetrator documentation survives or likely ever existed in any depth – finding survivors and the statements they left behind recognises these individual histories and adds their voices to the known archive. My efforts to revise Donat's list, to date, reveal 262 named survivors of the camp. Of these, seventy got out during the revolt, eighty-three escaped prior to that event, a further eighty-eight left via transport to another camp after a very brief time, and twenty-one survived through varying unique experiences. This new accounting expands the available source base in testimonies, oral histories, and other documents left behind by Jews who experienced this camp firsthand.Footnote ¹⁶

Even as work to find Treblinka survivors continues, it must be stressed that this search can never be conclusive or complete. It is highly unlikely that we will ever know the exact number of people who escaped from Treblinka prior to the revolt or how many fled and evaded recapture after the uprising. It is also possible that many survivors never chose to come forward or record a testimony of any kind, preferring to leave behind this terrible chapter in their lives rather than relive it in writing, postwar court testimonies, or oral history interviews.

Jewish women who survived the camp may have had additional reasons to avoid telling their stories. In a Fortunoff Archive oral history, Treblinka survivor Yaakov E. reveals one reason why women may not have desired to come forward as court witnesses or oral history subjects. He states that when he was preparing to travel to Germany to testify at one of the Treblinka trials, he spoke with a woman who had also survived the camp and feared she would have to admit she ‘lived with a German’ if she testified.Footnote ¹⁷ He explains that she did not want this revealed because by then she was married and thought her husband might leave her if it came out in open court. Yaakov E. recalls how he helped this unnamed woman secure letters from two doctors stating that she was too ill to travel for the trial.

Donat's original list of Treblinka survivors includes three women. One, however, is the mistakenly twice listed Sonia Lewkowicz.Footnote ¹⁸ While it is possible that the woman Yaakov E. recounts is one of the two women identified by Donat, this is not likely. Donat identified most of the survivors he named by searching German trial documents. Both Bronka Sukno and Sonia Lewkowicz did give evidence to prosecutors. Yaakov E.'s oral history indicates this third woman never went to Germany or recorded a pretrial statement.

As things stand, Sukno and Lewkowicz remain the only two women survivors specifically known to have been at Treblinka at the time of the revolt. Though seven more women are known to have survived the camp, none of them were in Treblinka at the time of the uprising or for a long enough period to experience life inside.Footnote ¹⁹ This makes researching the lives of Jewish women inside Treblinka something that must be done, for the most part, in sources left behind by men. With the increasing distance of this past, the story of women inside Treblinka, such as it is told, is mediated by the voice of male survivor recollections and then further filtered by the topic choices of male historians. This source problem, in turn, places even greater importance on how we interpret male survivor voices.

Yaakov E. highlights two of the reasons we know so little about the history of women prisoners at Treblinka. The first is their own understandable reluctance to relive these events, and the second is their later erasure by many of the male survivors they lived and fought alongside. In the same oral history interview recounting the story of this woman who was in the camp but did not want to testify, Yaakov E. also, quite stunningly, states that there were no women prisoners in Treblinka – after he described the circumstances of the woman survivor he knew in postwar life.Footnote ²⁰ His own unwillingness to talk about what happened to women at the camp explains his silence here and what looks like an attempt on his part (consciously or not) to erase their history in the camp. We return to the matter of their erasure, or male silences in regard to the experiences of women at Treblinka resistance after analysis of the locations that allow reconstruction of their many contributions in resistance.

The Pferdestall and Barracks Infirmary as a Place of Resistance

Treblinka prisoners wrested back a degree of control over life and death by finding means to limit German entrance into a structure called the Pferdestall (German for horse barn), also called Storage Barracks B. The Pferdestall never actually functioned as a horse barn or living accommodation; the name comes from its design and normal use in other camps. At Treblinka, the official use of this structure was to store clothing taken from victims. Control of this place and the infirmary enabled conspirators to both safeguard their sick and remove distrusted informants. Due to the interconnected ways in which Jewish prisoners used them, these two locations combine to form a single place of resistance.

The infirmary and Pferdestall took on positions as a place of resistance through inmates’ ability to control their uses and meanings. The Jewish prisoner Lagerälteste, or Camp Elder, Alfred Galewski – the highest-ranking prisoner in the German-assigned hierarchy and a leader of the resistance conspiracy – secured SS permission to create an infirmary in the main housing barracks with allowance for fifteen inmates to recuperate there at any one time.Footnote ²¹ Galewski used his position as an intermediary, which afforded some level of trust to convince the Germans that a system of recuperation rather than the killing of sick prisoners would lessen turnover in key roles and increase the efficiency of the camp.Footnote ²² It seems, however, that neither side of this bargain intended to use the official infirmary as a true place of healing.

From its creation, SS guard August Miete began sweeping the barracks infirmary for prisoners he considered too ill to work. Miete routinely marched those he selected from the infirmary bunks to a place of execution. The predictability of his actions made it possible for prisoners to not only protect those they hoped to save, but also to use him against their internal enemies. Individuals who resistance members wanted gone could simply be left in the infirmary – some of them incapacitated due to injections given by inmate doctors – while sick members of the prisoners’ conspiracy were instead hidden under the sorted clothing in the Pferdestall and allowed to recuperate there during the workday.Footnote ²³ Survivor Samuel Willenberg also points out how prisoners could even speed up the removal of an individual from the sick bay by telling the SS of their condition to bring about one of Miete's rounds on their own schedule.Footnote ²⁴ Dr. Irena ‘Irka’ Lewkowski was one of four prisoner doctors who may have helped drug informants so that they would appear ill enough for Miete to select them on one of his rounds.Footnote ²⁵

Prisoners controlled the safety of the Pferdestall as an actual place of recuperation by playing on German SS fears of lice and typhus – a preoccupation owed in no small part to Nazi propaganda labelling Jews as carriers of lice and vectors of the disease. Lagerälteste Galewski strengthened protection of this place by constantly reminding guards that the clothing stored in the Pferdestall was infested, giving them a reason to avoid the building rather than patrol it as normal.Footnote ²⁶ Several survivors speak of the Pferdestall and its use as a hiding place for the sick as well as for resistance planning and covert communication during the daytime hours. In a statement given in 1962, Bronka Sukno explained that her job in the tailor's shop gave her the ability to move freely between the shop and Pferdestall, among other areas.Footnote ²⁷ Moyshe Klaynman, the supervisor of the tailor's shop, confirms this and tells of his own ability to move back and forth between these spaces at will.Footnote ²⁸

Tailors like Sukno and Klaynman needed access to the clothes stored in the Pferdestall to gather materials for items they were forced to make for German guards. SS exploitation of the goods stolen from those killed in the gas chambers by guards was normal practice at all three Aktion Reinhard camps. Terrible as that is, it provided Jewish prisoners with opportunities for resistance and survival. Treblinka survivor Eddie Weinstein successfully hid in the Pferdestall for as many as seventeen days with a bullet wound to his arm inflicted by a Trawniki guard on the way to Treblinka. Despite a conspicuous inability to lift his right arm, Weinstein survived in this place of resistance until he was able to escape from the camp with the help of others.Footnote ²⁹ His survival in the Pferdestall was early in the existence of the camp – long before the establishment of the official infirmary on the suggestion of Galewski. This timing indicates that the creation of the infirmary as a location for healing was never Galewski's intent because prisoners already had an area to recover in the Pferdestall.

At this place, women helped remove informants and carried information to the Pferdestall that could have warned of impending visits by the guards or other changes during the daytime hours. While some scholarship on Treblinka already points out that Dr. Lewkowski took part in resistance, Bronka Sukno's role as a courier between the Pferdestall and the prisoner workshops on the other side of the camp has not been profiled previously.Footnote ³⁰ Klaynman's early memoir and other sources further confirm that women working in the tailors’ shop could enter the SS barracks at will to collect or drop off clothing.Footnote ³¹ The importance of their abilities to watch this place and report on the comings and goings of the guards could hardly be overstated, though it is rarely mentioned by male survivors – especially in later oral histories.

The Camp Kitchen as a Place of Resistance

Beyond the Pferdestall/infirmary place, what women did for resistance is more directly stated in sources covering the provision and concealment of arms for the uprising. Exploration of the next place of resistance, the camp kitchens, comes back to the day of the revolt and plans for the distribution of stolen weapons just before the appointed start of the fighting. Considering this place further compels confrontation with the erasure of women from both the history of Treblinka and the planning of resistance in male survivor oral histories.

In one such source, survivor Abram Kolski stated that he was to collect a weapon from the camp kitchen a couple of hours before the revolt. He explains that arms intended for his work detail were stored there after other prisoners had stolen them from the SS armoury with the use of a secretly acquired key.Footnote ³² What Kolski does not say – at this or any other time in his interview – is that Jewish women staffed this kitchen. In fact, Kolski never mentions women prisoners in his oral history at all. Other sources, however, confirm that work details in the kitchen, laundry and tailors’ shop in the main section of the camp consisted either entirely or partly of Jewish women. During a pair of interviews, Sam Goldberg explains that from the earliest days at Treblinka, he supervised between twenty-four and thirty-three women in the three laundry facilities – one each for German, Trawniki, and Jewish clothing that was not to mix under any circumstance.Footnote ³³ Sonia Lewkowicz worked in the German laundry.Footnote ³⁴ Each was quite near or inside the barracks, with laundry for the German SS adjoining the kitchen. Bronka Sukno's tailor's shop was in the same building near both of these work areas. In total, as many as forty Jewish women worked in this section of the camp with a further thirteen to twenty working and housed near the gas chambers and burial pits. We return to the contributions of this second group below.

Abram Kolski is not alone in his silence on the daily lives and contributions of women prisoners. Unlike Yaakov E.'s interview from the Fortunoff Archive, however, he does not deny the existence of women in Treblinka, he just never brings them up and he is not asked. Kolski's fellow survivor Abraham Bomba's interview in the VHA is more like that of Yaakov E. Bomba escaped Treblinka prior to the revolt, though not until he had endured months inside the camp. Asked about the presence of women in Treblinka, Bomba told his Shoah Foundation interviewer the following. (Note that by ‘my camp’ he means the specific section of Treblinka to which he was assigned.)

Bomba's statement here is notable for several reasons. First, because he is in error and – whether or not he had blocked out this truth by the time he gave his interview – he had to know this was not the case while he was in the camp.

One of the few Treblinka survivors to achieve some recognition, Bomba's later notoriety came from the difficult and emotional interviews he gave to Claude Lanzmann for the documentary Shoah. In these, Bomba recalls his forced labour as a barber cutting the hair of women sent to their deaths in the gas chamber.Footnote ³⁶ He and other men who evade or discount the existence of women prisoners never deny that the Nazis murdered thousands of women at the camp. They just will not talk about the more personal fates of women who lived in the camp as fellow prisoners. Kolski, too, recounts resistance by women as they arrived – including a woman who killed one man and wounded another with a razor blade as she got off the train – but all the while he says nothing about women prisoners.

Other testimonies and attention to camp geography can help us arrive at conclusions despite the contradictions of witnesses like Bomba, Yaakov E., and Kolski. Treblinka survivor Jonas Kornhendler's oral history interview provides a starting point. Kornhendler arrived at Treblinka from Czestochowa, Poland in September 1943.Footnote ³⁷ Bomba was also in the Czestochowa Ghetto and was deported to Treblinka at about the same time.Footnote ³⁸ Neither man is exact about the date, so it is even possible they arrived on the same transport. Where Kornhendler differs from Bomba is in his frankness about the existence of women prisoners in Treblinka. He not only says that they worked in the kitchen, he also states that you could see them and the kitchen from the barracks in which he slept – the same barracks as Bomba. Kornhendler also possessed almost identical access to geography, or areas in which he was allowed without drawing the attention of guards, from which he could observe the camp. Is it plausible to believe that Yaakov E., Abram Kolski, and Abraham Bomba did not see and even likely speak to these women? Beyond Kornhendler's statement that you could see their workplace from the barracks, the fact that Jewish women prisoners slept in a partitioned area of the same building in which men were housed is also well-documented.Footnote ³⁹

It is possible that Sonia Lewkowicz, the woman Bomba names in his interview, was not transferred to the other side of the camp until after Bomba had escaped.Footnote ⁴⁰ At or about the time that Bomba, Yaakov E., Kolski, and Kornhendler were in Treblinka, Sonia Lewkowicz was one of the very women he says he never saw.Footnote ⁴¹ It would be surprising if where she worked did not come up when they met in postwar life. The descendants of Sam Goldberg – laundry detail supervisor – recorded a prisoner reunion in the year 2000 that both Sonia Lewkowicz and Bronka Sukno attended along with four male survivors and their families. At this gathering, the survivors all talked of the camp and what they went through there.Footnote ⁴² Bomba's earlier meetings with Lewkowicz would have likely gone the same way. Meeting women survivors in Israel, however, did not change Bomba's recollections of women's work details in the camp. What he says in the interview shows that making the acquaintance of Sukno and Lewkowicz only led him to state that there were two women in the camp – nothing more. He did not add any context for their lives, discuss their larger work details, or comment on what they were doing in Treblinka. Contemporary witnesses, however, are not the only individuals to erase women from Treblinka and its story of resistance.

The Camp 2 Brothel as a Place of Resistance

Designers of the Treblinka II extermination camp – as at Belzec and Sobibor – divided the facility into two strictly separated parts. These are often referred to in the sources as Camp 1 and Camp 2. Camp 1 was also called the Living Camp – where prisoners worked on sorting the clothing and goods of those killed in the gas chambers in addition to skilled trades positions, while Camp 2 was sometimes referred to as the Death Camp, or the area that held the gas chambers, burial pits, and later pyres for the incineration of the bodies. Each camp inside Treblinka II had its own Jewish prisoner population. Treblinka's SS and Ukrainian guards ensured that any prisoner who entered Camp 2 never went back to Camp 1. This segregation for the purposes of secrecy was brutally enforced despite the realities of Camp 2 being common knowledge to all held in any part of Treblinka.

The barracks infirmary, Pferdestall, and kitchens were all in Camp 1. The final Place of Resistance was in Camp 2 – inside the prisoner barracks building. In his 1987 book The Operation Reinhard Death Camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and its 2018 updated edition, the late historian Yitzhak Arad titles a five-page chapter ‘Women Prisoners’.Footnote ⁴³ In this, he quotes the Camp 2 survivor Eliahu Rosenberg on the formation of women's work details in the Death Camp portion of Treblinka in about February of 1943. The punctuation Arad uses in this quotation is highly important:

Arad stops here with an ellipsis and makes little further comment on what became of these women. The quote used by Arad above and that below are both from Rosenberg's written testimony provided to prosecutors in Vienna in 1947. The punctuation below is reproduced faithfully from the original:

This re-excerpted selection of Rosenberg's writing carries far greater implications than the selection used by Arad. Omission of the quotation marks around aide/assistant changes Rosenberg's meaning as night and day. Rosenberg also employs these scare quotes around the term ‘private use’ in the section of the quote cut off by Arad. He is trying to point at something more.

If Rosenberg's statement is placed alongside the 1961 Eichmann Trial investigation testimony of Camp 2 survivor Szlomo Helman, they reveal a site of forced sexual exploitation, or what is often termed a camp brothel.Footnote ⁴⁶ While oral histories and existing Treblinka literature do not mention such a space, these early written testimonies show its presence. Helman further describes how the women forced to endure this place provided the lion's share of arms available to Camp 2 prisoners on the day of the revolt. Explaining the day of the uprising, he stated (in Yiddish), ‘Our girls, meanwhile, distracted the Ukrainians who had put down their rifles back in the waiting room.’Footnote ⁴⁷ He then states that Moyshe Shnayder ran into this waiting room and attempted to flee with eight rifles these women secured. He was shot, but the weapons seem to have ended up in the hands of other Jewish prisoners. This ‘waiting room’ does not appear on any existing map of Treblinka; however, a women's barracks room, kapos’ rooms, and a doctor's room adjoin in the same section of the building.

Szlomo Helman also recounts how Zelo Bloch ambushed and overpowered a Ukrainian guard near the well. Bloch, a recognized leader of resistance in Camp 2, and his accomplices threw this guard – or two guards – down the well and took his rifle. Without Helman's testimony, this is the only known source of weapons for the revolt in Camp 2. Helman and Rosenberg's combined revelation of sexual exploitation at Treblinka not only returns long ignored women to the historical record, it also shows their crucial participation in the revolt. These survivors indicate that there was a camp brothel at Treblinka, and on 2 August 1943 it became a place of resistance for the provision of arms.

Silence, Erasure, and the Absence of Women in Treblinka Literature and Oral History

Yitzhak Arad's decision to stop short of quoting Rosenberg in ways that would clearly reference sexual exploitation seems in keeping with the time in which he wrote. His book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka also barely mentions the fact that Sukno and Rosenberg insist that the deputy commandant was homosexual and maintained a forced Jewish sexual partner in the camp.Footnote ⁴⁸ Discussions of sex, sexuality, sexual exploitation, rape, gender, masculinity, and related topics began to appear regularly in studies of the Holocaust only years later. Arad might have also feared that continuing the Rosenberg quote would harm living survivors. Recall the unnamed woman, above, who was worried her husband and family might discover what she had gone through and judge her for it if she testified against the guards. An extensive exploration of these topics while most survivors were still alive might have made her fears a reality.

The same sort of logic – among other factors – is at play in the silences and erasures of later oral history interviews given by male survivors. Few oral history interviews given by men who survived Treblinka mention sex, sexual violence, or the lives of women inside the camp. This tendency to avoid the topic in recorded interviews at times runs contrary to the recollections of the same men in other formats – this is particularly true for statements written in the years just after the war. Eddie Weinstein, the survivor shot in the arm and hidden in the Pferdestall discussed above, says nothing of women at Treblinka in his oral history.Footnote ⁴⁹ In his memoir written in 1947 and published by Yad Vashem in 2008, however, Weinstein provides more. He states:

In this passage, Weinstein, as others, is more forthcoming about the fate of women that circumstances did not force him to consider personally. Here again the male survivor recalls what happened to anonymous women raped and murdered at the hands of the Nazis – albeit after the distancing words ‘we also heard’. In keeping with the statements of other male survivors, the women of whom he speaks in this passage were not long-term prisoners of the camp.

Weinstein follows the example of Bomba, Kolski, and Yaakov E. in denying the presence of women we can prove that he saw by examining the geography of his life in the camp. He lived in the same area as Bomba and must have been fed at the same kitchen as all the other Camp 1 prisoners. Therefore, the selections, rapes, and murders he says he ‘heard’ about – and thus insinuates that he did not actually see – took place in areas he would have been able to view from his routine place of work in the camp. The most important difference between his oral history and that of the others mentioned in this research is that the interviewer never directly asked about the presence of women, so he was never put in the position to make a denial.

Male survivors may have their own troubling reasons to avoid discussion of women in the camp. To be certain, the survivors mentioned here – weighing their oral histories, the other sources they left behind, and conclusions about their lives in the camp supported by further evidence – do not appear to have any individual culpability in the sexual victimisation of Jewish women at Treblinka. This is not at all to say that acts of sexual violence or relationships of a grossly unequal and exploitative nature did not happen between Jews in this camp or during the Holocaust writ large. Sources show that Jewish men and women did enter into relationships that can be described as ‘sex for barter’ or ‘instrumental sex’, in the terms of historians Anna Hájková and Waitman Beorn, respectively.Footnote ⁵¹ Rather, for these interviewees, silence in this historical source format in particular results from certain issues inherent to the oral history interview process and something of which historians using these important and powerful sources may want to bear in mind more generally.

Male survivor oral histories that avoid the topics of women prisoners, sex, and sexual violence urge consideration of what causes many male interviewees to be evasive. Their silences are best explained by what the historian Mary Louise Roberts terms ‘gender damage’, or injury to their masculine self-conception brought on by discussion of violence against women.Footnote ⁵² These men, Holocaust victims themselves, could do little or nothing to protect Jewish women from the sexual violence of guards and some prisoners in positions of power. The prospect of telling such stories years later should be understood as a traumatic bridge too far. Retelling the full picture of sexual violence against women at Treblinka could cause a revisitation of the male survivor's inability to protect women as their traditional gender roles required. The result in testimonies is sometimes – conscious or not – an avoidance of certain topics and a complete silence on others.

Most men who survived Treblinka and gave oral history interviews recorded their contributions in their own homes. Interviewers for the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive did their best to make sure these survivors were recorded in private – that is, in the presence of only the interviewer and videographer and away from family members – though several interviews show that this was not always possible. Archival interview notes for Treblinka revolt survivor Leon Diskin's oral history, for example, contain a remark by his interviewer that states the ‘survivor's wife arrives unexpectedly [at this point] and fuddles in the kitchen (even the best laid plans can go awry).’Footnote ⁵³ Those best laid plans were the hope that Mr. Diskin could be recorded alone, as is the preference and standard operating procedure of the USC Shoah Foundation.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, family members and other individuals can be heard moving about in the background of several interviews. Sam Goldberg's interview includes the voice of his wife Esther calling out to him from another room on a couple of occasions.Footnote ⁵⁵

Escape survivor Adek Stein's oral history best demonstrates the relevance of audience and interviewer/interviewee interactions. As he approached the topic of sexual violence while describing what he saw during the Holocaust, Stein became deeply uneasy when he realized he would have to tell these stories in front of women.

Stein demonstrates the difficulty that many older, traditional men had with the prospect of discussing sex and sexual violence in front of family and/or women generally. While he means it is ‘too drastic’ to tell these stories in front of young women to protect them from injury in hearing this history, he is also protecting himself from the pain of reliving these events in the company of people who remind him of the victims he had no power to protect. As he discusses these topics he halts frequently and looks around the room uncomfortably at his audience.

For Stein, it was not just the act of telling that was difficult, it was also the sex and age of those that would hear his stories. How often was this an issue in the oral history format? The single largest collection of Holocaust oral histories – the USC Shoah Foundation VHA – contains ninety-five interviews tagged as individuals who experienced Treblinka. Out of these oral histories, 75 per cent of male Treblinka survivors were interviewed by women. Considering only men who endured a period in the camp longer than one day, this number rises to 89 per cent. Statistics on how many of these interviews were conducted near or in the direct presence of family members are impossible to calculate.Footnote ⁵⁷ The percentage of male Treblinka survivors interviewed by women is actually a bit higher than the statistics for all Holocaust survivor interviews in the VHA. Of 53,231 Holocaust oral histories, 68 per cent of all interviewers are women, while 67 per cent of male survivors and 73 per cent of female survivors were interviewed by women.Footnote ⁵⁸

The avoidances, silences, or distortions in the oral histories of some male survivors cannot be attributed exclusively to the sex of their interviewer, but this is a factor that historians and oral history collection groups should consider. Male interviewees are often more forthcoming in other formats or with male interviewers,Footnote ⁵⁹ from Eddie Weinstein's book mentioning sexual violence while his interview does not, to the inaccuracies and inconsistencies of several other men cited here. Though this research almost always makes necessary the reconstruction of women's lives through the voices of men, historians should also be aware what may emerge regarding the oral history recollections of women survivors speaking to male interviewers.