Abstract
While many know of Auschwitz and its genocidal sub-camp Birkenau, few are familiar with the women’s section. This chapter offers an overview of the women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau: a place, its denizens—personnel and prisoners—and its social structures. It articulates a timeline for the women’s section and brings an approach that integrates analyses of women prisoners, prisoner functionaries, and guards. It adds to the work of others that challenge the notion of Auschwitz as a fixed site. It challenges previous scholarship that categorizes the responses of women and men prisoners as highly differentiated. It also counters two notions about prisoner functionaries: that they were primarily gentile and that they were complicit in genocide.
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Cushman, S. (2020). The Auschwitz Women’s Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration. In: Aarons, V., Lassner, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_38
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