Healing from the Holocaust

Matt Darroch: The first concentration camp was discovered by the Allies in 1944.

British Newsreel Announcer: German guards carry away the shrunken, tortured bodies of men and women systematically murdered.

Matt Darroch: By the end of World War II, 23 major camps and many more sub-camps were liberated.

British Newsreel Announcer: Prison clothes are burned. The only way to kill the disease they carry. Then the entire camp is scorched off the face of the Earth by British flamethrowers.

Matt Darroch: Those who survived were left a shell of themselves: malnourished, diseased, and traumatized. Children who lost their parents and extended family had nowhere to go.

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: Some of these children were so young that they didn't necessarily remember their—their—their family name, or they didn't know their parents' names. If you think about how many three or four-year-olds can tell you, you know, not only their name and address, but the full names of their parents.

Matt Darroch: Caregivers from across the globe, mostly women, swooped in to help. They offered all kinds of physical and psychological support, and they wrote extensively about their experience through letters, diaries, and memoirs—all in service to the child survivors and their stories.

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: They know that these stories deserve to be told, and their hope is that in listening to these stories, they are helping the act of healing to progress. But it's also not just the healing of these survivors under their care, it's the healing of this world.

Matt Darroch: From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Matt Darroch. Today on the show: Healing from the Holocaust.

After liberation, most concentration camp survivors needed urgent medical attention. There were thousands and thousands of survivors and nowhere near enough hospital beds. Maggie Fraser Kirsh is an instructor of Judaic Studies at William & Mary. She says former concentration camps—these sites of unspeakable horror—were turned into a staging ground to administer care and begin the healing process.

Matt Darroch: Maggie, your grandfather was among the first Americans to liberate a concentration camp during World War II. Do you know which one? Did you ever talk to him about it?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: He never told me the specific name. The story goes, as he tells it, is that this was following D-Day. They had crossed over from France into Germany, and they literally stumbled upon this camp. There was a German-born Jewish soldier who worked as a translator for my grandfather within the U.S. Army. And my grandfather told me the story of this German Jewish, now American, who was translating the words of the survivors that they encountered at that camp. His name was Eric. And that my grandfather told Eric to tell the people that they were free now, and my grandfather said that there was a stunned reaction, that there was not joy, it was just more of an overwhelmingness. And that was about all that he told me. But it did get me thinking. I became curious about what happens next.

Matt Darroch: Well, what happened to the Holocaust survivors in the months following their liberation? Were they, I don't know, whisked away to recover in local hospitals?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: It was really complicated. We're talking about thousands of concentration camps and labor camps all over Europe. And so, as you can imagine, this liberation is very ad hoc. So, the liberating armies provided immediate care, but then very quickly, you have this assembly of—mostly, in the initial days, it was mostly medical personnel—that arrive at these liberated concentration camps and labor camps. And eventually, this will all be orchestrated by an organization that's known by the acronym of UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association. But they're dependent upon a lot of smaller local organizations and a lot of far-flung international relief organizations as well to provide the staff to offer care to survivors. Many of these former concentration camps were turned into displaced persons camps. And those displaced persons camps aren't just housing Jewish survivors. There's literally millions of displaced people in the wake of war. But those displaced persons camps were the first opportunity that a lot of these survivors had to receive medical care. And so they were really an important lifeline in transitioning from that immediate need for relief to the eventual need for rehabilitation.

Matt Darroch: What about the child survivors? I imagine many of them, you know, lost their parents and maybe all of their extended family and basically had nowhere to go, right?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: That was a chief concern for many of these relief organizations. And part of this was because of the chaos of these camps and the aftermath of the war. It wasn't deemed to be a safe place for anybody to stay long term, in particular, children. And so there's certainly a prioritization to remove these children from these camps and to send them to places that are a bit more stable, where the hope is that they can get specialized care. You do have children that are living in these displaced persons camps, sometimes for several years, but the majority of them are spending a brief period there and then are being taken elsewhere. In great part because I think there was this belief that true healing could not happen in the places where these atrocities had just unfolded.

Matt Darroch: Right. I mean, it boggles my mind that these concentration camps were turned into, you know, recovery centers.

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: It really is. You know, and sometimes it's adjacent to, but we're not talking about very far away. So, this is why we do see this priority to take these children to other places. But that in itself was very complicated. Determining: are these children orphans? Do they have any surviving relatives? If so, where are they? Some of these children were so young that they didn't necessarily remember their—their—their family name, or they didn't know their parents' names. If you think about how many three or four-year-olds can tell you, you know, not only their name and address, but the full names of their parents. So, it was a multi-year process to find homes for these children. There's a lot of debate at this time period among sociologists and caregivers and educators about what is the healthiest place for children like this. And so those questions consumed a lot of energy and a lot of resources on a local, national, and international level.

Matt Darroch: You focus on the caregivers, the ones who came from, you know, all over the world to care for these child survivors. Tell me about who they were. Were they mostly women, and I assume Jewish as well?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: It's a really fascinating cast of characters that shows up in these places. Overwhelmingly, the longer-term caretakers are women. They're not necessarily all Jewish. They are people I have found, in general, who you might think of as being living on the margins of society. Many of them were divorcées. We have several gay women, or people who I think historians are beginning to assume were gay women, but we don't have, you know, necessarily confirmation of that. Many of them, you know, later recall that they felt like they were setting out on an adventure, or they felt driven by this desperate desire to do something to help now that the extent of the horrors of the concentration camp system were being exposed in newsreels. They're making a conscientious, calculated move to go into these places of great trauma, knowing in many cases that they are not necessarily well equipped to deal with what they're going to encounter, but are very determined to make some kind of change in this chaotic post-war moment.

Matt Darroch: Right, dropping everything in their life to care for children who were, you know, effectively strangers to them.

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: Yes, effectively strangers. They might have been headlines or they might have glimpsed them in newsreels or photographs in newspapers and tabloids. And many of them are coming from places that were not directly impacted by the war. You know, they're coming from San Francisco, they're coming from Australia, for example. And they're bringing with them a desire to help and not always much else.

Matt Darroch: I assume people didn't know much about PTSD back then, so what kind of support were the caretakers giving the children?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: There were a lot of different debates going on at this time about how do you interact with traumatized people. The biggest debate was: do you ask them about their past? Do you probe? Do you get them to relive that past and articulate it and move on? Or is it better and healthier to leave the past in the past and to focus on the future? And of course, we're talking about a very diverse group of caregivers, and so they all have different approaches. There's one caretaker, Marie Paneth. She had really wanted to be a social worker. Her mother did not believe that women should, you know, enter the employment force. Did believe, though, that based on their social standing, it would be okay for her to go to art school. So, Marie Paneth in the post-war period takes her love of art and develops basically an art therapy program for 300 children who have arrived in England in 1945. They landed at a place called Windermere. She's only there for several months with those initial group of child survivors, but she is teaching them and providing them with art supplies and letting them express themselves through art. So yeah, these are caregivers that are drawing upon whatever strengths they have and seeing if it works.

Matt Darroch: You look at the letters written by the caretakers. How did they process the horrors of the concentration camp, and I guess you know the state of the children they were caring for?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: So writing letters was a lifeline for these caregivers. It was a way of coping with what they were experiencing. It was a way for them to process what they're going through, and also to process the stories that are being told to them, that are being entrusted to them by survivors of all ages. 

So there's a woman, Muriel Knox Doherty. She was born in 1896 in Australia. She had a very prestigious nursing career in the Australian Army and in the Air Force. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross medal for her service during World War II. And instead of retiring at the end of World War II, she joins the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and she is appointed chief nurse and principal matron of the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Initially, the presence of female nurses in former concentration camps, even if you were very qualified like Dougherty, was was was discouraged by doctors who did not believe that women should be in those places, should be witnessing that kind of horror. It also became very clear very quickly that these women had important work to do. Their gender be damned. She's driven so strongly to write these letters back home, and she employed something that was was pretty common, or it seems to be pretty common in this time period of this this tradition of round robin letters. 

So she's writing one letter with the expectation that whoever is receiving it back home in Australia will make copies, will pass it on, so that as many people as possible can can receive these letters. In one letter that she writes, and this is in July of 1945, so she's she's has not been in this position very long. She writes to her audience back home. She says, "You may shudder at these descriptions. Perhaps you will say it is sordid and unnecessary, but hold on, my friends. The world should know what suffering and degradation this new order in Europe brought to millions, lest it be quickly forgotten and rise again in yet another guise. It concerns us all. We must not forget. And she also is using these letters not only as a way to cope, but also as a way to advocate for the people under her care. She's not prepared for what she sees in this liberated camp, and so if she can barely believe what she's seeing, how can she convey something that seems so unbelievable to an audience, you know, as far away, literally as Australia, and so she goes on to write in one of her her letters that the thing which we sincerely hope is that those who have no home, no families, and no country to which to return, and who have had air. Everything that was worthwhile in their lives taken from them, that they've been through hell. We hope they will find sympathy and understanding in whatever country they finally settle. It is only in this way that they can hope to recover.

Matt Darroch: Some of the caretakers publish memoirs too, right? Did their books do well? Was there an appetite for that kind of content post Holocaust? It really depended. 

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: One example of someone who was very successful with this was Dr. Robert Collis. He was an Anglo Irish physician, and he ends up in Bergen-Belsen in the immediate post-war period, and while there, he is contributing articles to medical journals back home. But he's also taking notes, and he's also at this point in his life has already published a memoir in the 1930s, and so he has learned from that what kind of stories sell? How to write to engage an audience? And so, in the postwar period, he ends up writing three memoirs that talk about his time working with child survivors, and they are both very well received. Another example of this that I think is really interesting. 

We have the story of Catherine Holm, this woman from from San Francisco. She had studied at UC Berkeley. She studied journalism in New York. When her marriage, which lasted for three years, ended in divorce, she takes a series of odd jobs that enable her to travel the world, and while she's doing that, she's writing extensively. She ends up in a displaced persons camp, and she keeps a journal. She's writing these round robin letters, and when she goes home, she writes about her experiences working with survivors, and the book does get published. It's called *The Wild Place* and while it was, you know, critical acclaim was pretty strong, the book never really did well. She did far better with another book that she wrote called *The Nun's Story* which I think seemed a bit more scandalous and exciting, and and that one ends up being turned into a film starring Audrey Hepburn.

Matt Darroch: Wait, how is it scandalous?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: I think the story was based on a former Belgian nun that Kathryn Holm meets. They're they're both working for UNRWA for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association. They meet while they're doing their initial training in France. And Kathryn Holm later talks about this woman who seemed very depressed upon starting their relief work. They get to know each other, and some historians believe that they also fell in love. That this wasn't just a platonic relationship, but this woman had recently. She did not leave Catholicism, but she was no longer a nun, and she engages in this relief work, and Catherine Holm is so fascinated by the story that she writes. It's a fictionalized version, but it's built very much on the real life story of another one of these caretakers who has, you know, just left her order, and doesn't know what to do next, and fills that personal and vocational void in her life with caregiving in this displaced person's camp.

Matt Darroch: Wow! And so, who does Audrey Hepburn play? The nun?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: Yeah, she plays the nun. Her name was Mary Louise Habits, who again, you know, crossed paths with Holm during their time in this this this training camp. And the nun story becomes a bestseller. It's a wild commercial success. It's translated into a dozen languages. It becomes a selection for the Book of the Month Club and the Catholic Book Club, so it comes out in 1956, and then the film with with Audrey Hepburn comes out in 1959. So those kinds of stories, I think, were eclipsing the quieter stories, but still the very profound stories of the work that people like Catherine Holm and Marie Louise Habits were were doing.

Matt Darroch: You know, there does seem to be a fine line between sharing these stories of child survivors and I don't know profiting off their experience, off off their trauma. Do you think that line was ever crossed?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh:That's a great question, and and this is one that that a number of these caregivers are struggling with because yes, they're writing these letters personally and sending them personally back home. There's also though a craving in the press for personal interest stories, but not only does the press have an appetite for hearing about the lives of these children, there's also this need by relief organizations to raise funds, and they know that people are more likely to donate to a cause if they can connect with these children in some ways, and so there's a lot of debates about this, about how much publicity is appropriate. Where does that publicity turn exploitive, and in what ways is that publicity really used to to fuel more healing programs. 

So Henrietta Zold was an American. She was born in Baltimore in 1860, and several organizations she establishes. One of those organizations is called Youth Aliyah, and it's established in 1932-1933, and its goal was to take Jewish children out of Nazi countries, eventually also Nazi-occupied countries, and eventually bring them to British Mandate Palestine, where they could live among other Jews, live as you know Jews in a healthy, open way, and there were many calls by the fundraising branch of Youth Aliyah to convince her that emotional, personal interest stories of these traumatized children would be a very powerful way to secure desperately needed funding from from donors, Henrietta sold though she's receiving all of these requests for publicity materials, and this is going on even as the war is unfolding. The war isn't over yet; the Holocaust hasn't ended, and she's already very protective. And she writes a letter in 1944 that reveals her reticence to speak on the children's behalf. The fundraising branch had asked for a human interest story with a boy named Yuri. 

She writes, "You imply the value of a human interest story with Yuri as hero. There is a story to tell about him, but I'm not going to tell it, it is of such character that I cannot permit it to be used, even if his name does not appear. I have a complex on the subject of the soul of the child entrusted to me. People here frequently question the children about all the gruesome details. The Yuri story is sacred to me. If we had a publicity department, which we ought to have, the publicity director would be free of such complexes. He might be able to make Yuri talk to him direct, and if the story came out well and good, I cannot tell it. So she's very protective. Interestingly. after she dies, and she dies in 1945, she does not live to see the end of the war. But but the work of Youth Aliyah continues, and you have these children coming from recently liberated concentration camps that that arrive in British mandate Palestine, and indeed, these caregivers that are working with youthalia have very different attitudes, and they're a little bit more shrewd in their thinking about how can we use these stories again, not to exploit the children, but to to raise funds.

Matt Darroch: You know, healing can take on many forms. You've talked about the psychological and the physical healing these caretakers, you know, helped administer. But you also say preserving the stories of the child survivors was a form of healing in and of itself. How so?

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: During these initial encounters with child survivors, there's something really interesting that happens when these caregivers show up with these nursing skills, with these medical supplies, with these clean clothes, with the delousing equipment. They are there to do this very tangible, physical work, but very quickly they take on the role of being a listener. There's this healing that starts to happen for the children when they land in a place. Not only where they can just kind of spill out what's happened to them, but to have a listener become an active participant. 

So there was a child survivor whose name is Dori Laub, who goes on to become a psychoanalyst, and he wrote extensively about what it was like to listen to Holocaust testimony, and of course, he's doing this as somebody who is is both a psychoanalyst and a survivor himself. But this quote has always stuck out with me as I've been working on this book manuscript. He writes, "The listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event. Through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself, and this was certainly true for the individuals who are listening to the stories of the individuals in their care that are that are metabolizing these stories and articulating the trauma that they're experiencing as frontline caregivers? They're navigating this complicated apparatus of recovery. They're also realizing the privilege of being entrusted with these stories. You have these caregivers who know that these stories deserve to be told beyond the hospitals, beyond the hospital, beyond the sanatorium, and they, to varying degrees of success, have the ability to find a larger, wider audience for those stories. And their hope is that, in listening to these stories, they are helping the act of of healing to progress, but it's also not just the healing of these survivors under their care; it's the healing of this world, and how can sharing this story make a difference in how we think, not just about the Holocaust, not just about this example of suffering, but about moving on from that trauma and using the storytelling as an act of resilience.

Matt Darroch: I love that, Maggie. This is fascinating stuff. Thanks for sharing your insight. I'm with good reason.

Maggie Fraser Kirsh: Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Darroch: Maggie Fraser Kirsch is an instructor of Judaic Studies at William and Mary. This is With Good Reason. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to With Good Reason, from Virginia Humanities.

Death by hanging was the harshest punishment assigned to Nazi-era war criminals after World War II. But my next guest says not all who were sent to the gallows were men. Jessica Trisko Darden is a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of The Accused: How Women Faced Justice for Nazi-Era Crimes.

Jessica, how did women help drive the Nazi war machine? Did women occupy any leadership positions or did they do, I don't know, more clerical-type work?

Jessica Trisko Darden: I think it depends what you really see as the driver of the Nazi regime. So women did not hold high-ranking roles, for instance, in the military or in the political system; those were male-dominated systems. But we see women becoming nurses, which had previously been an occupation really dominated by nuns and women associated with religious orders, they become public servants and are directly employed by the state. We also have women, obviously, working in the concentration camps as that system expands. We have women who are prominent doctors in this period of time. And the one area where we really don't see women engaged that's relevant for my work is the legal profession. Very, very few women become lawyers; there are no women jurists at this time. But we do see women becoming very prominent in other professions.

Matt Darroch: And do we have the numbers on how many women were accused of committing wartime atrocities?

Jessica Trisko Darden: We know that thousands of women were accused, not only in Germany, but in other Nazi-occupied countries and Nazi-affiliated regimes. But the actual hard number of women prosecuted hasn't been unearthed in the archival records of various countries. So, for instance, I look very specifically at Germany, which has very good record keeping regarding this—the archives have been thoroughly excavated by historians—and I look specifically at about 450 women who were prosecuted in what would become East and West Germany.

Matt Darroch: What were the most common atrocity crimes committed by these women?

Jessica Trisko Darden: West Germany in particular was very focused on the prosecution of nurses who had participated in medicalized murder as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Other examples include things like concentration camp crimes, what we're very familiar with, right, episodes of abuse or assault. But we also see things like the rounding up of escaped concentration camp prisoners by villagers in nearby towns, and women participated and in some instances really led those roundups. We have women who served essentially as informants; in some cases they engaged in what we would now call honey traps, where they would go on dates with men who would then say something anti-Hitler and be reported and arrested.

Matt Darroch: Wow.

Jessica Trisko Darden: One of the cases that I look at in detail has a woman who reported on a group of religious leaders, so a pastor, a priest, three laywomen, who had been involved in listening to clandestine radio broadcasts. So it's a pretty mixed bag of cases that I look at, but I think that's really important because it shows us the breadth of atrocity crimes that were committed in this era.

Matt Darroch: And for those women who were convicted, were they subjected to similar sentences as men? Like, were any put to death?

Jessica Trisko Darden: Yes, there's evidence that many, many women were executed both in kind of summary executions immediately after the war—so what we would call vigilante killings—but also women who were sentenced to death. So we know, for instance, that British military tribunals sentenced former concentration camp guards to death, and they were hung by the official British hangman immediately after the war. We also know that German legal systems did sentence women to death as well. So we do see these really extreme penalties be assigned to female defendants, but it was not a commonplace occurrence.

Matt Darroch: You mentioned earlier that men were in leadership positions, you know, they were the ones giving the orders to commit war crimes. So did women even have a choice when it came to following the orders of their male bosses? Wouldn't they be in danger if they resisted?

Jessica Trisko Darden: Ah, so this is the great question of what are the limits of women's agency and ability to make independent decisions during this era. What I found in my research is that it certainly varied based on the social position of the woman and her access to institutional power, right? So, for instance, if a woman came from an impoverished background, had been conscripted into military service and assigned to one of the camps, she didn't have that many options available to her in terms of serving or not serving as a concentration camp guard. What she did have control over was the level of violence that she used in executing those duties. So we know, for instance, that some concentration camp guards used violence willingly and excessively, and others did not.

For other groups of women, there was a lot more leeway, let's say. So, for instance, I mentioned that single women were often encouraged to join the workforce; many of these women served as nurses. And it was broadly accepted that if a woman married, for instance, she could drop out of the paid workforce and become a housewife; a housewife was considered a legitimate occupation. So young women who married, who became pregnant, had the option of quitting their jobs. Sick leave was available, paid sick leave. So women had different ways that they could escape their particular duties, for instance, by asking to be reassigned. And we see that in some of the cases that I examine where nurses asked for transfers to different institutions, where women went on sick leave while others quit. And so for those who were determined to avoid, for instance, engaging in euthanasia, it was certainly possible, but they had to have that desire to resist these policies and the awareness that what they were doing was wrong.

Matt Darroch: And for the women who were being tried in court for their atrocity crimes, what was their main defense? Was it that they were, I don't know, victims of the Nazi war machine and that they were just following orders?

Jessica Trisko Darden: If I had to generalize across these kind of very different types of crime, I would say the main defense was that what they were doing was perfectly legal.

And empirically, that is true, because many of these crimes were legal under the Nazi Penal Code. The number two defense was that women were doing what their male superiors had commanded them to do. So nurses were administering lethal doses of phenobarbital because those were the doses prescribed by the doctors, right? Concentration camp guards were just executing the rules of the camp and following the SS leadership that ran the camp. And then I would say the third reason was that women didn't know what to do. They were placed in these morally ambiguous situations, their husbands were away at the front, they were unmarried and young, and they simply didn't know what the correct course of action was.

So to give you a really great example of this: one of the cases that I examine is a married mother of three, she's at home in her German village, and a soldier knocks on her door, and he has clearly deserted the German army and is looking for a place to stay the night so he doesn't get captured. And she is faced with this decision of: Do I let this man into my home? That brings risks to her and her family, right? Does she close the door and pretend that conversation never happened? That too brings risks to her and her family. Or does she report him to the authorities, which technically is the legally obligated situation, right? So women were faced regularly with these very complex ethical, moral decisions, and they were judged for it after the war.

Matt Darroch: I know you've read through so many of these court cases involving these accused women. Did you ever feel sympathetic to some of them, that maybe some of the women who were convicted were taking too much of the blame for crimes committed, you know, by their male superiors?

Jessica Trisko Darden: I think I felt sympathetic for different reasons, right, which is putting oneself in a situation where, say, you're 18 years old, and you've been in a concentration camp for 2, 3 years, and you understand the brutality of that system, but you also understand that if you agree to serve as a guard, you will get more food, you will be able to give your family more food, perhaps your chances of survival increase some infinitesimal amount. And having to make that decision, knowing that if you don't agree, that you will ultimately die. I think that, you know, if we really think about the complexities that some of these women had to grapple with, we can see them more as human beings and see them in this kind of full, full-spectrum color that I hope we can.

But I also have sympathy for women who, for instance, were accused of these crimes, were publicly shamed, in some instances were, you know, physically assaulted, but never got to tell their side of the story, they never got a day in court. Because we see a lot of extrajudicial justice, right, killings, but also beatings, forcible head shavings, women being stripped and in some instances tarred and feathered in public. And those women never got their day in court.

Matt Darroch: Aside from acknowledging the basic fact that women are also capable of doing bad things, why is it important to you to shine a light on the war crimes of Nazi-era women?

Jessica Trisko Darden: So I think it's no small thing to point out that women are also capable of doing bad things. I think that as a society, we downplay continuously women's agency, women's involvement in extremist groups, women's involvement in day-to-day crimes, and we sensationalize women's participation as if it's something extreme or extraordinary, when in fact it is terribly ordinary. So I do still think that's a point worth making.

But I also think, you know, beyond the "women do bad things," I think that the ways in which a perpetrator's gender affects their treatment by legal systems is worthy of study and important, because it leads to disparate outcomes, right? Men could not claim effectively that they had a hard time making decisions because their wife wasn't home, right? That does not carry the same weight as a woman arguing that she didn't know what to do without her husband to tell her, right? So these gender biases, these assumptions about women's decision-making capabilities, about women's resilience, about women's intellect, those are things that still influence legal decisions today. And so I hope that in kind of illustrating the way that these factors affected legal outcomes in the Nazi era—frankly, through to the present, because we are not entirely done with these cases and with the women of this era—that we'll have a better understanding of how future international prosecutions, future international criminal courts, will deal with women defendants.

Matt Darroch: Well, Jessica, I've loved our conversation. Thanks for sharing your insight on With Good Reason.

Jessica Trisko Darden: Thank you for having me.

Matt Darroch: Jessica Trisko Darden is a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of The Accused: How Women Faced Justice for Nazi-Era Crimes.

A few years ago, Melissa Kravetz came across a truly rare find. It was a memoir written on onion paper from 1970 that had been stored in a closet for decades. And it told the life of a remarkable German woman who witnessed and resisted the Nazi rise to power. Melissa is a history professor and co-chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University. She's also the editor of The Memoir of Ilse Seger: Wife, Mother, Hostage, Nazi Resister.

Melissa, Ilse Seger married her husband, Gerhart, in 1928. How would you describe their relationship? Were they a good match?

Melissa Kravetz: So it's a pretty quick engagement, and between 1928 and 1930, I mean, they have a pretty sort of normal relationship with the exception of that he is a journalist and he starts to express interest in running for office and runs for political office in September of 1930 in an election that is very much colored by the Great Depression and unemployment in Germany at the time.

Matt Darroch: Yeah, what did it mean for him to be a German Social Democrat, you know, at that time?

Melissa Kravetz: To be a Social Democrat in the 1920s means that you're a party that's very much supporting parliamentary liberal democracy. You're consistently in opposition to the Communist Party that's building on the left and to the Nazi Party that's building on the right. His party is very popular during the 1920s; the first president of the Weimar Republic is a Social Democrat. They are the largest party up until that 1930 election.

Matt Darroch: How dangerous was it to be a political opponent of the Nazi Party? You know, during their rise to power, and how did that danger reach Ilse because of the political actions of her husband?

Melissa Kravetz: In the late 1920s, early 1930s, political violence again is really being seen through these paramilitary organizations. So you just have a lot of fighting on the streets that's happening, or disruption of political rallies. One evening, she's in her home, and I think she describes them as like a rowdy crowd, kind of like a drunken group outside of her house. And they shot up into her window, and I mean, didn't hurt anyone, but her baby was asleep in the room, and. This idea of like it affecting her home, so I think she starts to realize that things are very real, and she's she's exceptional in a way because of the fact that she's more attuned to this kind of political violence or to to what's going on politically in Germany at the time than maybe your average German citizen.

Matt Darroch: Soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ilse's husband was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. What was the concentration camp like? Was it a precursor to the death camps?

Melissa Kravetz: I would say the concentration camp that he's sent to in June of 1933 is called Oranienburg. It eventually closes and becomes Sachsenhausen, which is a very well-known concentration camp that lasts until the end of the Third Reich. So the concentration camp that he's in very much lacks barbed wire barracks, guard towers. The prisoners are wearing their own clothing. The concentration camp that he's in houses primarily social democrats and communists. It houses political opponents. So I'd say they're very different than the later death camps that aren't formed until 1941 and 42.

Matt Darroch: You say Ilsa was actively engaged in the resistance as well. In what ways did she resist the Nazi regime?

Melissa Kravetz: So I would say one of the most important ways that she resists is civil discourse. This is sort of a simple thing. We think of this as maybe passive resistance, but she continuously meets with other members of her party. She recognizes that she's resisting and that she could get in trouble for this because of the fact that they constantly have out cards or some tea in case someone showed up unexpectedly to make it look as if it was just a social gathering. But often they were discussing things like the Reichstag fire or the Nazis coming to power. 

Another really important way that she resists is through economic resistance. april 1, 1933. So just a few months after Hitler's appointed chancellor, he calls a boycott of all Jewish businesses and stores in Germany. This was to take place over one day. The attempt is to make Jews feel socially isolated and ostracized, so much so that they would want to leave Germany. And Ilsa purposefully drops her child off at her friend's house, and goes shopping at a Jewish-owned department store in Dessau for something that she doesn't need-a curtain rod. She ends up buying, and one of the most important acts of resistance is on one of her visits to visit Gerhart. She smuggles money into the camp for him, so she actually smuggles money in between some pictures, and this money is partially what allows him to escape from the concentration camp.

Matt Darroch: Eventually, Ilsa was taken into custody and held hostage with her infant daughter at another concentration camp. Why'd they come after her?

Melissa Kravetz: So Gerhardt was a pretty high-profile case of someone who had escaped. There's not a lot of people who escape concentration camps in 1933, and Ilse and her daughter are brought to a newly established concentration camp in Dessau called Rosslau, and they're held as hostages in an attempt to kind of goad Gerhard back to Germany, the thought being that if they held them and told him about it, that he would come back to Germany. Meanwhile, he was in Prague publishing a book about his escape and about the regime that was translated into several languages, and she and her daughter are held in this concentration camp for four months, while he publishes this book, goes on a speaking tour of it, and through a tour, part of his speaking tour that he was doing before members of parliament in England, he gets the attention of some members of parliament who helped him get them out of Germany in May of 1934.

Matt Darroch: Right, Ilse and Gerhardt were soon reunited and lived out the rest of their days in different spots in Europe and eventually the U.S. You know, you study the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime. How has Ilsa's memoir impacted your view of this era - you know, especially the role of women resisters?

Melissa Kravetz: I think that she's given me a lot of hope. She wasn't properly school educated, or isn't necessarily educated. In politics, can still resist. So she does give me a lot of hope in that regard. It's also very scary to think about the fact that, and I think she would recognize this: that she had no idea that just because her husband was involved in politics, in a different political party than the Nazis, that he would end up in a concentration camp, that she and her daughter would end up in concentration camps. 

I mean, the reason Gerhardt escapes is because of the fact that he says basically his only choice is to escape or to commit suicide. He talks about this in his own memoir, and she very much is fearing for her life once she's in Ross Lau. I mean, she has certain privileges when she's in there, but she recognizes that there's really not a lot of hope from her once she's in a in a camp, and there's not a lot of ability for her to move freely, connect with people freely, talk to people freely. That those basic rights that she had just a few years prior under democracy are gone.

Matt Darroch: Melissa Kravitz is a history professor and co-chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University. She's also the editor of The Memoir of Ilse Seeger: Wife, Mother, Hostage, Nazi Resister. 

With Good Reason is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monica Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Our production team is Sarah McConnell, Allison Quantz, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jennie Taylor for booking assistance, and to Ben Dolle at Virginia Public Media for recording assistance. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I'm Matt Darroch. Thanks for listening.