Author: Yaakov Ariel, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Academia.edu, ResearchGate, SciProfiles

Abstract: »YAAKOV ARIEL’S reflections on ‘The pain that did not speak its name’ examines the long way survivors had to go before they spoke about sexual and sexualized violence they had endured during the Second World War and its aftermath. It took until the final years of the last millennium and huge cultural shifts in societies before survivors overcame their reluctance to report what had happened to them, publishers and editors no longer refused to publish such recollections, and scholars of the Holocaust started to become interested in this topic.
Although the largest and best-known collections of survivors’ accounts, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive have not encouraged survivors to focus on this part of their experience, the small percentage of accounts that include recollections of sexualized violence amount to hundreds of testimonies, if not a few thousand. Ariel’s introduction to the topic focuses on some of the main developments and most important sources and publications in this area. It underlines that personal accounts are not carved in stone, and that victims do not share all their experiences at a given time, but rather entrust them when the time is right.« (Source: Helga Amesberger, Helga Embacher, Johannes-Dieter Steinert. »Introduction: Ideological Intersection of Sexualized Violence during Nazi Persecution.« I haven’t even told my mother: Children as victims of sexual and sexualised violence in the Second World War and its aftermath. Edited by Helga Amesberger et al. Salzburg 2025: 14)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / Nazi Germany | Genocide: The Holocaust / Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Sexual violence during the Holocaust, USC Shoah Foundation | Sex and the law: Sexual violence / Child sexual abuse