Speaker: Daina Eglitis, Department of Sociology, The George Washington University - ORCID, ResearchGate

Extract: »The Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania were home to a significant number of Jewish ghettoes during the Holocaust. The ghettoes of Riga, Daugavpils, Liepaja, Kaunas, Siauliai, and Vilnius, among others, held tens of thousands of Jews from the Baltics, as well as from countries that included Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The ghettoes were sites of displacement and danger and the last home that many Jews knew before they were murdered by Nazis and their local collaborators. This work highlights quotidian threats and violence of life in the ghettoes with a particular focus on the experiences of girls and women.
Gendered violence in the ghettoes took a multitude of forms. The term gendered violence in this instance focuses on coercive phenomena that targeted prisoners of the ghettoes as both Jews and women. The spectrum of violence, which included murder, psychological humiliation, assaults on the body, and loss of property, were visited mercilessly upon both men and women, but the purpose of this account is to build a narrative, using women’s own voices as witnesses,victims, and survivors, that recognizes experiences that may not be shared by men and women and that may be obscured in accounts that universalize the experiences of the ghettoes.« (Source: Paper Draft)

Contents:

	Sources of Data
	Latvia’s Big Ghettoes: Riga, Daugavpils, Liepaja
		The Riga Ghetto
		The Daugavpils Ghetto
		The Liepaja Ghetto
	Displacement and Danger: Jewish Women and Girls in Latvia’s Nazi Ghettoes
		Jewish Women and Girls and the Pervasive Threat of Rape
		Motherhood and Loss
		Dehumanization and Humiliation
	Conclusion
	References

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / Nazi Germany | History of Europe: History of Latvia / German occupation of Latvia during World War II | Genocide: The Holocaust / The Holocaust in Latvia, Arajs Kommando | Sex and the law: Rape / Sexual violence during the Holocaust