This chapter addresses how the close resemblance between Lengyel’s account of her participation in acts of infanticide at the women’s infirmary in Birkenau Auschwitz and Gisela Perl’s and reflects Lengyel’s commitment to writing not only a personal story about her own tragic losses, but also the collective account of many women’s experiences. As Annette Finley-Croswhite has stated, ‘The Jewish womb was a “Holocaust landscape”, another kind of killing field where the murderous Final Solution was deployed’ (Finley-Croswhite 2021, 103). She continues on to note that ‘the gender-based dimension of the Holocaust is largely ignored’ (Finley-Croswhite 2021, 103). Through her invocation of a collective experience, in her simple use of the pronoun ‘we’ as she describes the infanticides that took place in the Jewish women’s infirmary at Birkenau, Lengyel may very well have been giving voice to a frequent, but silenced, experience of women in the camps. How, though, does this collective locution, this story about the women who worked at the infirmary with the women who gave birth to live infants at Birkenau, serve Lengyel herself and articulate her own unique experience as a traumatised mother?

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Shadow Selves: Olga Lengyel’s Poetics of Identification

  • Sheila E. Jelen

摘要

This chapter addresses how the close resemblance between Lengyel’s account of her participation in acts of infanticide at the women’s infirmary in Birkenau Auschwitz and Gisela Perl’s and reflects Lengyel’s commitment to writing not only a personal story about her own tragic losses, but also the collective account of many women’s experiences. As Annette Finley-Croswhite has stated, ‘The Jewish womb was a “Holocaust landscape”, another kind of killing field where the murderous Final Solution was deployed’ (Finley-Croswhite 2021, 103). She continues on to note that ‘the gender-based dimension of the Holocaust is largely ignored’ (Finley-Croswhite 2021, 103). Through her invocation of a collective experience, in her simple use of the pronoun ‘we’ as she describes the infanticides that took place in the Jewish women’s infirmary at Birkenau, Lengyel may very well have been giving voice to a frequent, but silenced, experience of women in the camps. How, though, does this collective locution, this story about the women who worked at the infirmary with the women who gave birth to live infants at Birkenau, serve Lengyel herself and articulate her own unique experience as a traumatised mother?