“Enough weapons and war; women want peace”

Consul General of Italy in Sydney Andrea De Felip recalled the untimely death of Italian Ambassador Francesca Tardioli, highlighting the late diplomat’s unshakeable commitment to women’s issues and human rights.

In support of a gender analysis of the Shoah on International Women’s Day, De Felip quoted Nelly Sachs, the 1966 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in her speech: “Everything ferments in the nests of horror. Horrible guardians have replaced the mothers, fear feeds the babies and not the mother”.

The similarities between the war in Ukraine and the destructive force of the Shoah are undeniable, and the many signifiers of war – bombs, tanks and missiles – are hauntingly familiar markers of unrest in the current geopolitical climate.

Although the focus of the conference was on the female experience of the Holocaust, there were moments that reflected on how much human life is constantly on the brink of the abyss.

Author of The Women in the Shoah, Bruna Bertolo, created a book that balances the cold tones required for academic research along with empathy for the women who lived through the Holocaust.

“These were women who felt unstoppable, who wanted to share what they had experienced with the world on behalf oF the women who did not survive,” Bertolo said.

“What was most striking was the strength of Settimia Spizzichino, who was the only survivor out of the 689 women who were deported from the ghetto in Rome to a concentration camp.

“Her description of women with hopeless eyes is horrifying.”

In the book, Luciana Nissim describes her relationship with friend Vanda Maestro, who died in Auschwitz: “You sleep close to each other to find warmth in the other’s body – warmth that seems to have disappeared from your own.”

Giuliana Tedeschi, another survivor of a concentration camp, mentioned that many prisoners felt disconnected from their own bodies, seeing their physical forms as “empty skins”.

This was a direct result of having lived in the degrading conditions of the concentration camp – a “desolate land where the living died”.

 Frida Misul, a famous Jewish singer interned in Auschwitz, sang of the brutality of the Nazi guards.

Alba Valech wrote her own story in her book, A.24029: the title taken from the very number tattooed on her arm.

Liana Millu collected the stories from several survivors in Smoke Over Birkenau and spoke candidly of the femininity that had been both denigrated and annihilated in female prisoners.

Millu maintained that female survivors had a vastly different experience from that of their male counterparts.

“Women undergo a variety of different biological stages in their lives: menstruation, pregnancy, birth,” Bartolo explained.

“When these stages were disrupted, they became reasons for pain or death.”  

Another substantial difference was the way women reacted.  

“At Birkenau, death was in the air,” Millu wrote.

“After the initial shock, prisoners didn’t notice it anymore.

“Men wondered how death would come to them: via gas, lethal injection or beating.

“We women never discussed such things: our vital instincts didn’t allow it.”

Among women, feelings of solidarity, compassion and sisterhood developed.

Nissim spoke of “women who, in order to keep their sanity, would recall the stories of Chekhov, Maupassant, the physical laws of Newton, excerpts from Mozart and Beethoven.”

Lidia Rolfi Beccaria remembers that even in the face of hunger, which led to degrading behaviour and reactions, women “humanised” the absurd violence of reality.

“What is happening today in Ukraine makes us understand that the horrors of war are not limited to the past,” Bertolo said.

“It brings to mind Salvatore Quasimodo’s poetry: ‘You are still a man of the sling and of the stone’.

“It seems that history has taught us nothing: men’s thirst for power will never be quenched.

“As the philosopher Hobbes wrote, ‘homo homini lupus’: a man is a wolf to another man.

“Survivors in our midst, such as Edith Bruck, describe the memory of the concentration camp she was kept in as ‘an atrocious tenant” in her mind, almost a husband, a faithful monster who will never leave her in peace, we never learn.

“People often ask me how this could have happened,” Senator for Life Liliana Segre said.

“I always answer with this word: indifference.

“If something doesn’t concern you and you turn away, that’s where the horror begins.”