Shattered Liberation

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army, which is often embedded in popular imagination and collective memory. This is one of the first volumes to shine light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel in filtration camps during the liberation process. By focusing on testimonies and memoirs, this book discusses in detail a wide range of interactions, including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance. The book addresses methodological challenges of employing survivors’ testimonies in an analysis of a traumatic history of liberation sexualized violence. It explores the strategies survivors employed while recounting these traumatic experiences, and examines how survivors’ experiences of sexualized violence during liberation have been both included in and excluded from public memory. By challenging the popular notion of liberation as universally positive and instead focusing on the memories of Jewish survivors, Shattered Liberation uncovers a far more complicated, if not devastating, reality.