Includes bibliographical references.

In the early 1990s, Ruth Kluger, a survivor of the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz
concentration and death camps, published her memoir. By that time, many women had begun
sharing their stories of survival, but Ruth Kluger broke the mold. Instead of an inspirational work
which was based on recollections that were almost half-a-century old, Kluger recounted the
specifics of what she had experienced when trying to survive. Only the challenge was not just the
struggle of a single individual, it was the struggle of generations of Jews wanting to be heard,
and willing to share the challenges that they had faced while attempting to survive. Kluger’s
memoir contributed to questioning notions of sisterhood within the Holocaust. As such, her
memoir broke several traditional interpretations of the tragedy. Including a move from a maledriven narrative and questioning constructions of the female “special bond” that early feminist
scholars argued existed in the Nazi camps. This thesis proposes to continue on the path of gender
scholarship of the Holocaust by examining sisterhood within the concentration camp setting.
Using three memoirs by Ruth Kluger, Hanna Levy-Hass, and Olga Lengyel I intend to
show that women did not form “sisterhoods” within concentration and death camps willingly, but
rather as a necessity to survival. In the 1980’s, early feminists emphasized the notion of
“sisterhood” as a way to set female-authored memoirs apart from male-authored memoirs. As a
result, much of the female Holocaust experience was glossed over or ignored; therefore, a careful
reexamination must be made in order to understand the full extent of suffering that Jewish
women faced.
To situate better this thesis’ contribution, a brief historiographical review immediately
follows as a way to explain the importance of gender studies to our understanding of Holocaust
victims. It will allow me to better situate the multi-layered tragedy which Jewish women
experienced. Following this, I intend to show that some of the ideals of “sisterhood” that early
feminists emphasized when discussing female-authored testimonies were not the result of good
intentions, but of a cognizant effort to gloss over the struggles women faced. To these early
scholars, it seemed more important to extract a moral message which offered some meaning to
the meaningless suffering. I then turn to three examples from scholars who have shown the need
to qualify such notions of sisterhood before surveying three memoirs that will illustrate my point.
I conclude with a look at an unpublished memoir as a test case, as well as a brief consideration of
Primo Levi’s, Survival in Auschwitz in order to introduce the notion of a brotherhood and show
that a reexamination of established memoirs is necessary.