Holocaust exhibition about women opens in Germany
Israeli exhibition on how women coped in concentration camps opens in Dresden. Curator says show 'has a very optimistic message' on active role women played in forging their new identities
An exhibition about how women coped in concentration camps during the Holocaust opened this month for the first time outside Israel at a museum in the eastern German city of Dresden.
"This exhibition looks at the Holocaust from a very different perspective," said Melanie Ottenbreit, a spokeswoman for the German state of Saxony which is financially supporting the show.
"It is not about the perpetrators. It doesn't look at what people did to women in the Holocaust. It presents how they coped with their situation," she said.
The exhibition's Israeli curator, Yehudit Inbar, said it was impossible to take the show out of the context of the Holocaust, but the idea was to highlight something more positive.
"Normally when you think about the Holocaust you think of evil and murder. But this ... has a very optimistic message," said Inbar.
Forced to force new identities
The horrors endured by women in the Holocaust serve only as background information in the exhibition. Pictures, photographs, letters and artifacts describe individual stories of victims and are projected onto the museum's walls.
Some concentration camps, such as Ravensbrueck in northern Germany where 117,000 women and children died, contained only women. Others, including Auschwitz in Poland, were made up of compounds separated according to gender.
The exhibition shows women, robbed of their traditional roles, had to forge new identities.
"They (the women) weren't passive. They were very, very active," said Inbar.
She described women who would struggle to observe good hygiene and try to look good when they were lined up in front of guards for selections.
"Looking good in the camps could mean life or death. These small things suddenly became very important," said Inbar.
The exhibition, in one of Dresden's main art galleries, originally opened at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims last April.
"They did a wonderful job here," said Inbar. "I'm very excited. When I came here today I had tears in my eyes."
