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Brown Bag Biography with Nathalie Ségeral

Being pregnant in the Nazi extermination camps was far from exceptional. Among the 120,000 women deported to Ravensbrück, thousands are likely to have been expecting. In Bergen-Belsen, about 200 births were recorded. This presentation will focus on published and unpublished “deferred testimonies” (Horowitz 2022) of birth in the camps, both from the mother’s perspective and from the child’s standpoint. In their cathartic function, retrospective narratives often sublimate pregnancy into an act of resistance, whereby motherhood is rewritten into a successful story in keeping with established gender norms. Examining how silences and gaps are filled by an intertextuality with fiction and other survivors’ testimonies, I will highlight instances of embodied feminism, redressing the omission of women’s experiences as birthing mothers from French Holocaust studies.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Laura M. Dunn, 808-956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu