Language:
English
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
Fabula; Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung
Angaben zur Quelle:
50,1-2 (2009) 67-77
Keywords:
Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
;
Jewish women in the Holocaust
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Humor
Abstract:
Many oral reports by survivors, as well as memoirs and some immediate postwar historical works, have preserved a story of a Polish Jewish woman who killed a Nazi guard in Birkenau. Examines 14 extant versions of this story from a folkloristic viewpoint. Shows how the narrators use the story to raise issues that preoccupied the victims of the Holocaust (e.g. that of resistance), to express their dreadful situation and their aspirations (e.g. vengeance), and to provide sense for the chaos they went through. An apt way to express all this is to glorify a heroic woman. Such legends were a way to conduct a discourse expressing the atrocities, and the longings of victims and their search for meaning; they also played a therapeutic role.
DOI:
10.1515/FABL.2009.006
URL:
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