Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust

This book is an excellent contribution to the study of women and the Holocaust. Many books concentrate primarily on men and the Holocaust. This book provides various perspectives and is a valuable book for scholars and students of the Holocaust.

I used this book when I was writing the memoir RENA'S PROMISE: A STORY OF SISTERS IN AUSCHWITZ, which is the story of a woman on the first transport of women into Auschwitz. Aside from the Auschwitz Chronicles, this was the only text I could find that spoke of this transport, which was also the very first transport into Auschwitz. This book helped me further my research and provided me with invaluable information that allowed the survivor I was writing about to validate many facts that she remembered--thereby validating her story, her memories and the truth that women were targeted far more rigorously than men. It is amazing any of them survived.

This anthology is fascinating, moving, sad, horrifying and inspiring. It revises our notion of what Holocaust literature is, and shows us how very differently women experienced and wrote about it. The book's second section contains excellent essays about women and the Holocaust. In short, a must for feminist readers and anyone interested in Holocaust studies, genocide studies, and the literature of witness.