On March 24, 2005, I visited the Museum of Tolerance to see Renee Firestone speaking. Ms. Firestone is a Holocaust survivor who was forced into Auschwitz when he was sixteen years old and was later liberated. internment / death camp for twenty years.
Firestone grew up in Hungary, and lived what he thinks was a financially comfortable life. She and her family were surrounded by rumors that there were Jewish graves. But Firestone continued, “No one in the town believed that the rumors would go away or be false. They believed that Hitler’s rule would last for a very short time, and in the meantime, they would live.” When Firestone asked her father about the stories, he insisted that there was no way they could be accurate and urged her not to worry.
Gradually, however, the situation grew more and more difficult for the Hungarian Jews. Anti-Semitic lies about Jews and their political dominance (when they were less than one percent of the population) were spread throughout the city. Prejudice and discrimination followed. For example, non-Jewish children were allowed to attend schools with non-Jewish children. Jewish parents taught secretly. A more personal example of anti-Semitic discrimination hit the family when Renee Firestone’s father’s business was taken over by him. All he had was so strong.
Shortly after, in 1941, Renee Firestone and her family were forced onto a train, where they and thousands of other Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz like animals. The Nazis informed the Jews that they were needed in the factories to manufacture Hitler’s weapons. The Jews were promised money and food, and were given 24 hours to pack one bag of things. There was hardly room for the people crammed into the cars. In the corner of each train was a bucket, which was the only toilet available. For three days they went standing without food and water.
Once in Auschwitz, the Jews were ordered to leave their bags in the cars and were promised that their belongings would be handed over to their “animals”. This, of course, never happened, and the Jews were left in a geographical desert with almost nothing of their own.
The Nazis therefore separated males from females. Next, the young were divided from the boys and the old. Women are separated from girls and old from girls. Old people and children were sent straight to the gas chambers.
Firestone explains that the women were lined up by the Nazis to line up, then stripped the women of their clothes and gave them. gray “uniform.” He recalls the male guards gathering the naked bodies of all the Jews. After the women wear clothes, their heads are shaved. As they exit the buildings, a Nazi soldier dips a glass brush into yellow paint and spreads it from the front of the hair, across the head, and towards the back. Then a commotion was created, for no one recognized the other without hair.
Fire and his sister stayed close to each other for some time. However, one day, Firestone’s sister disappeared, and she never knew what happened to her until a decade later, when Steven Spielberg was working on a film about Holocaust survivors. At that time, he learned that his sister had been captured and tortured in a Nazi “medical experiment hospital” by the now infamous “doctor” Josef Mengele. Sister Firestone, after suffering a long torture, was driven to her death.
The story of Stone Fire, although deeply personal, helps us to understand more broadly the ways in which gender, race, and gender are closely intertwined and shape the social mechanisms through which oppressions are practiced. First, anti-Semitism brought “well-off” families to their knees financially. After the Jewish resources were taken away from them and when they were systematically denied business and material goods due to racism in their towns, they became poor and destitute. Then poverty led the Jews to believe the lies of the Nazis…that they would make themselves into military factories where they could be entertained and compensated. Finally, the women were fornicated, raped, raped, to make fun of appearances.
The horrors of Nazi torture affected both men and women. Although it is important to understand how race, gender, and ethnicity fit into the Holocaust, it is equally prudent to note that it was not sexism that produced the mass killings of the Holocaust. Nor was it classy. It was racism-anti-Semitism that was the basis of such a harmful historical event. Classism became the vehicle through which racism and murder were facilitated. He added sexism outside the gun for women incarcerated.
Before attending Firestone’s talks, I never knew that women “painted” arrived at Auschwitz, but this detail about the treatment of women it is remarkable that drones were employed to further dissuade and oppose them. Renee Firestone’s unique perspective adds a much-needed element of survivorship. There is something about learning about the Holocaust from surviving it, rather than reading about it in a typical cold text with narrow focus.
