SOURCE: Kremer, S. Lillian. “The Holocaust and the Witnessing Imagination.” In Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari, pp. 231-46. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

In the following essay, Kremer compares The Shawl to Touching Evil by Jewish American writer Norma Rosen, while exploring the violence brought upon Jewish women in the Holocaust.

Writing by Jewish American women focusing on women's Holocaust experience portrays Jewish women doubly cursed in the Nazi universe as racial pariahs and sexual victims, brutalized while the world remained silent. Although the primary motives of the Nazis' commitment to the destruction of the Jewish people were rooted in political, racial, and religious beliefs, women experienced the Holocaust in ways unique to their gender. Beyond the starvation, disease, hard labor, and physical violence endured by all victims, women were subject to gender-based suffering and degradation. They were sexually abused and...