Expected to live: Women shoah survivors' testimonials of silence

Despite the apparent recent flood of Shoah writing, silence is still a key component in survivors' survival strategies. Women Shoah survivors have found it particularly difficult to speak, or write, about their experiences, because of the implications of survival in relation to their possible sexual exploitation during the Shoah. Until relatively recently, writing about the Shoah tended to remain gender-neutral. This article is situated within the increasingly prominent feminist scholarship about the Shoah. Based on the accounts of women Shoah survivors, in testimony, poetry, and fiction, the article examines the gendered implications of the tensions between the self-imposed silences and the silences imposed on survivors by society on the one hand, and the gaps between the experiences of the Shoah and the discourses available to tell them on the other.