Through A Woman’s Eye in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXXII

Through A Woman’s Eye: Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust

Nehama Tec has written a fascinating book that focuses on the lives of men and women during the Holocaust, based on interviews that she conducted over the course of a decade. Although the book deals with gender, she does not dilute the centrality of the Jewish experience in order to concentrate upon the gendered one. Resilience and Courage is divided into eight chapters, each dealing with a different facet of Jewish men’s and women’s experiences during the Holocaust, or examining them in a separate geographical locale. Tec deals primarily with Eastern Europe and major chapters in the book focus upon “Life in the Ghetto”, “Leaving the Ghetto”, “The Concentration Camps”, “Hiding and Passing in the Forbidden Christian World”, and “Resistance”. These chapters concentrate mainly on the experiences of Jews in Eastern Europe. There are also discussions of life in camps in Central Europe.