Blind Spots: Feminist Memory, Gendered Testimony, and Cultural Trauma in Holocaust Memoirs

Abstract

This article examines how gender shapes Holocaust memory through close analyses of two canonical women’s memoirs: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (2001), a considerably rewritten and culturally reinterpreted version of her earlier German book Weiter leben (1992). Delbo, a French political deportee, and Klüger, an Austrian Jewish survivor, provide testimonies that challenge the male-centered paradigms that have long dominated the Holocaust literature. Although pioneering feminist scholars have shown that women experienced and remembered the Holocaust differently, gender-based analysis remains underused—not only in Holocaust studies but also in broader memory studies, where it is often assumed to be already complete or exhausted. This view of theoretical saturation reflects a Eurocentric bias that equates critical maturity with Western academic prominence, thereby masking the ongoing influence of gender on the production, circulation, and reception of testimony worldwide. Drawing on trauma theory, concepts of multidirectional memory and postmemory, systems theory of media, and ethical approaches to testimony, this article argues that gender is not merely descriptive of Holocaust experience but also constitutive of how trauma is narrated, circulated, and archived. Testimony, as a cultural form, is inherently mediated, and that mediation is fundamentally gendered. This analysis illustrates how Delbo and Klüger create gendered testimonial forms through unique aesthetic strategies. Delbo’s writing focuses on seeing by invoking a feminist aesthetics of voir as imagined and ethical visualization, while Klüger’s narrative emphasizes voice, utilizing rhetorical sharpness and ambivalent narration to challenge postwar silencing. Instead of equating gender with femininity, the article understands gender as a relational and intersectional system—one that includes masculinity, non-binary identities, and structural power differences. It also questions Eurocentric assumptions that feminist critique has been fully explored within memory studies, urging renewed engagement with gender in transnational contexts, such as the often-overlooked testimonies from wartime Shanghai. Ultimately, this article argues that feminist approaches to Holocaust testimony expose the gendered structures of grievability that determine which kinds of suffering are preserved—and which remain unspoken.

1. Introduction

Why Women? Gendered Historiography and the Construction of Memory

Holocaust historiography has long favored a gender-neutral framework, grounded in the premise that Nazi persecution targeted Jews as a collective racial and religious identity, irrespective of gender. However, this framing obscures how gender has shaped not only individual experiences during the Holocaust but also how those experiences are later remembered, narrated, and institutionalized. As Andrea Dworkin observes, even in the 1990s, women remain “conceptually invisible” in Holocaust museums and exhibitions, where gender-specific experiences are either marginalized or omitted altogether (Dworkin 1994).

The first significant scholarly challenge to this absence comes from Joan Ringelheim, whose 1985 essay “The Split Between Gender and the Holocaust” reveals how historical and testimonial narratives fail to integrate the distinct experiences of women, including sexual violence, reproductive trauma, and maternal labor (Ringelheim 1998). Despite organizing the first major conference on women and the Holocaust in 1983, Ringelheim faced strong opposition from scholars such as Cynthia Ozick, who accused her of de-centering Jewish identity by focusing on gender.

Building on Ringelheim’s work, feminist scholars including Marlene Heinemann (1986), Marion Kaplan (1993), Gisela Bock (1993), Myrna Goldenberg (2003), Pascale Rachel Bos (2003), and Zoë Waxman (2017) expanded the field’s scope. Their research highlights how gender influences pre-war roles, deportation strategies, resistance, survival techniques, and postwar recollections. Edited volumes such as Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (Rittner and Roth 1993), Women in the Holocaust (Ofer and Weitzman 1998), Mothers, Sisters, Resisters (Gurewitsch 1998), Experience and Expression (Baer and Goldenberg 2003), and Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waxman 2017) reframe Holocaust testimony by demonstrating how women’s narratives operate through silence, affect, intergenerational memory, and relational modes of witness.

Nevertheless, tensions remain. Lawrence Langer, for example, cautions against constructing a “hierarchy of suffering” between male and female experiences (Langer 1998). Others question whether gender-based studies risk reinforcing essentialist binaries or cultural feminist frameworks. In response, Bos (2003) proposes a shift from comparing experiences to examining “narrative truth”—analyzing how gendered expectations shape memory, voice, and testimonial form.

To advance feminist approaches to testimony and trauma, this article draws on trauma theory, beginning with Cathy Caruth’s foundational concept of “unclaimed experience.” In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Caruth 1996), Caruth argues that trauma is not fully experienced at the moment it occurs but is registered belatedly—through latency, disruption, and repetition. While trauma may be structurally “neutral” in its immediate form, memory is never neutral: it is always mediated, and that mediation, I argue, is gendered.

Susan Derwin extends Caruth’s insights in Rage Is the Subtext (Derwin 2012), reframing testimony not as the raw transmission of suffering but as a symbolic negotiation between the traumatic self and the narrating self (Derwin 2012). For Derwin, testimony is a double gesture: a withholding of volatile emotion and the creation of a “holding space” through which trauma is symbolically transformed. It becomes an ethical and relational act (11–12).

The act of narration thus engages broader systems of meaning—systems that, as Niklas Luhmann’s (2000) media theory suggests, are stratified and selective. In his model, communication does not merely express reality; it structures it. Memory is not stored but produced through codes, genres, and circulating expectations. Society, he argues, generates its own self-description through these codes, shaping who speaks, how they are heard, and what is remembered (Luhmann 2000).

Building on Luhmann’s model, Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory further illuminates how gender mediates memory across generations. Hirsch asserts that memory is transmitted not only through factual narration but also through affect, silence, bodily resonance, and intersubjective intimacy—forms that are often shaped by gender (Hirsch 2012). Memory, in this sense, is not just what is remembered, but how it is remembered and by whom. Gender, for Hirsch, is not merely a category of experience but a filter of transmission: a determinant of narrative structure, emotional resonance, and intergenerational understanding. Rather than invoking a generalized “narrative style,” this article builds on Hirsch’s theory of postmemory to consider how female-authored memory manifests in specific formal strategies such as fragmentation, repetition, bodily resonance, or silences—narrative modes that reflect gendered structures of intergenerational transmission and embodied trauma.

As Hirsch and Smith (2007) observe, cultural memory is not a neutral space of recovery but a gendered media field that authorizes certain voices and suppresses others. Judith Butler’s concept of “ungrievable lives,” introduced in Frames of War (2009), further clarifies that cultural memory is not merely about what is recalled, but whose suffering is deemed narratable or worth remembering. For example, gendered experiences such as maternal grief, menstruation, or sexual humiliation often remain illegible—not due to absence, but due to narrative exclusion (Butler 2009).

Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory challenges the notion that Holocaust memory is a closed or zero-sum space. In Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg 2009), Rothberg proposes that collective memories circulate through productive intersections across different histories—including colonial, racial, and gendered traumas (Rothberg 2009). His framework invites a comparative and dialogic approach that resists competitive victimhood and embraces relational remembrance.

Taken together, these theoretical frameworks—Caruth’s trauma latency, Derwin’s ethics of testimony, Luhmann’s systems theory, Hirsch’s gendered postmemory, and Rothberg’s multidirectional memory—underscore the central claim of this article: gender is not merely a dimension of experience but a structuring force in the production, circulation, and reception of Holocaust memory.

While feminist Holocaust scholars have long demonstrated the value of gender-based inquiry within the field, such approaches remain underutilized beyond it. Although gender analysis has been widely recognized within Holocaust scholarship, a Eurocentric narrative persists that equates theoretical exhaustion with saturation in Western academic discourse. As a result, gendered frameworks continue to be marginalized in transnational, comparative, or non-European contexts. This article thus intervenes not only in Holocaust historiography but also in broader debates about which forms of testimony are legitimized—and why.

In this article, I use gender to refer not merely to the binary categories of male and female but to socially constructed systems of difference, including masculinity, femininity, and nonbinary subject positions. Drawing on feminist cultural theory, I understand gender as relational, performative, and intersectional. By connecting feminist trauma theory with Holocaust testimonies, I argue that gender is not merely an aspect of suffering but a fundamental force in how memory is created, shared, and institutionalized. Gendered memory is not simply a reflection of gendered experience; it is a distinct cultural form that operates through genre, tone, affect, and authority. The continued under-acknowledgment in memory and trauma studies today does not reflect theoretical obsolescence but rather an ongoing discomfort with how gender exposes the contingency of what is considered global “history.”

The following sections analyze two canonical women’s memoirs: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (1965–1971) and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (1992/2001). While both texts are well known, they have not often been approached through the lens of feminist cultural theory. Gender is now more widely acknowledged in memory scholarship, but it remains debatable whether its analytical significance has been fully registered, especially outside the field of Holocaust studies. As recent scholarship has shown, gender continues to shape whose narratives are heard and how, including in the context of contemporary refugee integration in Europe, where experiences are often structured by gender-based vulnerability and visibility.

This article does not ask whether women suffered differently, but how they remembered differently: What narrative forms, emotional registers, and testimonial practices do Delbo and Klüger mobilize? Moreover, how might their works challenge masculinist norms in Holocaust memorialization and open new avenues for understanding cultural trauma?

This article proposes a new theoretical model of gendered cultural memory by combining feminist trauma theory with systems theory. It includes formal, comparative analyses of two well-known yet under-theorized women’s memoirs. The goal is to offer fresh close readings of Delbo and Klüger and to develop a theoretical framework of gendered memory that illuminates how trauma is formally and affectively transmitted through voice and structure.

2. Gendered Memory and Testimonial Form in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après

This section examines how Charlotte Delbo constructs a gendered voice of witness through poetic and visual fragmentation—what I term a feminist logic of memory. Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985), a French resistance fighter and political deportee, offers one of the most structurally complex and affectively nuanced memoirs of Holocaust experience. Her trilogy Auschwitz and After (Auschwitz et après, 1965–1971) consists of three volumes originally published in French: Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return, Delbo 1970a), Une connaissance inutile (Useless Knowledge, Delbo 1970b), and Mesure de nos jours (The Measure of Our Days, Delbo 1971). An English translation of the complete trilogy, translated by Rosette C. Lamont, was published as Auschwitz and After in 1995 (Delbo 1995). While not Jewish herself, Delbo bore witness to the suffering of Jewish women and children in Auschwitz and rendered their fate visible through an experimental testimonial form that destabilizes the boundaries between individual and collective, memory and narration, trauma and gendered witnessing.

Delbo’s memoir defies simple categorization as “testimony” or “fiction.” In the preface to Auschwitz and After, she writes the following: “Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful” (Delbo 1995, p. 1). This distinction between truth and truthfulness anticipates Elena Esposito’s theory of Realitätsverdopplung (the doubling of reality), where narrative constructs a reality that is not factually verifiable yet epistemologically valid (Esposito 2007). Delbo’s testimonial form functions within what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, embedding her own experience within imagined recollections of others, especially Jewish mothers and children, with whom she shared a camp but not a fate (Hirsch 2012).

Her work foregrounds what Lawrence Langer calls the split between mémoire ordinaire (common memory) and mémoire profonde (deep memory), a framework drawn from Delbo’s own language (Langer 1991). Deep memory, as Langer notes, does not evolve or resolve; it intrudes into the present with the weight of non-closure. Delbo’s prose resists linear chronology, opting instead for repetition, fragmentation, and temporal layering—a style Michael Rothberg (2007) defines as traumatic realism, one that “reorients the reader’s affective and cognitive relation to atrocity” (p. 53). He argues that Delbo’s testimonial form destabilizes the binary between l’extrême and l’ordinaire—between the horror of Auschwitz and the banality of everyday life—not by choosing between them but by insisting on their simultaneity. Her writing thus collapses the divide between the exceptional and the habitual, generating a realism that is ethically dissonant and politically urgent. This is echoed in Rothberg’s (2000) earlier formulation, where he notes that traumatic realism “disorients readers” by merging past and present, the extreme and the everyday, thereby transforming trauma into both an object of knowledge and a site of ethical pedagogy (pp. 145–147).

Importantly, Delbo’s testimony does not simply recount traumatic experience; instead, it constructs gendered memory. While many Holocaust narratives are authored by and privilege the perspectives of male witnesses such as Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, Delbo writes from a doubled positionality: as a female witness who both shares collective trauma and experiences gender-specific forms of violence. Her observations of Jewish mothers, stripped naked before their children and male guards, convey not only the violation of bodies but of social and symbolic gender roles. As Myrna Goldenberg notes, such attacks on maternity and womanhood form a recurring pattern across female-authored testimonies (Goldenberg 2003). Delbo amplifies these patterns through literary montage, switching between first-person witnessing and imagined third-person intimacy.

For instance, in “Arrivals, Departures,” Delbo observes the following: “For women and children are made to go first” (Delbo 1995, p. 5). Here, she transforms bureaucratic language into a gendered indictment, undermining any residual moral comfort in traditional cultural tropes. In her description of women attempting to protect children from cold showers or hiding them from the male gaze, Delbo performs what Susan Derwin calls the “holding function” of testimony (Derwin 2012): bearing witness not to resolve pain but to symbolically protect the vulnerable from its erasure.

Delbo’s writing becomes, in terms of Niklas Luhmann, a medium of risk communication, a structure through which society processes uncertainty by projecting possible futures. As Luhmann explains in “Describing the Future” (Luhmann 1998), modern society manages contingency by circulating imagined risks before they materialize. In narrating her trauma, Delbo does not merely record the past but actively shapes how future generations might interpret and respond to atrocity. This process also reflects Luhmann’s distinction in “The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society” (Luhmann 1976) between present futures (anticipated risks) and future presents (realized outcomes). Through testimony, collective trauma is not simply archived but enters circulation within the social system, where it functions as a warning, a reference point, and a moral imperative. In this way, Delbo’s memoir contributes to the futurization of trauma, making the past meaningful not only for historical understanding but also for imagining and navigating ethical futures.

Even more powerfully, Delbo invokes gender as a relational structure of survival. She documents how women performed emotional labor not only to protect men’s dignity—“We hid our apprehension from the men, so they would feel less emasculated” (Delbo 1995, p. 117)—but also to preserve a shared sense of emotional survival. These bonds, however, are not universalized. Delbo notes moments of hierarchy and exclusion, for instance, when Polish women withhold water from starving French inmates. Her depiction of “camp sisterhood” is intimate, situated, and deeply embodied, especially in the vignettes of Lulu and Viva, two fellow inmates whose care for Delbo echoes maternal tenderness: “It is as though I had wept against my mother’s breast” (Delbo 1995, p. 105).

Delbo’s representation of men is equally gender-conscious. In her chapter “The Men,” she describes male prisoners reduced to “wolves’ eyes,” scrambling for crumbs of bread and refusing to meet women’s gazes (Delbo 1995, pp. 20–21). These portraits challenge the stereotype of male rationality and emotional detachment. Delbo shows how traditional gender roles collapse under atrocity and how women, paradoxically, assume both caregiver and witness roles, often in silence. In this inversion, Delbo critiques the conventional gendering of caregiving and witnessing roles, which are usually culturally coded as feminine.

Finally, in the post-liberation sections of Mesure de nos jours, Delbo articulates the afterlife of trauma in feminine terms through the voice of Delbo’s camp sister Mado, who declares, “I am not alive. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it” (Delbo 1995, pp. 257–67). Here, survival is not a triumph but an ongoing dislocation—a gendered impossibility of return. Mado’s motherhood cannot fully bridge the rupture, nor can her marriage fulfill the social scripts of femininity. Trauma, Delbo insists, persists in time’s failure to “erase” what is not narratively resolvable (Delbo 1995, p. 267).

As Langer argues, though his unredemptive view has also been subject to debate, “The Auschwitz past is not really past and never will be” (Delbo 1995, p. xviii). Delbo’s temporality is durational, not developmental. Her nonlinear form echoes Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, where personal trauma opens into more expansive political terrains, including the colonial violence of the 1960s and gendered violence of postwar silence (Rothberg 2009). Delbo thus does not simply write as a woman but writes gender itself as a structure of memory—relational, embodied, and unresolved.

Delbo’s ambition as a writer about the concentration camps, as Lawrence Langer notes in the English edition of Auschwitz and After, is enshrined in one of her guiding expressions, Il faut donner à voir, which means, as Langer translates, “they must be made to see” (Delbo 1995, p. xviii). This imperative to visualize the unrepresentable became the ruling principle of her testimonial art. Delbo’s choice to render the unrepresentable through vignettes, poetic fragments, and disjointed narrative scenes does not aim to reconstruct events in a factual sequence but rather to make trauma visually and ethically legible. This form of witnessing, grounded in seeing, constructs what Primo Levi might call a proxy memory.

In The Drowned and the Saved (Levi 1989), Levi argues that true witnesses—those who experienced the full horror—did not survive:

I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witness. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule; we are the exception(…) We speak in their stead, by proxy.

(Levi 1989, p. 83)

Delbo’s literary form acknowledges this paradox. She was not sent to the gas chamber; she did not witness the ultimate moment of annihilation. However, she stages these absences through borrowed, imagined, and fragmented memories, making visible what Levi describes as the experience of the Muselmann in Survival in Auschwitz (Levi 1996)—the “complete witness” who cannot speak.

Rather than undermining Delbo’s authority, this imagined witnessing reinforces the ethical stakes of her testimony. By evoking mundane moments—travel, stations, arrivals, and routines—Delbo conjures the ordinary as a space of horror. Through what Esposito (2007) calls Realitätsverdopplung, or “doubling of reality,” Delbo invites us to see not only what was experienced but how that experience now circulates as mediated memory.

In Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Esposito 2007), Esposito explains the following:

One can only speak of reality if something delineates it, something described either as non-real or realistic in a different way. If this is a case of doubling, then it implies a structure within the realm of reality through which real reality can be distinguished from the reality of another kind. This holds true for the fictional reality of novels, which are not lies, even though they engage with characters and events that do not exist and never existed. Furthermore, this also pertains to the probable, which is not necessarily true. However, it is also not false.

(Esposito 2007, p. 175)1

Esposito argues that narrative constructs a reality that is not empirically verifiable but epistemologically possible. This double reality is the space of Delbo’s testimony—what is truthful, even if not factually “true.”

Delbo’s approach also visualizes trauma through gendered lenses. The experience of Jewish mothers being stripped in front of their children, the daily humiliations inflicted on women, and the reversal of traditional gender roles are not only recounted—they are rendered visible in narrative tableaux. These scenes function as what Dominick LaCapra calls “transference texts,” producing in the reader an affective engagement with suffering that is not cathartic but ethical (LaCapra 2014). Delbo’s imagined episodes of mothers worrying about warm showers, shielding their children, or caring for male inmates embody what Joan Ringelheim calls the “unspoken female realities” of the camps: moments that male memory may acknowledge but cannot fully represent, given the embodied specificity and maternal intimacy of these experiences (Ringelheim 1984).

Delbo’s feminist seeing extends even further. By inviting readers to look not just through her eyes but through the imagined eyes of those who did not survive, she performs a layered voir—a “three-dimensional seeing” that combines survivor memory, imagined testimony, and reader reception. This triangulation enacts what Langer (2007) describes as the durational time of Holocaust memory, in which “the past is always present,” and memory does not serve a function but “only preserves” (Langer 2007, pp. 197–98). Memory, in Delbo’s writing, is not a linear archive; it is a temporal rupture—one that destabilizes gendered identities and performative scripts both during and after the Holocaust.

Delbo’s temporality is durational, not developmental. Her nonlinear form echoes Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, where personal trauma gestures toward broader structures of political violence (Rothberg 2009). While Auschwitz and After focuses on Holocaust testimony, Delbo’s later works—such as La Sentence (Delbo 1972)—engage with French police violence during the Algerian War, suggesting a political continuum that reframes memory beyond a single historical frame. Her notion of “useless knowledge,” the fear that Holocaust memory might lose relevance, becomes a defiant claim to visibility. As she writes, the trauma she carries is “wrapped in the impervious skin of memory” (Delbo 1995, p. 3). That skin may not heal, but Delbo’s writing insists that it be seen—and insists that it be remembered.

3. Gendered Survival and Relational Memory in Ruth Klüger’s Weiter leben

Klüger’s memoir, by contrast, enacts a feminist ethics of voice that reframes survival as a form of rhetorical agency. Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (2001), while often described as the English translation of her German memoir Weiter leben (Klüger 1992), is in fact a substantially rewritten and culturally reframed narrative. As Schaumann (2004) argues, Still Alive reconfigures tone, structure, and intended audience, repositioning Klüger’s testimony for an American cultural framework. Similarly, Fischer (2012) interprets Still Alive as a Jewish-American autobiography that mobilizes memory not only across languages but across identity positions and national imaginaries. These distinctions are crucial for understanding how Klüger constructs feminist memory in two different yet dialogic testimonial contexts.

Born in Vienna in 1931, Klüger was deported to the Nazi camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and the lesser-known labor camp of Christianstadt with her mother, Alma. As a Jewish girl who survived forced labor, she narrates her life through multiple voices: the child witness, the postwar immigrant, the dissident daughter, and the elderly feminist scholar. Her layered narrative voice embodies what Caruth (1996) calls trauma’s latency—the delay between event and narration—while also asserting a deeply gendered lens through which that trauma is remembered.

Where Charlotte Delbo insists on seeing, Klüger foregrounds voice, often in tension with visibility. “I would have liked to be a man, and preferably not a Jew,” she asserts, signaling her marginalization within both gendered and ethnic hierarchies (Klüger 2001, p. 184). Andrea Reiter (2002) insightfully describes Weiter leben as a “feminist survival report” (p. 291) that defies both the conventions of redemptive Holocaust narratives and the expectations of passive victimhood. Klüger’s memoir challenges the genre of testimonial coherence by foregrounding contradiction, irony, and emotional dissonance. Rather than seeking catharsis, her writing unsettles normative memory scripts and resists closure—a strategy that mirrors feminist refusals to universalize trauma or to frame survival as moral triumph.

Klüger’s testimony also confronts what Hirsch and Smith (2007) describe as the “distribution of and contested claims to power” in cultural memory, particularly as it pertains to gender:

In a variety of ways, feminist theory can provide a valuable lens through which cultural memory may be studied. Indeed, gender, along with race and class, marks identities in specific ways and provides a means by which cultural memory is located in a specific context rather than submitted into monolithic and essentialist categories. Moreover, gender is an inescapable dimension of differential power relations, and cultural memory is always about the distribution of and contested claims to power. What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender.

(Hirsch and Smith 2007, p. 223)

Her memoir critiques not only the Nazi assault on Jewish life but also the patriarchal structures of postwar remembrance that continue to silence women. Klüger critiques:

Wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male of the species. And fascism is a decidedly male property, whether you were for or against it. Besides, women have no past, or aren’t supposed to have one. A man can have an interesting past, a woman only an indecent one. And my stories aren’t even sexy.

(Klüger 2001, p. 18)

This ironic reversal exposes the implicit moral judgments attached to female memory and pre-empts reader expectations with rhetorical sharpness. This tension underlies her entire project: to claim space as a gendered voice within a historical canon that has largely muted female perspectives.

At the heart of Klüger’s narrative is the ambivalent relationship with her mother, Alma. Their survival is interdependent, but emotionally strained. Alma, who had lost her first son, Schorschi, refused to place Ruth in a Kindertransport evacuation. Later, her behavior became unpredictable—both protective and reckless. Klüger often frames Alma as both savior and antagonist. This emotional ambiguity resonates with Susan Derwin’s (2012) model of testimony as a “holding space”: a double gesture of containment and transformation, particularly within the context of maternal trauma (Derwin 2012, pp. 11–12).

Unlike many male survivors who reflect on moral or philosophical questions in more abstract terms, Klüger emphasizes relational trauma—the rupture of familial, gendered, and intergenerational roles. The emotional distance between Klüger and her mother led her to speculate that her mother blamed her for her brother’s death. Her mother frequently told Klüger that if it were not for her, she would have saved her brother (Klüger 2001, p. 29). Klüger began to believe that, as the daughter, she was less important to the family and less loved. After the loss of her father and brother, she reflects that she also lost the social identities attached to them—as daughter, sister, and protected child. “I had spent my life among women […] men had been at the periphery of my life,” she claims, noting that even after the war, patriarchal values remained dominant, though men themselves had perished (Klüger 2001, p. 179).

She describes how postwar society viewed female survivors as inferior: “In my family, the women had survived, not the men. And that meant that the more valuable human beings had lost their lives” (Klüger 2001, p. 184). Her testimony challenges the assumption that women and children were less harmed—an assumption widespread at the time and reinforced by early postwar narratives and commemorative practices. This aligns with Joan Ringelheim’s (1998) critique that male memory often overlooks the specific vulnerabilities and perspectives of women and thus cannot confront its own complicity in female marginalization.

Klüger’s rage is directed not only at perpetrators but at cultural rituals of commemoration. For example, Klüger criticizes American students’ attempts to whitewash Auschwitz fences, claiming such gestures reduce genocide to sentimental tourism. Instead, she asserts a Rothbergian view of trauma as pedagogical rupture. Klüger writes the following:

We don’t get off so cheaply; the ghosts cling to us. Do we expect that our unsolved questions will be answered if we hang on to what’s left: the place, the stones, the ashes? We don’t honor the dead with these unattractive remnants of past crimes”.

(Klüger 2001, p. 64)

Rothberg (2000) argues that Klüger’s writing expresses trauma through the dissonance between extremes and the mundane. He claims she “lived beyond extremes in a new world of the quotidian” (p. 138), and that her narrative “is a quest for knowledge” that instructs readers on how to approach an unknown past (p. 140). Klüger’s memoir, echoing Rothberg’s theory of traumatic realism, insists that memory must be ethically disruptive rather than aesthetically reconciliatory.

As Klüger’s critique makes clear, memory is not simply personal—it is politically shaped and gendered. Gender, for Klüger, is not merely an aspect of suffering but a structure of exclusion. In postwar New York, she encounters sexism within her family and the academic world. Her mother encourages her to find a husband, while male relatives express contempt rather than solidarity:

Today I understand (though still not fully) that these men had their own agenda: the Jewish catastrophe was mainly and merely a resounding humiliation to them, not the tragedy of saints and martyrs that our own propaganda has made of it since. (…) What these male refugees who had spent the war in America—my uncle, Lazi Fessler, all of them—held against us was that we were the mothers whom they had left behind, we were the women and children whom they should have protected.

(Klüger 2001, p. 187)

Klüger gradually diagnoses their misogynistic resentment as displaced guilt. She also feels confused about her mother’s need for male validation. She describes the sensed competition between Alma and herself as she grew into a young woman:

One moment, she would tell me out of the blue how pretty I was, the next moment, exhort me to try harder to find a boyfriend. Both instances of motherly love seemed to me uncalled-for and embarrassing. In retrospect, I am sure she sensed competition. She was looking for a husband, and here I was growing into a young woman.

My mother constantly pretended to be six years younger than she really was. Six years is the length of World War II. Perhaps she didn’t want to have aged in those years. She pretended that the Nazi years had washed over me, as if, being a child, I hadn’t been quite conscious of what was happening. I was a stage prop, her property, at most a minor figure in her drama.

(Klüger 2001, p. 180)

Klüger uses this theatrical metaphor to critique her mother’s psychological control and the gendered erasure of her subjectivity. In response, she possibly sought to escape familial constraints by marrying an American soldier:

Later I was married for some years to one of those paratroopers, and probably chose him mainly because he had jumped out of the clouds and into the legendary land of Normandy during the leaden summer of 1944 to liberate me.

(Klüger 2001, p. 102)

However, even in marriage, Klüger experienced silencing. Her husband, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, refused to let her speak about the camps in his classes. Speaking in public, in his view, reflected poorly on his authority as a decorated veteran. He also could not tolerate her questioning during a conversation with a veteran friend, who fondly described chasing a German plane during the war. It was a moment of camaraderie, in which the man proudly recalled sparing the German’s life. However, Klüger emphasized that the fear of being killed was the same for the Germans (Klüger 2001, p. 183). To her, what he saw as heroism and mercy resembled the humiliation and manipulation inflicted by the Nazis in the death camps. Her husband was furious at her interruption, reflecting a broader cultural attitude that prioritized heroism and male storytelling over listening to survivors. Klüger eventually realized, “Women are tolerated in these circles only when they keep their mouths shut” (Klüger 2001, p. 183). The marriage lasted barely a year.

Her experience illustrates Luhmann’s (2000) theory in The Reality of the Mass Media, which states that communication systems, such as academia and nationalism, authorize specific types of speech while discarding others. Klüger’s survival is not merely physical but rhetorical: a continuous battle to be heard.

Still Alive reframes Holocaust testimony through feminist critique. Klüger writes not to mourn but to indict. Her trauma is ongoing and self-aware. She reimagines survival not as endurance but as resistance through flight—refusing to remain in spaces that deny her voice: “Running was the best thing I ever did… You feel alive when you run away” (Klüger 2001, p. 16). In this reframing, escape becomes not a failure of endurance but a gendered ethics of survival. For Klüger, testimony becomes both a mode of resistance and a method of self-preservation—remaining alive by refusing to forget, to conform, or to be silenced.

Her title is not a celebration, but a provocation. She is still alive—still speaking, still challenging the ways memory is coded, heard, and silenced. In doing so, she reclaims the space of testimony for women who have long remained peripheral to both history and its narration.

As LaCapra (2014) argues, testimony is not merely a historical record but a space where affect, memory, and ethics converge. He writes the following:

Testimonies are significant in the attempt to understand experience and its aftermath, including the role of memory and its lapses, in coming to terms with—or denying and repressing—the past. […] One issue that is raised in accentuated form by the study of survivor videos is how to represent and, more generally, come to terms with affect in those who have been victimized and traumatized by their experiences, a problem that involves the tense relation between procedures of objective reconstruction of the past and empathic response, especially in the case of victims and survivors.

(LaCapra 2014, p. 13)

Klüger’s memoir is thus not only a personal document but a feminist intervention. It expands the boundaries of historical knowledge and insists that cultural memory remain open to gendered dissent.

Finally, her insistence on voicing resonates with Judith Butler’s (2009) concept of “ungrievable lives”—those whose deaths were never socially acknowledged as fully human and thus cannot be publicly mourned. Klüger’s testimony becomes not only a personal reckoning but a challenge to the gendered structures of grievability that shape collective memory. Her speaking, despite marginalization, reclaims the right to grieve, to narrate, and to be counted among history’s witnesses.

In this light, Holocaust memory is not only a matter of ethical remembrance but also of political visibility: of who is remembered, how, and why. Women’s testimonies, long ignored or dismissed as secondary, confront this hierarchy of grievability and push toward a more inclusive, feminist ethics of memory.

4. Conclusions

In History and Memory after Auschwitz, Dominick LaCapra (1998) reminds us that memory is both more and less than history. While history may never fully capture “the intensity of joy or suffering” found in memory, memory likewise cannot replace history’s factual rigor. The challenge lies in their interplay: memory troubles historical narrative, insisting that we reckon not only with what happened, but also with how it is remembered, by whom, and to what end (p. 8).

This article has argued that Holocaust memory is profoundly shaped by gender—not only in terms of experience but also in modes of narration, silence, and testimony. Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Klüger write from radically different positions: one, a non-Jewish French political deportee, the other, a Jewish girl from Vienna. However, both construct gendered archives of survival that confront the reader with ethical, aesthetic, and historical demands. They do not simply record suffering; they reframe it through feminist memory practices that foreground maternal bonds, relational trauma, the female gaze, and the struggle to speak from the margins.

Building on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) concept of postmemory and Susan Derwin’s (2012) model of testimony as “holding space,” this article argues that trauma, when mediated through gender, assumes specific cultural forms. Delbo’s voir and Klüger’s conflicted voicing embody how women survivors re-enter public discourse not as passive witnesses but as critical agents of historical disruption. In this sense, gender is not a minor category of difference but a constitutive force in how Holocaust memory is archived and transmitted. This framing of gender includes not only femininity but also the broader structural logics of sexual difference and grievability.

As Sara Horowitz (1998) notes, women may remember through embodied, affective, and domestic experiences often absent from male-authored narratives—such as menstruation, maternal caregiving, or sexual violation (pp. 373–374). These gender-specific memories expand what we understand as Holocaust trauma and call for their inclusion in both historical and literary canons.

Furthermore, as Kate Chedgzoy (2007) argues, memory itself is gendered in its authority: women’s voices are often “harder to hear and listened to with less respect” (p. 217). A feminist approach to Holocaust testimony thus entails more than recovering forgotten voices; it involves challenging the epistemological frameworks that have long governed what counts as credible memory. Feminist memory work, then, involves both epistemic justice and archival transformation.

Finally, Michael Rothberg’s (2009) theory of multidirectional memory and Elisabeth Weber’s (2016) critique of Eurocentric memorial politics call us to think globally. The memoirs of Delbo and Klüger, while anchored in Europe, invite comparative inquiry across geographies, including understudied testimonies from Shanghai, Soviet exile, and postwar migration. For example, the testimonies of Jewish refugees in wartime Shanghai, often overlooked in Western Holocaust discussions, offer crucial insights into survival, displacement, and gendered vulnerability outside of Europe’s geographic and memorial framework. Just as Rothberg (2009) urges us to view memory as dialogic rather than competitive, this study encourages a non-hierarchical expansion of gendered Holocaust scholarship across time, space, and narrative forms.

Judith Butler (2009) reminds us that cultural frameworks authorize certain lives as grievable while excluding others. A feminist approach to Holocaust memory must therefore not only uncover hidden narratives but also challenge the power structures that render certain testimonies unintelligible within prevailing narrative frameworks—for instance, fragmented accounts of menstrual trauma or maternal ambivalence that defy redemptive closure.

As new survivor testimonies and second-generation narratives continue to emerge, we must ask the following: how do gender, memory, and trauma circulate beyond the camps, beyond Europe, and beyond traditional literary forms? The Holocaust is not over. Its afterlives persist, not only in inherited wounds but also in the ways we remember them. Attending to women’s voices is not only about expanding the archive; it is about transforming the terms of remembrance itself—across generations, geographies, and narrative forms.