Expected to live’: Women Shoah survivors’ testimonials of silence

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. Until relatively recently, writing about the Shoah tended to remain gender-neutral. . Based on the accounts of women Shoah survivors, in testimony, poetry and fiction, this paper 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.