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Testimonies and Memories

“They didn’t break me either way”. Women, Captivity and Interrogation in World War II: Resurfacing Self-Empowering Narratives

"They didn't break me either way". Femmes, incarcération et interrogatoires pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale : récits féminins et affirmation de soi
Simona Tobia

Résumés

Les interrogatoires représentent un élément clé des souvenirs des prisonniers de guerre et des leurs récits personnels, et les anciens captifs en parlent souvent comme des expériences qui ont changé leur vie. Cependant, les témoignages de femmes sur les interrogatoires pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ne sont pas aussi faciles à trouver que ceux des hommes. Les femmes ne correspondent que rarement à la définition des prisonniers de guerre car même lorsqu’elles étaient combattantes, elles ne l’étaient pas légalement. Ce qui est probablement plus important, les femmes détenues ne sont pas entrées dans la mémoire collective aussi fortement que les prisonniers de sexe masculin, et il est essentiel de ramener à la surface les récits de vie des femmes sur ces expériences qui sont encore cachés dans les profondeurs des archives et musées américains. L’analyse secondaire approfondie des récits d’histoire orale conservés dans les archives sonores du Veterans History Project au sein de la Bibliothèque du Congrès et au United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, à Washington, D.C., fournit des études de cas pour montrer comment les narrateurs ont été affectés par leurs expériences d’incarcération et dans quelle mesure leurs souvenirs s’inscrivent dans la mémoire collective de la captivité en temps de guerre. L’article conclut que la façon dont ces femmes ont accepté leur passé violent remet en question les idées sur la vulnérabilité des incarcérées et que leurs récits atteignent des épilogues inattendus.

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Texte intégral

To all war victims, particularly of the war in Ukraine, raging as this article goes to press.

Introduction and methodology: resurfacing invisible narratives

  • 1 Hereafter: POW or plural POWs. The author is grateful to all those who supported her work for this (...)
  • 2 Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, “Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the (...)
  • 3 The differences between a prisoner of war, a political prisoner, a civilian internee, and concentra (...)
  • 4 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them’: Gender, Captivity and the Special Operat (...)
  • 5 Simona Tobia, “Conclusions: Interrogation, Interviewing and Questioning in the Twentieth Century,” (...)

1Interrogation, interviewing and questioning are often remembered as life-changing by those who have been held in captivity in wartime, and they represent a key element of the prisoner of war experience in the personal narratives of former POWs.1 Historians estimate that about 35 million combatants have been held in captivity,2 and the inclusion of civilian internees and concentration camp inmates would escalate the number to several millions.3 While captivity represents a very peculiar experience of the war, for both men and women, scholars tackling this issue have shown that narratives about wartime imprisonment are often gendered.4 The majority of testimonies of women held in captivity, and interrogated while there, comes from the group of political prisoners, including former resisters and Jewish women who were arrested, held at various prisons across Europe, and later sent to concentration camps. Interrogation for these prisoners was always particularly harsh because it was conceived more as a form of punishment than as a way to extract valuable information.5

  • 6 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 274.

2Female prisoners, however, have not entered the collective memory of World War II as strongly as male captives6 in part because of the relative paucity of documentary records in archives and museums holding collections about war and conflict, and in part because women rarely fit formal definitions of POWs, which are presumptions of the dominant narratives on wartime captivity. Women’s accounts of interrogation and questioning in World War II are not as easy to find as men’s, but they do exist in archive and museum collections, particularly in the United States. Resurfacing these hidden voices through a re-listening and re-reading of personal narratives is therefore essential.

  • 7 Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop, Autumn 1981, no. 12, 1 (...)

3Oral history provides an opportunity to explore the subjective meanings of captivity7 and the study of female prisoners’ accounts shows that they challenge dominant narratives about women’s roles in wartime. The oral narratives analyzed below are a series of case studies of female prisoners of the Nazi forces in the European theatre of war, who were submitted to interrogation by the Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel (SS). The testimonies have been selected because the narrators had similar experiences: they were captured, imprisoned for a time and questioned in France, often in the southern part. Many later migrated to the United States, where they were exposed to similar public narratives and shared memories of the conflict.

  • 8 <https://www.ushmm.org/information/about-the-museum>, accessed March 18, 2022.
  • 9 Judith Tydor Baumel, “‘You Said the Words You Wanted Me to Hear But I Heard the Words You Couldn’t (...)
  • 10 These results were obtained in March 2022.
  • 11 These oral histories have been collected since the 1980s both by the museum’s oral historians and b (...)

4The sources are from two American institutions which purport to preserve the memory of the war, although they have a different core focus. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is “a living memorial to the Holocaust”8 and its impact pervades these narratives creating a framework of victimization within which narrators compose their memories.9 The Veterans History Project (VHP) at the Folklife Center of the Library of Congress preserves and maintains access to the personal accounts of American war veterans, to offer the public a better understanding of the realities of war. The fact that this archive is specifically focused on the experiences of veterans means that the materials held there are centered on those who were actively involved in wars and conflicts, in other words it mainly collects combatants’ stories. Women’s narratives as they relate to the experience of captivity and interrogation in wartime are heavily underrepresented at both institutions. The USHMM database of materials labelled as ‘Interviews in Audio or Video’ includes 81,297 collections, of which only a little more than a tenth – 9,569 – are tagged as “women – personal narratives.” A keyword search in the same database, using the term ‘interrogation’ gives 1,041 results, of which 213 are with female narrators.10 These results include subjects who mention the interrogation of family or another member of their community rather than their own, and 73 collections are in languages other than English. The selection of sources from this body was based on narratives by women who testified about their own experience as witnesses of their own history, reflecting on the direct experience and memory of interrogation in captivity. The other selection criteria were geographic, as mentioned above.11

  • 12 Accessed in September 2021.
  • 13 Library of Congress (LOC), VHP - Helene Stewart collection.
  • 14 Leisa D. Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women’ (...)
  • 15 Penny Summerfield, “Gender and War in the Twentieth Century,” The International History Review 19, (...)
  • 16 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Clayton, Vic: Monash University Press, 20 (...)

5The VHP database consists of a total of 121,473 entries12 covering all conflicts in which the U.S. forces have been involved, including the most recent ones. Even so, only 7,198 entries are recorded as “female”. Restricting the search to female participants in World War II, who were also POWs, gives 14 results and if we examine these further to exclude simple errors in the classification or those who were interned as civilians (for example in the Far East) and were never subjected to questioning, we are left with only one entry, the Helene Stewart collection.13 These numbers confirm the argument that the studies on gender in wartime tend to underrepresent women, especially female combatants, in the shared memory of the conflict.14 Indeed, women’s accounts are less likely to be found in the male-dominated VHP archive and more likely to be represented in the USHMM, which keeps testimonial records of Holocaust victims. Even so, women’s accounts of captivity are a minority. The VHP, where there is more expectation of stories of heroism in battle, tends to represent the cultural norms of the time, crucial for “the wartime gender contract,”15 which construed masculinity as strong and protective and femininity as passive and vulnerable. The underrepresentation can be problematic for the achievement of composure, a process of memory-making by which subjectivities are constructed in life story telling in a way “that helps us to feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities.”16

  • 17 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self. Personal Narratives and Historical Practice, London and (...)
  • 18 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit.; Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wa (...)
  • 19 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories, op. cit., l. 540.
  • 20 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit., 20.

6Methodologically, this article positions itself with the post-positivist approach17 which in the analysis of personal narratives, focuses on meanings rather than representativeness and typicality. The different types of sources analyzed here allow us to bring to the surface the complexity of the female experience of wartime captivity by problematizing the gendering of these memories, which hinges on the construction of the narratives and on processes of memory composure.18 An example of this process is Thomson’s discussion on the influence of ‘pubic legends’ on memory, which reveals that it also shifts in relation to personal identity because in our narratives we tend to compose a past that we can comfortably live with.19 Summerfield goes further to explain that this subjective composure is also dependent on social recognition and that both the “self and world figured in a narrative” are linked to shared and collective identities.20

  • 21 In oral history, the expression ‘secondary analysis’ is understood as the study of pre-recorded int (...)
  • 22 Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, op. cit., 180.
  • 23 Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, (...)
  • 24 A model of this type of analysis is proposed in Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Struc (...)
  • 25 Portelli has defined the concept of history-telling as different from that of storytelling as one t (...)
  • 26 A discussion of the presumed vulnerability of female wartime captives and of its representation in (...)
  • 27 To cite but a few examples: Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, op. cit. Simona Tob (...)
  • 28 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 71.

7Through the ‘secondary analysis’21 of these interviews, collected between the 1980s and the early 2000s when a ‘composed identity’22 of the POW experience had already been established, the article tackles the question of the visibility of women23 in this context, focusing on subjectivity and on the way narrators compose their memories often in contrast to dominant notions of female vulnerability. A closer look at women’s narrative patterns24 as forms of history-telling25 allows us to challenge the celebration of women’s roles in wartime and achieve a more nuanced understanding of their experiences. These accounts establish that the ways women come to terms with their violent past challenge ideas on their presumed vulnerability in war, as the narratives are self-empowering rather than merely an addendum to victimology.26 The purpose of this article, which continues and expands the existing research on allied POWs,27 is to offer an analysis of these gendered memories of imprisonment. Narrators tend to emphasize particular aspects of their experience of incarceration rather than others, and interrogation is often highlighted in a way that tends to follow common patterns in prisoners with similar experiences. Three elements, discussed in detail in the following parts, emerge from these accounts as key in the process of memory composure of female narrators: feminine self-representation, a fractured storyline about the moment of interrogation, and constructions of gender hierarchy, built around the self-empowering idea of an unbroken self, challenging dominant notions on the “fragility of feminine subjectivities.”28

Narrative emplotment: fractured storylines about interrogation and captivity

  • 29 J. Ryan Stackhouse, “Gestapo Interrogations. Myths and Realities,” in Interrogation in War and Con (...)
  • 30 A discussion of popular representations of the Gestapo and the SS would be very interesting, but it (...)
  • 31 The Secret Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British organization created in 1940 to conduct (...)

8The word ‘interrogation’ in the context of World War II often brings to the mind the image of Germany as “a gigantic torture chamber,”29 to borrow the words of the American Judge Advocate General at Nuremberg Robert H. Jackson. It emerged after the conflict from eyewitnesses’ accounts and developed during the war crime trials to then reach wider audiences through popular media.30 The testimonies revealed stories of arbitrary beatings, solitary confinement in darkness, and many forms of physical and psychological torture, carried out in particular by the Gestapo and the SS. In France, too, they were particularly brutal with resistance fighters and political prisoners, and interrogations could be simple police interviews or countless days of horrific torments, with the purpose of extracting key information, often the names of fellow resisters or members of the interviewee’s partisan cell. This idea was further reinforced by the Auschwitz Trial of 1963-65 and in France by the trial of Klaus Barbie, also known as the ‘butcher of Lyon’, in 1987. The history of female captivity in World War II is no exception, and it is riddled with accounts of women who were brutally tortured and raped by their captors, be they political prisoners, SOE31 agents or civilians.

  • 32 For a clear discussion on the ways in which the vocabularies “available to narrators […] make some (...)

9These images have entered the public discourse on captivity, providing a framework that was available to narrators at the time of their interview.32 A general look at the whole body of USHMM women’s oral histories on interrogation reveals that most narrators tell stories of questioning by Nazi authorities which fit those public accounts. Yet, these stories are most often of other people’s questioning rather than the informant’s own experience. Subjects tell about a family member, often a parent or sibling, who was taken away, imprisoned for variable lengths of time, then came back after having suffered the most brutal torments. This basic framework about ‘treatment in interrogation’ conforms to public narratives and is not gendered as such, but looking beyond it, through a more in-depth analysis of accounts based on first-hand experiences, unveils more complex meanings showing that there are gendered aspects in testimonies about wartime detention.

  • 33 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows” op. cit. Juliette Pattinson, Noakes, and Ugolini, op. cit (...)
  • 34 Simona Tobia, “In Enemy Hands”, op. cit., 291.
  • 35 For a more articulated discussion on the question of vulnerability, especially in relation to exper (...)

10Captivity in conflict is represented and remembered as an emasculating experience bringing shame, lost honor and silence on male prisoners.33 However, male captives’ narratives call attention to the specific moment of questioning as showing their heroic efforts in their experience as soldiers and POWs: “They are in the in-between zone – not yet POWs, and they can still fight against the enemy, or at least this is how they relate to this experience.”34 They emphasize their ability to resist omniscient interrogators, and stress the technical aspects of questioning both as a military intelligence operation and as a struggle to keep the enemy from extracting useful information, often downplaying or silencing their vulnerabilities.35

  • 36 This study looks at case studies from the western allied forces. For future studies, the Red Army w (...)
  • 37 Juliette Pattinson, Behind Enemy Lines, op. cit.; Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie wi (...)

11Women’s role in wartime, on the other hand, was not conceived to include combat,36 with some exceptions concerning those involved in para-military organizations or irregular warfare activities, and the notions of emasculation which scholars have studied to make sense of the experiences of male POWs do not satisfy the need to understand women and captivity in war. The evaluation of gender-specific memories of female prisoners goes through the study of the complex interactions at play between the identities of ‘woman’, ‘prisoner’, and for some also ‘soldier’. Female prisoners tend to remember detention and interrogation differently than men: through their accounts they recognize and accept their traumatic experiences, thereby also confronting narratives that positioned women as helpless and vulnerable. Therefore, their personal narratives actually challenge preconceived notions about female vulnerability by allowing them to reframe their stories. Pattinson, who worked on British SOE agents captured by the Nazis,37 argues that these detainees often resorted to female stereotypes to survive.

  • 38 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representati (...)
  • 39 This is consistent with the representation of the Gestapo or SS interrogation existing in publicly (...)
  • 40 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 92.

12The moment of interrogation follows a similar storyline in all accounts. The narrative structure’s key patterns express the speakers’ “relation to social models. In their anecdotes, they picture themselves confronted with a dominant model.”38 The storyline pattern starts with the moment of capture, often due to the betrayal of neighbors or acquaintances, the fear felt at the time which contrasted with the responsibility to protect others, for example younger friends, relatives or fellow members of the resistance.39 The questioning itself is always the object of a fractured narrative. This might be explained by the emotions linked to interrogation experienced at the time as a traumatizing event, but also by the cultural approach to oral history: “ordinary people who have memories that do not fit publicly available accounts have difficulty finding words and concepts with which to compose their memories, whether in anecdotal snapshots or extended narratives.”40 Thus, a fractured narrative might also mean that the narrator recounts a memory that fits with public and shared narratives but struggles to achieve composure.

  • 41 USHMM - RG-50.146.0005. « C’était atroce », « C’était terrible », « Ça c’était quelque chose the te (...)
  • 42 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.
  • 43 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.
  • 44 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

13Sarah Colin regularly repeats that her experience of interrogation was “horrible” and “something terrible.”41 She uses these hyperboles to describe her arrest and the prison, and when she moves to interrogation, the account becomes even more fractured. She changes subject, talks about someone else, or interrupts the flow of her own story by trying to recall specific pieces of information such as names or dates. The same pattern can be found in other narratives, for example Marie Fauss repeats “I knew it was going to be a tough one,”42 and she recounts the beatings she suffered in interrogation but interrupts herself repeatedly. In other cases, the fractured quality of the account is represented by the struggle to follow a clear timeline in the storytelling. Madeline Dautartus says: “Questioning, questioning, you know… one after the other.”43 Then she interjects the narration with anecdotes from other interrogations she underwent at different times. One example is the story about swallowing the message she was carrying, to then conclude “after all this questioning they couldn’t get nowhere, they brought us to the prison,”44 as if this were the epilogue of all her interrogations, blurred in one. Helene Stewart’s account is similarly fractured, as she dwells on certain anecdotes:

  • 45 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

I had a bag, a mountain bag with certain things […] and they put it on the floor […] and at first I was naïve and bend down to pick it […] and they would kick you! [sighs and cries] […] and that they did it every time! […] never bend down to pick up anything, even if it’s a passport.45

  • 46 The interviewer in this case is a woman, too and her name is Ina Miller.
  • 47 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representati (...)
  • 48 Ibid, 78.
  • 49 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit., 117-27.

14Stewart then moves from her experience of interrogation to her thoughts about the role of France and the United States in the war, but her interviewer constantly interrupts her to “establish a timeline” and correct anything she considers erroneous. The interviewer’s anxiety to follow the chronology of events reflects her struggle to understand Helene’s fractured account.46 These intrusions however erase part of the meanings in the narrative, bringing the institutional framework of the interaction to the attention of both the interviewee and the listener/researcher. Oral historians agree that the temporal and causal organization of the narrative and the emphasis given to events considered significant are the ways in which narrators make meaning, because “the most crucial information resides […] in the narrative organization itself.”47 The self dramatized in the narrative is thus “the social self viewed in relation to its past.”48 When memories are at odds with public discourses, or are still marginalized, narrators sometimes elaborate special justifications to explain deviance from the norm, resulting in these fractured narratives which are often considered as “clues to the difficulties of composure.”49

Female self-representation in narratives about wartime detention

  • 50 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 274.
  • 51 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them,’” op. cit., 271-292.
  • 52 Ibid., 277-78.
  • 53 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 255.
  • 54 Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit., 116.

15Research on women in captivity has shown that imprisonment deeply affected femininity in many ways, ranging from not feeling like real women anymore, to exploiting their female – even sexual attributes: “Real women wore make up, had their hair done and wore floral dresses. The prison camp was an ambiguous zone, for both men and women, and it disrupted common understandings about gender roles in war.”50 When captured, female SOE agents often got away with “playing the daft lassie,”51 which involved a stereotypically feminine role of performed vulnerability, thus depoliticizing their role in the resistance.52 Women with these experiences mystified symbolic notions about “appropriate gender roles in wartime”53 because the confluence of tensions around issues of gender, war and detention, placed female captives in an unusual position. As POWs, women were excluded from the accepted wartime gender norms of domesticity or help on the home front. This produced contrasts between discourse and subjectivity which could cause “both their discomposure and the urge to remedy it.”54 Female self-representation is based on publicly available accounts, and women narrators tend to emphasize the exceptionality of their imprisonment by voicing the humiliations they faced as female captives.

  • 55 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.
  • 56 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.
  • 57 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.
  • 58 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

16When she was captured, Helene Stewart was in a group of 54 young resisters trying to cross the border into Spain, but she emphasizes that she “was the only woman.”55 This insistence is recurrent in narratives about capture, interrogation and detention, and it highlights the deviance from perceived gender roles. Madeline Dautartus insists on the same point stating that she “was captured in 1942 with 2 boys.”56 Nicole Long’s job in the resistance was to travel between Paris and the south of France to take orphaned children to safety. Her account of being arrested is another example of this point: “they ask for I.D. and I showed the I.D. and so they, they know that it is I and it is my mother. And then we went into a waiting room with 50 other people, all women and children that morning, by the way.”57 Besides insisting on the fact that they were the only women at the moment of capture, they express their femininity also by recalling emotions or feelings linked to specific memories of captivity, especially the degrading conditions of their captivity. When Dautartus was arrested she was put in a cell with a few other girls, where everything was dirty and there was only one mattress; she was offered the mattress, but found herself unable to accept or even to care about it: “I was so … uh … you know … – turns her head to look away – humiliated, and you know … all that happened.”58 She stops abruptly, smiling for the first time in the whole interview, expressing her sense of unease at recalling that finding herself in a room with many other female captives and only one mattress caused her to feel “humiliated”. In the account of her own interrogation, Nicole Lang dwells on certain stereotypical aspects of what it means to be a woman prisoner, mostly linked to her physical appearance, including her captors’ voyeuristic gaze at her when she was getting dressed and undressed. This part of her testimony is full of meaningful pauses which sound as very loud silences, eventually revealing the humiliation of these moments:

  • 59 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.

Yes, since they watched me wash, they watched me dress! I was wearing the same thing I wore during the whole war years. I spent a lot on shoes. […] And no stockings because there were no stockings to be had during the war and, you know, I remember the coat, which was very handsome. It was cut up from the beautiful coat of a man cousin of mine, the rich cousins. So, I was simply well-dressed, no hat.
Q: They watched you get dressed?
A: They watched me get undressed…
Q: And dressed?
A: Wash…
Q: And dressed.
A: They went to the bathroom with me. So they watched me wash, bare.
A: They sat around the sink with me while I washed.
[…]
I mean, that was part of the…humiliating you. You know, it’s humiliating to have somebody watch what you are washing your behind are two young people, snickering.59

  • 60 Baumel, “‘You Said the Words You Wanted Me to Hear But I Heard the Words You Couldn’t Bring Yoursel (...)
  • 61 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit., 20.
  • 62 Ibid., 16-19.

17These testimonies highlight “gender-specific issues of incarceration and victimization-humiliation.”60 In fact, the oral histories from the USHMM reflect the connection between humiliation and the notion of feminine vulnerability in wartime very well. The imagined audience of these testimonies was understood as public and research-oriented, and the impact of the Holocaust pervades these memories.61 In this context, social recognition62 is given by a specific public, one interested in stories about the Holocaust, which represents the cultural values that interviewees and their imagined audience have in common.

  • 63 USHMM - RG 50.045.0006.

18Marie Fauss was brought in for interrogation by the Gestapo when she was only 17, in the occupied part of France. Her memories of questioning are intense and very detailed as she recalls her feelings of humiliation and powerlessness in front of the Gestapo male interrogators. The pace of her narrative changes when she recalls her questioning: heavy breathing and long pauses between words slow down her story, she looks down, bending her head more as the story becomes more detailed, “[There were] four faces there, two of the Gestapo […] two guards near the door. […] I knew it was going to be a tough one.”63 Her description of the interrogation is slow-paced and focused on her own reactions:

And they hit me, and I lost my breath. He said ‘you’re lying […] I might repeat the question for you again: are you Jewish?’ […] and then I get hit again, and that’s when broke two of my teeth and my nose, and blood started coming down.

19The narrative becomes more excruciating when she describes the painful wounds on her body: “I was hurt so badly I hardly could talk,” even though she still tried to “hold my tears.” She was so severely wounded that “I could see the blood coming out, I couldn’t breathe.” She relives the painful blows as she is speaking about a scene that she refused to talk about when people asked her what had happened; she would just say “Don’t ask”, and had to be taken home, unable to walk on her own. Having been hit across her face, her back and her knees, and having had her teeth and nose broken, she was disfigured, but again, the emphasis here is on her feelings of shame.

20This feminine self-consciousness becomes evident in accounts about humiliation that are even more explicitly connected to gender:

  • 64 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection

[…] they decided to put me with this putain woman who had gone crazy and she was singing the same song over and over again, so that the… the putain sings day and night […] fille de rue […] a whore […]. Every morning the Germans would come in and throw water all over the floor. It was already ground so that it became mud. […] She would splash all over, and she would sing that song […].64

  • 65 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representati (...)
  • 66 Ibid., 78.
  • 67 Ibid., 77-79.

21In this account, the self dramatized in the life story65 offers a clear reference to a symbolic representation of the social context66 in which the notion of woman as a prostitute is seen as socially unacceptable. Helene Stewart distances herself from this woman, a “prostitute” of unsound mind, whom she socially refuses to be associated with. The public dimension of the oral history interviews, and the institutional framework of the interaction, are settings where the speaker wants to express an image of the self that can be considered acceptable by contemporary society (and by oneself),67 especially in a context where the imagined audience is that of the VHP stories of heroic war veterans.

  • 68 Joanna Bourke, op. cit., 362.
  • 69 Nicola Henry, War and Rape: Law, Memory, and Justice, Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2011, 4; Nico (...)
  • 70 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them,’” op. cit., 280-281.

22This context leads the female narrators to bring out aspects of female self-consciousness as they address memories that are more closely linked to sexuality. Rape and sexual violence are recurrent topics in their testimonies primarily for two reasons: interrogators would concentrate on the more sensitive parts of the body to inflict more pain or more fear of pain. The threat of rape was also terrifying whereas “attacking their sexual organs would be more degrading than their arms or legs.”68 It would be naive to assume that rape and sexual violence were perpetrated only against women, for many men have also been subjected to atrocious forms of sexual brutality even in more recent conflicts.69 The sexual abuse of female captives in World War II was widespread and degrading the female body aimed at inflicting punishment and at producing fear and humiliation.70

  • 71 Joanna Bourke, “Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible,” in Liberal Democracies at War. Conf (...)
  • 72 USHMM - RG-50.030.0197.
  • 73 USHMM - RG-50.030.0197.
  • 74 Joanna Bourke, “Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible,” op. cit., 135.
  • 75 Ibid. Robert J. Lilly and François Le Roy, “L’armée américaine et les viols en France: Juin 1944-m (...)

23Research on sexual violence is very difficult, because direct experiences of rape were often silenced and narratives are very hard to find.71 More frequently, the interviewees talked about bearing witness to someone else’s rape. Dorotka Goldstein’s first experience of sexual intercourse took place in a concentration camp while the prisoners were questioned about the escape of three inmates.72 All the women in that unit were made to stand naked in the freezing cold, while four or five of them were pulled out and raped in public: “And to see those young women raped by the men there with sticks, and … and my mother was near me and she took her hand and put it on, on my eyes, [so] I shouldn’t see for the first time sexual intercourse.”73 Goldstein attended a violent rape, inflicted as a form of punishment and humiliation. She openly uses the term ‘punishment’ earlier in her narrative, to describe something which was theoretically conceived as a means to gather information. Wartime rape did not only occur in the context of interrogation by Gestapo or SS officers. Despite the fact that “sexual violence perpetrated by armed members of liberal democracies has […] been silenced”74 and that writing about this has been particularly difficult due to veteran politics, some historians have exposed an estimate of thousands of rapes committed by Allied soldiers in Europe.75 This topic however has remained a taboo and silence has prevailed among victims.

24In their accounts about interrogation in captivity, women’s notion of self-representation is constructed around publicly available discourses: the exceptionality of the captivity experience for women, sometimes the exploitation of female stereotypes and some other times the disclosure of experiences of humiliation. In this last case, composure depends on the imagined audience linked to the archive for which the narrative is collected.

Gender hierarchy and empowering narratives

  • 76 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit.,; Penny Summerfield, Histories of (...)
  • 77 The estimated numbers of women enlisted in all branches of the armed forces in the U.S. in World Wa (...)
  • 78 Summerfield, “Culture and Composure.”
  • 79 Ibid.

25Social norms defined wartime gender roles: combat and violence were not suitable for women, who were expected to devote themselves to marriage and motherhood,76 and the idea of a woman in uniform or brandishing a weapon was unconceivable for Americans.77 World War II was a time of intense mobilization, when social hierarchies focused around identities available to men, as for male combatants or non-combatants. Civilians, including women, were at the bottom of this social hierarchy.78 Thus, for them the relationship to publicly available discourses on their roles is more complex, especially because they relegated women to second-class status. Social roles favoured “male norms of action and control, which locate[d] women within a disadvantaged subject position.”79 When their experiences conformed to these norms, it was easier for women to find a place for their memories within public discourses, but if their experiences deviated from norms, the tensions between agency and conformity to traditional values became more problematic.

  • 80 Article III of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War includes a clear understa (...)

26According to the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, women prisoners should be sheltered and protected from harm because of their assumed vulnerability.80 Narratives on and by women in captivity and more specifically in the context of interrogation, are developed around the expectation of differential treatment. The idea that female prisoners should be treated in consideration of their gender further emphasizes the existence of a notion of women’s vulnerability in this context. Despite those norms, the evidence repeatedly points towards the fact that women were not spared brutal treatment. Nevertheless, women’s memories of these events show how they made sense of gender hierarchies in the relationship with their captors, for their narratives effectively challenge dominant discourses, with empowering epilogues for the narrators.

  • 81 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 71.
  • 82 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.
  • 83 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

27Nazi officers and interrogators embodied a male hierarchy in front of women whom they treated with contempt.81 The female speakers repeatedly use the dichotomy of the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘them’ to establish a sharp contrast between the narrator and the interrogator or the arresting officer throughout the interviews. Interrogators exploited fears to subdue their captives: “It was terror. Terror was their way of getting a lot of people to obey you.”82 Sometimes there are attempts to make sense of the officers’ brutality by striving to find emotions which make them human, such as fear: “They were scared. They were really scared, but with the gun you feel stronger.”83 For Helene Stewart the notion of national identity and loyalty to a nation is key. As she is struggling to compose a past that she can live with, negotiating her own two national identities (French and American), she explains that her interrogator had a dual nationality as well:

  • 84 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

[…] a guy came in and he told me he was an American […] and he had been a policeman in the New York police force, but he had gone back to Germany being the father mother [sic] German. He said you know… you can talk to me, because I’m an American and he showed me, he had … he still had his badge […] he went back to the fatherland.84

28The testimony does not openly attempt any explanation or judgment, but her silences and her tears betray her bewilderment and incredulity at this soldier’s life choice.

  • 85 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.
  • 86 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.

29For Nicole Long too, the nationality of her and her mother’s captors is problematic, because “they were French […] they were in a French uniform.” This declaration comes as a surprise at this point in the oral history, when the listener’s expectation is that these captors were German officers. The interviewer further problematizes this issue of nationality by asking if any of the prisoners said anything to these French officers. Long’s answer testifies to the fear that she must have felt at the time: “No! That was dangerous. Those French people were a… police people are… well, they had their bâtons, at least, you know; it was dangerous to say anything.”85 The tension between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in these accounts is more than just the one that highlights the distinction between captors and prisoners, or interrogators and interrogatees. The narrators also emphasize tensions around national identities, revealing astonishment at their captors and at their choices to instill fear and terror. However, these parts of the testimonies do not highlight tensions around gender roles, thereby challenging dominant narratives on the vulnerability of women in captivity. At this point, the interviewees provide an image of themselves which stresses the resistance rather then the conformity to the image of woman in use in the specific social context of wartime captivity.86 In other words, they give an account of a position of vulnerability because they were prisoners, not because they were ‘female’ prisoners, and do not seem to consider themselves any more vulnerable in this situation because of their gender.

  • 87 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.

30These women obviously survived their violent past, in some cases not just temporary incarceration, but also longer-term internment in concentration camps. However, these testimonies demonstrate that the violence and humiliation they suffered does not lead to victimization in memory composure. They construct their life stories by dwelling on their violent past, but prove they were left unbroken and stronger by speaking out. After a long and painful account of the beatings, which left her permanently injured, Marie Fauss confesses: “They didn’t break me either way. I knew I wouldn’t have endured another hour… I mean… they would have killed me,”87 but she survived. Helene Stewart emotionally describes how she was humiliated by her interrogators even before the beginning of her questioning. However, Stewart does not allow this experience to define her as a victim. When she joined the American Army, becoming a WAC, Stewart was involved in the training of other recruits and she used her recollections of the arrest and imprisonment to explain what to expect from the Germans. She used her experience of questioning to prepare other women to face the enemy and to endure humiliating interrogatories in case they had to (although only a minority of the women who served as WACs were deployed overseas). Helene Stewart makes sense of her life by narrating her story in a way that sometimes produces distress, even tears and pain, as in the extracts transcribed above, but she foregrounds the story of her resilience and her ability to refuse a victim status.

  • 88 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.
  • 89 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.
  • 90 USHMM - RG-50.146.0005.
  • 91 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.
  • 92 See for example: USHMM - RG-50.030.0197; RG-50.091.0062 .
  • 93 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.

31The interviews illuminate the relationship between the narrated self (the personal image that is constructed – composed – in the oral history interview) and the social sphere, which is represented by certain key phrases or refrains88 that women use to express the desired image of the self in the interview context. Stewart often repeats “if people knew” and “if people only knew” in reference to the brutality of war she experienced both as a participant and as a witness when she was captured and also when she was involved in the Normandy landings as a WAC.89 Sarah Colin’s refrain is “c’était atroce,”90 Marie Fauss’ “it was tough”91 and other interviewees repeat “we were punished”, or that the interrogation was “punishment.”92 Through these refrains they both vent their frustration at the wartime social model which they were excluded from and stress the distance between that model and their present self.93 Composure is thus achieved through empowering narratives which effectively challenge dominant discourses of the time and allows the narrators to provide an image of the present self which survived a violent past but is left unbroken.

Conclusion

  • 94 Ibid., 78.

32Women’s life stories do not only deal with the relation between the self and the social, but “above all, with woman’s condition and with the collective representations of woman as they have been shaped by the society with which the woman being interviewed must deal.”94 The study of the memories of women who experienced captivity and interrogation in wartime shows that they were affected by their experience of imprisonment in different ways than men and it determines that interrogation, interviewing and questioning were remembered in complex and multifaceted ways that cannot simply be described as traumatic, as they challenge the dominant notions on women’s roles in conflict, rooted in the cultural norms of the time.

33The construction of dominant meanings concerning female prisoners revolves around the idea of their vulnerability. In wartime, particularly in captivity, women are expected to be vulnerable because of accepted understandings of wartime gender roles. Women prisoners’ narratives about World War II are still underrepresented in American institutions such as the USHMM and the VHP, which exist to preserve the memory of the conflict, following specific narratives. Likewise, in those institutions gender roles remain represented as polarized, thereby creating a tension between the construction of women’s memory and their image in these institutional settings.

34However, by resurfacing the hidden voices of women from these archives, we find that this expectation constructed on the idea of the fragility of women in war, was not met when female captives were interrogated by the Gestapo or the SS. Narratives of experiences of captivity and interrogation expose the tensions leading to composure: narrators do not elude accounts of humiliating and victimizing experiences which are revealed through their fractured narratives, a complex feminine self-representation and in accounts of gender hierarchy. Eventually however, these narratives show that composure is achieved through the rejection of pre-constructed gender norms focused on notions of feminine vulnerability. Female interviewees powerfully challenge these dominant meanings and they see the oral history interview as empowering because it gives them a chance to reaffirm their agency by composing an image of their unbroken self.

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Notes

1 Hereafter: POW or plural POWs. The author is grateful to all those who supported her work for this article with their time, advice and guidance, particularly Professor Hilary Footitt, Senior Reference Specialist for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project Megan Harris, USHMM Senior Historian Patricia Heberer Rice, Project Coordinator Ina Navazelskis and Archivist James Gilmore.

2 Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, “Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the Second World War,” Journal of War & Culture Studies 7, no. 3, August 2014, 180.

3 The differences between a prisoner of war, a political prisoner, a civilian internee, and concentration camp inmate are substantial from the legal point of view, as the Hague Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War and the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 both refer to ‘lawful combatants’ who qualify as prisoners of war. But in archives the differences between definitions of political prisoners or internees versus prisoners of war are more porous, and in personal accounts narrators may often define their experiences as prisoner of war even when they cannot formally be considered as such. For a comparative discussion of these categories. Ilse Dorothee Pautsch, “Review: Prisoners of War and Internees in the Second World War: A Survey of Some Recent Publications,” Contemporary European History 12, no. 2, 2003, 225-38; Felicia Yap, “Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees of the Japanese in British Asia: The Similarities and Contrasts of Experience,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2020, 31.

4 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them’: Gender, Captivity and the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 13, no. 2, June 2006, 271-92; Juliette Pattinson, Noakes, and Ugolini, op. cit.; Juliette Pattinson, Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing, and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2007 ; Simona Tobia, “In Enemy Hands. Allied Prisoners’ Interrogation Experiences and Memories in the Second World War,” Journal of War & Culture Studies 9, no. 4, October 2016, 288-302; Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows: Gender, War and Captivity,” Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 124, October 2004, 255-74; Christina Twomey, “POWs of the Japanese: Race and Trauma in Australia, 1970-2005,” Journal of War & Culture Studies 7, no. 3, August 2014, 191-205.

5 Simona Tobia, “Conclusions: Interrogation, Interviewing and Questioning in the Twentieth Century,” in Interrogation in War and Conflict: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, Studies in Intelligence Series, London & New York: Routledge, 2014, 268-91.

6 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 274.

7 Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop, Autumn 1981, no. 12, 1981, 96-105.

8 <https://www.ushmm.org/information/about-the-museum>, accessed March 18, 2022.

9 Judith Tydor Baumel, “‘You Said the Words You Wanted Me to Hear But I Heard the Words You Couldn’t Bring Yourself to Say’: Women’s First Person Accounts of the Holocaust,” The Oral History Review, no. 1, January 1, 2000, 17.

10 These results were obtained in March 2022.

11 These oral histories have been collected since the 1980s both by the museum’s oral historians and by other institutions such as the National Council of Jewish Women in Cleveland or the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies (to name two partner institutions linked to the sources used in this article). The museum also partners with teams outside the U.S., who carry out interviews in languages other than English. The vast majority of these teams were located in Eastern Europe because that was a cost-effective way for the USHMM to collect materials. At the same time, the women who were most likely to have been interrogated as political prisoners were from countries in Eastern Europe. This does not mean that women in other countries, such as France, did not have the same experience, but that it was less likely to have been collected by this particular institution (this information was collected in an interview conducted by the author with USHMM project coordinator Ina Navazelskis and archivist James Gilmore).

12 Accessed in September 2021.

13 Library of Congress (LOC), VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

14 Leisa D. Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3, 1992, 581; Lucy Noakes, “Gender, War and Memory: Discourse and Experience in History,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 4, October 2001, 663-72.

15 Penny Summerfield, “Gender and War in the Twentieth Century,” The International History Review 19, no. 1, March 1997, 13-15.

16 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Clayton, Vic: Monash University Press, 2013, loc. 510.

17 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self. Personal Narratives and Historical Practice, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 108.

18 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit.; Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1998; Alistair Thomson, “Anzac Memories. Popular Memory Theory Into Practice in Australia,” in The Oral History Reader, London ; New York: Routledge, 2016, 342-53.

19 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories, op. cit., l. 540.

20 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit., 20.

21 In oral history, the expression ‘secondary analysis’ is understood as the study of pre-recorded interviews. These can have been conducted by the same researcher or, as is the case of this paper, they may have been collected previously in a context different from that of the current study and deposited at sound archives. In this case, the interviews are part of the sound archive of the VHP of the Library of Congress and of the USHMM, Washington D.C. The theoretical framework for this type of analysis must therefore consider the context of interview collection and the type of archive where they are held.

22 Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, op. cit., 180.

23 Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York: Routledge, 1991, 1.

24 A model of this type of analysis is proposed in Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representation in the Life Story,” in Women’s Words. The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York: Routledge, 1991, 77-92.

25 Portelli has defined the concept of history-telling as different from that of storytelling as one that takes into careful consideration the intersubjective relationship between interviewer and interviewee, as well as the fact that personal recollections are woven into public narratives and narrative units of anecdotes or tales are part of a complex framework. Alessandro Portelli, “History-Telling and Time: An Example from Kentucky,” The Oral History Review 20, no. 1, March 1, 1992, 51-52.

26 A discussion of the presumed vulnerability of female wartime captives and of its representation in popular culture and media of the 1940s and be found in Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows: Gender, War and Captivity,” Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 124, October 2004, 255-74.

27 To cite but a few examples: Juliette Pattinson, Lucy Noakes, and Wendy Ugolini, op. cit. Simona Tobia, “In Enemy Hands. Allied Prisoners’ Interrogation Experiences and Memories in the Second World War” op. cit.,; Christina Twomey, “POWs of the Japanese,” op. cit.,

28 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 71.

29 J. Ryan Stackhouse, “Gestapo Interrogations. Myths and Realities,” in Interrogation in War and Conflict. A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, Studies in Intelligence Series, Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2014, 76.

30 A discussion of popular representations of the Gestapo and the SS would be very interesting, but it is beyond the purposes of this paper.

31 The Secret Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British organization created in 1940 to conduct intelligence operations behind enemy lines. Its ‘France Section’ included 37 female agents led by Vera Atkins until 1945. The SOE was dissolved after the war in 1946.

32 For a clear discussion on the ways in which the vocabularies “available to narrators […] make some matters easier or more difficult to talk about.” Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit., 115-16.

33 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows” op. cit. Juliette Pattinson, Noakes, and Ugolini, op. cit., 179.

34 Simona Tobia, “In Enemy Hands”, op. cit., 291.

35 For a more articulated discussion on the question of vulnerability, especially in relation to experiences of brutality and solitary confinement. Ibidem, 292-94; 297-300.

36 This study looks at case studies from the western allied forces. For future studies, the Red Army would represent an interesting comparison for the combat roles of women.

37 Juliette Pattinson, Behind Enemy Lines, op. cit.; Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them,’” op. cit.

38 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representation in the Life Story,” op. cit., 80-81.

39 This is consistent with the representation of the Gestapo or SS interrogation existing in publicly available narrative frameworks, for example in many films, documentaries, books and in popular culture in general, such as Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) or Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958), which celebrated the heroism of SOE agents captured in France, as well as many others on the experience of the resistance.

40 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 92.

41 USHMM - RG-50.146.0005. « C’était atroce », « C’était terrible », « Ça c’était quelque chose the terrible ».

42 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.

43 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

44 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

45 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

46 The interviewer in this case is a woman, too and her name is Ina Miller.

47 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representation in the Life Story,” op. cit., 77.

48 Ibid, 78.

49 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit., 117-27.

50 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 274.

51 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them,’” op. cit., 271-292.

52 Ibid., 277-78.

53 Christina Twomey, “Australian Nurse Pows,” op. cit., 255.

54 Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit., 116.

55 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

56 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

57 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.

58 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

59 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.

60 Baumel, “‘You Said the Words You Wanted Me to Hear But I Heard the Words You Couldn’t Bring Yourself to Say,’” op. cit., 48.

61 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit., 20.

62 Ibid., 16-19.

63 USHMM - RG 50.045.0006.

64 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection

65 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models, and Symbolic Representation in the Life Story,” op. cit., 77.

66 Ibid., 78.

67 Ibid., 77-79.

68 Joanna Bourke, op. cit., 362.

69 Nicola Henry, War and Rape: Law, Memory, and Justice, Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2011, 4; Nicola Henry, “Theorizing Wartime Rape: Deconstructing Gender, Sexuality, and Violence,” Gender & Society 30, no. 1, February 2016, 44-56.

70 Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them,’” op. cit., 280-281.

71 Joanna Bourke, “Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible,” in Liberal Democracies at War. Conflict and Representation, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 137.

72 USHMM - RG-50.030.0197.

73 USHMM - RG-50.030.0197.

74 Joanna Bourke, “Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible,” op. cit., 135.

75 Ibid. Robert J. Lilly and François Le Roy, “L’armée américaine et les viols en France: Juin 1944-mai 1945,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 75, no. 3, 2002, 109; Robert J. Lilly et al., La face cachée des GI’S: les viols commis par des soldats américains en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale, 1942-1945, Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008. Sociologist Robert Lilly found ample evidence of rape perpetrated by American soldiers in France and Germany, but he also wrote that only an estimate of 5% of wartime rape victims denounced the crime. Some narratives can be found in the depositions gathered for the trials and these are mostly focused on refusal and fear of death. However, the social taboo on rape and the limited numbers of complaints also explain the difficulty in finding publicly available personal narratives on this issue. Albeit interesting, a compared analysis of female self-consciousness in narratives of captivity and of rape is therefore not achievable unless relevant sources can be accessed.

76 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, op. cit.,; Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self, op. cit.,; Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit.; Penny Summerfield, “Gender and War in the Twentieth Century” op. cit.

77 The estimated numbers of women enlisted in all branches of the armed forces in the U.S. in World War II is 350.000, but they were not deployed for combat or given arms training. For a discussion on the impact of this development on American society. “Skirted Soldiers: The Women’s Army Corps and Gender Integration of the U.S. Army during World War II,” 2021, 9; Jane Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane” op. cit.,; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, London: Granta Books, 2000.

78 Summerfield, “Culture and Composure.”

79 Ibid.

80 Article III of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War includes a clear understanding that POWs should be spared any type of humiliation and for this reason there is an expectation of difference in treatment based on the sex of prisoners: “Prisoners of war are entitled to respect for their persons and honor. Women shall be treated with all consideration due to their sex.” “Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva.” July 27, 1929, ICRC Databases, <https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305>, accessed March 18, 2022.

81 Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure,” op. cit., 71.

82 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.

83 USHMM - RG-50.091.0062.

84 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

85 USHMM - RG-50.030.0474.

86 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.

87 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.

88 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.

89 LOC, VHP - Helene Stewart collection.

90 USHMM - RG-50.146.0005.

91 USHMM - RG-50.045.0006.

92 See for example: USHMM - RG-50.030.0197; RG-50.091.0062 .

93 Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, op. cit., 79-80.

94 Ibid., 78.

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Simona Tobia, « “They didn’t break me either way”. Women, Captivity and Interrogation in World War II: Resurfacing Self-Empowering Narratives »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol. 20-n°53 | 2022, mis en ligne le 26 août 2022, consulté le 15 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/14178 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.14178

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Simona Tobia

Simona Tobia is Maîtresse de Conférences at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, where she teaches American history and politics. She has previously taught at the University of Reading and at UCL in the UK, and she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on war and culture studies, oral history and memory: her publications include Advertising America. The United States Information Service in Italy (1945-1956), Milano: LED, 2008; with Hilary Footitt, War Talk. Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe, 1940-47, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 and with Christopher Andrew, Interrogation in War and Conflict. A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Her articles have appeared in the journals Cold War History and Journal of War and Culture Studies among others. She is one of the co-founding editors of the Close Encounters in War Journal.

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