Janine Holc’s compelling Weavers of Trautenau makes a threefold contribution to Holocaust scholarship. It illuminates the scarcely-studied subject of factory camps for the “coerced labor” of Jewish women, displays a nuanced and sophisticated use of the post-war testimonies of 125 survivors as Holc’s key source of historical evidence, and plots the evolution of the exploitation of female Jewish labor in the Trautenau-region camps from the relatively lax supervision of local factory employees under the distant oversight of Organization Schmelt to a strict regime of ‘sexualized violence’ imposed by SS functionaries dispatched from the notorious Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
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