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Marta Havryshko

KRYPIAKEVYCH INSTITUTE (UKRAINE)

Marta Havryshko holds a Ph.D. in History. She is a research fellow at the Department of Contemporary History, Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. She is a Yahad-In Unum’s Young Scholars Fellow. Her research interests are primarily focused on sexual violence during armed conflicts, gender and war, gender and the Holocaust, oral history, memory studies.

PRESENTATION

Abstract

Local Perpetrators of Sexual Assaults against Jewish Women

during the Holocaust in Ukraine

MARTA HAVRYSHKO

The paper examines how the gender of Jewish women, their race and identity combined with genocidal conditions during WWII made them extremely vulnerable to different forms of sexual violence perpetrated by locals in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine. It focuses on the sexual victimization of Jewish women perpetrated by different local actors. The main objects of analysis in this project are different situations and places of mass violence against Jews which made women’s bodies’ particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. This paper seeks to understand how sexually violent behavior of local men in Ukraine was rooted in cultural ideas of sex and gender and how it was influenced by and evolved from the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. It is mainly based on the trial materials and criminal cases on Nazi collaborators preserved in the State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA SBU, Kyiv) and its regional offices. The paper offers a new research perspective by using oral testimonies that author conducted during the past three years with former members of OUN, UPA and witnesses of WWII; testimonies of Holocaust survivors; and oral testimonies of neighbors (e.g. from the Yahad-in Unum Archive).

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