We Were Not Women Anymore : Substantiating the Manipulation of Jewish Fertility in Auschwitz

In We Were Not Women Anymore, Holocaust historian Ruth Jolanda Weinberger substantiates the many claims of pharmacologically-driven sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women in Auschwitz.

Supported by witness statements, compensation files, memoirs, and interviews with several hundred victims, Weinberger challenges the long-held perception that these women’s loss of menstruation was caused solely by psychological trauma and malnutrition. The book features analyses based on previously unexamined testimonies submitted to the Fund for Victims of Medical Experiments and Other Injuries, a Holocaust compensation program administered by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

By reconstructing a granular history based on the long-overlooked words of the survivors themselves, Weinberger offers scholarly grounding for claims of physical and emotional trauma that left Jewish women who survived Auschwitz with lifelong uncertainty about fertility, childbearing and womanhood, and in grave circumstances to birthing children with physical and mental disabilities.

We Were Not Women Anymore tells these women’s story, in their own words.