Based on the personal story of Dutch-Jewish girl Clara Vromen, which was pieced together from several transnational archival collections, this blogpost by Alex Scheepens traces the sexual abuse committed in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

It exemplifies how reevaluation of survivor testimonies, mainly focusing on silences, allusions, euphemisms and the ways by which victims evaded talking directly about episodes of sexual violence, can unveil the heightened vulnerability of women and girls to sexual assault in hiding.

The post discusses the continuity of the power relations between the person in hiding and the rescuer in the postwar period.

Read the EHRI Document Blogpost “I Loved Him as a Father”: The Silences of Hiding-Related Sexual Violence. This post is part of the EHRI Document Blog Series “If This Is A Woman” – Gender Studies and Holocaust History. 

Image: Close-up portrait of Clara Vromen wearing a Jewish star and holding hands with a Christian friend. Enschede, the Netherlands, 1942. Source: USHMM.