HOLOCAUST RESEARCHER DISCUSSES ROLE AND HARDSHIPS OF WOMEN

As childbearers, Jewish women living during the Holocaust faced moral dilemmas with no preparation. It made their experiences as survivors unique, Dr. Harry James Cargas said Thursday.

The Webster University professor and published Holocaust scholar spoke on the subject before a group of about 40 at Rose Theater, located on the Southeast Missouri State University campus. His audience appeared horrified and contemplative, considering the tragedy.

Cargas' speech was one of several activities at Southeast this week to remember the Holocaust -- a methodical Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jews during World War II. The professor will be at Barnes and Noble bookstore at 7 p.m. today for a roundtable discussion and book signing.

Women were treated with disrespect in Germany before the Nazi regime, considered useful only for cooking and raising children, Cargas said. When the Nazis came, they were forced to leave positions as doctors, judges and teachers.

In Nazi death camps, Jewish women with children, considered less useful for work, were sent to the gas chambers first. They faced a double prejudice, Cargas said. They were less than human as Jews, less than men as women.

Cargas recited the experience of one woman sent to a death camp when she was newly pregnant. The other women shared meager rations with her, helped do her work and hid her in the middle of their ranks so the pregnancy wouldn't be detected.

When it came time for the mother to deliver, the "wheelbarrow woman" responsible for scooping up dead bodies around the camp hid her under a stack of corpses and took her to a remote section of the camp. The baby was delivered and quickly strangled.

An obstetrician-gynecologist who survived the Holocaust, Gisella Perl, performed countless abortions to save mother's lives.

"No one will know what it meant to me to destroy those babies," she wrote. But she had seen what the S.S. guards did to pregnant women, throwing them live into crematoriums.

It was only one of the moral dilemmas faced by women during the Holocaust. Can you kill your fetus to save yourself? Can you smother a screaming child to save the family? Cargas is gathering information for a book on the subject.

Other women's positive spirits survived the Holocaust although they did not. Anne Frank wrote that she believed "people are good at heart." Her contemporary, Etty Hillesum, wrote: "Despite all the suffering and injustice, I can not hate others."

"We betray the victims if we forget," Cargas said of the Holocaust. "We betray the victims if we sweeten the tales."

The Rev. Scott Moon, a campus Methodist minister helping coordinate the week's events, said interest in Holocaust Remembrance Week activities has been encouraging.

"If people see Holocaust events on human terms, when they see news reports today they know people are represented," he said. "They see that technology, political power and influence, used in an inhumane way, is devastating."