“Block der Frauen” by Ingeborg Hunzinger, 1995, Rosenstraße, Berlin-Mitte, Germany. Wikipedia.
In a Berlin park near the former site of the Rosenstrasse Protest, the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger’s “Block der Frauen” commemorates the action by several thousand women in February and March 1943 that caused the release of 1800 Jewish men.
These men had been rounded up as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution in preparation for shipping to Auschwitz and certain death.
Facing armed SS troops prepared to shoot them down, the women shouted, “Give us back our husbands!”
And they did. After the recent defeat of the Nazi forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, Goebbels who was in charge of deporting Jews from Berlin feared that even more massive protests would be triggered if thousands of unarmed women were murdered. Possibly the Nazi’s sentimental view of the importance of family also influenced Goebbels at least at this moment.
It was the only public demonstration against the deportation of Jews which may be why it is not widely known. An assumption could be made based on its success that other demonstrations might have halted other deportations.
This public action on the part of women saved countless lives. Berlin Jews were ordered to stop wearing yellow stars; Jews in France married to non-Jewish French women were spared deportation; and the example these women gave us should—but does not—resonate today.
All around me I hear people disparaging the campus protests so brutally put down at a number of “top” universities, disparaged as a meaningless waste of time. But as Elsa Holzer, remembering Rosenstrasse, insists, “If you had to calculate if you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone. But we acted from the heart.”
Listening to Peace Talks Radio yesterday morning, a program of the University of New Mexico’s Public Radio Station, I heard Christine Rack of UNM (author of Latino-Anglo Bargaining: Culture, Structure and Choice in Court Mediation) and Michael Nagler of Berkeley (author of many books and an emeritus professor at Berkeley, especially Our Spiritual Crisis: Recovering Human Wisdom in a Time of Violence) talk about “the incredible power of alternatives.” It’s the power of alternatives that the small groups that gather in front of the state capitol here every Wednesday are demonstrating: peace as a viable alternative even now in wartime.
I was especially gratified, and surprised, to hear Dr. Rack declare without hesitation that she is a feminist. Gratified because I believe in our power and our moral duty to be spokeswomen for peace, and surprised because it has been a long time since I’ve heard a woman announce this self-definition.
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