In the Lithuanian woods: Jewish and Lithuanian female partisans

ENThe thick Lithuanian forests provided in the 1940s a stage for a divided history. During rather short periods of time, women and men fought here as members of different underground formations and with different goals. It was here that women for the first time were seen in uniforms and with machine guns – sights that prior to 1941 would have been inconceivable and hard to imagine for the society in Lithuania. The events of the war led to radical social changes that to a large extent, especially with regard to social and gender-historical consequences, have not yet been studied adequately. That permits the question: To what extent were women in Lithuania involved in military action during the Second World War and in the post-war era? What long-term consequences arose from that? I will look at women from different ethnic backgrounds and at their activities in a relatively small territory measuring just over 65.000 m2, an area known as Lithuania or – as it was formerly known – the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The subject of my interest is women in two partisan movements. I will consider the Jewish female partisans who left the Kaunas und Vilnius ghettos in 1943 to fight the German occupying forces in the Lithuanian forests, and the Lithuanian female partisans who revolted against the Soviet occupation of their country between 1944 and 1953. The starting point and setting for the activities of these women were the dense Lithuanian woods, which in the 1940s served in quick succession as a fighting base for very different political groups and interests. I will deal with a time period that reaches beyond the general break point of the war’s end in 1945. It is a special feature of the Eastern European history of the Second World War that its military operations did not end in the summer of 1945, but rather the armed struggle raged on in numerous regions.This paper intends to point out that here on the periphery of Central Europe (as in many other areas of Europe), women got involved in the structures and mechanisms of power which (1) for the most part, lay outside of their usual lives and in which (2) they frequently took on new duties. So my effort will be to sketch out a spectrum of partisan activities participated in by women in Lithuania in the 1940s. That will involve asking several questions: 1) about the motives for the respective decisions to join up with these very diverse groups, 2) about the role which was assigned there to the women and young girls, or which they themselves carved out according to the gender relations in the respective groups, and 3) about the gender representations in the respective groups of partisans. Lastly, this perspectival view is supposed to help highlight how gender roles in the post-war society of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic were configured based on the military activities of women. [p. 199-200].

• Adopting and remembering Soviet reality: life stories of Lithuanian women, 1945-1970. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2010. vi, 234 p.
• Jewish partisans and Soviet resistance in Lithuania. Collaboration and resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Bern: Lang, 2004. P. 459-478.
• Kita mėnulio pusė: Lietuvos partizanų kova su kolaboravimu 1944-1953 metais. Vilnius : Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2009. 426 p.
• Moterų dalyvavimo ginkluotame pasipriešinime 1944-1953 m. ypatumai. Genocidas ir rezistencija 2006, 2 (20), 53-62.
• Prijaukintos kasdienybės, 1945-1970 metai: biografiniai Lietuvos moterų interviu. Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2007. 205 p., [8] iliustr. lap.
• Resistance and survival: the Jewish community in Kaunas, 1941-1944. Oakville : Mosaic Press, 2005. 251 p.
• Su adata širdyje: getų ir koncentracijos stovyklų kalinių atsiminimai.. Vilnius : Garnelis, 2003. 406 p.
• The Fall of a sparrow: the life and times of Abba Kovner. Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2010. xxiv, 411 p.