Female Memories of the Experience of Totalitarian Places of Isolation

Abstract

This article presents and compares the narratives of some female Polish prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, Soviet prison camps, and those imprisoned in post-war communist Poland. It does not focus on the structural and political differences between these total institutions as much as on what was common between the individual experiences of the repressed women and their memories of these repressions. It also considers the oral history methodology and its impact on the character of the presented sources. The paper focuses on some elements of the narrative, biographical oral testimonies of women – the attention paid to detail, to being an object of mental and physical harassment (including sexual), and to their strategies of survival, including bonding into surrogate families, as well as their post-imprisonment trauma. It also attempts to put these elements into a national, cultural, and gendered context.