MEN, WOMEN & WAR - SOME QUESTIONS

It has always surprised me that the specificity of women's experience during the Holocaust was overlooked by researchers - there were exceptions, of course, but not many - because the Nazi genocidal war against the Jews was infused with notions about sex and gender as well as race. Two examples that come to mind are the Nuremberg Race Laws, which forbade intercourse between' Aryans" and Jews and the Nazi Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) programme which encouraged the birth of "racially sound" children. Myrna Goldenberg an American feminist scholar, argues that during the Holocaust, women endured the same hell as men, but suffered different horrors. I wanted to know more about those "different horrors" which is why I began to listen more closely to the voices of women during the Holocaust.

In March 1997, at a conference Professor Valerie Morgan (University of Ulster) and I organised for INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution & Ethnicity) a project sponsored by the University of Ulster and the United Nations University, thirty five invited scholars and activists from Europe, America, Asia and Australia met at Magee College, University of Ulster, for the conference "Men, Women & War".

Women know that there is nothing unprecedented about mass rape in war. From time immemorial, they have been raped during war as casually or frenetically as a city, town or village is looted or gratuitously destroyed.

Not even the 1935 Nazi Race Laws, which prohibited sexual intercourse between "Aryans" and Jews, kept German soldiers from trespassing on the bodies of women, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. From the day the German army entered Poland in September 1939, mass rape of Jewish women in particular was an everyday occurrence. In fact, the most well documented report on rape during World War 2 is the rape of Jewish women by German soldiers, though they were not the only ones violating women.

In 1937, two years before the war in Europe broke out, the Japanese army's forceful occupation of Nanjing in China was accompanied with such freewheeling sexual violence that it became known as "The Rape of Nanjing". As a result, Japanese officials were compelled to take stock, not because their soldiers ran amok, but because the Nanjing bloodbath failed to break Chinese resistance against the Japanese occupier. Indeed, it stiffened resistance. In addition, the Japanese government had to contend with the overwhelmingly negative international reaction to the incident.

In an effort to reinstitute some discipline among their soldiers, the Japanese Military Command revived a plan they had tried in Shanghai in 1932. It involved assigning agents of the Imperial Japanese Army to recruit Japanese karayuki (travelling prostitutes) for their troops in China. The agents were unable to recruit a sufficient number for the army's purposes. Consequently, agents of the Shanghai Special Service Branch, normally in charge of undercover or subversive activities, were ordered to entice young women from the Korean mining community of North Kyushu, Japan to work for the army. The vast majority of the Korean women in North Kyushu were poor and illiterate so when they were promised high wages and benefits to work for the Imperial Japanese Army, many women accepted. Thinking they would be employed as cooks, maids and laundresses for the Emperor's soldiers, they imagined they could send their wages home to help support their families, but they were mistaken.

While the word "slavery" can be overused, in my view no other term more accurately describes the comfort system established by the Japanese Military during WW2. The women and girls, some as young as twelve years of age, recruited, tricked, coerced and kidnapped to serve in the "Women's Voluntary Service Corps" were so often diverted into forced prostitution for the Japanese military that after the war Korean women who actually did work in essential war industries were reluctant to acknowledge their participation in the Corps.

The Japanese had no intention of using these Korean womenfor menial household tasks. To their shame and horror they were sent to military recreation centres located between Shanghai and Nanjing. The centres were under the direct control of the Japanese Army Command. Here these chaste "daughters of Confucius" were forced to provide sexual services" to Japanese troops, officers and enlisted men alike. Thus began a vast organised network of military brothels, initially referred to as "recreation centres" - the official term - but later called "comfort stations" . They women became known as "comfort women".

Those women unlucky enough to be sent to comfort stations were raped by Japanese soldiers day in and day out, for weeks, months, sometimes even years. That they were held in slavery, unable to leave, to freely return to their homes was attested to by Kim Yoon-shim, who described to participants at the "Men, Women & War" conference what it was like to have to perform sex acts with soldiers, day after day. Kidnapped in 1943 from her remote village in Korea, she was sent to a comfort station in Harbin, China, at just 14 years old.

No one knows exactly how many women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the war, though it has been estimated that 193,000 women and girls were forced into the "comfort system". Some 50,000 are believed to be still alive.

The Japanese also recruited Japanese prostitutes, but they served mainly high- ranking officers in brothels and had much better conditions than the comfort women. Like their Nazi German allies during World War 2, the Japanese considered themselves racially superior to other ethnic groups, particularly those in the countries they conquered and occupied. Like so called "Aryan" women who were supposed to bear children for the Fuhrer, so too Japanese women were to bear children for the Emperor. Other women, for example Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Filipino, would be used to amuse and comfort the Emperor's soldiers. By 1945 there were literally hundreds of comfort stations allover Japanese occupied Asia, from Manchuria to Shanghai, from Hong Kong to Okinawa, and beyond.

When the war ended, what became of these women? Was anyone held responsible for the crimes committed against them? Did anyone acknowledge their suffering? Was anyone punished?

From available documents in American and British archives, we know that the Allied military were aware of the comfort women. As the tide of war turned and the allies advanced from island to island in the Pacific, and from one country to the next in South East Asia, American, British and Commonwealth soldiers captured many of the women. Some were interrogated, reports and memoranda were written. An American Psychological Warfare Team even did a study of the comfort women system but little ever came of these reports and memoranda. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946) did not prosecute the Japanese Military Command or the Japanese government, for forcing 193,000 women into sexual slavery, although accounts of mass rape and rape in the form of enforced prostitution was heard in the Tokyo trials. "

One could say that the allies were more concerned about atrocities committed against their POWs than atrocities committed against Asian women. They should have been concerned about both. Research has shown that Allied soldiers themselves took advantage of comfort women after capturing them, which may account in no small part, for the indifference of the Allied military to them. There is no doubt though that racism also played a part. The Dutch took action at the Batavia Military Tribunal against the Japanese for forced prostitution (in Dutch Indonesia) but only on behalf of Dutch women. "Indonesian women who were also captured for comfort stations did not figure in the Batavia Trials, a reflection of racist bias just as the failure of the Allies to try those responsible for the comfort system is a reflection of sexism. There [also] is the niggling thought that the suffering of the comfort women did not matter enough for an issue to be made out of them" (George Hicks; 1994; The Comfort Women: Japan's brutal regime of enforced prostitution in the Second World War; New York, WW Norton & Co.)

Another factor that probably also contributed to the indifference of the Allies to the crimes against women in the Pacific, is the fact that over a ten-day period (August 30 - September 10) during the first weeks of the American occupation of Japan, 1,336 cases of rape of Japanese women by US soldiers were reported to Allied Military Occupation Authorities in Kangawa prefecture. An "official US report" also stated that 247 soldiers were prosecuted for rape in the last six months in 1945, although many other rapes undoubtedly went unreported. One cannot discount the influence of this behavior by American soldiers on the thinking of the Allied Military Command in general, and on the Americans in particular, when it came to prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Tokyo Military Tribunal.

In his book Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil, Fred Katz defines evil as "behavior that deliberately deprives innocent people of their humanity...". This definition is concrete; it focuses on how people behave toward one another, where the behavior of one person, or an aggregate of persons, is destructive to others. When I hear or read the testimonies of women like Kim Yoon-shim who were brutalised and de-humanised, I am awed by them. If anyone "encountered" evil, surely they did. And like Kim Yoon-shim, they have been forced to live with the never-ending effects of such evil in their lives.

The epigraph for this essay is taken from a poem written by Gertud Kolmar, "You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?” Kolmar was Jewish and perished in Auschwitz in 1943, no doubt as 14 year old Kim Yoon-shim was being repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers in Harbin. Thousands of miles separated these two women, yet their suffering also unites them in universal sisterhood, and so too, does their determination to be heard and remembered, not with our ears only, but with our hearts as well.

Gertrud Kolmar's question is the right one, for Kim Yoon-shim too. Each in her own unique life and distinctive manner echo protest and even resistance. Kolmar's question, inflected in various tones, is raised by all the different voices we can hear, from World War 2 and the Holocaust, to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda today, if we will but listen. Listening for the question, "But do you hear me feel" hearing it, heeding it, responding to it - these acts could lead us to wake up and move in ways that can begin to mend the world.

Carol Rittner R.S.M. is Distinguished Professor of Religion at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, USA