Sexual abuse, sexual barter, and silence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Until recently, silence has shrouded the experience of sexual abuse of and sexual barter by Jewish adolescent boys during the Holocaust. Nate Leipciger’s memoir, The Weight of Freedom, published by the Azrieli Foundation in 2015, offers a rare window onto a phenomenon singularly absent from young Jewish males’ narratives and scholarship about their lives. This paper investigates Leipciger’s memoir closely, exploring the at once abusive and beneficial sexual relationships that Nate describes. And it reflects upon the silence — survivors’ silence and scholars’ silence — around these interactions, examining the prompts for it and shifting interpretations over time.