6

This article explores the everyday lives of Jewish women in hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. While Holocaust scholarship incorporating gender has grown steadily, much of it has focused on the threat of sexual violence, inadvertently reducing women’s experiences to episodes of abuse and to a single form of trauma, while neglecting the broader, everyday realities of survival.By drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, family records, and oral testimonies in Dutch, English, Hebrew, and German, this study expands the gender analysis. It argues that women’s existence in hiding encompassed a wide spectrum of challenges that extended beyond sexual mistreatment, including new responsibilities, the trauma of separation, pregnancy and motherhood, and the constant fear of betrayal. Hiding, after all, reconfigured gender roles, undermined traditional family structures, and forced women to assume new responsibilities as mothers, daughters, and wives. In the process, this study reveals how gender influenced not only the challenges and risks Jews faced but also their survival strategies, emotional burdens, and daily routine.