People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (Book Talk Review/Response)
I went to this fantastic book talk about LGBTQ Jewish Holocaust history with Dr. Anna Hájková and the Museum of Jewish Heritage a few weeks ago. One of the first stories was from the founder of the [Lesbian Herstory Archives](https://lesbianherstoryarchives.org), Joan Nestle (born in 1940 and still kicking!). One evening as she was beginning the project, a group of women at her kitchen table looked around and realized that not only were they all lesbians and all middle-aged, but they were all Jewish! One of the women was not only Jewish, but a survivor of the Holocaust and then spoke about having read The Well of Loneliness back in Poland before the war, and how that book (one of the first books with a sort-of-happy ending for its queer characters) and the drive to have a relationship like that kept her going through the concentration camps. Queer love, the hope and need for it, helped save her life.
I think this was an excellent quote to start off with. Even though that specific survivor’s identity has been lost to history, it shows not only a poignant overlap between LGBTQ and Jewish people but also gives some additional background on a queer leader. Joan Nestle wasn’t just any lesbian - she was a major community anchor, an archivist whose work has helped countless lesbians and other queer people find a link to their history.
After some Googling, I’ve found that it was around this time, in the 70’s and 80’s (AIDS crisis era) where some mainstream Jewish groups were also rapidly advancing on LGBTQ rights, often spearheaded by Reform Jews - [a Jewish women’s group called for decriminalization of homosexuality in 1965 and two major Reform Jewish organizations called for human rights for homosexuals in 1977 (though it wasn’t until 2000 that “the Central Conference of American Rabbis made history by becoming the first major group of North American clergy, as an organization, to give its support to those in its ranks choosing to perform same-gender ceremonies”](https://rac.org/lgbtq-rights-and-position-reform-movement).
It’s kind of dizzying how recent all of this progress is. Though of course, queer history itself is far older. That’s starting to be recognized more now, as is [intersectionality between queer and Jewish people](https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/06/09/jewish-lgbt-pride). For years, Holocaust historians focused on Jewish victims of the Holocaust and LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust as separate groups. People who were persecuted and murdered for being Jewish were sometimes also queer, but this was largely overlooked, perhaps out of a desire to avoid attaching further stigma to Jewish people during years when there was ferocious backlash against increased queer visibility.
Several of Hájková’s sources were survivor memoirs that I now want to look up in addition to People Without History Are Dust itself. She also tried to end on as hopeful a note as possible. Obviously, a lot of the people she profiled were murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish, but she sought out their descendants and families wherever possible and was able to share some stories of connecting with them through history, senselessly violent as it was.
I definitely want to get the book now and [the talk itself is on the museum’s YouTube for anyone else who wants to check it out.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tbXzIF2v0)