I am certain this piece will stir some emotions and will probably cause controversy. There will be some who will question it and “Why would you pick this subject?” However, for future generations (and us) to understand the Holocaust (or at least as much as possible), it is necessary to address all aspects.
Recently I realized how important it was for some survivors to have children after the war. Many of them had lost most or all of their families. They, therefore, started new families, not to substitute them for lost families but to ensure the continuation of the bloodline. It was also a way to show the Nazis that they lost.
Such was the horror of the holocaust though, that this option was denied to several women. I was watching the documentary “The US and the Holocaust” a few days ago. One of the survivors mentioned in the documentary, when she was in Auschwitz, didn’t have any periods—her menstrual cycle had stopped or had been disrupted. This intrigued me and I looked into it.
Evidence at the Nuremberg trial showed that Nazis sought methods of mass sterilization of Jewish women.
Immediately upon arrival at the concentration camps, over 98% of women stopped menstruating.
Anna Hájková has written about the Jewish Theresienstadt prisoner and physician František Bass’ research on amenorrhoea, the loss of menstruation, which focused on how it was caused by the shock of incarceration. Interestingly, however, almost all this research discussed ovulation (and its lack) rather than menstruation, even though both are part of the same biological function.
Periods impacted the lives of female Holocaust victims in a variety of ways. For many, menstruation was linked to the shame of bleeding in public and the discomfort of dealing with it. Periods also saved some women from being sexually assaulted. Equally, amenorrhoea could be a source of anxiety: about fertility, the implications for their lives after the camps and about having children in the future. There has been minimal investigation as to the cause(s) of amenorrhea, beyond malnutrition and trauma.
The only women who did not stop menstruating attributed it to detecting something added to the soup on some occasions and refused to eat on those occasions. Two other women reported detecting a white powder in the “disgusting” and “foul-smelling” brown liquid that participants referred to as either “soup” or “coffee” at Auschwitz but were too hungry to discard the soup.
A few women (15/93) identified precisely what led to their amenorrhea in Auschwitz and for most (as described below), subsequent difficulties with fertility. Most women were haunted by never knowing what caused them to suddenly stop menstruating and later, the long-term effects on their fertility/infertility.
One survivor reported having been sterilized in Auschwitz by radiation. Two were singled out and sterilized in Auschwitz by surgery on their reproductive organs in Nazi experiments. Peggy J Kleinplatz and Paul Weindling conducted interviews focused on reproductive histories, including amenorrhea beginning in 1942-45, subsequent attempts to conceive, numbers of pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths. Ninety-eight per cent of women interviewed were unable to conceive or carry to term their desired number of children. Of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births. The true number of pregnancy losses is likely much higher. Only 15/93 (16.1%) of women were able to carry more than two babies to term, despite most wanting more children desperately. Amenorrhea among Jewish women arriving at concentration camps was too uniform and sudden to be affected only by trauma and/or malnutrition. Survivors’ narratives and historical evidence suggest the role of exogenous hormones, administered without women’s knowledge to induce amenorrhea as well as subsequent primary and secondary infertility.
Upon entry into the camp, prisoners were given shapeless clothing and had their heads shaved. They lost weight, including from their hips and breasts, two areas commonly associated with femininity. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that all of these changes compelled them to question their identities. When reflecting on her time in Auschwitz, Erna Rubinstein, a Polish Jew who was 17 when in the camps, asked in her memoir, The Survivor in Us All: Four Young Sisters in the Holocaust (1986): ‘What is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’
Some teenagers experienced their first period in the camps alone, separated from their families or orphaned. In such cases, older prisoners provided help and advice. Tania Kauppila, a Ukrainian ina Mühldorf Concentration Camp, was 13 when she started her periods. She did not know what was happening and shed many tears. She was scared that she was going to die and did not know what to do. Older women in the camp taught her and others in the same position about periods. The girls were taught how to handle it and what they needed to do in order to cope with the blood flow. It was a different learning process than they would have had at home: ‘You tried to steal a piece of brown paper, you know, from the bags and do the best you can’, recalled Kauppila. This story reoccurs across numerous oral testimonies. Many orphaned survivors who had just started mentioned the help of older women, who took on both a sisterly and motherly role in helping these young girls, before they experienced potential amenorrhoea; older women usually lost their period within the first two or three months of imprisonment.
For each testimony, participants were asked about the number of live births and pregnancy losses. It is notable that of the four women who had given birth in the years 1935–1940 and whose children were killed in the camps, three had difficulty conceiving after the war, even though they were still in their 20s and 30s. The total number of live births for 93 women since 1945 was 136. Twenty women were unable to carry any children to term. The majority of women had 1-2 children.
I know this is a controversial subject, and I don’t claim to be an expert in the matter, therefore I have used text from scientific papers, However, it is an important aspect to address.
sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953622005561?via%3Dihub
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36007428/
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/menstruation-and-holocaust
History of Sorts 
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