We are delighted to announce that Jessica Bush (MA, 2020) has been awarded the first annual Janet Hyer Essay Prize for her Major Research Paper (MRP), “The Women on Block III: Sexual Violence during the Holocaust in France.”
This prize was created in earlier this year in memory of Dr. Janet Hyer, a long-time former staff member and devoted supported of CERES. Dr. Hyer, who passed away in June, was a proponent of great writing and was herself a gifted writer and tireless editor. It is therefore a fitting tribute to award this prize in recognition of exceptional achievement by a second-year CERES MA candidate in completing their MRP.
The prize committee, chaired by Prof. Susan Solomon, offered these words of congratulations:
Jessica Bush’s excellent Major Research Paper is a study of violence against Jewish women in the internment camps in France during the Holocaust, a subject that she argues has not only been neglected but deliberately “shrouded in silence.” Bringing together the literatures on sexual violence and on the Holocaust in France, the author carried out original research in the archival files of the case against Captain Marcelin Vieux, commander of the Drancy camp from July to September 1, 1942. She supplemented the archival materials with recorded interviews of women imprisoned in Drancy and with official documents. Jessica Bush treats her sources judiciously, taking care not to overinterpret the materials she saw. Her Major Research Paper is elegantly written and beautifully argued. The reader feels the author’s voice, her passion to learn. This is the work of a young scholar-in-the making: it richly deserves the first Janet Hyer Essay Prize.
An abstract of Jessica’s paper can be read below. Congratulations, Jessica!
Abstract of
“The Women on Block III: Sexual Violence during the Holocaust in France”
Jessica Bush, MA, European and Russian Affairs, 2020
Captain Marcelin Vieux commanded the Drancy internment camp in Paris from July to November 1942. During his tenure there, he subjected the Jewish women, men, and children under his control to vicious violence: brutal beatings, psychological torture, solitary confinement, and starvation. Toward the camp’s foreign-born Jewish women, Vieux’s cruelty took on another dimension: sexual violence. In this paper, taking a microhistorical approach to the case of and against Captain Vieux, I explore issues of French collaborationism, French-perpetrated antisemitic violence, and the intersections of race, gender, power, vulnerability, silence, and shame during the Holocaust in France and in the aftermath of the French occupation.
