This confession reached us in 2016. On the other side of the phone was Anna, an Israeli citizen, a woman who introduced herself as a Holocaust survivor who had just read our book in Hebrew, titled How Did You Survive.

We were not surprised. Anna wanted to assure us that although war was a dangerous time for girls, she nevertheless “succeeded in escaping its gender’s fate.”

Why was it so important for Anna to share with us a narrative of a spotless past?

We chose to answer this enigmatic question by listening to the stories of 23 women and three men, all Holocaust survivors and Israeli residents aged 75 to 93. As Israeli academics and researchers of people in stressful situations, we were quite familiar with the horrors of war and with the specifics of World War II. Yet, we were not aware of the war against the suspicion that these women had been fighting ever since they set foot in their homeland—Israel.

At the time, even though little was known about the Holocaust, suspicions prevailed: “If you survived that terrible war, you must have been violated. You must have used your body, or you have merely been raped.” The most beautiful female survivors could not escape this hidden blame.

Similar suspicions emerged in postwar Israeli literature, poems, and artworks. Notable in this regard is the poem by Yitzhak Sadeh, the mythological commander of the Palmach (the major Jewish resistance organizations of the Yishuv, the pre-1948 Jewish population of Israel), which he titled “My Sister on the Beach.” In it, Sadeh depicts an encounter with a young female Holocaust survivor, real or imaginary, who had found her way to Israel from Europe via an illegal refugee boat:

Darkness. On wet sand my sister stands: Dirty, barefoot, her clothes are ripped and her head is down as she stands and weeps.

I know that a tattoo is imprinted on her flesh; For officers only.

While Sadeh probably intended to raise empathy and compassion toward this poor immigrant, one wonders if he would be so suspicious regarding a survivor’s past if the subject of his poem was not a female survivor, but a male. In his poem, Sadeh provides the woman an opportunity to defend herself: “Am I worthy that young healthy boys risk their lives for me? No, there is no place for me in the world. I should not live.”

We listened carefully to the response that Sadeh placed in the girl’s mouth. One of us, Ester Dror, is a daughter of an Auschwitz woman survivor. The second, Ruth Linn, is a daughter of Israeli pioneers, who served under Sadeh. We both recalled how cautiously our teachers in school discussed the rules of war—and how little was said, if at all, about women’s fate during the ancient wars depicted in the Bible, and about the fact that the winning soldiers were permitted to marry the conquered and abused women.

Ruth Bondy, a writer and a survivor of the Terezin Ghetto, thus describes her experience as a new immigrant in Israel immediately after the war: “Here in Israel the Jews also wished to know: How did you stay alive? What did you have to do to survive? And in their eyes a spark of suspicion shone: a capo? a prostitute?”

Similar feelings are shown by the American author Ruth Kluger, who survived the Holocaust as a child of 12. Kluger emphasizes the endless struggle of women against what was sometimes required of them in order to survive, both during the war and in light of the postwar “collective narrative” of suspicion:

And there were, in fact, both men and women with whorehouse fantasies who wanted to know whether I had been raped. Like the college doctor who saw the Auschwitz number on my left arm and called sundry nurses and colleagues, as if, now that I had washed up on these shores, the natives could invade my privacy at will. I was shaken but I’d answer, no, not raped: they merely wanted to kill me. I’d explain the concept of Rassenschande, the rule against miscegenation Aryan style, because I found it interesting that a malicious idea could serve as protection (albeit not a foolproof one) against sexual abuse.

In his movie Stalags (a Hebrew nickname for concentration camps), the journalist and filmmaker Ari Libsker claims that the suspicious attitude toward female Holocaust survivors is largely a result of the notorious Israeli popular booklets of the ’60s which carry the same name. The Stalags booklets described the erotic sadistic-masochistic abuse inflicted by a German woman commander on American male inmates. Libsker explains that these ideas of sexual abuse popped into his mind already as a child, during his visit with his grandmother in Haifa. There, he happened to hear about a neighbor, a childless woman Holocaust survivor who used to scream during her sleep. The gossip was that she had probably lost her mind because she was forced by the Germans into prostitution. “How easy it was back then to attach this stereotype to women survivors who were beautiful and childless,” he concludes.

Yet even if we agree that these are exclusively fabricated tales, they are probably not fully detached from the suffering of actual women during the Holocaust. However, for many years, most researchers preferred not to contaminate their research with topics related to sexuality that might be judged by the public as improper. The few who dared to do so faced hostile academic responses.

When Joan Ringelheim first presented her data on the sexual vulnerability and agency of Jewish women during the Holocaust, for example, she was accused of disrespecting the victims’ memories, serving the purposes of Holocaust deniers. Similarly, when Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel, two noted American scholars, presented similar data, they were scolded by a famous Holocaust researcher present at their conference (whom they refused to name): “You are not allowed to talk about it [sexual abuse of Jewish women] if you have no proof.” Other scholars reported that they were often ridiculed for not knowing that “Jewish women always knew how to protect their bodies.”