People are not comfortable when hearing about rape and decide that they do not want to hear about it. Rape is an act that violates a body and rights and should be heard but is silenced because of the discomfort of society. Why is society pushing victims to aside when they are uncomfortable when they are nowhere near as violated as the person being raped? While women are speaking up about rape, many try to understand why men felt motivated to do this act. Men turned to alcohol which unleashed an aggressive side. During the war, Russian veterans do not believe in rape and insited that women agreed to having sex with the soldiers. Soldiers during the war left out acts of sex/rape in notes and narratives. Typically there are there are gaps in books and articles where rape is taking place. It is often too difficult to write or talk about what happened during a traumatic event. There is no need for an explanation about what is happening we all know. During World War II propaganda was huge and hard to avoid. Most headlines about rape in the beginning people though was just propoganda. Then it started to get bigger and people started to understand this is their life now.
Thousands of German women, ages ranging from young to old, were raped by Russian soldiers. Many women were killed or committed suicide after being raped. By having a “relationship” with a soldier, women were offered protection. Rape is a sensitive topic when talking or writing about and is rarely described in narratives. Women have learned to become silent when it comes to the topic of rape. If the topic is not talked about, it gets pushed aside and not thought of: “We fail to acknowledge either the suffering of the victims or the political complexities and moral quandaries inherent in these stories.”(85). People should understand the pain felt is nowhere near as bad as the body that was tortured. Russian soldiers wrote notes during the war and left out parts about women. German women on the other hand, typically wrote and voiced out the sexual assault received by these men. For example, Gelfand is a man who believes he is a “lady’s man” and thinks that because a woman follows him, they are agreeing to have sex. Did Gelfand leave out these acts of rape and make up stories of how women agreed to consensual sex? In books and articles surrounding rape, there is no explicit writing about the event itself. Victims will skip over the event most of the time. It is too traumatic to recount the events.“The absence of retrospective contextualizations and explanations leaves readers in an uncomfortable position.” (94). Why does the absence leave the reader feeling uncomfortable? Is it because they know what is happening and no one is talking about it and they just have to imagine for themselves. In A Woman in Berlin, you see rape in headlines. They know how many times a woman has been raped and they publish it. Who was counting and why would they be counting? Hilter even ecouraged it and wanted his Nazi’s to rape and talk about it.
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