The 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia was marked by intense sexualized violence that ruined the lives of old women and young girls alike. One hallmark of the terror was the creation of “rape camps” in which women were tortured and violated repeatedly. The fractured history of the Balkans led to three years of war from which the region is still recovering today.

Virtually unexplored until recently, sexualized violence in the Holocaust took many forms, faces, and insidious paths. Among the more than 6 million Jews killed were an unknown number of women, probably thousands, who were raped—in camps, in hiding, in ghettos. The perpetrators were Nazis, fellow Jews, and those who hid Jews. There are few records of this particular form of suffering for many reasons, including no records being kept of rape, that few women survived, and that Nazis were specifically forbidden from sexually touching Jewish women because of race defilement laws called Rassenchande—hence, some scholars have been loath to believe sexualized violence was extensive.