80 years later, scholarship is breaking silence on women’s suffering and strength at Treblinka – including their role in its uprising

Adek Stein – a Holocaust survivor from Bialystok, Poland – looked anxiously about the room, struggling with the question he’d just been asked. As his eyes searched his small audience, it was clear he was nervous. That itself wasn’t new. But the interviewer had asked about sexual violence during the Holocaust, and Stein’s face seemed to betray a pain and worry he had lived with for years.