Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012), a Belgian Jew, was 10 years old at the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, forcing her family to flee to Casablanca. The atmosphere of I Who Have Never Known Men mirrors details of Nazi invasions and the Holocaust. The characters have only faint memories of the events preceding their imprisonment, but the women describe screams, flames, and a chaotic onrush in the middle of the night. The imagery parallels pogroms, most notably Kristallnacht, in which Nazis seized and imprisoned Jews while synagogues and other buildings burned. Likewise, Harpman’s characters experience the dislocation and separation of families, as well as mass incarceration, a system that resembles Nazi concentration camps. Moreover, the characters’ discovery of successive mass graves echoes the realities of postwar Europe.

Harpman was also a trained psychoanalyst, and I Who Have Never Known Men touches on the foundational concepts introduced by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on exploration of an individual’s unconscious, which may harbor childhood fears or traumas, such as the young protagonist’s experience of the guard’s whip when she seeks a comforting embrace.