The Nine, by Gwen Strauss

Not long ago in The Walls Came Tumbling Down by Henriette Roosenburg, I read the story of a Dutch Resistance woman who made her way home in the chaos of postwar Europe. Roosenburg was a member of the Nacht and Nebel (‘Night and Fog’) group of political prisoners and had been liberated from the Waldheim camp in Germany, but the French Resistance women whose story is told in The Nine, How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany had been in Ravensbrück, the camp exclusively for women slave labourers which I had read about in Sarah Helm’s If This is a Woman.  The escape of the women who are featured in The Nine was not from the Ravensbrück camp itself but from one of the infamous WW2 Nazi Death Marches.  Many of the thousands who perished in this Death March were Jewish, but the…