A review by susannadkm
The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany by Gwen Strauss

adventurous dark sad tense medium-paced

3.5

As they traveled through Germany they passed town after ruined town. At first it felt good to see how the country had been flattened. Then they were overwhelmed by the feeling of desolation and waste.”

The Nine primarily covers the days-long journey of French political prisoners towards the American army on the other side of the Front after escaping a death march in the last weeks of World War II. The story is interspersed with the women’s backstories and experiences in the camps.

As the great-niece of one of the women, the author asks important questions: When and how do you talk to relatives about trauma? How do you accurately record events if survivors don’t want to recall horrific memories?

In 1964, one of the women who published an account of Ravensbruck and the escape was rewarded with “a scathing letter to the editor [from another Ravensbruck survivor] admonishing Nicole for publishing such painful memories. No one was interested in this story, the woman argued. It was unseemly.”

There were three main areas of WWII that I hadn’t learned much of before: the experience of the occupied French, the final days of the war in rural Germany, and the appalling treatment of French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” with Nazis. This could include anything from sleeping with Nazis to selling them food or laundry services. 

“Roughly 20,000 women, in almost every department of France, were publicly shaved by frenzied mobs. France’s humiliation, Vichy’s crime of collaboration was placed on the female body, just as Pétain had placed the blame for the military’s shockingly quick loss to Germany on the low morals of the female population.”

Unfortunately, the story-telling lacks perfect coherence and jumps from story to story.