The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

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With their arms draped around one another and their hearts pounding, they waited for the beat of the clogs dragging on the ground to fade. When the column was no longer in sight and they could no longer hear the rhythmic pounding of feet, Lon said, “It’s clear.” A] narrative of unfathomable courage... Ms. Strauss does her readers—and her subjects—a worthy service by returning to this appalling history of the courage of women caught up in a time of rapacity and war." —Wall Street Journal Tales such as this one never fail to haunt and surprise me. I find myself learning new things every time.

Although the book didn’t go into details of the women’s resistance work, it did cover what happened at the end of the war and that seems to be an area often neglected. In May 1943, she joined the Résistance, working for the Bureau des opérations aériennes (BOA) for the M region. The BOA had been created that April to act as a liaison between the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI, the name used by Charles de Gaulle for the Résistance) and England. The BOA’s role was to ensure the transport of agents and messages and to receive parachute drops of arms. The M region, which was the largest in the FFI, covered Normandy, Brittany, and Anjou. Right before the Normandy landing, managing this territory was crucial and dangerous. The Gestapo was successfully capturing or killing an alarming number of leaders and network members. In the frenetic months surrounding D-Day, Hélène’s region was a hotbed of activity both for the Résistance and for the Gestapo’s increasingly vicious and desperate attempts to break the underground networks.The Nine by Gwen Strauss is an excellent nonfiction that tells the suspenseful and true-life stories of a group on nine women whom were captured, imprisoned, and escaped from the clutches of the Nazis during WWII. p> 6. The women took pride in mak­ing gifts for each oth­er and their fam­i­lies, even when they risked being pun­ished for it, and even when, strict­ly speak­ing, these items were not nec­es­sary for sur­vival. Why were these items so important? I particularly liked the chapter at the end about their lives after the war, and the ingrained trauma that the next generation had to deal with — I never thought about anything like that but it makes sense.

The second is that I love nature. I have a deep connection to it, and when I saw that tree and thought about the seasons, it instantly came to me: What if there was a girl who changed with the seasons? But now they were in the middle of Saxony, facing frightened and hostile German villagers, angry fleeing officers of Germany’s Schutzstaffel (SS), the Russian army, and Allied bombers overhead. The Americans were somewhere nearby, they hoped. They had to find the Americans or die trying. A compelling, beautifully written story of resilience, friendship and survival. The story of Women's resistance during World War II needs to be told and The Nine accomplishes this in spades." — Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of Cilka's Journey From 2005 to 2007 Strauss was Director of the Lacoste Campus ( Lacoste, France) of the Savannah College of Art and Design ( SCAD). The Nine is poignant, powerful, and shattering, distilling the horror of the Holocaust through the lens of nine unforgettable women.” —Kate Quinn, author of The Rose CodeWith the Allies nearing the end of the push that would bring an end to the Second World War in 1945, commanders of the all-women camp near Berlin were trying to leave no traces of their barbarity and sent 5,000 women on their way with almost no rations to survive on and guards who gunned them down if they weakened. Joined the Resistance in May 1943. Worked with Bureau des operations aeriennes (BOA) for the M region.