‘Unwavering friendship’: The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march
“The Nine”, by Gwen Strauss, tells the extraordinary true story of how nine young women from the Resistance survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and then escaped from a death march in Nazi Germany. Its American author recounts their remarkable getaway, their friendship and the lives the women led once back home.
“It wasn’t until she told me, one day over lunch, that I realised she was a war hero.”
Gwen Strauss’ great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky, was one of nine women who used their wits and courage to escape a Nazi death march and find the Americans in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end. Seven of the nine were in the French Resistance and two were in the Dutch Resistance. They were all arrested in France and deported to Ravensbrück, Hitler’s concentration camp for women.
April 30 marks 80 years since Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviets.
“In my family, we always talked about Daniel, Hélène’s husband, and all the things he’d done,” Strauss recalls. Daniel Bénédite was a well-known Resistance fighter who had helped save artists like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Hannah Arendt.
“But Hélène didn't talk about her story, and neither did we,” says Strauss.
This was typical not only within the families of women who had been deported, but also in society in general. After the war ended, the women lucky enough to have survived the concentration camps rarely talked about what had happened to them.
‘She wanted to tell me’
But Strauss knew Hélène had an extraordinary story, and so, a few weeks after their lunch, she recorded her great-aunt’s account. Ten years later, in 2012, Hélène, who was in her nineties, died peacefully after a short illness.
“She wanted to tell me, because she knew it would be forgotten otherwise,” says Strauss.
She did not immediately start writing about Hélène’s escape from Nazi Germany. “I let it sit, and I regret that,” she says. “Because if I had started sooner, I might have been able to interview more of the women. By the time I started to really investigate the story, all of them had died.”
In 2017, appalled by the white supremacist riots in Charlottesvile, Virginia, Strauss decided the time had come to revisit Hélène’s story of resistance and resilience and write "The Nine: How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany" (Manilla).
‘I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real’
An archivist in Leipzig tracked down documents which showed Hélène’s name, because she had spent time there at a forced labour camp. “That was really a gut punch. I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real,” says Strauss. But tracking down the other eight members of the group was not easy, in part because they had nicknames and noms de guerre.
By sheer chance, some years earlier, she had come across a book, "Neuf filles qui ne voulaient pas mourir" (Nine girls who didn’t want to die, Arléa), in a Parisian book shop. “It was just sitting there on the table.” The author, Suzanne Maudet, known as Zaza, was one of the nine and had been very close to Hélène.
She contacted Zaza’s nephew, because he was the one who had got her book published and his name was in the preface. “I went to see him in Rennes, with my daughter,” Strauss recalls. “That was an incredible interview, an incredible day talking with him, because I discovered how traumatic the whole thing was for Zaza.”
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The death march
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