This Day in History > Nine Women, WWII Resistance Fighters, Survive a Nazi Death march

 

‘Unwavering friendship’: The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march

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“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.

Hélène Podliasky was arrested when she was 24 and working as an agent de liaison for the French Resistance. Her nom de guerre was Christine. © Martine Fourcaut

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.

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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

The Teenage Girls Who Flirted with Nazis Before Luring Them into Woods and Shooting Them

Courageous girls of the Dutch Resistance

Maya Oppenheim
The Independent

Red lipstick and shiny eye shadow were unlikely but important weapons deployed by members of the Dutch resistance when taking on Nazi soldiers.

Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, two sisters, and their best friend Hannie Schaft would put on their best clothes and fastidiously apply their make-up before going into bars to seek out unsuspecting targets.

The young girls, who were active in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, would then strike up conversations with Nazi soldiers or Dutch collaborators. They would giggle and bat their eyelashes as they cajoled them into disclosing classified information.

Then they would lure them into the woods on the pretext of a “romantic walk” – and shoot them dead.

Freddie and Truus survived the war but Hannie, who is far more famous than the Oversteegen sisters, was caught and executed by the Nazis just three weeks before the war came to an end.

The last words she uttered are said to have been “I’m a better shot” after one of her executioners wounded her with the first attempt.

Sophie Poldermans was a close friend of Freddie and Truus, who both recently died at the age of 92, and intimately and regularly spoke to them about their memories of the war throughout their lives.

Ms Poldermans, a lawyer who specialises in women and war crimes, has now written about their harrowing experiences in a book titled Seducing and Killing Nazis – Hannie, Truus, and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII.

Truus Oversteegan with a sten gun

“They were extremely brave women,” she told The Independent. “I would not want to have stood in their shoes. They started out small in the resistance – carrying illegal newspapers printed by the resistance news about Nazi troops. They would ride their bicycles and deliver them to specific addresses. They would also steal false identification papers for Jewish people in hiding.”

Freddie and Truus, who was two years older than her, were born and raised in Haarlem, a Dutch city close to Amsterdam, by a single mother.

The parents had divorced and their mother was a communist. She would get the young girls to make dolls for children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War.

Ms Poldermans, who worked with the siblings for over a decade as a board member of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation but also knew them personally, said Truus and Hannie would help transport Jewish children to safe houses but Freddie, 14 at the beginning of the war, had been too young to help.

“People also could have easily thought she was a Jewish child herself because of her appearance so it would have been too dangerous for her,” Ms Poldermans said. “But Truus and Hannie would take Jewish children from one safe house to another on their bikes if they knew there were traitors around. It was not suspicious for them to be carrying young children because they were women. They would sing songs to distract the children.”

But the three girls’ roles and tactics in the resistance grew increasingly dangerous as they got more heavily involved.

Freddie Oversteegen in 1945 (Sophie Poldermans)

“They would use explosives to blow up railway lines and trains to make sure Germans were not able to transport soldiers or weapons or Jewish people,” Ms Poldermans explains. “This was a heavier type of resistance. They wanted to make sure it was chaos on the railway line.”

It was not long before the teenage girls started seducing and shooting Nazis – with commanders assigning them particular targets.  

“These are the only three women we know of who seduced and killed Nazis in the Netherlands,” Ms Poldermans says. “That is what makes it such a unique story. They were teenagers and they were young and pretty. They would dress up very nicely and wear heavy make-up. They would pretend to be kraut girls who were local women who had relationships with German officers, Dutch traders (traitors?) and general members of the Nazi party. Of course, their main target was the high-ranking officers.”

She adds: “They would go into bars and then they would flirt with these soldiers and giggle and smile and be girly girls. They would say ‘We can go for a romantic walk in the forest’. They would lure these guys into the woods to try to extract all the information they needed and then they would shoot them right there on the spot. Freddie was about 16. Truus was 18 and Hannie was 21. They started in the summer of 1943 and carried on until the end of the war.”

Truus was a real tomboy who had never worn make-up before, whereas Hannie always powdered her face right before an assignment in order to “die beautifully” in case she was captured by the Nazis.

Ms Poldermans, who notes the girls never slept with the Nazis, said they would have to relocate if their profile started to become known in the area to ensure they were not recognised. The girls kept their actions a secret from everyone – even friends and family – for security purposes.

The sisters always refused to reveal how many Nazis they had killed when asked about it after the war – with Freddie telling Ms Poldermans: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”

“They did what they did because it had to be done,” Ms Poldermans says. “They believed in justice. They did not believe there was another way. At the same time, they tried to remain human. They suffered from depression and had nightmares and what we would now call PTSD.”

The lecturer says it took a long time after the end of the war before the sisters got the recognition they deserved – explaining many people wanted to look forwards rather than backwards, and stories of the resistance were dominated by men.

Ms Poldermans adds: “They had to fight for recognition. Truus was very outspoken. She would always tell her story but Freddie was very traumatised. She couldn’t talk about the war and it was only in the last few years of her life that she could. Freddie got all the recognition for her work after she died. It is too bad she doesn’t know. 

“War affected everything in their lives. Truus became a well-known sculptor but the war was present in all of her artwork. The trauma never went away for them. Every day around liberation day in May, they would wake up screaming, having nightmares about the war. All the memories came back to them. It was so bad that Freddie would have to leave the country for a couple of months during that time of year.”

Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule

Jewish women and children at Auschwitz.   (Wikimedia Commons)

Book Review
(NEWSER) – "We don't have the right to say it's too difficult to read." That's what Beverley Chalmers says about her book Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule, which chronicles the "horrific" experiences endured by both Jewish and non-Jewish women as the Third Reich pursued its agenda to create a master race.

It took the 65-year-old Canadian more than a decade to research and write the book, the Times of Israel reports. After poring over more than 600 books and articles and searching WWII-related archives in Israel, the US, and the UK, Chalmers has put together a comprehensive account of the brutality suffered by women, including rape, disfigurement, forced abortion even in the ninth month, sterilization through X-rays, and experimentation. As the Times notes, it's a topic that often has been "sanitized."

“Survivors didn’t talk about anything having to do with sex because they didn’t want their children and grandchildren to know what had happened to them,” says Chalmers.

Birth, Sex and Abuse is "a library within a library," Marcia Weiss Posner writes in a review for the Jewish Book Council. "Each word, each bit of information is precious and unlikely to be found elsewhere with such clarity and comprehensiveness."

A review at Oxford Journals says the book helps show how "the Nazis aimed at the destruction of the Jewish race partially through ideologically driven attacks on women’s reproduction." Many non-Jewish women also suffered under the Nazis (their babies were taken from them; they were forced into prostitution; and the government encouraged their husbands to divorce them if they couldn't bear children). However, Chalmers tells the Times, "The Jewish experience was horrifically unspeakable."

See also: 'Screaming Silence' The Holocaust Nightmare Just Got a Lot Worse

Hidden Secrets: Sexual Abuse and the Hidden Children of the Holocaust

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In honour of that I present some research into the sexual abuse of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during WWII. They were the lucky ones, except some were not so fortunate.

Jewish children who lived in hiding generally were treated well by their rescuers. But not all youngsters had such experiences. Because they could not turn to local authorities for help or were afraid of being turned out, some children had to endure physical or sexual abuse by their “protectors.”

Studies conducted in the Netherlands estimate that more than 80% of the hidden children interviewed were treated well by their rescuers, while 15% were occasionally mistreated, and some 5% were treated badly.

Read the inspiring story of a Dutch Christian family who sheltered a Jewish family during the war.

A new study conducted at the Haifa University reveals that Holocaust survivors who suffered sexual abuse during World War II were much more traumatized by molestation than by any other of the horrifying experiences they went through during that period.

The study, the first ever to focus on the subject, is set to be presented next Sunday in the framework of a conference to mark the international Holocaust Memorial Day at the university.

Prof. Rachel Lev-Wiesel, who conducted the research, said that although the survivors experienced other traumatic events during the holocaust, including the loss of parents, physical abuse and hunger, the memory of sexual abuse remained etched in their minds more than anything else.

"This abuse still causes incessant thoughts on the subject and nightmares," Lev-Wiesel said.

The study consists of interviews with 22 men and women in Israel and the United States, who were willing to share with the researcher stories about the abuse they underwent during the war.

Lev-Wiesel said that some people who offered to take part in the study were rejected, because she believed they would not be able to cope with the burden of memories and the self-exposure involved with the interview.

The average age of the interviewees stood at 68 years, and Lev-Wiesel said all have told their story with clarity and precision, in contradiction to how people usually speak of a traumatic event.

This is proof, Lev-Wiesel said, that the survivors retell the story in their heads over and over again, reliving the past daily.

All the survivors interviewed for the study have spent the war years on the run from the Nazis, some at hiding in the houses of Christians, others moving from place to place with the partisans, an easy prey for menacing adults along the way.

According to Prof. Lev-Wiesel, this fact does not eliminate the possibility similar incidents took place at ghettos as well.

In some of the cases revealed in the study, the abuse was carried out by relatives or other Jews, which alleviated the trauma and embarrassment among survivors.

 In one of the cases the abuser was a man who helped smuggle children from one place to another, in another it was a father who sexually abused his daughter, and in several other incidents – mothers who molested their sons.

Prof. Lev-Wiesel stressed that situations of stress and war do not create pedophiles, but that they enable such people to operate more freely.