Band of Sisters

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Female inmates in rows of five.
PHOTO: YAD VASHEM, THE WORLD HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE CENTER

From The Wall Street Journal:

Gwen Strauss writes movingly in her book “The Nine” about the courage and luck that enabled nine young women to escape German imprisonment during World War II and return to their homes in France and Holland. Offering incisive images of life inside concentration camps and on death marches, Ms. Strauss relies, as any skilled researcher would, on archives and interviews, but as an accomplished poet and short-story writer, she also calls on her vibrant imagination to portray the emotional and physical traumas visited upon these young women. It is this poetic sensitivity, conveyed through a transparent style, that offers readers a nuanced perspective on what took place more than 75 years ago.

These nine young women—six French, two Dutch and one Spanish; one with a Jewish father, another from a Jewish family—were captured by the Gestapo, then sent to Ravensbrück, Germany’s primary concentration camp for women. Soon they were “loaned out” as laborers to a munitions plant owned by one of Germany’s largest arms manufacturers. It was there that the nine met. In the early spring of 1945, as the Allied fronts closed in from the east and west, Nazi authorities ordered the labor camps emptied, and so began the death marches across Germany. Taking bold chances, the nine women escaped from a casually monitored march and made their way into the fields and woods of Saxony.

Ms. Strauss’s narrative takes place during perhaps the most violent phase of the war in Europe—its final six months—but her book transcends that period and speaks to the humanity of all who are oppressed. “The Nine” is defined by examples of solidarity, empathy and perseverance. As they searched for color in a barren landscape, the women held fast to the belief that goodness had not disappeared.

Ms. Strauss is careful to identify geographical markers so that, with the help of a good map, a reader can trace the women’s long trek home. And the author is astute in keeping us mindful of the weather that a rude spring visited upon them. Her meticulous descriptions of the social and surveillance conditions in the horrific camps—gender and racial hierarchies, the treatment of ill and pregnant women, the murderous use of the dreaded daily roll call where dozens would faint or fall and be immediately executed—form the foreground of this narrative of unfathomable courage.

All nine women had been arrested for acts of resistance or for nonviolent political activities while still in their 20s. In fact, it was their youth and good health that allowed them to survive the devastating abuse their bodies would endure before and during their escape. The fugitives traversed a no-woman’s-land of a battered nation, filled with suspicious and resentful inhabitants. Once free of the camp, the greatest threats of their odyssey were hunger and men. Finding potatoes, raw or—less frequently—cooked, is a recurrent theme that encapsulates the anthropology of concentration camps and forced marches. Hunger hung persistently over the lives of the group. They never knew, when they knocked on a farmer’s door, whether they would be chased away or given a good meal. Men are generally depicted as at best indifferent to these women’s plights or, at worst, brutally abusive. The constant fear of being raped, beaten or murdered weakened them as much as their physical distress.

. . . .

From the beginning, Ms. Strauss tells her readers, “I am not a historian. I was trained as a poet.” And though she avails herself of archival evidence, much of her narrative finds her imagining (a word she uses frequently) what it must have been like for nine women to escape annihilation together. Her notes reveal how carefully she intertwines interviews with survivors and their descendants and how she was deeply influenced by two remarkable books: Lise London’s “La Mégère de la rue Daguerre” (“The Shrew of Daguerre Street”) and Suzanne Maudet’s “Neuf filles jeunes qui ne voulaient pas mourir” (“Nine Young Girls Who Did Not Want to Die”). Maudet was one of the nine escapees.

. . . .

Ms. Strauss, an American who has lived in France for more than 20 years, comments several times about the hesitancy that interrupted her writing. “I felt I was breaking a taboo. The voices in my head told me it was not my business; I should be ashamed of myself for exploiting [this] story.” More important, “How do we hold on to the past’s truths without letting the past hold us back from living in the present?”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG doesn’t usually give this big a blurb for a given book, but his current reading concerning World War I and his extensive prior reading concerning World War II makes him believe that the stories of the incredible suffering and bravery of so many who were caught up in the World Wars of the 20th Century need to be remembered.

In an era in which many Woke Warriors and Political Correctness Enforcers explode with angry emotions and bitter denunciations at the slightest deviation from whatever standards are current at the moment, PG thinks it’s important to remember and reflect on truly monstrous behavior causing real and often deadly harm and the incredibly brave responses on the part of those whose lives and the lives of their families and friends, not just their feelings, were actually on the line.

Part of PG’s concern is that some of the tactics the Woke direct at their enemies are straight out of communist/fascist playbooks and he believes we need to remember what consequences resulted from similar runaway extreme behaviors and strategies in the past.

For the Nazis, the best-known enemy was the Jews and anyone who associated with or supported them, but Romani, blacks, those of mixed races, Slavs, other members of “the masses from the East” and all manner of other untermenschen, including those of any ethnic group who were regarded as physically or mentally disabled, were also put through horrors we find difficult to imagine today.

“Serbia must die!”

The term “under man” was first used by American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.

“Untermensch is usually translated into English as “sub-human”. The leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European “under man” to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that “this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” [“…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete.”]Quoting Stoddard: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives”.”

. . . .

Nazis repeatedly used the term Untermensch in writings and speeches directed against the Jews, the most notorious example being a 1942 SS publication with the title Der Untermensch, which contains an antisemitic tirade sometimes considered to be an extract from a speech by Heinrich Himmler. In the pamphlet “The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization”, published in 1936, Himmler wrote:

We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.

In his speech “Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus” (“World danger of Bolshevism”) in 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that “subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent”. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels also declared that “Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.”

This poster (from around 1938) reads: “60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read ‘[A] New People’, the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP.”

During the Warsaw Uprising, Himmler ordered the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto because according to him it allowed the “living space” of 500,000 subhumans.

Italicized paragraphs and poster above from Untermensch on Wikipedia

The Aryan certificate (German: Ariernachweis) was a document which certified that a person was a member of the presumed Aryan race. Beginning in April 1933, it was required from all employees and officials in the public sector, including education, according to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It was also a primary requirement to become a Reich citizen for those who were of German or related blood (Aryan) and wanted to become Reich citizens after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. A “Swede or an Englishman, a Frenchman or Czech, a Pole or Italian” was considered to be related, that is, “Aryan”. Iranians were also considered to be Aryans after an 1936 decree from the Hitler Cabinet which declared Iranians to be “pure-blooded Aryans”.

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