nonfiction, historical-places-events, historical-research, history-and-culture, cultural-heritage, Europe, 20th-century, horror, bravery, survival, survivor-s-guilt, survivors, PTSD*****

Stark.
This is a recounting of real horror.
These brave women, pushed beyond endurance have managed to live on until old age despite the ones who wanted them dead for both impersonal and personal reasons. Yet in telling of their own triumphs and tribulations they each mention specific women who they could do nothing to save. The research is impeccable and includes interviews and photos.
I requested and received a free temporary ebook copy from St Martin's Press via NetGalley. Thank you

I received a free e-arc through Netgalley.
I read a lot of historical fiction. This one is a blend of fiction and non-fiction as the author is the great-niece of one of "The Nine" so she details her journey to finding out more about these amazing young women as they worked in The Resistance in France and then dealt with being in German concentration camps as political prisoners and how the power of friendship kept them alive.

I read about some things about the war that I haven't come across before and it was quite disturbing that a lot of soldiers (yes, even American soldiers) thought that French women were easy with their sexual favors. There was a lot of rape and some American soldiers were hung after the war for rape. This also brings up racism as the author says that Black soldiers only made up 10% of the force, but 25 of the 29 soldiers hung for rape were Black.

There is a lot of darkness in most stories about war, but this one also has a light shining through about women power and the joy of having friends even in the darkest point of your life when you don't think you can go on.

I received this ARC with the promise of a review. The Nine, written by Gwen Strauss, is an epic story of nine courageous, indomitable women who served in the Resistance during World War II. The author, through incredible years of research, related the journey of the nine brave heroines as they existed in concentration camps, escaped from the camps by various means, and bolstered the morale of those they encountered as they moved through the countryside in search of freedom. This is an amazing true adventure filled with the worst and the best experiences of the group. This book is a must for anyone interested in the realistic side of those who chose to resist the evil so prevalent during and following World War II.

For all my fellow history buffs, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany by Gwen Strauss is a must-read! I didn’t really know a whole lot about women in World War II until I listened to a few podcasts and then I was hooked on learning more and more.

If you are someone who likes to learn about history, specifically women, this is absolutely a book you need to read.

Take a look:

The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris.

The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments. They were arrested by French police, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. They were subjected to a series of French prisons and deported to Germany. The group formed along the way, meeting at different points, in prison, in transit, and at Ravensbrück. By the time they were enslaved at the labor camp in Leipzig, they were a close-knit group of friends. During the final days of the war, forced onto a death march, the nine chose their moment and made a daring escape.

Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative from Gwen Strauss is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.

What amazing, brave young women.

Coming out on May 4.

The Nine by Gwen Strauss

By now, most of us have read a book or two on the Holocaust. This book centers on nine young women who formed a very strong bond in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. The usual forms of punishment and cruelty at the camp are described.

Skeletal, hungry and barely clothed, the nine managed to get away during a forced march under armed guards. Hélène was more or less the ring leader and cheerleader of the group, and as such, was the most prominent in the story. Taken prisoner in 1944 for her work in the French resistance, she insisted the group keep moving ahead to find the Americans at the front, begging for help along the way.

The story continues to follow the lives of these nine women from after their rescue, through their lives re established, to reunions and their deaths-most of old age.

Thanks to St Martin’s Press and Net Galley for my ARC.

Because this is based on a true story of how nine women survived a WWII concentration camp in Germany, it may be a difficult read. The book recounts the story of nine real life women from the French Resistance at the hands of the Nazi's.

It is an all to real story told like a work of fiction. It is hard to believe that anyone survived these camps and the deplorable conditions.

Many thanks to Netgalley and St Martin's Press for this advanced readers copy. This book is due to release in May 2021.

I am a big fan of stories of inspiring women (Cilka's Journey, etc) so when I saw that The Nine was offered for review, I quickly requested it. Heather Morris is one of my favorite historical authors and I wasn't expecting Gwen Strauss to come close to her work, but she did. Boy did she ever.

This is the true story of nine women who refused to give up no matter what was thrown at them. Their dedication to survive and thrive is so inspiring. Each woman has her own story and each woman's story will hit your heart.

Thank you so much to #NetGalley for the ARC

This is the story of nine young French women who become part of the French Resistance and then are arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis during WWII. Written by the niece of one of the women, author Gwen Strauss brings to life the womens’ story of uncommon heroism in the face of impossible odds.

The Nine were comprised of 6 French, 2 Dutch, and 1 Spanish woman. All were in their 20’s during this time and they were all in the French Résistance, although two had just come into contact with the Résistance at the time they were arrested. I think all were tortured in one way or another, with the author’s aunt Hélène (code name Christine) receiving some of the worst treatment. The Nine, having been friends in small groups, all bonded into one cohesive group during their time in the camps.

The book recounts their imprisonment in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany and then at a Kommando, a satellite camp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany that was used to hold prisoners used in slave labor in privately owned factories. The women were rented out to companies in the Nazi war effort such as Siemens, BMW, and others for four Reichsmarks per day for very heavy, dangerous work. Although the women worked, conditions were deplorable and the main cause of death at the Kommandos was starvation.

The book explains the nationality mix in the Kommandos with this one holding French, Dutch, Spanish, Poles, and Russian Red Army captives, among others. The Nazis put the Poles in charge and also exploited the nationality differences to try to keep the women from coalescing into one unit. Most of the prisoners were political such as the Résistance fighters and the Russian Red Army soldiers, but there were also Romani and Sinti (what have been called Gypsies in the past), gay women/lesbians, and criminals. Most of the German countryside was told in propaganda that the foreign women, especially French women, in the camps were prostitutes. This made it particularly difficult for The Nine after they escaped their death march.

When the Nazis realized they were losing the war and the war superstructure began crashing down, the camps were ordered variously to liquidate (murder) all of their prisoners or put them on death marches. The death marches had no end point, they were just to get the prisoners out of the camps where either the Allies or the Soviet Army could find them. Prisoners on these marches either dropped dead of exhaustion and starvation or they were shot for infractions such as not keeping a straight line. At one point our nine young women made a break for it and rolled into a ditch, hiding among the dead until the long columns of marching prisoners were gone.

Then they faced the daunting task of walking through the mostly hostile German countryside looking for the Western Front and the Americans. They found angry, violent, predatory people but they also found those who genuinely wanted to help them and were generous. They had a harrowing crossing over the Spring-swollen River Mulde to the American military but then were treated quite well there. They wanted to go home so they had to leave the American encampment for a refugee camp which was very much like a concentration camp itself. Using their intelligence and ability to speak more than one language, they first ran a home for female former prisoners, and the author’s aunt Hélène wound up in uniform working for the American military as a translator. Eventually all made it back to France and finding what was left of their families is detailed.

The author gives us a look at the life of each woman prior to the war via the use of flashbacks in the text. I hope that these are offset in the finished text to enable the reader to smoothly transition into them. The author also continues the narrative of these womens’ lives long after the war and talks about the struggles of each as a survivor. Information about the psychology of the trauma endured is included, along with a discussion of the trauma passed on to the survivors’ children. Although the term “post traumatic stress disorder” is not used, I think it could be.

The writing of the text is good for the most part, although transitions from paragraph to paragraph are frequently rough. There need to be some sentences added to smooth out these transitions from thought to thought.

The author did a LOT of research in person and a LOT of interviews, and it shows. Of course some of the information for this book comes from the writings of the other women but the author researched and verified that information as much as possible. Tough subject; good job.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press, Gwen Strauss, and NetGalley for providing me with an eGalley of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for writing and publishing this work that reveals so much more about Nazi atrocities against women.

✨The Nine✨

4.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 #fourandahalf

Thank you @netgalley & @stmartinspress for this Advance e-copy of “The Nine”! What an amazing story.

This is a story of Nine women during WWII who were apart of the Résistance. These are true stories of what happened. This is about their time imprisoned & their escape. Each chapter features the woman’s stories which makes them super long which is my only little qualm. This is a nonfiction book so there were facts but the story also felt like a fiction read at the same time. You can hardly believe these things happened but they did.

It’s honestly amazing hearing about the women & men who worked in Résistance against Nazi Germans... I’d like to think I’d be brave & strong enough to do the same in these awful circumstances. The greatest part about this book is that these nine women had each other and stuck together to survive. These women were brave, smart, & strong! So happy I got to know their story.

The author asked her Tante Hélène (one of the nine women we learn about 😉) if she was ever scared. She said no. That even with the risks she was happy to help fight for her country. 😭

Happy Sunday friends! ❤️ If you’re interested in reading about amazing women during WWII this book is for you!

✨Pub Date May 4th,2021! 😍

How do people withstand the most horrific abuses performed by a nation led by a madman?

There are many books about soldiers surviving what were basically death camps when they were taken prisoner, about well planned and executed escapes, about spies hanging on, in hiding, while an entire militarized police force look for them.

The Nine has all of that, and more. It's the story of nine women, resistance fighters in WWII, captured and interrogated by French police before being sent off to Germany for interrogation by the Gestapo and ultimately imprisoned at a work camp.

The primary focus is on the author's great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who ultimately became the de facto leader of the group as they met one another in their journey from freedom to prison and back to freedom again.

Where this book shines comes after all of that - after the beatings, the torture, the forced work, and all manner of atrocities. As Germany was facing defeat, some of the camps, including the one housing The Nine, were sent on forced marches, to move prisoners from outlying areas about to be overrun, to prisons closer to what was left in German hands. During their march, they took a chance and fled the march, running into the forest, heading for France.

This journey, free of guards and the wire of prisons, wasn't any easier than that. Along the way, they found both people willing to help them, and people who had no interest in doing so, preferring to turn them in. They also found those who wanted to use them for their own ends - soldiers, for instance, who thought the Allies would look more favorably on them if they were found assisting a group of former prisoners.

The author is a poet, and it shows. It's a fantastic piece of narrative nonfiction, although I would say that if you're just dipping your toes into the water of the cruelest parts of WWII, or if you're just learning about it, you might want to start with a broader history first, to understand the whole of the war, then narrow to the final days of the European theater before reading this. Doing so will better inform the reader about that particular point in the war, and how the engineered system developed by the German leadership was breaking down.

Much like Night (Elie Wiesel, another must-read), The Nine captures the sense of how it was to live with daily atrocities, and how people came through them.

Highly recommended - a five star read.

Thanks to St Martin's Press and NetGalley for the review copy

Pub date: May 4, 2021

I finished reading "The Nine" before work this morning and all I can say is "what a story!!" I have read numerous books about the Holocaust, both fiction and non-fiction, some good or great, others not so great, but out of each and everyone of them there is one thing that stands out above all else and that is the resilience and courage of these men and women. In every book, novel, article, biography and memoir I have read those qualities rise above all. They shine brightly through the women's stories in "The Nine".
Gwen Strauss, the great-niece of Helene Podliasky tells the story of these nine courageous Resistance fighters with dignity and grace. She brings their trials to life and shares their suffering in such a way as we, the readers, feel it also. Not dwelling on, nor glossing over the horrors of the camps and tortures suffered by these women, she give4s us a clear portrait of what their time there encompassed.
I really liked this book, I won't say I "enjoyed" reading it, because how does one enjoy reading about dying children and tortured women? But I did learn from these women and their story as I have learned from all the books I have read about WWII. Strauss does a great job bringing the facts to life so that we feel, right along with Helene, Zinka and all the other women. I liked that the facts weren't just listed in some long, dry, litany, but divulged in such a manner as to evoke emotion in the reader. To me this defines the difference of being a good writer, to being a great writer.
5 stars for sure, I found nothing worth detracting from a 5 star rating. I would recommend to readers that like to learn the hard truths about those times so maybe not the right kind of book for the more casual light reader, but certainly a fit for serious students of the Holocaust.
Thank you to the publisher's at St. Martin's Publishing Group for the free advanced reader copy of this book. I am posting my review on Goodreads, NetGalley and Bookish First, and my website mycatreads.com, upon publication I will post on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Instagram and Twitter.

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.

This book was so engrossing, fascinating, harrowing, and captivating that I forgot at times that it was nonfiction. These women all participated in the Resistance against the German occupation, risked their very existence, and were imprisoned. Instead of giving up, they continued to fight, and this is their story of escape, survival, and resilience. I am stunned and forever changed by their heroic and unforgettable stories. I am so grateful that the author (whose own aunt was one of the women) was able to bring light to these events and be able to tell the world of these strong women. Reading their stories of escape and survival is something that everyone needs to read. It is something that I will never forget.

5/5 stars

Thank you NG and St. Martin’s Press for this arc and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.

I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon, Instagram, and B&N accounts upon publication.

I've read about this subject before but the author has done a fantastic job of writing about it here. Very well done. I loved it.

Books about female spies and resistance workers in WWII France are all the rage right now. To be honest, they've all started blurring in my memory. What makes The Nine different is that this book focuses on a different aspect of that story- escape.

The Nine tells the story of nine women who were arrested for resistance work in WWII France. They came from all different parts of Europe (two were Dutch, another Spanish), and did different types of work before their arrest. Before their arrival in the Nazi concentration camp system, most of them had never met each other. The women were sent to Ravensbruck, the famous women's concentration camp, and then on to a work camp where they worked in a munitions factory. The book tells a little about their experiences in Ravensbruck and subsequent camps, and about their time in the prisons in France before their deportation. But the real focus of the story is what happens in the last days of the war, when the SS, under orders not to let their prisoners fall into the hands of the Allies, emptied the concentration camps and took their prisoners on a march to nowhere, the Death Marches. These women, who had become friends in the camp, escaped from one of these Death Marches, and began their trek across Germany back to France.

What made this book interesting to me was the depiction of rural Germany in the last days of the war. During their trek home the women encounter "normal" Germans, POWs, and German soldiers- some friendly, some hostile, and some resolved to the fact that they were about to lose the war and who thought that helping these escaped prisoners might reflect better on them. The nine women must also rely and support each other- a daunting task when faced with the challenges of base survival.

I would recommend this title to anyone interested in espionage and resistance during WWII, but not as their first foray into this subject. If they've read and enjoyed The Lost Girls of Paris, A Train at Midnight, or any of the other books on this subject that has come out in the past few years, they will enjoy this book. However, if this is there first introduction to this subject, they may be lost on some of the aspects of the earlier parts of the story that are only briefly discussed.

A powerful look at the horrors of war from the eyes of real-life survivors, author Gwen Strauss' The Nine digs deeply into the lives of nine women held as political prisoners in Nazi Germany. Captured through their resistance efforts in France, the story of the nine protagonists begins with Strauss's own aunt Helene. Smoothly transitioning between historic events and biographical details, Strauss weaves a compelling and disquieting tale of suffering and strength from a female perspective. Introspective and harrowing, this is a book that offers details not just about the nines' journey to survival but also the lives they and others like them built in the aftermath. An intensely personal and fascinating book, The Nine is a literary odyssey worth taking.

Reading this book was such an emotional experience...utterly heartbreaking and horrendous yet beautiful and wonderful. I have read over 50 WWII books in the last two months and this one is a standout. My feelings are so difficult to put into words as this book is not fiction. It is about nine young women, Résistance fighters, who were captured, tortured at forced labour camps including Ravensbrück and Leipzig and finally escaped, though the escape was another form of torture.

The author, Gwen Strauss, the great niece of the leader of the group of nine, Hélène, does not gloss over brutal details such as waterboarding, pitiful "food" and polluted water, stench of rotting flesh, standing naked in lines outside for hours on end, lice, forced labour, seeing brutal murders...and so much more. She describes what the girls did before their arrests (fascinating and inspiring stories!). Strauss interviewed her aunt and descendants of these women...heroines in my view...and wrote the experiences here. And the full stories were not told because they were too unspeakable to mention. How they went through what they did...what they resorted to for mere survival, mentally and physically, at such a young age and then to also have people not believe them and others after is incomprehensible. To allow the enemy to win was certain death so the prisoners became "social workers" to bring each other back to existence. The attitudes toward groups such as the French, Jews, lesbians, Polish, etc. are explained. I loved the sweet recipe sharing and life-saving singing between the women!

Each of the women's personalities, skills and characteristics are described in this book as well. We learn how they literally leaned on each other for support in their dark, dark days and nights. When escape finally came it was awful. Food was scarce. Though they didn't experience it personally, the Russians liberation and treatment of prisoners was horrendous. I hadn't thought about how the German villagers would treat escapees but wow...it's all here, too. The girls found kindness as well as hatred. The utter desperation is evident, so well written, yet the women did not feel sorry for themselves.

This book is not for everyone (though it should be required reading) as it is very descriptive yet it is also inspirational and packed with information. It will break your heart but feed your soul. But more importantly, it focuses on the incredible, incredible mental strength and spirit of these women. They made the decision to face their situations unwaveringly, to survive. The book ends with how these women "lived" after this nightmare.

Strauss follows their journey by visiting these camps with her daughter. What an emotional time that must have been! I learned so much from reading this. It is truly an epic book and will be memorable the rest of my life. It is THAT powerful and moving.

My sincere thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this outstanding and breathtaking book in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it very much.

Gwen Strauss is the niece of Helene Podiasky, one of this group of nine women. Strauss is a poet but became a detective in trying to discover and honor the lives of these extraordinary resistance women who were known by aliases and numbers. Six were French, two Dutch and one Spanish, who were all sent to Ravensbruck as political prisoners. In July 1944, they were sent to an armament factory near Leipzig. The support these women gave each other and others kept them alive during a horrific time. That they escaped toward the end of the war and survived to in part tell their story is amazing. All the women suffered from physical and mental harm for the rest of their lives. The French government and people they came back to were not as supportive as they should have been. They and other women were basically encouraged to never speak or their ordeal. Although Strauss feels she never knew all of her aunts tribulations or those of the other women, she gives the reader a chance to raise a toast to friendship and bravery. I received a digital copy of this this book from the publisher through NetGalley for a honest review.