Gwen Strauss

Nine women slipped away from a forced march out of a German labour camp in April 1945 and spent ten days crossing the collapsing front on foot, hungry and in prison clothing, until they reached American lines. Six were French, two Dutch and one Spanish, none of them yet thirty, all arrested for resistance work: moving weapons, sheltering agents dropped by parachute, hiding Jewish children in apartments. One of them, Hélène Podliasky, was Strauss's great-aunt, and the book began with Strauss asking the family what the story actually had been. The Nine, published in 2021, rebuilds each woman's route into the resistance and out again from archives and from the survivors' children. Strauss is a poet and a children's writer whose earlier titles include Trail of Stones, The Night Shimmy and Ruth and the Green Book.