The Nine

In April 1945, as Nazi Germany collapses, nine young women slip out of a death march column in Saxony and dive into a roadside ditch. They are concentration camp prisoners, all former members of the French Résistance, and their leader is Hélène Podliasky, a twenty-four-year-old engineer who speaks five languages. Author Gwen Strauss, Hélène's great-niece, reconstructs their escape and the experiences that brought them together, drawing on a 2002 recorded interview with Hélène, the posthumously published memoir of fellow escapee Suzanne Maudet (known as Zaza), Nazi transport lists, French National Archives documents, and interviews with the women's descendants.

The book traces each woman's path into the Résistance and then into captivity. Hélène, under the code name "Christine," organized parachute drops of arms and coded radio messages for the Bureau des opérations aériennes (BOA), a liaison unit coordinating with the British. Arrested by chance at a hotel in Brittany in February 1944, she was transferred to the prison in Angers, where the Gestapo subjected her to waterboarding, suspension by her arms, and the extraction of her fingernails. To maintain her sanity, she worked mathematical equations on her cell walls. Zaza joined the Résistance through the Auberge de la Jeunesse, a youth hostel movement. She married fellow activist René Maudet in February 1944; one month later, both were arrested. René was deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp and assigned to a bomb-disposal squad with a one-in-ten survival rate. Nicole Clarence rose to leadership in the Paris Résistance, directing agents de liaison, the couriers who carried messages between underground cells. She was arrested on August 4, 1944, only three weeks before Paris was liberated, and endured three days of torture at a Gestapo site before being sent to Fresnes prison. Madelon Verstijnen (Lon) and Guillemette Daendels (Guigui), both Dutch, traveled to Paris to join the Résistance through Lon's brother Eric but were arrested the day after arriving. Renée Lebon Châtenay (Zinka), the oldest of the nine at twenty-nine, joined the Comète network sheltering downed Allied pilots and was arrested while trying to visit her imprisoned husband, Louis Francis. Already pregnant, she gave birth to a daughter she named France in Fresnes prison and was permitted to keep her for only eighteen days before the baby was taken away. Joséphine Bordanava (Josée), the child of Spanish immigrants raised in a foster home in Cannes, distributed aid to Résistance families before her arrest. Jacqueline Aubéry (Jacky), a war widow, served as a courier for the Brutus intelligence network. Yvonne Le Guillou (Mena), a working-class Parisian from a Breton family, joined the Résistance to be with her lover, Jan van Brakel, escorting Jewish families across France to safety. Jan died in the camps.

By mid-1944, the women had begun converging at Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp built exclusively for women. Strauss describes the dehumanizing arrival routine: prisoners were stripped, shaved, and dressed in dead women's clothes shipped from Auschwitz. In July 1944, a mass selection sent prisoners to the HASAG Leipzig munitions factory, a subcamp where they produced Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades under twelve-hour shifts. Nicole and Jacky arrived on a later transport in September.

At Leipzig, the women formed a tight bond sustained by solidarity and resistance. Hélène sabotaged weapons production by secretly turning off factory ovens mid-process, causing shells to shatter. Nicole's nightly recitations of elaborate recipes became a communal ritual, offering psychological relief from starvation. A German civilian foreman named Fritz Stupitz, who had lost his son on the Eastern Front and opposed the war, quietly aided Hélène. He falsified the women's production quotas and eventually gave her a pair of wire cutters and a map showing the direction to France.

On the night of April 13, 1945, after Allied bombardment destroyed the factory, the camp's 5,000 women were assembled and marched east in the early hours of April 14. The march was savage: twenty-eight hours of walking through freezing conditions with no food or water, past corpses of prisoners shot for falling behind. On the morning of April 15, outside the town of Oschatz, the nine held a pivotal conversation. Each stated what she wanted to live for: Zaza wanted to see René; Zinka had to return to baby France; Josée wanted to become a pilot; Hélène wanted to witness the Nazis' defeat. They agreed unanimously to escape together. Hours later, when guards became distracted, the nine slipped into a ditch and lay flat until the marchers passed.

Strauss narrates the six days that followed as the women traversed enemy territory toward the American lines. They carried almost nothing: matches, wire cutters, 110 German marks, one civilian dress, and a can of sardines. Nicole, gravely ill with pneumonia, collapsed until Josée and Mena forced her to her feet. Their encounters alternated between danger and kindness. A screaming mayor tried to send them to a prison camp; they fled. Yugoslav prisoners of war fed them their first real meal in days. Hélène charmed a policeman into drawing a map on official letterhead, which they repurposed as a forged travel permit that proved repeatedly effective against German officials. Near the front, a German commander demanded sexual favors from Hélène in exchange for a travel pass; Lon intervened, and the commander relented.

On April 21, the women reached the Mulde River, where the bridge had been destroyed. They descended a precarious series of lashed-together ladders to broken concrete slabs in raging rapids. Zinka nearly fell in and lost her bundle containing the only photograph of her daughter and a stuffed bear Mena had made. After crossing, they trekked through forests under artillery fire, waving white rags and singing "Yankee Doodle." On a forest road, an American military jeep pulled up. Two soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division offered them cigarettes.

At Colditz Castle, now American military headquarters, the women were sheltered and fed. After a week they moved to a Red Cross refugee camp in Grimma, where Hélène and Lon negotiated with the local American commander for a separate house to shelter incoming French female survivors. On May 7, Germany's unconditional surrender was announced. Hélène stayed behind as an interpreter for the US Army; Jacky remained to run a convalescence home. The other seven boarded a train to France; Lon jumped off partway, determined to walk home to Holland alone. At the Gare de l'Est in Paris, crowds surged forward with photographs of missing loved ones, but the emaciated returnees could not recognize the beautiful women in the pictures. At the Hôtel Lutetia, a luxury establishment converted into a repatriation center, the six remaining women were processed and then scattered, unable even to say goodbye.

Strauss traces each woman's postwar fate. Zaza reunited with René, who survived Neuengamme; they had four children, but three developed severe mental illness, and one died by suicide. Nicole built a career in journalism at Elle magazine and received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest national honor, in 1991. Lon walked home to Holland, learned her brother Eric died in the camps, and lived to 101 as the last survivor of the group. Guigui married Timen Spijker, the man she had met briefly in Gestapo custody. Mena died young at fifty-one. Zinka waited months before learning that Louis Francis had died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen; she married another Résistance veteran and died in 1978 from lifelong tuberculosis. Hélène drove to Fritz Stupitz's village to deliver food, fulfilling her wartime promise, then returned to France, where she experienced severe depression and trauma-related episodes before her death in 2012.

Strauss reflects on the silence surrounding these women's experiences. Postwar France marginalized female survivors: Charles de Gaulle honored only six women among the 1,038 Compagnons de la Libération, the order he created to recognize liberation fighters, and returning deportees were told not to speak of their ordeals. Six of the nine married other survivors, and their children frequently exhibited symptoms of intergenerational trauma. The book closes with Nicole's letter from a late reunion of the surviving women, affirming their enduring bond with the refrain from the camp farewell song: ce n'est qu'un au revoir, it's only a goodbye.