29-04-2025
‘Unwavering friendship': The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march
'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.
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.'
The death march
In Zaza's book, she describes the nine's escape in an almost light-hearted tone. 'It's really happy, positive and optimistic. There are so few allusions to the fact that they were coming from a concentration camp and all that had happened to them before getting to that point.'
Strauss knew the real story was far darker. The women had been forced to labour in factories for the German army. They had survived months living in appalling conditions in concentration camps infested with disease, lice and without enough food or water. They were surrounded by violent SS guards and torture was common.
The Ravensbrück Memorial estimates that 28,000 of the 120,000 women of more than 20 nationalities who passed through Ravensbrück did not survive.
When the Nazis realised the Allies were drawing closer, they forced many prisoners on what became known as death marches, because up to a quarter of the prisoners died along the way. In mid-April 1945, the nine managed to escape from their death march when they were near Oschatz. They were just in time: 'The ones who didn't run away ended up being executed in a field two or three days later,' says Strauss. 'That would have been their fate too'.
The escape
From Zaza's book and the archives in Leipzig, Strauss began piecing together the story of the nine. She got in touch with Dutch filmmakers who had made a documentary featuring a reunion between Hélène and Madelon Verstijnen (Lon), one of the two Dutch members of the group. She met with more family members from different parts of France, and was able to read accounts some of the women had written which had stayed within their families.
She learnt that they had escaped from the death march during a moment of chaos when the guards weren't looking. They hid in a ditch, pretending to be dead. This worked, because there were corpses on the roadside.
They then walked from village to village in what was still Nazi Germany. Hélène used her impressive language skills with the locals. At one police station, she managed to acquire a hand-drawn map on headed paper, which they were able to use as a laissez-passer during their ten-day escape journey.
The women finally found the Americans in Colditz on April 21, 1945, after crossing the frontline, which involved a perilous traverse of a fast-moving river.
'No longer marriageable'
The women who returned after being deported found, very quickly, that they couldn't talk freely about what had happened to them. Most people simply couldn't understand what they were saying, the horror they had endured seemed unthinkable.
'There was also this idea of 'Let's not dwell on the darkness, we're trying to build a new world now.' All those stories were so gloomy, and people didn't want to hear them. And also, nobody could understand them except for fellow survivors,' says the author.
Women who returned after being deported also faced stigma. Marriages were called off. 'There was this idea that if you had been a young woman in the Resistance and then deported and survived, you must have prostituted yourself in some way to survive. You must have been raped. You were no longer pure and so no longer marriageable.'
In "The Nine", Strauss explores the lives the women went on to lead. Some married fellow Resistance members, like Zaza and Hélène. Others, like Joséphine Bordanava (Josée), never told their families they had been in the camps.
The survivors arrived in France in spring and summer 1945, but Paris had been liberated since August the year before. 'And then these women came with their shaved heads and their emaciated bodies, and it was so shameful and awful for them,' says Strauss.
That explains why the tone of Zaza's book comes across almost light-hearted. She had written it in 1946, a year after the war had ended. 'I think that was the attitude that women who had been in the camps and in the Resistance had adopted. It really comes through in the writing.'
'Unwavering friendship'
Instead of 'dwelling in the darkness', Zaza's account focused on the deep bonds the nine developed during their journey.
As Strauss continued researching, she brought to light a story of unwavering friendship. They had several close shaves during their escape, attracting attention for being a large group of women. But splitting up was not an option.
They encouraged each other, shared what little they had and physically supported members of the group who were ill and suffering. Josée, who had the most beautiful voice, would soothe the group by singing for them.
'To me, that was really the beautiful part of the story that I kept discovering;' says Strauss. 'The women really did help each other out again and again. And that helped them survive. To me, that's an important lesson.'
