The Nine: The True Story of Female Resistance Fighters

On Thursday, September 12, 2019, the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention cohosted its first event of the academic year, in conjunction with the Office of the President, inviting Gwen Strauss – an author, poet and essayist – to discuss her forthcoming book, The Nine: The True Story of Female Resistance Fighters. Strauss is also Director of the Brown Foundation Fellowship Program, an artist’s residency program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France.

The book – which focuses on nine women who joined the resistance against the Nazis in 1943, before being deported to Germany and finally escaping from a concentration camp – deals with questions of collective and individual memory, the healing of transgenerational trauma and the importance of giving survivors’ a voice.

After an introduction from President Celeste M. Schenck, Strauss detailed the research process she used to uncover the identities of The Nine. One was her great aunt; what started as a family project quickly evolved into a book. Strauss is still in the process of writing and hopes to complete a final draft in the spring of 2020, so attendees were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at her ongoing research.

As part of the process of researching the book, Strauss worked with testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, an archive of Holocaust testimony and testimonies from survivors and perpetrators of other genocides and incidents of mass violence. The archive is hosted at the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention; the Center was one of the first institutions in France to offer full access to the archive.

The full video of Gwen Strauss’s talk is available below.