'THE NINE': WW2 Women in the Resistance Survived Ravensbruck Concent Camp, Escaped Nazi Death March

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Last edited Thu Oct 23, 2025, 10:17 PM - Edit history (1)

‘Unwavering friendship’: The True Story of 9 Women Who Escaped A Nazi Death March, France24, April 29, 2025. - Ed. - PHOTOS 🫂

“The Nine”, by Gwen Strauss, tells the extraordinary true story of how nine young women from the Resistance survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and then escaped from a death march in Nazi Germany.

Its American author recounts their remarkable getaway, their friendship and the lives the women led once back home.
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“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, Va., Strauss decided the time had come to revisit Hélène’s story...- More + Photos,
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250429-true-story-nine-women-who-escaped-nazi-death-march-ravensbruck
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- Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Wiki

.. Between 1939 and 1945, some 130,000[1] to 132,000[2] female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were murdered in the gas chambers. Upon liberation on 29–30 April 1945, approximately 3,500 prisoners were still alive in the main camp....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravensbr%C3%BCck_concentration_camp

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1. WW2: From Ravensbruck to Freedom, Sweden's Daring 'White Bus' Rescue, Red Cross ⛑

- 'From Ravensbrück to Freedom: The Story of Sweden’s Daring ‘White Bus’ Rescue,' France24, April 24, 2025. - In April 1945, as Nazi Germany is on the brink of defeat, the Swedish Red Cross launches the largest rescue operation of World War II. The mission - arranged in secret between a Swedish aristocrat and Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, SS chief Heinrich Himmler – ultimately saves 15,000 prisoners from Nazi camps.
One of the destinations is Ravensbrück, the main concentration camp for female prisoners, where thousands of women are evacuated onboard Sweden’s now-iconic “White Buses”.
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In the spring of 1945, an extraordinary rumour had begun to circulate among the prisoners in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Word was that the Red Cross, which in the past few weeks had negotiated the distribution of food packages and the evacuation of a handful of the camp’s worst-off inmates, planned a much larger rescue operation, potentially bringing hundreds of them to Sweden.

“I walked around and whispered to myself: ‘Lakes and forests, lakes and forests.’ It became like a mantra for me,” Anika Neyssel, a 26-year-old Dutch woman interned for her involvement in the French resistance movement, said in her post-Ravensbrück testimony.

The timing was crucial. It was the final phase of the war, and as the Allies pressed on from the West and Russia’s Red Army from the East, the Nazi camp guards had drastically ramped up their efforts to eliminate any remaining evidence of their systematic atrocities. Ever since October – when camp commander Fritz Suhren had received the order to execute 2,000 prisoners per month – the white, thick smoke billowing from the crematory had become a sickening constant. But now, the ovens were working so hard, the chimneys had begun spitting out big red flames.

“Ravensbrück already had a gas chamber and a crematory, but an additional gas chamber from Auschwitz had been brought in and installed in the camp. We could literally smell the daily executions. The horror was indescribable,” Selma Van de Perre, a Jewish resistance fighter from the Netherlands recalled in her 2020 memoir “My Name Is Selma”. By then, Van de Perre wrote, she and the other inmates had already come to the same chilling conclusion:

“The Germans were panicking and wanted to leave as few witnesses as possible.”

The already poor living conditions in the camp had also worsened. Infectious diseases like Typhus, Diphtheria and Tuberculosis were spreading like wildfire, killing the weak and starved inmates like flies. But just as the women braced for the worst, dozens of buses from the Swedish Red Cross pulled up outside the camp’s barbed wire fences. For many, rescue had arrived. Between April 23 and April 25, and in several different convoys that travelled under the guise of night, some 2,500 women – most of them from Belgium, France Poland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia – were brought on the buses past the abandoned trenches and bombed-out remains of Hitler’s “Third Reich” to safety in Sweden...
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250424-from-ravensbr%C3%BCck-to-freedom-the-story-of-sweden-s-daring-white-bus-rescue

- Folke Bernadotte, wiki,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte