This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only 49 returned to France.
The book’s whimsical but ultimately uninformative title belies a book which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling. The first 150 pages deal with the women’s Resistance activities — attending secret meetings, arranging safe passage to the free zone, running clandestine printing presses. The second part is about their experiences in the camps. As any account of life in Auschwitz inevitably must, it contains stories which are so profoundly disgusting that it is very difficult to read them at all. Much of Moorehead’s text is appallingly effective.
The author’s goal is presumably to bring alive large subjects, the Resistance and the Holocaust, by telling the story of a small part of them. Yet the emphasis on the friendship and mutual support the women offered each other seems unnecessary: it is quite normal for people, and not just women, to pull together when they are daily faced with death in wartime. In any case, some of the ways the women dealt with life in the camps sound superficial — one of them said her goal was ‘to keep alive, to remain me’. Others are deeply perplexing: in the autumn of 1943, the women staged Le malade imaginaire and one later wrote,
It was magnificent, because, while the smokestacks never stopped belching their smoke of human flesh, for two whole hours we believed in what we were doing.
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