How 9 women escaped a Nazi death march

When Gwen Strauss’s great-aunt revealed that she had led a group of nine Resistance women in an escape from a death march nazi In 1945, Gwen wanted to know more.

Her desire led her on a path where she walked in the footsteps of those women and ensured that her bravery was recognized more than 75 years later.

In 2002, Gwen Strauss was enjoying a relaxed lunch with her 83-year-old great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky.

Hélène was French and Gwen, an American author, lives in France.

The conversation focused on Hélène’s past. Gwen knew that her great-aunt had worked in the Resistance in France during WWII, but she knew nothing about that time in her life.

Hélène told him how she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and deported to Germany to a concentration camp. As the Allies approached, the camp was evacuated and she was forced to walk miles on a Nazi death march.

“Then I ran away with a group of women”He said briefly.

Gwen was amazed.

“She was nearing the end of her life, I think she felt ready to talk about it,” says Gwen.

“Many survivors who were silent for years, when they spoke they did not speak with their immediate family, but with someone a little distant.”

Elegant and forceful

Hélène Podliasky was only 24 years old when she was arrested while working as a liaison officer for the Resistance in north-eastern France. His War name, or alias, it was Christine. Hélène spoke five languages, including German, and was a highly qualified engineer.

“He had a high position in the Resistance”, dice Gwen.

“He had been working for over a year contacting agents and guiding parachute drops.

“It was brilliant. An elegant person, calm, but forceful ”.

It was the last years of the war, and Hélène had been arrested in 1944 after a great push from the Nazis to try to break all the networks of the Resistance in France.

At this time eight other women were also arrested. A friend from Hélène’s school among them.

The other 8

Suzanne Maudet (War name: Zaza) was optimistic, kind and generous.

A month after she married a Resistance member, René Maudet, at the age of 22, the couple was arrested for helping French youths clandestinely escape the Resistance instead of being recruited to work in German factories.

“Then there was Nicole Clarence, who was in charge of all the liaison officers throughout the Paris region, ”says Gwen, putting her in immense danger.

At just 22 years old, she was arrested three weeks before the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and deported in the last transport out of the city.

Jacqueline Aubéry du Boulley (Jacky) was also one of the last prisoners taken from Paris.

Jacky, 29, was the oldest of the group, a war widow and part of a key intelligence network in the Resistance. She had been raised by an aunt and uncle since her father was a sailor and was at sea.

“When he got home, she moved in with him,” says Gwen. “She spoke like a sailor and spoke her mind. He smoked all the time, he had a very deep and serious voice. It was tough. “

Gwen also describes her as incredibly loyal and caring.

Madelon Verstijnen (Lon) y Guillemette Daendels (Guigui) were 27 and 23 years old when they were arrested. Good friends, they came from upper-class Dutch families.

“They came to Paris to join the Dutch network, but they were immediately arrested,” says Gwen. “Guigui was athletic, ethereal, and serene, while Lon was the type of person who had to be in the middle of it all.”

Gwen refers to Renée Lebon Châtenay (Zinka) as “unbelievably brave.” Described by Lon as a “little doll”, Zinka was said to be short with blonde curls and a gap between her front teeth.

She and her husband worked for a network that helped British airmen escape back to England.

Zinka was arrested at the age of 29, and had a baby in prison that she named France. She was only allowed to stay with her baby for 18 days, and Zinka was deported to Germany.

Zinka always said that she had to survive for her daughter.

Then there was Yvonne Le Guillou (Men). Gwen describes her as a working-class girl who “loved to be in love.” She was working with the Dutch networks in Paris and at that time she had fallen in love with a Dutch boy. She was arrested at the age of 22.

The youngest of the 9 was Joséphine Bordanava (Josée), who was only 20 years old when she was arrested in Marseille. She was Spanish, and had the most beautiful singing voice.

Josée calmed and reassured the children by singing to them.

The 9 were transferred to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women in northern Germany, and then sent to work in a labor camp in Leipzig making weapons.

It was there that they forged a strong friendship.

Painful hunger

Conditions in the field were dire.

They were starved, tortured, stripped and forced to stand in the frozen snow to inspect them.

They survived creating a network of friendship.

At the camp they had a tradition, says Gwen, which consisted of passing out a solidarity bowl and everyone put a spoonful of their soup. Then they gave the bowl to the woman who needed it most that day.

Hunger was painful, but women found it reassuring to talk about food.

Every night Nicole recited her recipes for chestnut cream or a bavarian with strawberries soaked in kirsch.

She would write them on scraps of paper that they had managed to steal from the office and Nicole turned it into a recipe book with part of her mattress forming the cover.

Freedom

When Gwen recorded Hélène’s full account of what happened, she says her great-aunt wanted her to know that although they were incarcerated, they were still soldiers, and together they sabotaged the making of the projectiles for a weapon called panzerfaust.

By April 1945, the Allies had bombed the factory so many times that the Nazis decided to evacuate the camp, driving 5,000 starving and exhausted women in fine clothing and bleeding blistered feet east through the German countryside.

The women were aware of how dangerous this march was.

“They knew they only had one option,” says Gwen, “they had to escape or they would kill them or starve “.

“So they found a moment where there was some kind of chaos, they jumped into a ditch and pretended they were corpses. There were so many piles of corpses that it worked and the march continued without them. “

For the next ten days, the women searched for American soldiers who were in the front line of combat.

Jacky had diphtheria; Zinka, tuberculosis; Nicole was recovering from pneumonia; Hélène had chronic hip pain. They had broken bones and they were starving, but they were determined to find freedom together.

The odyssey

It took a lot of detective work and three trips to Germany to uncover the exact route the women took.

What surprised Gwen, as she retraced the steps of the women, was how little progress they made each day.

“Sometimes they only traveled 5 or 6 km,” he says.

“They needed food and a safe place to sleep, so they had to go to the villages and talk to the people, but every time they did it it was very dangerous because they could fall into a trap or be killed by the villagers ”.

Hélène and Lon, who spoke German, always went ahead to ask the village chief for permission to sleep in a barn or get food.

“They soon decided that the best strategy was to act like there was nothing wrong with them being there, pretending they weren’t afraid,” says Gwen.

The river

They finally learned that the Americans were on the other side of the Mulde River in Saxony, Germany, and that was the last hurdle they had to overcome.

“For me, the most moving thing was standing on the Mulde bridge and looking at the river,” says Gwen.

She had found information about the women in the nine o’clock military archives, in some of the accounts they wrote about their escape, from filmmakers who had researched Lon’s story, and talking to the women’s families.

I had discovered that crossing the river was one of the most distressing moments for women during elopement.

When they reached the other side, there was a moment when some of them feared they could not continue.

Jacky could hardly breathe, but the women were determined that no one was left behind. At that moment, they heard the roar of a Jeep and two American soldiers jumped out, offering them security and a cigarette.

abnormal life

During her research, Gwen discovered how difficult it was for women to return to normal life after the war.

“They looked haggard and they looked terrible. Also, there was a kind of shame in being a woman who had been in a field and a kind of loneliness as well, ”says Gwen.

“They were so close as a group and suddenly they dispersed and were left with people they couldn’t talk to, people who didn’t want to listen to them “.

“It must have been a psychological isolation. I think it’s like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but not recognized, because they weren’t considered soldiers. “

As young women, they had often been told to keep their stories a secret after the war, so their heroism went unnoticed.

“Of the 1,038 Compagnons de la Libération, which was the group that [el presidente Charles de Gaulle] considered as the leaders of the Resistance, there were six women, and four of them were already dead, ”says Gwen.

“That is ridiculous, because the Resistance was probably made up of at least 50% women.”

Some of them decided to leave the past behind, but others, like Guigui and Mena, remained friends for life and were godmothers to each other’s children.

“The women met again much later, when my aunt told me the story. The surviving group had a little reunion, ”says Gwen.

The baby

What happened to France, Zinka’s baby?

Gwen searched for her for a long time until “by strange coincidence I found her and went to see her in the south of France.”

“Told me: ‘Imagine, after 70 years I found out all this about my mother.”.

France was reunited with her mother after the war, but Zinka was very ill and had to undergo multiple operations due to the tuberculosis she had contracted in the concentration camp.

Zinka was sometimes too weak to care for her as a child, and she was often sent to live with other family members.

Zinka died in 1978, without France knowing the story of her mother’s escape.

“He didn’t know how important it had been to his mother,” says Gwen, “and to her survival.”

Great-aunt

Great-aunt Hélène passed away in 2012.

Towards the end of her life there were times when it became clear that she was still haunted by the past, says Gwen, in her book “The Nine” (Nine o’clock).

“Women endure the brunt of war in profound and unacknowledged ways, and I want that to be recognized and known,” says Gwen.

However, Gwen also wants “incredible acts of kindness and generosity” to be recognized.

“All these little ways they were held up are so beautiful that I think they should be celebrated as well.”.

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