The Nine Quotes

“Lise London, one of the résistantes in the same transport, remembered the moment in her memoir and, quoting Rabelais, she wrote, “Le rire est bien le propre de l’homme” (Laughter is a human trait).12 With laughter and song they would hold on to their humanity and fight back.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“Robert Faurisson”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“She didn’t tell him that she was a survivor. She had already learned not to talk about it. The first night home when she began to tell stories, her mother had shaken her head and clicked her tongue, shushing her. “That’s all in the past,” her mother had said. “Life goes on. Don’t dwell there.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“Marceline Loridan-Ivens reported that upon her return from Auschwitz one of the first questions her mother asked her in a whisper was whether she was still pure and could still be married. “She understood nothing. We were not women, we were not men, there. We were dirty Jews, things, stinking animals. They made us strip only to determine when to kill us.”11”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“US forces executed twenty-nine soldiers for rape, and twenty-five of them were African American. The executed soldiers, mostly Blacks, would be hung, as in a lynching, and this posed a problem in the land of the guillotine. A hangman was brought from Texas just to carry out the job.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“They preyed on us, just as they preyed on you. Everyone was scared to speak the truth, and that’s how we got into this mess.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“But sharing the memory of a meal allowed the women to feel human without it hurting too much. Recipes were a link to the real world, to their lives before, and to their lives in the future. And they formed a link with the other groups in the camp. Everyone eats. Everyone has a favorite meal. Not everyone can write a song or poem, but to remember a good meal is universal.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“Perhaps we need to wonder about our tendency to form hierarchies of suffering, especially when those hierarchies are based on a concept of female purity. A more truthful accounting would recognize that women have had to bear the burden of war far more than has been acknowledged.”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany

“Sans haine mais sans oubli (Without hate but without forgetting),”
― Gwen Strauss, The Nine: How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany - The Powerful True Story