Heroes, Victims, and Villains: Essential Books About World War II Women
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Feb 17, 2023
Christopher C. Gorham Recommends Judy Batalion, C. Sarah Soh, and More
Days after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime confidante, Anna Rosenberg, exhorted American women to “keep things going, no matter what happens… to take the men’s places in the shops and factories… We must carry on when those we hold dearest are fighting.” Like her commander-in-chief, Rosenberg knew WWII would be different from all others. “War is no longer confined to trenches and battlefields,” she said.
She was right. As never before, women were pulled by the gravity of a total war that stretched from Singapore to Stalingrad. Women risked torture and death as spies; they chronicled the war as correspondents; they built the bombers that delivered deadly payloads over enemy cities; they tormented the enemy as partisan fighters; shouldered rifles in combat; deciphered codes; and helped guide their nations as policy-makers. Some were perpetrators of violence as unspeakable as that of men. Millions were victims.
The war pulled in Anna Rosenberg, too. In 1944, just weeks after D-Day, she was racing across France with the soldiers of General Patton’s army. Anna was a special emissary of President Roosevelt, but she refused special treatment. She slept in cold tents, shared rations with the men, and saw the dead in ruined villages and cities. She also listened to their hopes and dreams should they make it home alive. The data Rosenberg collected in the war zone in 1944 and again in ’45 gave the G.I. Bill of Rights the educational thrust which would transform postwar America. But on her two missions to Nazi-occupied Europe, the ticker-tape parade down Broadway was but a dream.
Whether in New York, Paris, or Seoul, the sacrifices of wartime women were hardly known or almost immediately forgotten. War-workers took off their aprons and service-members quietly returned to civilian life, attentive to male pride and eager to settle down. Women spies kept their secrets, and women journalists handed over their microphones to their male counterparts.
In Asia, the so-called “comfort women” were, for decades, stonily silent with shame. In the Third Reich, the women who indulged in the barbaric violence against Jews remained anonymous. For the millions of girls and women who died between 1939 and 1945 the silence was eternal.
Just weeks after the end of the war, Anna Rosenberg became the first American, man or woman, to be awarded the Medal of Freedom. President Harry Truman cited her “exceptionally meritorious service in the prosecution of the war against the enemy.” For the next two decades Anna Rosenberg continued to shape American policies in war and peace before she, too, faded from the historical discussion. With The Confidante, I hope to return her to a place commensurate with her impact on modern American history.
After decades of relative silence, several recent works have uncovered the stories of the women who did their part to fight totalitarianism. As war again rages in Ukraine, where untold numbers of women died eight decades ago, these works have a timely resonance.
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of the Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
by Judy Batalion
At the bottom of a box of documents in the British Museum were dusty notebooks written in Yiddish. When Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, dusted them off she unearthed the long-lost stories of the brave Jewish women who conducted their own secret war against German soldiers from within Poland’s Jewish ghettos. In Krakow, Warsaw, and Będzin, these young women smuggled weapons, couriered coded messages, and lured flirting German soldiers to their deaths.
To do their work, some passed as Aryans, and others pretended to be Christian. Many of them, like Renia Kukielkher, were teenagers. All risked their lives. The book’s descriptions of Nazi sadism, often victimizing women and children, are difficult to read, but it makes the resourcefulness and courageousness of the “ghetto girls” all the more admirable.