Lynne Olson —The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler's All-Female Concentration Camp - with Liza Mundy

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women's concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly's bestselling novel, Lilac Girls. Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80 percent of its inmates were political prisoners, among them a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance. Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, these women joined forces to defy their German captors and keep one another alive. The sisterhood's members, amid unimaginable terror and brutality, subverted Germany's war effort by refusing to do assigned work. They risked death for any infraction, but that did not stop them from defying their SS tormentors at every turn--even staging a satirical musical revue about the horrors of the camp. After the war, when many in France wanted to focus only on the future, the women from Ravensbrück refused to allow their achievements, needs, and sacrifices to be erased. They banded together once more, first to support one another in healing their bodies and minds and then to continue their crusade for freedom and justice--an effort that would have repercussions for their country and the world into the twenty-first century. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593732304?ic_referral=1cBdgpL-kHrnP60pc4x43m6cTnhjey7HR9jwY-nNWP8wM-XMuLww2uq8l6SuXgzyQ_WgTQuD22ZepqoWFFPIS8fbZ7X0ik23cbPjPuMlHrhMyWU052gq7HjsBiW_FA8vlrMw9zw Lynne Olson is the New York Times bestselling author of Empress of the Nile, Madame Fourcade's Secret War, Last Hope Island, Those Angry Days, and Citizens of London. She has been a consulting historian for the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Olson is in conversation with Liza Mundy, an award-winning journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of five books including her latest work, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA (2023). The Sisterhood recounts the true story of the women espionage officers—tough, brilliant, resilient—who helped build the world’s foremost spy agency. Her previous book, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (2017), tells another true story of women’s contributions to American intelligence, recounting the lives and legacy of more than 10,000 women recruited to break Axis codes during World War II.