PositiveWall Street JournalThis is a work of nonfiction written with the narrative freedom and use of figurative language that we expect from fiction ... And though she avails herself of archival evidence, much of her narrative finds her imagining (a word she uses frequently) what it must have been like for nine women to escape annihilation together ... The history of murder that defined World War II suggests, even insists, that writers, filmmakers and artists be wary of purely aesthetic representations of the period. Yet it is the power of Ms. Strauss’s persistent sensibility that endows these events with a palpability that places them firmly in our imaginations. She concludes that these stories should be told and retold ... Numbers numb, but stories of the bliss of finding cooked potatoes in a broken world do not. Ms. Strauss does her readers—and her subjects—a worthy service by returning to this appalling history of the courage of women caught up in a time of rapacity and war.
