This is an eye-hop podcast, guaranteed human.
It's that time to put on your jersey and wave your flag.
Whoever you root for. Why do I wash the world up? That's like asking me, "Why do I breed?" And it's beautiful. The guys are young and cute and fit.
It's not, yes, I mean, it's your culture. I think watching it was my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari and this is American Football. I show about soccer culture in the U.S. and it's underdog roots.
Listen to American football on the eye-heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now.”
There's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, How to Copy. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving, on-air chats.
Listen to Joy 101 on the eye-heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with How to Copy is presented by CVS. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It's scared the hell out of me.
Evil wake up. I'm the one that saw the murder.
“Take place by treating that end of the hippo.”
Anthony DiPipo showed no signs of remorse, appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grave. Listen to the devil's quarre in the bone valley feed on the eye-heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC]
Hi, listeners, I'm Michelle, host of the Kingdom of Fraud podcast. It's the story of a devote polygamist from Utah, a fearsome Armenian businessman in L.A.
and their $1 billion fraud conspiracy.
I'm excited to share the story with you, and want to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of Kingdom of Fraud 100% ad-free when an eye-heart true prime-plus subscription. Available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of Kingdom of Fraud one week ahead of everyone else. Available only to eye-heart true prime-plus subscribers.
So don't wait, head to Apple podcasts, search for eye-heart true crime plus, and subscribe today. [MUSIC] Hi, listeners, I wanted to give you a heads up that this story discusses concentration camps in Nazi Germany. There will be some mentions of torture and violence, but you'll also get to hear about nine
“amazing female resistance fighters, and how their friendship was the key to their survival.”
[MUSIC] Thousands of women are marching. They are organised in rows of five blocks of 100 and groups of a thousand. They are wearing wooden clogs that scratch and slip on the dirt road. Their thin coats are emblazoned with a thick white cross on the back.
They are marked as prisoners. It is spring 1945, we are in Germany, and the writing is on the wall for the Nazis. Heinrich Hymler has ordered the evacuation of all concentration camps. These women are on a death march. They don't know where they're going.
They just know that they have to keep walking. If they stumble out of line, they'll be shot. Besides the road is a ditch, and they're in the ditch, and nine women. They are arranged in a pile like corpses, but they're alive. Elaine is the leader of this group of women, and she has a plan.
If she and her friends can pull it off, they will finally be free. They have all suffered torture, starvation, force labor, and disease. But through all of that, they also had each other. Wicked jokes, rebellious schemes, and tender nurturing support.
They never stopped fighting.
From Elaine's position, face down in the mud. All she can hear is the third, third, third of clogs trooping past.
Her body is completely motionless, but her heart is racing.
She listens intently, until the final few steps disappear into the distance.
“Then, she grabs her friends' hands and runs.”
I'm Anna-Synfield, and from the teams at novel and eye-hot podcasts. This is the girlfriend's spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning. [music] Today, Elaine outsmarts the Nazis. For as long as she's known her, Gwen Strauss has admired her great aunt,
Elaine. She was brilliant, especially for her time. She was highly educated. She was a chemist, and also a mathematician, and she continued to work her whole life after the war. I obviously knew her more as an elderly woman in her 80s, 90s.
She was very elegant when I knew her always really well-dressed. She was sort of Chanel, fashion,
beautiful, tailored outfits. She showed it to had beautifully manicured fingernails, and had a lovely voice as well, and spoke gorgeous French, and also spoke English really well, and she also spoke Russian and Polish and German. She was a polyglot. She was an incredibly good linguist. Gwen knew that Elaine was impressive, but she didn't know just how seriously impressive she was, until one day when they were having lunch. She started telling me this incredible
“story. I was so, that was Guards Mac. I mean, I was just like, are you kidding?”
Elaine tells Gwen a story that starts back in 1943, four years into the Second World War. Elaine is in her early twenties, living in Paris. The city, and most of the rest of France, is under Nazi occupation. Elaine's father, a Lithuanian Russian Jew, has fled the country with her mother. It had gone to Switzerland, and left her behind, and she supposedly was behind to continue her studies. And also she had a job at a factory there, as a chemist, but she stayed behind
actually to work in those systems. 23-year-old Elaine had joined the French resistance, a group of ordinary citizens who opposed the Nazi occupation of France. They did everything they could to undermine the regime. Elaine was involved in all sorts of operations, but some of the most high-risk involved organizing secret parachute drops from the Allies. She would listen to the radio and wait for messages from Britain that were hidden in BBC broadcasts. She would then crack
the codes to discover where and when the next drop would be. Then she would organize a group of fighters to be there to receive it. She would liars with all the different resistance groups and have
the field ready for when the plane would come and it would always be on a full moon or a few days
around the full moon because the plane had to have some visibility, but that also makes you very visible. So she had to choose the right kind of place where it was far enough away from people perhaps seeing it. Elaine and her band of comrades would hide in the shadows of trees and hedges bordering the field. And then when they heard the little single engine plane probably coming from England, first they would do a shoot with a signal, like a flashlight flashing signal to the plane.
And if the planes would go back, they would all around the perimeter, they would light flashlights or lanterns. So they would light up a runway. When they made the drop, they had to very quickly dig a hole and bury the white parachutes. These beautiful silk parachutes, which she said she
always wanted to keep to make clothes with, but couldn't. Once they had buried the parachute,
that terror from the parcel that was attached to it. A lot of times it was arms, it was guns, sometimes explosives, sometimes she said it was things like cigarettes, chocolate, you know, and also money to pay the resistance. And then she had to make sure that everybody got away quickly because you had about 20 minutes before Gestapo or police would come to where they'd heard an airplane. And I must have been quite a dangerous thing to do, because I mean, if you're called mid-happening,
there's no, you don't deny that. Right, exactly. The life of a person in the resistance was quite short lived. It was really hard to keep things secret. And especially the region where she was working with Germans had a sense that there was a vulnerable area. So they were definitely trying to break
“the resistance and find those networks. How do you feel about your own doing all of this stuff?”
I'm super proud. I mean, I asked her, when I talked to her about it, I said, how did you, you know, why were you so brave? Like, well, how could you do that? And she said she didn't even think about it because I had to. And I think she was appalled by how quickly France
Capitulated at the beginning of the war.
So for her, it was almost innate that you had to fight against fascism and the Nazis. My great great uncle was a bit of a war hero. And the famous line that people quote in books and any memorials or whatever, I actually have the tattooed. Oh really? So it's duty called and
called me to obey. And he did some crazy stuff during the First World War. And he wrote that
in a letter on his deathbed to his fiance. And I think it really sums up how a lot of people who grew up in times that we can't even imagine exactly, based with the horror of war. There's
“no choice. This is what you do. It's what you have to do. Yeah, yeah, completely. That's a beautiful”
it's a good line. Yeah. Yeah, my god of war hero and a poet. What can you do? A lentil grant about the parachute drops. But that's not even a half of what she was involved in. She was also the person that was often sent around France to vet potential new resistance people, men. She was a beautiful woman and she could travel more easily than men and she would go and check them out and see if they were trustworthy. Wow. In her early 20s. Yeah. How did she rise to those
ranks? She was scouted by a British officer who met her and he's the one that hired her to head that section of the SOE. You only hired eleven people. So he must have thought that she was capable of it. The average time that someone lasted in the resistance was around three to six months. Usually by then they had been arrested, possibly tortured for information or even
“deported to a concentration camp. LN managed to defy the odds and keep going for about 10 months.”
But then on the fourth of February 1944, her luck ran out. She had a message that she had to give to someone named General Alar and it was sewn in the lining of a purse that she was carrying. People actually did that. Yeah. Yeah. And right when she walked into the cafe, somebody at the back of the cafe turned out it was General Alar now got up and ran out and then she turned around and behind her in came the police. So she just moved over and sat down as if she
was coming to the cafe and acted as if she was just a normal client. And then they just basically took everybody in the cafe. She would round up. And she was terrified that they would find the note
in the lining of her purse. They never did. So for a few days, she felt that nothing would happen.
And she was told by the Germans, oh, it's not a big deal. We just have to check your paperwork and
“you should be like, oh, soon. But while she was in prison and while they were checking out”
who was who and whose papers were in order, that's when suddenly she could feel that everything had changed towards her and they they must have broken somebody under torture or something. Somebody spoke and turned her in because then she was suddenly taken from that jail and taken to Anger to the prison there where she was I think a couple of months and where she told me she was that Anger is always from me the the symbol of suffering.
The life of a prisoner at Anger was bleak. She was alone in a cell. She was handcuffed. I know that they waterboarded her. I know that they pulled out her fingernails and that she would often be sent back to her cell in a stretcher. She had lifelong injuries from that time. Even in this most desperate situation, I then found a way to stay strong. She worked out very complicated mathematical formulas on her cell wall to pass the time. She wrote the formula
for me down and I asked my sister who's a mathematician with the formula was about and it's a formula that's sort of unsolved into one of these enigma's and mathematics and it's about trying to find unreal numbers. So it's this kind of interesting dilemma to be working on when you're in such a limited space of a cell. It's almost like she was trying to go to outer space with her mathematics on the walls. And then was just 24 years old when she was arrested.
Her parents hiding in Switzerland still thought she was a student back in Paris. She didn't want to get word to her parents because she didn't want to put them in danger but she sent a note to a friend of her godfather's and the guard did this German guard sent the note for her. And so she then got a package from her mother while she was in that cell and she said that's
when she first cried because when she saw her mother's handwriting, she just crumpled her knees.
It was real then. In a way she said once she knew that they knew then she felt all of the suffering that she was trying to stoically keep in. I can imagine it would feel so wrong to have something like her mother's writing this woman who's there to comfort her and is from this side of her life which is so separate to be in such a hostile environment. Absolutely, I think that's exactly right. I think you're very stood. She doesn't belong there to the mother, yeah.
A land is imprisoned in on chair for two months.
she hears something that sounds kind of like hope. In the distance, there are explosions,
D-Day has arrived and the Allies are landing on the shores of Normandy. The German guard said, you know tomorrow I'll be a prisoner and you'll be free. But that night they started to execute all the male prisoners in Austria and she could hear them being executed throughout the night in the courtyard. Thinking that in any minute it would be her turn. But instead they put her and some other women in a train so she ended up in Germany. It's clear that the Allies have the upper hand
and the occupying Germans are beginning to panic. A land is first sent to the Ravensbrook concentration camp
where she faces violent treatment and profound hunger and then she is transported again.
“This time to a forced labour camp in Leipzig. Here she will meet eight women who will be the key”
to her survival. After the break, meet the nine. In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It scared the hell out of me.
That was your first murder case. Yes, sure. It's fair to say this was the biggest case here,
career. Yes, right, the murder of her child is 12 year old child. Balsy gets. I would think so. Take place by crevents and Dippippo. Anthony Dippippo showed no signs of remorse appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grief. Listen to the devil's quarry on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear the devil's quarry add free with exclusive content. Subscribe to Love of For Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans,
“the announcers calling the place soccer, football. It's home. Why do I wish to walk up?”
That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. I think watching it was my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernando Chavari and this is American football. I show about soccer culture in the U.S. and it's under dog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is accessible. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head which cracked my skull. It is an American game.
The Brazilian don't like hearing that though. Are they the only ones that don't like it? Actually, nobody likes that. As we get ready for the men's world cup this summer, listen to American football as part of the Michael Thuda podcast network available on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Katt V host of the podcast. Joy 101 with Hoda Katt V together. We're going to have
meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people like when actress Olivia Mann shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and it helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand post-partner question. I was not prepared for post-partner anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Katt V on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about
“in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into”
the forensics. Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. IHeart open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.
Until a few months ago, a Lenn was a free woman cycling her bike through the ...
and commanding groups of resistance fighters to carry out thrilling operations. Now she was hundreds of miles away from her home at a German forced labor camp called Hassag Leipzig. They're using these women as labor. They were making pants a fast, which are these grenade launchers. Because she was young and strong, she along with a group of women with chosen to go work in this factory. They were on the same sort of work unit together and they became quite
close and really a strong friendship and bond of helping each other out.
“Gwann is going to introduce you to these nine women. But don't worry, you don't need to remember”
all the details. I just want you to be able to picture this incredible gang of young women.
Age between 20 and 29. The youngest was Joseph. She was Spanish and apparently very beautiful and had a gorgeous singing voice. So they all remember her singing. Then there was Reney, who used the code name Zinka. She'd gotten the rest of watchers pregnant. But as soon as the baby was born, whom she named the baby France, of course, very patriotic. They took the baby away from her and then she was deported. But she basically was wanted to get back to France to both the country and her daughter.
And she was very little and very brave. Everyone said she was the most brave amongst them. There was Zaza. Zaza's very funny, very positive, very optimistic. I would say. Two of the women were Dutch, Long and Gigi, who had come to France to join the resistance, but they'd walked right into a trap and the very next day they were arrested by the Gestapo.
“There's also Minna, who sounds like great fun. Minna was this working class girl from Brittany,”
who said she joined the resistance because she was in love with a guy. She loved to be in love big flirt. Jacqueline was the oldest of the group. She was 29. She was a widow. She's the one that had diphtheria, smoke like a chimney when she could when she had cigarettes. And also it's for like a
sailor. Eighth girlfriend is Nicole. She was amazing in the resistance, first working in Leol and
almost caught by Clouse Barbie. In her escape to Paris where she was going to join another unit of the resistance in Paris, she was dressed as a nurse and the train got bombed and then she had to act as if she was a nurse. So terrifying. And number nine is Elene. Gwyn's great aunt, the chemistry physics, maths genius, who can also speak five languages. So that's the nine. Jose Zincar Zaza Lone Gigi Minna Jacqueline Nicole and Elene. Brave, young resistance fighters
from across Europe. There were all different, you know, there were different social
“economic classes and different political beliefs and different, you know, different in every way”
and yet they managed to be great friends and all those kind of differences didn't matter.
They were very much united in helping each other survive.
I'm struck by her relatable these women sound. I could attribute big flirt, great singing voice and swears like a sailor to half of my home girl gang. As because, of course, they were in many ways just normal girls, but they weren't in a normal situation. Their experiences at the camp were horrific. The women worked 12 hour shifts, seven days a week in the factory. Every day each of them had to move seven tons of iron grenade
shells. They were told the motto of the camp was whoever doesn't work, doesn't eat. But even if you did work, you were only given starvation rations, just enough to keep you alive. Disease and injury became the norm, but at least the women had each other. They were incredibly solid air, you know, they had such solidarity with each other, like just beautiful stories. The one that I find really moving, they had a thing called the bowl of solidarity
and at night, they just had two meals a day. Well, bread in the morning, and then they had like a watery super night. If you felt like you could, you'd take a spoonful out of your bowl, you'd put it in this other bowl, and they would decide each night who deserved that bowl the most. So, whoever was at their lowest, whoever was depressed, whoever had might have heard that their child had died or their husband had died, they would give that bowl to that person.
It wasn't doggy to dog at all. It was this idea that we can only survive if we help each other. That's really beautiful. It's really beautiful. And you find it in the female camps. You find it amongst the women. Yeah, it's a very nurturing form of looking out for each other. Yeah, and it's a form of resistance, actually. You know, I'm not going to submit to this really violent brutal way of being treated by treating everyone else around me the equally the way.
Yeah, I'm going to maintain my humanity by being generous and humane. Another way in which the women keep hold of their sanity and the camp is through remarkable creativity. A whole group of the women there with the French women were from the hat-making area of Paris. Oh, cool to you. And so there's a French tradition that no longer is celebrated,
It's a certain day of the year when unmarried women would all wear these real...
and dance. And so these women made these hats for the women who were not married for the young girls,
“and they all wore them and they danced and they were saying, "Well, we're making them out of."”
Well, that's stolen scraps of wire or they were tear apart to their mattress or recuperated stuff.
Yeah, just incredible. And the other thing that they did, they made cookbooks,
which is kind of hard to imagine, but Nicole had one, and actually Gigi had one, starving people love to talk about food. And so they started to write down the recipes on unscrathed paper and pass them around to each other in the different barracks and share these meals, and then they collected them and they made these little cookbooks, which they kept hidden because they thought people wouldn't understand about it. And they would think that we were just
frivolously making recipes, but it was really because they were starving. That is just like one of the most beautiful things ever. I know. Have you seen one of the cookbooks? Yeah, I've seen Gigi's cookbook. Yeah. What kind of recipes are you? I mean, they're really full of sugar and butter and cream and eggs. Like everything you would want if you were starving and meat and like ladles of fat poured over
noodles. Yeah, there's no grit, so courage. No, no. What's amazing is that despite everything,
these women still had their fighting spirits, and none more so than a laden. Because she spoke German really well, she befriended the head of the factory, this guy named Fritz Stupitz.
“They became quite close. I think he fell in love with her, frankly, and he hated the war,”
and he was trying to help her escape. And he also put her in a position where she could sabotage the factory. He put her in charge of the thermostats, and so she was able to rig the thermostats, so that in the middle of tempering the shells, the ovens would turn off, and then they would turn back on at the end, so they would come out red hot, but they had not been properly treated, so they would blow up in the face of the soldiers, so these were really defective, and they kept
getting inspected, but no one could ever believe that these starving women were capable of such
sophisticated sabotage, so they were never caught. That is so cool. It's gruesome, but
it's gruesome, and also she didn't stop resisting, you know, she was fighting all the way through, and she told me that when she figured out how to sabotage the production, she felt so happy,
“like it was actually dead, she was still a soldier, she wasn't just waiting to die.”
The Allies knew that the camp was a munitions factory, and so it was often bombed. Many women did die in these bombings, but the nine survived, and in April of 1945, their time at the camp came to a sudden end. The fact she was completely bombed, and no longer functional, it was getting close to them to wear anyway. It was snowing, it was cold, the Germans started to line everybody up in the central courtyard to start a death march, as they were doing in all the camps.
Himlah had issued an order to evacuate all concentration camps. The Nazis knew they were losing. They didn't want the prisoners to fall into enemy hands, and provide evidence of Nazi war crimes. The 5,000 women from Hassag likesig were ordered to assemble outside in the freezing night air. They were told to get information and march. They didn't know why, or where they were going. A land clung to her eight friends. They were determined not to get separated.
After the break, a landspots, a golden opportunity. In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It scared the hell out of me. That was your first murder case. Yes, yeah.
Fear to see this was the biggest case here, career. Yes, sir. Right, the murder of a child is probably more challenging. The battles against. I would think so. People wake up and the woman saw the murder, paid place by crevents and the people.
Anthony DiPipo showed no signs of remorse, appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said, "I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grave." Listen to the devil's quarry on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the devil's quarry add free with exclusive content, subscribe to Love of Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I love the sounds, the buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, ...
the place soccer, football, at home. Why do I watch the world cup? That's like asking me,
why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. I make watching it with my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernando Chavari and this is American Football. I show about soccer culture in the U.S., and it's under dog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great.
I saw a game this festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game.
“The Brazilians don't like hearing that though. Are they the only ones I don't like?”
Actually, nobody likes that. As we get ready for the men's world cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the Michael Thuda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hodakot. Be host of the podcast. Joy 101 with Hodakot. Be together. We're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people.
Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges, I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand post-partner question. I was not prepared for post-partner anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hodakot. Be on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science, behind these cases that we hear about in the news,
“body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics.”
Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. [Music] As they marched away from Leipzig, the temperatures dropped and the mud froze onto their feet. And then, and the rest of the nine managed to stay close together.
Along with thousands of other women, they marched all day and all night. Now at this point, a lot of them are really near the end of their rope, physically. And so people were collapsing and there were a lot of executions along the way. If you stumbled or stepped out of line, the soldiers would shoot you. There was no food, there was no water. There was sort of no plan.
After 20 hours of walking, they come to a field, ringed with Bob Dwyer. They're allowed to stop here for the night, and the nine claps in a heap. But a land weren't rest. Not yet. A land and lawn started to talk in Leipzig, so we know they're going to kill us at the end of this, or we're going to die, so we have to escape. And they made a plan that the next night
they would escape together. This plan gives them something to live for. They allowed themselves to hope. They were sitting in a circle and they each said
“what they would do if they were free. Do you know what some of them said?”
A land said she would go back to school, she wanted to do more training in math. Men asked that she wanted to sit with her grandmother by the sea. The Jacqueline said she wanted to be in a French cafe and have a glass of wine. That's cigarette. Of course, Zincas said she wanted to see her daughter, France,
and lawn wanted to see her brother. She would never find her brother.
So each talked about what they would do when they got free, and then they had this plan. The next day, the march begins again. The nine start trudging forward, pulled along by the anticipation of their escape that night. But their opportunity comes sooner than expected. They were walking by these large, calls of fields as yellow flowers in the spring and this woman ran into the fields in start to eat the flowers and nobody shot her. Whereas the day before a woman
was shot for picking up a fallen apple on the road, the march has become stretched out along the road. The guards in front and behind a suddenly out of sight. A land notices, oh my god, there's no one watching us and she whispers to the person next where this is when we should go. And there's a little bit of back and forth. Oh wait, we said we
go tonight. Are you sure they're scared? But finally, it's sort of like a greed. I think it's Zincas
that says no, we need to go now. And they slid off into the ditch along the road. And the whole time there had been these piles of corpses because people were being executed all the time. So they basically piled on top of each other like a pile of dead bodies and let the march continue
Past them.
the ditch and run away from the road and into the fields. Then they collapsed because they were
“so exhausted. And there's a moment then when they're catching their breath and kind of”
incredibly euphoric because they've escaped. Also at that moment, strangely Nicole doesn't want to go on. She's just to have pneumonia and her last bit of strength was to to this escape. And she says to them, "Just leave me. I'm okay. At least I'll die free. This is all I wanted." And they, they won't let her. They're like no. The nine are desperate to find a way back to France, but they're stranded in the middle of the German countryside. A landscape that is getting
more volatile and dangerous by the day. The Americans are sweeping across Germany, taking over towns and cities from the Nazis and liberating concentration camps. The Soviet army is also on the ground, doing the same. They were trying to get to the Americans. They didn't know where the Americans were and they just didn't want to get caught by the Russians. The Russians soldiers were famously brutal in rapists. And obviously, the Americans had this kind of mythological
virus. Heroes, right? The women get to their feet and begin walking towards assessment
that they can see in the distance. First they get to a town and the burger monster comes out
and he says you've escaped. I'm going to call the police. He yells at them. He said, "You know, you're a shameful Jewish." He's like, "The police are going to come get you and he walks away and they're like, "What?" And they ran away. He thought that they would just neatly stand there. And then they noticed that they need to keep their wits about them. If they're going to make it to the Americans alive, but they also desperately need to rest. They couldn't really move very fast
as a group. They were in such bad shape physically. They were starving. They were exhausted. They find some really kind, Yugoslav prisoners who find a place for them to go in this
hay barn and who bring them some food. And there's a description of them eating. They all described
this moment of eating bread and cream and coffee to look like jam. Oh, I'm so proud. Someone gave them fat and sugar. Yeah. And Nicole remembered eating that and crying and realizing that only a few hours earlier, she was ready to die. Unless she's sitting in the sun, eating this feast really. Wow. Yeah. The nine needed to figure out how to survive the next few days. They take an inventory of their meek of possessions. And among them, they have a needle and thread, some wire cutters,
and most importantly, civilian dress. And then had traded some food for something she could wear that wouldn't mark her out as a prisoner. And then would wear the dress and she would go into the town. Her German was perfect, so she could pass as a German person. And she would scope it out and find somebody and ask them to help. And then they would find a place that they could sleep, and maybe even a place that they could get a meal, get some information. While these stories
of the nine's ingenuity and camaraderie are heartwarming, it's important not to understand the level of danger that they were in at all times. There were these robbing gangs of Germans rounding up escape prisoners and hanging them. There were people just put into barns and the barns
“that I'm fire, the last few months of the war. Friends eat, and friends eat deadly time, right?”
The nine are on the road for ten days, surviving on just their wits and the kindness of strangers. Eventually, they get to the river mold. They've been told that they will find the Americans on the other side, but there's a problem. All the bridges have been bombed. To cross the river, they have to descend a precarious ladder from the bank and scramble across wet, slimy boulders in their prison issue clocks. It was spring so the river is really raging and several of them
couldn't swim. They're almost falling. They lose some of their really cherished possessions and the river. They've lost their shoes and the river, you know, it's just crazy crazy. All nine women make it across the river alive and run into the nearby forest. But this final effort has pushed them to the very edge. They are wet and shivering, and they are so hungry. They know that the Americans have a basin called it, but that's still 15 kilometers away. That distance feels impossible.
There's a point when they hit a dirt road and three of them sit down and say they can't move.
“They're not getting up again. And a land is like you have to. We're not leaving you here.”
We'll give you 10 minutes and then we're going. So you have to get up. And they're looking down the road and they see a car coming. They think it's German SS coming towards them and she's
Trying to get them to get up, get up, get up so we can run into the woods and...
realizes that the license plate on the car is weird. It's not German. And then she realized it's two
“American soldiers. It's all just fine them and like ask them if they want chewing gum. I mean,”
it's real cliche. They all climb into their Jeep and they bring them back to the base. Did Ellen tell you what she felt in that moment? She didn't. I got that from the other women's
accounts about how amazing it was. I mean, lawn just apparently according to her daughter,
ever since her mother had a thing from men in uniform. Like any American in any uniform, her mother was just like the greatest thing ever. They took them to the town. They actually kicked out a German couple who were in their house and requested it for the women and said, this is your house now. I know in front of them and the Germans were protesting. They said, this is what you did to them. It's a brutal time. But in the house, they could take a bath. There was food. I found
“clothes. They all slept in the same bed together because it couldn't stand to be a part.”
And all of the women survived. All of them survived. Yeah.
The nine had survived the months at the concentration camp. The starvation rations and lethal
working conditions. They had survived the death march with its indiscriminate shootings. They survived 10 days on the run. Now really avoiding snipers and lynch mobs. And now here they all were. Elaine Saza, Zincar, Lawn, Menna, Gigi, Jackie, Nicole and Jose tucked up together in a feather bed with American soldiers guarding the door to keep them safe. The nine had made it together. Millions of others did not.
It takes a while in all the chaos of the end of the war. But eventually the women are repatriated. All but two. Jacqueline, a trained nurse, stays behind to set up a hospital for refugees to sick to travel and a land. A land end of it becoming the system to the general. She became like the translator for him. She stayed behind and worked with him for several months. And to thank her, he let her use his cattle or Chevrolet. It was like one of these big American cars with a big
star painted on it. And then she was allowed to take the car and drive back to France. Where she drove to see her parents. She drove into their town. And the parents came running out and saw her. Drive up in this big. She's like a scene for a minute. And she had like American uniform on the khaki bang. Yeah, yeah, she drove. And then it was quite a shame. Everyone must be eyes on her. Yeah, because actually her father had thought that she was dead. And so her mother said,
"You see, I said she was alive." She was like, "I must have thought here's hallucinating when she arrived, and then that car." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When the women from the concentration camps were time
time, they didn't always get the welcome they deserved. It was a very traumatic experience for the
women. Because they didn't look like anything that they had looked like before. They were emaciated. Some of them still bald. And these families were just horrified to see these women.
“And also you have to understand that Paris had been liberated already for a year by the time”
the women get home. So there was also a kind of almost discussed with them like we don't need this reminder. There was also a profound double standard applied to the women who had fought in the resistance and survived the camps. Men were commended for their bravery, but the women were treated with disdain. This is one of the reasons it took our land so long to tell her story. It was considered shameful if you had been in the resistance and young and survived and meant you had slept around
or been a prostitute. So it meant that you were no longer sure. That's a lot of the reason there was a lot of silence about it after the war. People didn't talk about it. They also erased the amount of work that women did in the resistance. Pretended it didn't happen. Gwen was so inspired by her great Aunt story that she decided to write an article about a land and the rest of the nine. But once she started researching, she realized that there was
so much more to the story that she needed to know. It couldn't just be an article. It had to be a book. Gwen spent years trawling through documents, working with Archivists and traveling around Germany in order to piece it all together. And now thanks to her thorough research, we know what happened to every single member of the nine after their escape. We couldn't do all of their stories just as
Here.
details from the time they spent together. By the time Gwen started writing her book, all of the women had passed away. So instead, she made contact with their family members in order
“to see if they knew any more information and to share some of her own discoveries. And I think”
the most beautiful example of this is the story of how Gwen found Syngar's baby France. That's actually one of the great experiences from his writer. It was really hard to figure out who Syngar was because her name was Renee Le Bonne, which is like there's three gazillion of them in France. Anyway, it took a long time from me to figure out who she was. Gwen carried out some very impressive detective work and eventually tracked down a young and psychoanalyst living in France,
who she saw just might be Syngar's second child. So I emailed him and I said, I don't know if you were actually the son of this woman that I'm trying to write about, but she was known as Zincar, and I give him the whole little reveal and he goes, "Yes, yes, I was my mother and do you want to talk to my sister, France?" And I was like, oh my gosh, it's because it's just so, it's
“since the beginning I had realized that France was born in the prison in 1943. So she could”
easily still be alive. So from the beginning I was trying to find her. So then I emailed her and she lives a couple hours away from me. So I drove out, I know, really close by and I drove up to see her with my daughter and there she was and she started to cry, I started to cry like we kind of fell into each other's arms hugging and crying and I'm going to cry now anyway. I said, you wouldn't believe how long I've been looking for you. And she said, well,
imagine me finding all this about my mother seven years later. So she and I had a whole long day talking and her experience of her mother wasn't abandonment. Because after the war, she was reunited with her mother, but her mother was quite ill. And so she went to different families and was taken care of by other members of the family. And whenever she would ask her
“mother, why did you do it? Like, why did you join the resistance? You know, why did you leave me”
basically? And I'm about to say, oh, she's for fun. It was so much fun. It was her mother tried to downplay it like all the wounded. And when I was able to tell France was, your mother talked about you all the time. And you're the reason that she's still alive. Her reason to continue was you. She fought to survive because of you. And it was like kind of a, it was a gift that I could give her.
And then she went up into the attic and opened up a box that she had never looked out of
her mother's papers because it had been too painful for her. And in that box there was an account of the escape. So she was able to kind of recover the story of her mother. And that was a great moment for me. Has it changed the way that you view yourself? Yes, absolutely. It's been a life-changing experience. Weirdly positive. I just found in their story of friendship and sticking together and taking care of each other, such amazing inspiration. I don't know if I could do that. I hope
that I could. But the way that they helped each other out, it really moved me and made me realize others all these different ways to resist. It's not just, you know, throwing them all off cocktail something. There's many, many ways that we can fight back against fascism. And I also found in finding out these stories. And sometimes bringing the stories to the families, things about their
mother and sister, they didn't know. That was also incredibly powerful for me. I felt
a little honored, I guess. It really lucky to have been given the story by my aunt. It's saddens me that these amazing heroic women fell unable to share their stories after the war. And I'm so pleased that Gwen's written them back into history through her book. Sometimes war stories only focus on the moments that make someone a hero, which are for most of us really quite unrelatable. But I love that through Gwen's intimate research. I can recognise
my friends in these women. Of course, they were extra ordinary. But at the same time when they sat down and spoke about what they longed for, they said the sort of things I would. A glass of wine and a cigarette by the sea. Bliss. It makes me feel that perhaps we've all got a bit of the
9's courage locked away in us. Even if I hope we never have to use it.
If you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find loads more incredible women on our feed. Do check them out. And please do spread the word and tell your friends about us. We want as many people as possible to be part of the girlfriend's gang. Next time on the Girlfriend's Spotlight, Tuba stumps the Taliban. She told me, Tuba, the Taliban, take the hero's province. Everything is under the air control.
I say, what's mom?
This season, we're supporting the charity Women Kind Worldwide. They do amazing work to help
“women's rights organizations and movements to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out more”
or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womenkind.org.uk The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHot podcast. For more from Novel, visit Novel.org. The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield. This episode was written and produced by Maddie Hickish, with production support from Al Shebani. Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Saiana Yusuf. The editor is Hannah Marshall, Max O'Brien and Craig
Strakhan are executive producers, production management from Joe Savage, Shari Houston and Charlotte
“Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson, music supervision”
by J.co. Tyvich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louise Agustin and Gemma Friedman. The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkole. Willard Foxston is creative director of development. Special thanks to Katrina Novel, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHot podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME. It's that time to put on your jersey and wave your flag, whoever you root for. Why do i watch
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