Women Defying Hitler: Rescue and Resistance under the Nazis

About the Author
Nathan Stoltzfus is Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Hitler's Compromises (2016) and Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (1996), which was a co-recipient of the Institute of Contemporary History's Fraenkel Prize and acknowledged as a New Statesman 'Book of the Year'. He is also the co-editor, with Robert Gellately, of Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (2001) and, with Henry Friedlander, of Nazi Crimes and the Law (2008).
Mordecai Paldiel is Adjunct Professor in Jewish History at Yeshiva University, USA. He is the former Director (1984-2007) of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, Israel. Professor Paldiel is also the author of several books, including Saving One's Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (2017) and The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (2007).
Judy Baumel-Schwartz is Director of the Schulman School of Basic Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, memory, the State of Israel, and commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (1998), Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the making of Collective Israeli Memory (2010), Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938-1945 (2012) and Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women (2013), My Name is Freida Sima: The American-Jewish Women's Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina (2017), and A Very Special Life: The Bernice Chronicles (2017).
This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women's defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women's history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants.
Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.