Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆
With the somewhat accurate and rather clunky sub-title of “True stories of the unsung women heroes who rescued refugees and Allied servicemen in WWII”, this is a book whose idea I liked rather more than the execution. The core is six chapters, each devoted to a woman or pair of women, who operated before and around World War II, mostly helping refugees to escape the Nazi regime as it swept across Europe. Every chapter has the same structure. Each begins with ‘The Threshold’, describing how they came to take on that role; then ‘The Move’, covering their heroic activities; and finally, ‘The Close’, detailing what happened to them afterward.
These stories are all worth telling, though perhaps not to the same degree. A couple appear more like glorified bureaucrats, and while their roles in facilitating emigration of refugees were important, you don’t get much sense they were in genuine danger. Others, however, such as Irena Sendler, was clearly risking her own life in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, being captured and brutally interrogated by the Gestapo. The same goes for Andrée de Jongh, who ran the Comet Line which allowed Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in occupied Europe, to make their way back to friendly territory. She ended up in Ravensbruck concentration camp: that’s “real” heroism, putting yourself at personal risk, and definitely deserves to be better known.
However, the desire to cram in too much here works against the book. Each chapter typically covers only 20-25 pages, and as a result, you get not much more depth about each woman, than you would find in a well-written Wikipedia article. These are more like an appetizer, and you’ll probably be left hungry to know more about the likes of de Jongh. Baker has an odd tendency to shift from factual descriptions to what reads like dramatic restagings of scenes, an awkward shift that she does not manage to pull off. Rather than letting the stories speak for themselves, she tends to belabour her point about sexism being responsible for suppressing these stories.
It’s somewhat questionable, since many male heroes of WW2 are arguably more unsung: de Jongh, for example, was awarded decorations by multiple countries, including the George Medal, Britain’s highest civilian honour. That’s not “unsung.” I’d rather Baker had used the pages she spends on making such points, to tell the reader more about the women’s stories. I will admit, I did learn things here, and if you’re looking for a primer – a Cliff Notes on wartime heroism – this and the other books in the series are probably worth a look. But it feels like Baker is only skimming the surface, and the subjects would have been better served by a more in-depth recounting, rather than trying to cover so many different candidates. Sometimes, less is definitely more, and this would be a good example.
Author: Elise Baker
Publisher: Intrepidas Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book Part of the Brave Women Who Changed the Course of WWII series.