Provides an important historical record of women’s experiences during the Holocaust
 
In Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, twenty-five survivors of the Holocaust furnish compelling and historically vital testimony that illuminates and explores Jewish women's experiences during that terrible period. In entries that preserve each voice, personality, and style, survivors describe their efforts to evade Nazi laws and subsequent dehumanization, protect their children and siblings, and maintain their Jewish identity.
 
Throughout each narrative, from Brandla Small’s description of having her child dragged from her arms at Auschwitz, to Eva Schonbrun’s remembrances of her sister who refused to leave her siblings and save herself, to Emilie Schindler’s account of rescuing Jews left abandoned on a cattle car, we become intimately involved with each woman's struggle and eventual survival. We also gain a new appreciation and understanding of the Holocaust experiences unique to women.
 

Brana Gurewitsch is archivist at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
 

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“Brana Gurewitsch has presented a valuable volume, carefully arranged to reveal yet other angles of the Holocaust, angles that must remain irreducible, because they are the expressions, dutifully given, of individual souls. The women who speak to us throughout the book do so bravely and elegantly.”
—Barbara Galli, The University of Alabama
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“An important original contribution to the fields of Holocaust history and women’s studies. The stories are compelling, detailed, varied, and nicely balanced geographically. Gurewitsch’s analysis is reasoned and scholarly, without excluding or diminishing the role that faith played in sustaining the survivors.”
—Myrna Goldenberg, University of Maryland
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“The collection is a rich one which enhances our knowledge of women’s experiences in several ways. Born in such diverse countries as Poland, Holland, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Lithuania, Hungary, Italy, Austria, and Slovakia, the interviewees provide details of the onslaught of Nazism in a range of contexts and of how that onslaught affected women specifically. They speak of childbirth in unspeakable conditions, of the fear and the actuality of rape, of Lagerschwestern (camp nurse) relationships, of being thrust into unaccustomed roles of responsibility and decision-making, of family dynamics, of life in the ghettos, of the behavior of liberators, of internment in a wide range of camps, of their roles in resistance. They speak of the mundane aspects of day-to-day living—food, clothing, sleep, healthcare—which often made the difference between life and death. They recount experiences in hiding, failed and successful efforts at escape, and the gripping circumstances of chance which are part of all survivors’ stories.”
—Journal of Genocide Research
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