Introduction: Women's holocaust heroism

This multidisciplinary book brings together two dozen international scholars working on various aspects of women's heroism before, during, and after the Holocaust as well as the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. There remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pen, pistol, or sabotage. The leadership strategies, networks of defiance, and testimony of female activists in the fields of culture and social welfare, spiritual resistance, rescue, and military activity still merit far more attention. We argue that our understanding of the Shoah and genocide, and the central question of how it happens, will be impacted and re-conceptualized, illuminated by a growing understanding of the wide spectrum of female resistance and rescue. By focusing on them in various chapters of this book, we intend that the life stories of Jewish and non-Jewish women who used their wit, their faith, their resourcefulness, their friends, and their families, become part of the canon of Holocaust and genocide studies.