SOURCE: "Choices, Risks, and Conscience," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter, 1993–94, pp. 42-5, 48.

[In the following review, Goldenberg discusses several works written by women, both personal narratives and fiction, that examine Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.]

We are witnessing a flood of books about the Holocaust. Even the trickle of books by and about women during the Third Reich is slowly widening to a stream. Sometimes the stream yields crystalline gems and sometimes murky flotsam. The seven books reviewed here range from jewels to dregs, from rescue to survival, from ethnography to journalism, and from authenticity to sexational fiction.

Lucie Aubrac's and Hiltgunt Zassenhaus's important autobiographical chronicles of their defiance of the Nazis [Outwitting the Gestapo and Walls: Resisting the Third Reich—One Woman's Story] leave the reader breathless. Aubrac outwitted Klaus Barbie, the infamous head of the Vichy Gestapo (aka the...