Etty Hillesum’s diary, which she kept between 1941 and 1943, is the only extant source about her. Explicit in both its expression of sexuality and profession of faith, Hillesum’s diary reflects a mature, nonconformist Dutch woman attempting to grapple with the changing landscape of her internal and external worlds.

Judith Herzberg is a Dutch Jewish poet, essayist, screenwriter, and professor who has been hailed as one of the greatest living Dutch poets for her ability to imbue everyday objects with unexpected meaning. Making her debut as a poet in the early sixties, Herzberg has written poems, essays, plays, film scripts, and television dramas, with many translations and adaptations to her name.

In the years between 1914 and 1933, numerous significant personalities in art, culture, politics, society and sport met in the photographic portraiture studio of Nini and Carry Hess. With their technical and aesthetic brilliance, the sisters were among the leading photographers in Germany of the time.

Lilli Henoch quickly developed a love for sports as a child and joined the Berlin Sports Club (BSC), where she was a key player on its handball, hockey, and track teams. She achieved many feats, notably a world record in the 4x100 meter relay race in 1926. She kept competing in Jewish leagues through 1942, when she was deported and murdered.

On the outbreak of World War II, Bela Hazan escaped her hometown of Rozyszcze, Poland, for Vilna, where she worked as a smuggler for the Dror movement. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she served as a nurse, then to Ravensbruck, and finally to Leipzig, from which she was liberated. She immigrated to Israel, where she died in 2004.

Politically active from a young age, Haika Grosman played a key role in the underground resistance to Nazi occupation and the Holocaust and put her safety on the line in the name of the movement.

Sephardi and Romaniote women during the resistance movements in Greece and in Auschwitz Birkenau have been rarely mentioned in the literature on World War II, but they made varied contributions to the movement.

Tatyana Grosman nurtured an entire generation of printmakers and raised printmaking in the United States to the status of major fine art. Universal Limited Art Editions, which she founded in 1957, published prints by many major American artists, and launched collaborative endeavors between artists and writers. Much of the press’s work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Michal Govrin, born in 1950 is an Israeli poet, writer, and stage director. She takes a highly individualized perspective on Israeli-Jewish post-Holocaust reality by combining artistic experimentation with Biblical and Rabbinic sources and philosophical discourse. In her poetry, prose and essays she examines places and spaces within a polyphonic context of architecture, art and theater, the sanctity of land, and the national narrative.

A passionate idealist, Mire Gola organized anti-German resistance in World War II as a Communist in occupied Poland. She inspired others with her eloquent poetry and her fortitude through imprisonment and torture.

After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from Budapest to Brazil, dancer Marika Gidali became an influential performer, teacher, and choreographer at a time when the arts faced serious repression under military dictatorship. In 1956 Gidali began dancing with the Ballet Company of Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Gidali later set up her first school, which was the meeting point for many artists in the mid-1960s.

The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a social psychologist who is best known as a coauthor of The Authoritarian Personality.

German-born Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in 1933, which assisted in sending Jewish European teenagers to Palestine prior to World War II to be trained as agricultural pioneers on kibbutzim. Although she was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jewish youth, Freier’s efforts were not officially acknowledged until 1975, when she was eighty-three years old.

Anne Frank is famous for the diary she wrote during the Holocaust, in which she describes her life while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. She was caught and perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her diary, which is often part of school curricula, has become one of the central symbols of the Holocaust and human suffering.