One of Great Britain’s most famous classical pianists, Dame Myra Hess had the idea of setting up lunchtime concerts at London’s National Gallery during the Second World War. The success of those concerts made Hess an international star, and the honor of Dame of the British Empire was conferred upon her in 1941.

A brilliant pediatrician used to working in difficult circumstances, Anna Braude Heller struggled to keep children’s hospitals open through both World War I and World War II, even as the Nazis occupied Poland and placed Jews in ghettos. Although she evaded deportation in 1943, she was killed shortly afterwards when German soldiers raided the Warsaw Ghetto.

Controversial both during and after her life, Lillian Hellman was one of the leading women of letters of mid-century America and a pioneer woman playwright. Hellman displayed courage not only in writing powerful plays like The Children’s Hour but also in her public refusal to name colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Women played many different roles in the operations of the Haganah. Though their stories are frequently excluded from the story of the Jewish paramilitary organization in British Mandate Palestine, women served as caretakers and nurses, as well as fighters and commanders.

Five years after the American chapter of the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) was founded in 1922, a women’s auxiliary group (WAO) was created. WAO aided displaced Europeans and focused on creating vocational schools across the world. In the later twentieth century, WAO expanded to help create medical services for students and provide recreational facilities, among other programs.

Nelly Wolffheim spent her career developing and teaching a kindergarten curriculum based around Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework. She taught this curriculum, which encouraged children to express their sexual desires, to Jewish women teachers in Berlin. After escaping Germany for England in 1939, Wolffheim struggled to continue her research but began publishing her work again after the war.

During the Holocaust, many women’s experiences were shaped by their gender. Pre-war roles and responsibilities, anticipatory reactions to Nazi actions, German policy and treatment of men and women, and the responses of Jewish men and women to Nazi persecution all affected women’s ordeals.

A well-known Social Democrat and Holocaust survivor committed to equal rights for women and sustained Jewish existence in Germany, Jeanette Wolff refused to compromise her socio-political beliefs. She was active in the SPD both before and after the war and served on the denazification committee in post-war Berlin .

London-born Marguerite Wolff was a member of Berlin’s intelligentsia in the early 20th century. Between 1925 and 1933 she served as unofficial co-director and later as a research scholar at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law.

Annette Wieviorka (b. 1948) is a major French historian of the Holocaust. Her work highlights the specificity of the Shoah in the context of Nazi and Vichy crime generally.

Operating under at least five different names in the course of her career, Ruth Werner (a pen name) was a singularly accomplished spy, whose espionage activities spanned some fifteen years, from 1931 to 1946. Twice awarded the order of the Red Banner, the highest Soviet military decoration, Werner also held the rank of colonel in the Red Army.

Considered an architect of European unity, Louise Weiss is best known for her campaigns on behalf of the peaceful resolution of international conflicts during the interwar years and the Cold War. She also worked on behalf of Jewish refugee rights in the late 1930s and was a leading feminist activist who focused on obtaining the right for French women to vote.

Dora Wasserman created a place for Yiddish theater in Canada by founding a theater and adapting great works of Yiddish literature for the stage. After World War Two, Wasserman immigrated from the Soviet Union to Montreal, formed the Yiddish Drama Group, and produced plays and musicals. She was the first to demonstrate that a theater of diversity could survive and flourish in Canada, and she did so with an all-consuming selfless dedication to her art.

The Jewish population of Turkey navigated far-reaching changes in the political, social, and geopolitical spheres in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire pursued reform and collapsed and the Turkish Republic that took its place imposed a process of “Turkification” on its residents. During this period, Jewish women partook in traditional customs relating to religion, family, and the home, while also accessing new opportunities in the public sphere through education and political engagement.

Zelda Treger was born in Vilna, Lithuania, which was occupied by the Germans beginning in June 1941. Treger soon joined the United Partisan Organization (FPO) and was tasked with smuggling groups of residents and supplies out of the ghetto and labor camp. Escaping capture several times, she aided in the liberation of Vilna and ultimately settled in Tel Aviv, where she remained until her death.

Nechama Tec's sociological work, informed by her experience as a Holocaust survivor, addresses the silences and inaccuracies surrounding the Holocaust and reveals untold stories of righteousness and rescue. Her experiences inspired the movie Defiance.

A self-proclaimed “torchbearer for matrix theory,” Olga Taussky-Todd made the previously little-known field essential for scientists and mathematicians.