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.

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.

Cecilia Slepak, a journalist and translator, was a member of the Oneg Shabbat group, which was vital in collecting records and interviews about life in the Warsaw Ghetto. She focused in particular on the lives of women in the ghetto as they struggled to survive.