Janine P. Holc, <i>The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust</i> (Waltham, MA: Brandies University Press, 2023)

Janine Holc's The Weavers of Trautenau presents a ground-breaking study on the experiences of Jewish girls and young women subjected to forced labour during the Holocaust under the Schmelt system.The book documents how approximately 3,000 Jewish girls and young women were deported from their homes in the Zagbie region of Poland, around Sosnowiec which became the headquarters for the Organisation Schmelt, to labour camps and factories.Girls, some as young as eleven, and young women were deported as forced labourers in textile factories in Sudetenland, in the Trautenau region, the Nazi occupied border region of former Czechoslovakia (today's Czechia), where they faced not only the hardship of labour but also the complex social dynamics of survival under oppressive and dehumanising conditions.Holc's work stands out in Holocaust scholarship by using an extraordinary sample of testimoniesboth by number and by incorporating an under-researched group of survivors.Holc analyses particularly those testimonies archived by the USC Shoah Foundationto convey both collective and individual experiences, and provide a window into their emotional and psychological resilience.She innovatively utilizes testimonies, juxtaposing the experiences of several girls and women on the same topic.Apart from the deep dive into USC Shoah Foundation testimonies, the book includes rich body of sources from archives in five countries.In nine chapters, Holc traces changes in living conditions and statuses of forced labourers and their impact on the studied group of survivors.While the book chronologically follows the fates of Jewish girls and young women in Trautenau, the chapters are organised by themes, such as Jewish girlhood in the pre-war world; the system of the worksite as well as the worksite as a social world; the impact of Hungarian women arriving from Auschwitz to the Trautenau factories in 1944, together with the knowledge this brought the girls and young women in Trautenau; the ethics of care for one's self and others inside the camps; desire in the coerced labour camp system, and finally the narratives of liberation.The book explores the distinct, gendered impact of forced labour and examines the layers of identity that shaped how these young women endured and interpreted their ordeals.She juxtaposes survivor