Oak Park Author Chronicles Women War Heroes

Kathryn Atwood’s fascination with World War II began with her father, a veteran of the conflict.

She used to watch the British documentary series The World at War with him when she was younger. He seemed to want to figure out what he’d been a part of, she said, and her interest grew from that, and from seeing The Hiding Place when she was in high school.

When Atwood watched that movie, about two sisters in Holland during Nazi occupation, she just kept thinking about it, she said.

“I wondered, ‘What would it take to defy the regime?’” she said. “And that stayed with me for a long time.”

Now, her book Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue, details exactly what it took for women from many different nations — including the Netherlands, France, Poland, Denmark and Belgium — to defy Nazi Germany.

Atwood, who has performed around the Oak Park area as part of The History Singers with her husband John, shared bits of these stories as part of an Active Agers program Thursday at .

She showed pictures of many women, including Hannie Schaft, a Dutch law student who became involved in sabotage and assassinations. She became known as “the girl with the red hair,” even though she had more auburn colored hair, Atwood said.

Another story, that of Sophie Scholl, always makes Atwood a little emotional when she reads it.

Scholl was a German student who was part of the White Rose non-violent resistance group during the Third Reich. After a janitor discovered her distributing leaflets at the University of Munich, her brother Hans and she were convicted of treason. They were executed by guillotine.

Atwood said Scholl expected her death would cause other German students to rise up and take new places in the resistance fight, but that didn’t happen. In fact, many of them applauded the deaths and celebrated the janitor who turned them in.

Yet the Allied Forces got their hands on one of those leaflets, and they recreated it in order to drop mass quantities on Germany during the war. Perhaps this means the Scholl’s deaths weren’t in vain after all, Atwood said.

She began the book in the fall of 2008 and spent nearly all of 2009 working on it. World War II is “the ultimate good guys versus bad guys story,” Atwood said, and everyone likes to hear good triumph over evil.

After her presentation, audience members discussed their or their family member’s experiences during WWII.

One woman was a child in London at that time and she said when the schools were evacuated to air raid shelters, they would all sing hymns. She even had a shrapnel collection and used to play in a crater left from a bomb explosion.

“I don’t like the smell of concrete garage steps,” she said, “because they smell like brick air raid shelters.”

Debby Preiser, the library's community relations coordinator, said the next Active Agers program will take place on the third Wednesday in September, instead of the second like normal.

“We had such a large group age 60 and up who are available to come to programming in the afternoon and in the winter,” she said, so the library began the program last summer.

The next event will feature Sally Barker, a woman who translates famous paintings into fabric replicas to allow the blind to “see” the paintings.