Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis

Journalist Cope (Power Hungry) spins a thrilling saga of four young women of the Italian resistance. In interweaving vignettes, she traces how each woman came to join antifascist efforts—some under Mussolini’s regime, others not until the 1943 Nazi occupation, but all because they grew to feel that “to do nothing was to side with the enemy.” Among those profiled are a bicycle courier who delivered messages to partisan camps outside Florence, a newspaper publisher who organized a mass strike to disrupt Nazi industrial production in Turin, and a smuggler who guided young men out of the city of Reggio Emilia to help them avoid conscription. Cope’s narrative rivets as she tracks how the young women escalated their efforts; one woman, who at her first resistance meeting was asked to play Chopin to cover the partisans’ voices, ends up a key member of a hit squad. (Her role was to stand at countryside crossroads and offer German soldiers inaccurate directions—straight into an ambush.) By focusing closely on these women’s experiences, Cope is able to reflect on how their understanding of events informed their decisions, like how one woman’s decision to identify for resistance assassins her former philosophy professor, Giovanni Gentile—“widely considered the architect of the Fascist ideology in Italy”—no doubt took into consideration how Gentile’s “reforms” had codified gender inequality in higher education. It makes for a captivating look at how antifascist resistance operated and evolved during WWII. (Apr.)