Behind Enemy Lines: The Untold Stories of Italy’s Female Warriors Who Sabotaged the Nazis
SC: I was looking for first-person experiences, either written or spoken – I had some interviews – and that was what I wanted to foreground, because part of my premise was that there’s so much written about World War II, and almost none of it by or about women. And what little of it is about women is done through a scholarly lens. I really wanted their words and their representations of their experiences to be forefronted. As I said in the introduction of this book, I don’t purport that this is a history of war, and I’m consciously centering the stories of these women. There were times when the fact checker came back and said, “I can’t prove this” or “how do you know?” and my response was, “Because they said so.” If there was something you could prove happened on another date then I would go with the historical record, but that almost never happened. For some of these women I was also looking at memoirs that were written by different people who were with them at different points, so there were times when I could compare if they were both in the same place. But for the most part, other than some dates that I could verify, if it was about how she was feeling or her interpretations of the day, I always went with her story, over the story of the person she was with. I would layer their stories, but I would never supercede her story with someone else’s. I wanted them to lead the narrative.
