“While I was hunting down information, I discovered that prisoners in certain concentration camps also had access to prostitutes, one of Himmler’s ideas on how to incentivize the camp labor force and thereby boost economic productivity. Keith explains that she did not originally set out to write about these relatively unheard-of women, initially thinking to write about an SS officer, exploring his motivations and mindset, but when determining how to portray him through the eyes of those he impacted, she turned to the SS brothels and made a surprising discovery. When Dutch resistance fighter Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and sent to different concentration camps in Nazi Germany, Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or-for a chance at survival-to join the camp brothel. In The Dutch Wife, debut novelist Ellen Keith shines a spotlight on two forgotten victims of history: prostitutes in Nazi labor camps and “the Disappeared” in Argentina’s state-sponsored terrorism of the 1970s.
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