Review: "Three Ordinary Girls" by Tim Brady

Three Ordinary Girls by Tim Brady
Published February 2021 via Citadel Press
★★★

For all that I've heard about the strength of the Dutch resistance, it strikes me that I've read very few stories of that resistance: real people, who in peacetime would likely live ordinary lives with very little fanfare, doing whatever they could to slow the advance of the Nazis. It also feels very on point to read this sort of thing now, when my news sources are full of stories about Ukrainian teachers and students and farmers who have been catapulted into new roles they never wanted—ones in which they fashion molotov cocktails and teach field first aid and learn to fire weapons.

The writing is fairly flat, possibly in part because no matter how much research Brady did for this (and I have no idea what sorts of connections he might have, if any, to the Netherlands or the Dutch resistance), this was never going to be his story—it's all somebody else's story, somebody else's dialogue remembered years and years later. In some places the story must have been reconstructed third- or fourth-hand, because (not really a spoiler) not all first-hand sources were alive to tell the tale.

Much of this, though, is a reminder of how scrappy war can get: how plans fall apart, how a few people with more bravery than common sense can grow into a resistance cell with little direction or oversight, how sometimes a rescue mission can turn terribly deadly...and then be forgotten to time, because there is so much horror in war that the individual moments stop standing out. And then how murky ethics can get, and how quickly heroism can get muddied by politics.

All three women have Wikipedia profiles, though if you're going to read this book—or another longer-form work about them—I'd recommend holding off on the Wikipedia rabbit hole.