Celebrating Women Who Resisted for Holocaust Memorial Day

She will offer two performances of the piece in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre on Saturday, January 27 – a piece commissioned by the Chichester Marks Holocaust Memorial Day committee.

Kate will tell the stories of the extraordinary women of World War Two whose courage and bravery deserve to be better known, from Irena Sendler, Yukiko Sugihara, Sophie Scholl and Renia Kukielka to Mary Elmes, Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo – a chance to hear about some of the heroines who stood firm against the evils of the Third Reich.

As Kate explains: “Clare Apel, who is the leader of Chichester District Council and is involved with the organisation of Chichester Marks Holocaust Memorial Day, came to see my show Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries when I was playing at the Theatre Royal in Portsmouth. She loved the show and was blown away by the stories of many of the women that she had not heard of. She approached me and said would I consider writing a show for Holocaust Memorial Day, a short one-woman show bringing the stories together of the women who had stood firm against Nazi oppression and evil. I thought it was a fantastic idea.

“I went back to my book to start with because the book covers all sorts of areas, women in science, in medicine, in the arts, writers and also very significantly women of courage many of whom are women who fought against oppression. And readers of mine will know that one third of my Languedoc trilogy is set in occupied Carcassonne, and the book is dedicated to two unknown women of the Carcassonne resistance. I had already written about how World War Two women's stories had been very much overlooked with one or two exceptions. I was particularly researching the Jewish women who had been written out not just of World War Two histories but also the Jewish histories, and the research was very fulfilling to do.

“I am doing two shows on the one day but for one day only and it is for Chichester. I won't have done the show until I actually do it but I will have practised in my study. But I decided that it had to have a balance between darkness and light. Many of the stories are appalling and tragic and speak of the enormous suffering, the stories of women in the camps and stories of the women in the Polish Jewish resistance. These stories are very, very challenging to read and to put on the stage. All those stories are inspirational but I also wanted stories of people that survived, but of women who had made an enormous difference. There was an extraordinary Japanese woman whose husband gets all the credit. He was working at the Japanese embassy in Lithuania when the Nazis were trying to round up the Lithuanian Jews. And he with enormous bravery and with complete support from his wife issued nearly 6,000 visas to get people out of the country. She was Yukiko Sugihara and she did as much as he did. But her story is very little told.”