"I have always been fascinated by women and fascinated by Judaism,” Natalie Livingston told a JC event launching her new book, The Nuremberg Women, on Thursday.
Livingstone was in conversation with renowned historian and TV presenter Simon Sebag Montefiore at Hampstead Synagogue.
The idea for her third book, which puts eight women centre stage in the post-Holocaust trials, came to her when she saw a painting at the Imperial War Museum, she told an audience of more than 100 people.
“It was at the Cliveden literary festival [that the idea] about the Nuremberg trials [came to me],” she went on.
“When I think about the trials, I think about this recall of famous men - the judge, the defendants – it's a man’s world...”
But the idea was solidified, she explained, by a visit to the Imperial War Museum.
“I saw this painting,” she recounted. “It is on permanent display in the Holocaust Galleries. It depicts Courtroom 600 where the trials took place, and in it you can just see a sea of men - male lawyers, male defendants - men, men, men.
“You have to look very closely to see that the painting was actually the work of a woman - a very famous British artist called Dame Laura Knight.”
Livingstone said that this realisation suggested to her that there were likely more women at the trials who had been lost from the historical narrative.
“If there is this one famous artist who has effectively painted herself out of history, then who else?”
“It took me on this journey of discovery where I ‘met’ this extraordinary cast of women...
“It changed my understanding of the trials... in ways I could have never imagined.”
She also expressed her sadness that, in writing her book, which comes after 2021’s The Women of Rothschild and 2016’s The Mistresses of Cliveden, she never got to meet the women she was writing about, as they have all passed away.
However, she told guests at the event that she has become close to their families, gaining new insight into their stories.
The eight women included are anti-fascist journalist Erika Mann, daughter of Germany's most famous writer, Hungarian countess Ingeborg Kálnoky, Russian interpreter Tatiana Stupnikova, German writer Ursula von Kardorff, American lawyer Harriet Zetterberg, writer Rebecca West, Auschwitz survivor and French Resistance fighter Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, and Knight, who sparked the idea for the book in the first place.
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