Who deserves to be remem­bered? How is it decid­ed who is hon­ored? In the field of sci­ence, why is it that Ein­stein and Bohr are house­hold names syn­ony­mous with pow­er and genius, while Lisa Meit­ner and Hed­wig Kohn are not only for­got­ten, they were nev­er suf­fi­cient­ly rec­og­nized in the first place?

Olivia Campbell’s daz­zling research and flow­ing nar­ra­tive go a long way to right­ing this wrong by bring­ing us into inti­mate con­tact with four female physi­cists who, like Ein­stein, fled Nazi Ger­many to add immea­sur­able dis­cov­er­ies to our sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and advancement. 

Dur­ing the women’s ear­ly careers, in the first part of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the boys club of acad­e­mia in Europe sim­ply would not acknowl­edge the tal­ent of female sci­en­tists, squelch­ing their ambi­tions, deny­ing them lab space and teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, and throw­ing road­blocks of all kinds in the way of women not only des­per­ate to advance but quite capa­ble of doing so. 

Many were sim­ply shut out of the uni­ver­si­ties, forced to work as col­lab­o­ra­tive authors on sci­en­tif­ic papers and as lab assis­tants with­out get­ting any cred­it, and doing much of the grunt work but earn­ing none of the glory. 

Camp­bell pin­points her focus by telling the sto­ry of four of the more bril­liant women, Jews in Nazi Ger­many, who suf­fered the twin dis­ad­van­tages of both the severe sex­ism and vir­u­lent anti­semitism direct­ed at them at the time. Sci­en­tif­ic progress would have been stunt­ed if their indomitable spir­its had been extin­guished along with their oppor­tu­ni­ties, but the Nazis sim­ply did not win. Hed­wig Kohn, Lise Meit­ner, Hilde­gard Stucklen and Hertha Spon­er went on to make sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies despite the prej­u­dice they faced, demon­strat­ing that sis­ter­hood can tran­scend time and space and pro­vide hope in the face of despair.

What exact­ly did they accom­plish? Kohn’s patent under­pinned the quan­tum inter­pre­ta­tion of opti­cal dis­per­sion. Stucklen dis­cov­ered cos­mic radi­a­tion and its effect on mete­orites. Spon­er brought intel­lec­tu­al advance­ments in the field of the spec­trums of chem­i­cal com­pounds. And Meit­ner dis­cov­ered nuclear fis­sion, the crit­i­cal com­po­nent in the cre­ation of the atom bomb, which brought the bru­tal destruc­tion of World War II to an end.

Part of the rea­son the book suc­ceeds is the warmth that threads through the sto­ries of the four women’s back­grounds – where they came from, their fam­i­ly life, their edu­ca­tion, and their emo­tion­al and intel­lec­tu­al reac­tions to the walls they con­stant­ly ran into as they tried to progress in their fields. All the women pos­sessed daz­zling intel­li­gence, but in addi­tion, their own per­son­al val­ues and courage made a huge dif­fer­ence in their abil­i­ty to over­come the barriers.

The book con­tains a deep bib­li­og­ra­phy for those who want to know more, a com­pendi­um of the archives accessed in the research process, and detailed end­notes that care­ful­ly spec­i­fy the sources on which the book is built. Sis­ters in Sci­ence will be a worth­while read for both Holo­caust schol­ars and lay peo­ple with an inter­est in the era, along with read­ers who care about sci­ence and also those who find it uplift­ing to read sto­ries of tri­umph. In addi­tion, women’s stud­ies pro­fes­sion­als plus girls and young women look­ing for inspi­ra­tion in their sci­en­tif­ic work will be fas­ci­nat­ed by the narrative.