Reviews

‘One of those rare gems that comes to the reviewer out of the blue . . . enough twists to shame a cobra . . . the story fairly rips along, defying the reader to put the book down . . . Christine Poulson should be heralded as the fine entrant to the world of crime fiction she most certainly is.’ [Stage Fright]

- WWW.CHRISHIGH.COM

Stories of amazing courage

UnknownMatthew Cobb’s book, The Resistance: The French Fight against the Nazis (2009) seemed a good choice of reading for my French holiday. Although I read some of it with tears in my eyes, I was glad I had taken it. I had known, of course, that the French had suffered during the Occupation, but I hadn’t known how much. I hadn’t known about Service du Travail Obligatoire through which young French men were conscripted to work for the Nazi war effort in Germany. It was an idea that back-fired, as many young men escaped by taking to the hills and joining the Resistance. I hadn’t appreciated the scale of German reprisals: when the military commander of Nantes was killed by the Resistance, forty-eight hostages were executed including Guy Moquet, the 17 year old son of a Communist deputy, followed by another fifty.

The Resistance was never a unified movement and the history of the shifting enmities and allegiances between different groups and their political affiliations was at times hard to follow. It is the stories of individual daring, of hair’s-breath escapes, of RAF Lysanders taking off from French fields on moonlit nights that stay in the memory. Women as well as men behaved with great courage: Lucie Aubrac spirited a group of resistants from a guarded hospital by posing as a nurse. Andrée de Jongh ran an escape line across the Pyrenees; when she was arrested the Nazi refused to believe that a woman could be the organiser. They sent her to Ravensbrück all the same. She was one of the lucky few to survive.

Their numbers were never great, but the Resistance made a significant contribution to the Allied war effort, for instance in supplying information that led the destruction of German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire, and destroying lines of communication after the Normandy landing.

After we got home, we watched for the second time Melville’s extraordinary film about the Resistance, Army of Shadows, starring the sublime Lino Ventura.

2 Comments

  1. Lyn
    August 26, 2015

    I’ve just read a review of Fighters in the Shadows by Robert Gildea & I’m looking forward to reading it. He tells the stories of some of the overlooked heroes of the Resistance, especially women & Jews. I’m always amazed & humbled by reading of such bravery & can’t help wondering what I would have done in those circumstances.

    Reply
    • Christine Poulson
      August 26, 2015

      Yes, I want to read that, too. I think it is part of the fascination of such books that one is bound to wonder how one would have behaved. It is very hard to know.

      Reply

Leave a Reply