PLEASE NOTE NEW COMPETITION CLOSING DATE - I AM AWAY FOR A LONG WEEKEND AT A WEDDING IN JORDAN AND WILL THEREFORE EXTEND THE DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES TO : MIDNIGHT UK TIME TUES OCT 21... THIS APPLIES EQUALLY TO THE POSTING "WHO ARE YOU?". THE PRIZE: ONE COPY OF THE AGNES HUMBERT BOOK FOR THE BEST REPLY TO EACH. .....
Films about war I can live without. Films about wartime are another matter, if you see the distinction.
Put me in front of loud, all-action blockbusters about warfare, with battles scenes and tons of special effects, and you should not expect an enthusiastic response. But Au Revoir Les Enfants, Yanks, Hope and Glory, The Pianist and Joyeux Noël are rare examples of movies I would contentedly watch more than once.
It is similar with books. Max Hastings or John Keegan on military history I respect but do not choose to devour. But hardly had I put down Rosemary Bailey’s Love And War In The Pyrenees: A Story Of Courage, Fear And Hope, 1939-1944 and - rediscovered in English, four years after I interviewed her daughter in Paris - Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française than I came by chance on Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France by Agnès Humbert, a Parisian art historian who helped to create one of the earliest resistance groups as France fell to the invading Germans.
This is not, as the Barnes and Noble website puts its, “a real-life Suite Française”, since Némirovsky lived the events she described in fictionalised form (and died in Auschwitz for heaven’s sake). But it is one of the most powerful books of non-fiction on any subject that I have ever encountered, and I say so even though it is also, in parts, extremely painful to read.
Humbert’s group did not receive its inspiration from youthful zeal and bravado. Most of the volunteers were intellectuals the wrong side of 40 - she was 45 - when war broke out.
Between them, they produced a newspaper and committed low key acts of defiance, in her case adding de Gaulle’s name to banknotes and generally making little secret of her disgust at France’s new masters. Others in the group assisted Allied servicemen to get out of France and back to the war effort. A few went in for heavy duty sabotage.
A lot of it was amateurish. Insufficient attention was paid to the need to cover tracks. The group lasted only months before its members were betrayed by an informer, and those rounded up paid heavy prices for their courageous actions.
The men, including a crippled hero of the First World War and a boy who was 16 when his “offences” - noble acts of patriotism - took place, were lined up and shot. They were singing La Marseillaise or chanting Vive la France as the sound of firing rang out.
And Humbert was carted off to jail, first in France and then to Germany, sentenced to five years’ forced labour after a show trial in which the outcome was pretty much pre-determined, though she and her co-accused were full of praise for the dignity and fairness with which the presiding judge, a German lawyer/officer conducted the proceedings (his hands were rather tightly tied, as they seemed to acknowledge; even his recommendations of mercy for two of the condemned, the boy and the disabled veteran, were dismissed).
The ordeal Humbert chronicles would be beyond belief if we did not already know only too well how despicably the Germans acted in the Second World War. She accomplishes the task with admirable eloquence, breathtaking command of detail and even a great deal of humour. That is all the more extraordinary given the appalling conditions of barbarism and deprivation in which the Master Race kept those hapless captives it didn't butcher.
This achievement was possible in part because Humbert was a brilliant woman with astonishing recall and descriptive powers, and partly because the book was written soon after the end of the war, originally appearing as Notre Guerre . It attracted a little attention then but slipped into obscurity until being dragged back into the publishing limelight in recent times.
For once, when writing on this issue, I have avoided my mantra that the British would very likely have responded in much the same way as many French men and women under Nazi occupation. In other words, with varying degrees of acceptance ranging from grudging non-resistance to outright collaboration, leaving a selfless minority to fight the occupying force.
But if I have said enough to make you want to read more, you can address that proposition in your comments. The best response on any issue raised by this discussion of Humbert’s book - and my judgement on that will have to be final - will entitle its author to a free copy of the book.
Closing date is midnight , UK time, on Saturday Oct 25. And there is still time to compete for the other prize copy of Agnès Humbert’s book: by entering the competition at my Who Are You posting.
*Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France by Agnès Humbert published by Bloomsbury, to whom thanks for making the prize/s available
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