A former reporter and award-winning author rescues the almost unbelievable account of one family’s experience in Nazi-occupied France.
Between the cruel caricature of a nation of collaborators and the purposeful, Charles de Gaulle–promoted myth of a country full of valiant resisters lies the truth for most of the French during World War II. In the same manner a young girl’s diary once vivified the Holocaust and the fate of 6 million for a postwar audience, Kaiser (The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, 1997, etc.) tells, through the Boulloche family, the story of lives turned complicated by the bizarre realities of Vichy France. He fills us in first on the toll World War I took on France, on the Boulloche family pedigree, and on the iconoclastic, republican spirit of the parents, Jacques and Hélène. Although by no means pro-German and for honorable reasons of their own, neither they nor their oldest son joined the Resistance. Nevertheless, their arrests, deportations, and deaths in the infamous internment camps all resulted from their silent approval of the decision by André and sisters Christiane and Jacqueline to actively oppose the Nazi occupation. Hitler, Eisenhower, Patton, Churchill, Roosevelt, and, of course, de Gaulle appear frequently in the background of this narrative and help supply just enough historical information to orient readers. In the foreground always, though, are the young Boulloches and their close confederates. Smuggling arms, recruiting friends, gathering information, enduring torture, tales of escape, secret knocks, Gestapo interrogations, fortuitous encounters, sabotage missions, clandestine apartments—all are part of their story. Their resolve and bravery and even the “romance” of their exploits are plain to readers but not to the survivors who knew too well the price the family paid. For 50 years they remained, even to their own children, largely silent about all of it. Thanks to a family connection forged in the war’s immediate wake, Kaiser has managed to gather all the painful details, and he assembles them masterfully.
At once heroic and heartbreaking, this story leaves an indelible mark.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-614-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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