This is an excellent novel of the French Resistance recommended to me by Mike Connell. It is told through the eyes of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac. Vianne is older, has a daughter and a husband who is a POW. She teaches in the village and occupies a home her family has owned for generations, while her eighteen-year-old sister is a firebrand filled with anger. The Germans assign a polite, gentlemanly captain to billet at their home and Vianne complies. Isabelle treats him with disdain. While Vianne copes, Isabelle is off to Paris on fake paperwork and quickly is hip-deep in serious resistance activity. She remembers her mother's friend in the foothills of the Pyrenees and soon is leading an escape route from Paris to Spain for downed Allied pilots. She is also very pleased to learn that her dad is not a collaborator but a legendary forger. Vianne works with and convinces the local orphanage to take in fourteen Jewish children. Vianne, her husband and two children survive the war and remember.
Once again, a novel fulfills the role of filling in the blanks. No matter how many histories one has read, only in a well-done novel or in a movie can you get a feel for being in a column fleeing Paris, what it is like to have a stranger living in your home, the daily privations of rationing, the pain of starvation, waiting endlessly for word from your husband, traveling without the proper papers, watching a Jewish friend be sent away, losing a child and a sister and remembering it all - for as long as you live.
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