Barbara Mellor

The subtitle of this books is: “A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defense in Occupied France.” So I'm not sure if this is the exact match for this book--but it seems unlikely to me that she wrote more than one. Whichever way, it’s fascinating, sometimes horrifying and heartbreaking reading.

After reading the Diplomat’s Wife, I became more interested in the resistance movements in varying countries occupied by the Nazis during WWII. While on a trip to France, browsing a most fabulous book store, I came across Resistance and resolved to get it from my local library as soon as I returned home. It was a strange read for me–the kind of book that instantly sucks you in, you read longer than you should, but when you do finally put it down for some reason, you discover that it’s hard to pick back up. After doing that a couple of times, I think I realized that it was because I was so emotionally invested in her story–and I knew that her experience was only going to get worse.

Agnes Humbert was one of the first members of the first resistance cell in France. You see her flee Paris as the Nazis take over and then return with some idyllic and mostly naive sense that there must be something she can do in Paris to help her country. And she does. She had many interesting political connections before the war, which enables her to get in front of the right people at the right time. Initially her work is merely leaflets to be distributed to Parisians who have only heard the Vichy french or German point of view of the war–a perspective decidedly out of whack with reality. Eventually, leaflets are no longer enough and she spearheads an underground newspaper–appropriately called resistance. In the final days of her efforts, she harbors a British soldier who is trying to escape and helps coordinate the dissemination of stolen important intelligence documents and maps. With just over a year of efforts to the resistance under her belt, a member of the cell’s inner circle betrays them all and the gestapo takes her away unexpectedly.

Agnes spends about a year in a horrid french prison with vermin, little food, torture, and freezing conditions. Eventually, she is tried with the rest of the cell, but because she is a woman, she is spared the death penalty, unlike her comrades. She then is deported as a political prisoner to Germany, where she discovers that political prisoners there are no different to the Germans than murderers, thieves and other convicts and she is set to hard, progressively dangerous labor. The next many sections of the book cover her movement in Germany to a couple of different work factories, where her greatest accomplishment other than staying alive is knowing that everything she produces in the factory is subtly defective–not enough so that someone immediately inspecting it could tell, but so that as soon as it is untraceable to her and needed for use, it would not meet its function. For which I felt glee for her as well.

The ending is inspiring. She stays on to help with intelligence before going home to France. All told she spent nigh on four years behind bars of some sort for her little over one year’s largely publication efforts at resistance.

I don’t know if I can love a book about so much misery and destruction. But I can say that it was very worth while–one that I won’t forget. And that I am better educated for having read. One commentator to the book praised it saying that the quality of the writing is not what one would expect from the many memoirs made about WWII–rather, it was great literature. I wholeheartedly agree. I think it’s even more important in the grand scheme of important WWII books because it’s a woman’s point of view, who was in the thick of it, who used her brilliance to make a difference.… (lisätietoja)

This book is the actual journal of a Frenchwoman's experiences during World War II. At the start of the war Agnès Humbert was a bookish art historian working in a museum in Paris. After the occupation of Paris began Agnes and other staff at the museum were replaced by Nazi sympathizers. Together with some of her friends she decided to form a small resistance cell to share information and publish anti-Nazi propaganda in a pamphlet called 'Resistance'. This cell was composed of other middle classed scholars, artists, writers, and even some social gadflies. All well intentioned amateurs. So, you can imagine a resistance run by amateurs was inevitably riddled with amateur errors. It was not long before the arrests began. Agnes was arrested in 1941 and spent the next four years in abominable circumstances. Prisons, forced labor, and slavery. Throughout she managed to stay alive. This is the story of a remarkable woman who was very brave in dangerous times, and of her ability to deal with very harsh conditions.
The book is written in the first person, present tense which gives it a real sense of urgency. The first third of the book is her own journal entries from her time working for the Resistance. The remainder of it was written during the nine months after her liberation, but she continued to write it in the style of a diary as if she had a journal and pen in prison with her. She writes "my memories are so clear that I am able to commit them to paper as they happened and in strict sequence. I remember everything as clearly as though it was written in notebooks, one event after another". I thought it was a pretty damn good book.

… (lisätietoja)