Introduction

“Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during The Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book.” ?Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes

New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba explores a devastating period in Paris's history and tells the stories of how women survived?or didn’t?during the Nazi occupation.

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.

When the Nazis and the puppet Vichy regime began rounding up Jews to ship east to concentration camps, the full horror of the war was brought home and the choice between collaboration and resistance became unavoidable. Sebba focuses on the role of women, many of whom faced life and death decisions every day. After the war ended, there would be a fierce settling of accounts between those who made peace with or, worse, helped the occupiers and those who fought the Nazis in any way they could.

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Excerpt

Prologue
Les Parisiennes

Paris, mid-July 2015, and the city is swelteringly hot. By July 19, thunder is in the air. I am sitting on a temporary stage, waiting for the rain, enraptured by an unremarkable woman in her late eighties telling a most remarkable story. Annette Krajcer is one of the few surviving victims of the most notorious roundup in French twentieth century history. When she was twelve she and her mother and sister were arrested by French police and taken in French buses to a sports stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, along with 13,000 others including more than 4,000 children. After three days held in disgusting conditions with almost nothing to eat or drink and totally inadequate sanitary facilities, they were crammed into cattle cars and taken to another camp, Pithiviers, which was just a little better as they slept on straw-filled bunks and were given some meagre rations. But, after two weeks here, their mother was taken away and the sisters never saw her again. Abandoned, they were now taken back to Drancy, a holding camp in Paris. Most of the children who returned with them on this occasion did not survive much longer as they were now shipped to Auschwitz and gassed. But Annette and her sister Leah were, miraculously, saved. A cousin who worked as a secretary in the camp, saw their names on a list and managed to organise their liberation. They spent the next three years in hiding but at the end of the War were reunited with their father, who had been a prisoner of war working on a German farm in the Ardennes. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Which of the women can you relate most/ least to?

What are your feelings about the choices some of the women were forced to make?

Which portions and/or people captivate you the most in Anne Sebba's presentation of Les Parisiennes?

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