NDMU Common Read Resource Guide 2017-2018: Background and Context: Library Resources

While several classic memoirs of the Resistance exist, relatively few have been written by women. Chevrillon, the scion of a prominent literary family, was head of the Code Service for Paris and the main link in the lines of communication between the Resistance and the Free French government in London. It was Chevrillon and her team who coded many of the telegrams published in Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's Is Paris Burning? Highly readable and moving, her memoirs recount in vivid detail the hardships of living under occupation, the deportation of her Jewish relatives, and the difficulties of life in prison, where she spent four months.

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance―very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)

An extensively researched cultural history of Paris from 1939 to 1949, covering events leading to the fall of Paris, its occupation by the Nazis, and the early postwar years. The author pored over memoirs, diaries, and letters, read books, watched films, handled artifacts, and interviewed women who lived through the events to understand how the war changed the lives of Parisiennes and how they adjusted to loss, fear, and hunger under occupation.

Syrian immigrant Moussa Abadi was only 33, and his future wife, Odette Rosenstock, 28, when they found themselves trapped in Nazi-occupied France. This young Jewish couple—he a graduate student in theater, and she a doctor—was poor but resolute. Risking their own lives and relying on false papers, the Abadis hid Jewish children in Catholic schools and convents and with Protestant families. In 1943, their clandestine organization—the Marcel Network—became one of the most successful operations of Jewish resistance in Europe.

a page–turning story of a group of resistance workers who secreted downed Allied fighter pilots through France and into safety in Spain during World War II.

As war raged against Hitler's Germany, an increasing number of Allied fliers were shot down on missions against Nazi targets in occupied Europe. Many fliers parachuted safely behind enemy lines only to find themselves stranded and hunted down by the Gestapo. The Freedom Line traces the thrilling and true story of Robert Grimes, a 20–year–old American B–17 pilot whose plane was shot down over Belgium on Oct. 20, 1943. Wounded, disoriented, and scared, he was rescued by operatives of the Comet Line, a group of tenacious young women and men from Belgium, France, and Spain who joined forces to rescue the Allied aircrews and take them to safety

Robert Gildea’s penetrating history of resistance in France during World War II sweeps aside “the French Resistance” of a thousand clichés, showing that much more was at stake than freeing a single nation from Nazi tyranny.

As Fighters in the Shadows makes clear, French resistance was part of a Europe-wide struggle against fascism, carried out by an extraordinarily diverse group.

This work recounts stories of six evasion adventures set in Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Albania and Greece which took place during World War II, between 1941 and 1945. In 1944 alone, nearly 30,000 American airmen survived bailing out of, or crash landing, their aircraft in Europe. Most were captured, but others managed to evade their pursuers. The book is based on interviews with the airmen and Europeans who helped them at the risk of their lives.