Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

ISBN-13: 9780099554646 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 384 str.

Caroline Moorehead

Opis

A Sunday Times Top Five Bestseller shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize 2014. From the author of the New York Times bestseller. A Train in Winter comes the extraordinary story of a French village that helped save thousands who were pursued by the Gestapo during World War II. High up in the mountains of the southern Massif Central in France lie tiny, remote villages united by a long and particular history. During the Nazi occupation, the inhabitants of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the other villages of the Plateau Vivarais Lignon saved several thousand people from the concentration camps. There were no informers, no denunciations, and no one broke ranks. Together, the villagers held their silence, and kept persecuted people - resisters, freemasons, communists and above all Jews, many of them children and babies - from danger. During raids, the children would hide in the woods, their packs on their backs, waiting to hear the farmers' song which told them it was safe to return. After the War Le Chambon became one of only two places in the world to be honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among Nations. Just why and how Le Chambon and its outlying villages came to save so many people has never been fully told. But several of the remarkable architects of the mission are still alive, as are a number of those they saved. Caroline Moorehead travelled across the world to interview these people, and searched archives that few have seen, to bring us the unforgettable testimonies of many of those involved in this extraordinary account. It is a story of courage and determination, of a small number of heroic individuals who risked their lives to save others, and of what can be done when people come together to oppose tyranny.

Recenzje

Brilliant... It is refreshing to read a book that so confidently abandons the rhetoric of heroism and tries to see its subjects for who they were... Moorehead has had to master a huge amount of background material, and she pulls it off with skill and a remarkable lightness of touch Keith Lowe Mail on Sunday

O autorze

Caroline Moorehead is a bestselling and prizewinner author, and the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Madame de la Tour du Pin and Martha Gellhorn. Her recent books - a quartet focussed on resistance to dictatorship, particularly in Italy - were shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize and the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London.