Customer Reviews

Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an interesting but not riveting book telling the stories of various American citizens from 1939 to 1945 in France. Although the narrative is somewhat disjointed and at times incomplete, I liked the author's work. It is definitely worth reading if one is interested in World War II. However, to put the stories into context, I recommend reading "Hitler's Empire -- How The Nazis Ruled Europe" by Mark Mazower.

A quick check in my library of other works concerning France under German occupation in WWII revealed essentially no information on the people covered by this work. Books like "France Under The Germans", "Verdict On Vichy", "The French Against The French", "Soldiers Of The Night", "Vichy Two Years Of Deception" and "Paris Underground" failed to mention the principal characters in this work, and Ambassador Bullitt only rated a single line in all of the above. Obviously, the French and writers of the French occupation years are interested in only presenting the stories of French citizens -- usually to depict how heroic they were in resisting the Germans. The actual story as we now know is that collaboration was widespread and Vichy was the only Non-German government that voluntarily rounded up and shipped off Jews to Germany for extermination.

So to me, at least, this story of Americans in France during this time was essentially unknown. Some of those individuals covered in this work actively resisted the Germans and some didn't. Nonetheless, I found all of the characters important to form a complete picture of the situation, although some like Charles Bedaux present complex and sometimes contradictory behavior. One must remember that most of the Americans who remained behind in France after Ambassador Bullitt recommended that all American citizens leave after the outbreak of the war in September, 1939, exhibited a strong streak of Francophilia and tended to look to France as their cultural and spiritual fatherland. The author also shows this tendency when he speaks of Paris as the cultural capital of Europe, and by extension, of the world. France certainly got a lot of mileage out of assisting the US in its Revolutionary War and has been repaid many times over for that involvement. And the author is incorrect in stating that "... 17,000 Frenchmen had answered the Marguis de Lafayette's call to fight for American independence." No such thing occurred -- the French soldiers in Rochambeau's army were fighting against England after France declared war on England.

The writing is relatively good, but the stories are sometimes thrown together haphazardously. For example, the story of Drue Leyton stops at one point where she is in Southern France, and she next appears near Paris. How did she get there with her name on the Gestapo list for immediate arrest and execution? Then her story mysteriously stops while running a ratline for downed fliers. It would be nice to know that she survived the war, but she rates no mention in the Epilogue. Drue (born Dorothy Parsons in Mexico in 1903 of American parents and who grew up in Mexico) had been an accomplished Hollywood actress but one of the curious tribe of American women who favor all things foreign to the exclusion of all things American, yet still consider themselves American patriots. Late in life she returned to the US after experiencing French xenophobia first-hand, and died in California in 1997 where her foreign exploits and "exotic" lifestyle were welcome.

The treatment of Ambassador William Bullitt also could have been expanded. He was a fascinating character who eventually fought as a Major in De Gaulle's Free French Army without losing his citizenship. As the author points out, Bullitt fell from Roosevelt's favor when he stayed in Paris rather than following the French Government in their flight to Southern France and was ultimately removed as Ambassador. Robert Murphy became an important player in Torch and other time during the war although he was often viewed as a somewhat controversial diplomat. Charles Bedaux is a major character developed in this work, but the mystery of why the American Government continues to refuse to allow access to documents (to this day) concerning his activities certainly indicates that there is more to his story than is being told.

All in all, this is an interesting book that does not quite rise to five stars due to so many missing elements. I also hope the author will include some photos of many of the characters in the final edition (this review is being made from the Vine advance proof.) Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to anyone interested in World War II.

The anecdotal material buried inside this 400-plus page book is fascinating, but the reader sometimes has to dig deep to find the nuggets -- such as the octagenerian African-American French Legion veteran who appears in the opening and closing chapters, only to vanish in between; the story of Mary Berg (American only in name) who miraculously is sent from Warsaw to an American internment camp (which isn't, incidentally, in Paris at all...) and Drue Leyton, who runs a Resistance and evasion network when not interned as an enemy alien.

The problem, I think, is that Glass has approached his subject in an almost encyclopedic way, cramming together the stories of anyone and everyone who was American and who happened to be in Paris between June 1940 and August 1944. The result is jarring, as we move from Sylvia Beach (a fascinating story of the experiences of a Left Bank bookseller and patron of such writers as Hemingway and Joyce) to unknown heroes, like the doctor at the American Hospital in Neuilly, who sacrifices himself to save Allied airmen and others as part of the Resistance. Some have fascinating stories, but simply don't fit well into the overall story, like Charles Bedaux, at whose home the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married, and who appears to have had no interest in anything but doing business -- with whatever regime he happened to be tied to at the point in time. Technically an American -- and someone who died in American custody -- he's not really representative of the experience of Americans in Paris during this time.

The stories are often compelling, but a good book is more than just a series of stories tied together in chronological chapters; it has some kind of overarching theme or point to it. A book of a similar kind that I've re-read several times, How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War deftly combines themes and chronology for a fascinating tale of day-to-day experiences of British civilians in the war. In this case, Glass has no overarching theme: it's simply stories about these individuals and their very disparate experiences.

That is part of what made this a frustrating book for me to read. Moreover, in addition to a choppy narrative and the absence of an overall theme or focus, the writing is often dry and ponderous, along the lines of 'X went to Y, where she met A. They played tennis and golf, and had dinner. Then Y went to meet with Z..." The prose style began to feel almost like a metronome. I realized just how irritating this had become when I read a passage in which a Parisienne describes the sounds of the night under occupation, the military footsteps of five soldiers marching with precision; occasional bursts of gunfire, etc. and it conjured up such a vivid mental image that I shivered. Glass's own prose comes nowhere close to conjuring up that sense of time and place, alas.

Most irritating at all, there are a host of characters who simply vanish from the book altogether -- we don't find out what happens to them by war's end or after the war. The most egregious example of this is Pierre Laval, who was executed for treason by the French in 1945. True, he's not American, but his daughter was married to the son of two of the primary characters in the book, Comte Adlebert and Comtesse Clara de Chambrun (she American; he, American-born and a dual citizen; a descendant of Lafayette) and Laval himself appears frequently throughout the book. One would imagine that a dramatic ending to his life would be worthy of noting. Similarly, it's only thanks to another reviewer here that I learned what had happened to Drue Leyton!

There is a tremendous amount of research in this book, and many parts of it are very intriguing. But at the end of the day, what it succeeded in doing was whetting my appetite for some of the original source material on which Glass based his book, rather than inspiring admiration for the book itself. I've ordered some of them, and will start by reading about Sylvia Beach and her store, Shakespeare & Company.

I'm sure this will find a host of eager readers among those who are interested in World War II anecdotes -- and I don't think there is another summary book on this subject. Still, it doesn't come close to being what it could have been, and ends up feeling rambling and chit-chatty where it should have been focused and created a sense of dramatic tension. I've rated it 3.5 stars, rounded down. Only for those very interested in the era and without the time or patience to seek out some of the biographies or primary material about these individuals and their lives.

The title is imprecise: The geographical scope is wider than Paris, and the featured Americans had stronger ties to France than to the U.S. That is why they stayed there after the French army's collapse and the division of the country between a German-occupied zone and the territory of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Leaving would have entailed the sacrifice of extensive business interests or close personal friendships or humanitarian enterprises.

Americans in Paris follows the fortunes of about half a dozen of these Franco-Americans. They are not a representative sample. Except for a few who show up only in vignettes, all have been the subjects of other books. They include industrialist and efficiency expert Charles Bedaux, the aristocratic de Chambrun family (père an American citizen in his own mind, mère and fils in reality), Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Paris, and Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the original Shakespeare and Company, Paris's leading English language bookstore. I suspect that octogenarian Charles Anderson, a minor business functionary married to a French woman, is more typical. He gets only a passage near the end of the book, and that passage aims to score points against American racism rather than illuminate the experience of living in wartime Paris.

The advantage of the atypical main characters is that they have fascinating, and very different, stories. On one side is Dr. Jackson, who used his hospital position to help downed Allied airmen escape from the Germans. More ambivalent are the Chambruns, who worked to keep the American Hospital and American Library out of Nazi hands but showed no sympathy for the Resistance and were on good terms with Pierre Laval, whose daughter Chambrun fils had married. M. Bedaux alternately fought with and sought to profit from both Vichy and Berlin. At the end of his life, he was facing treason charges in the United States; the post-war French government awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Legion of Honor. Sylvia Beach, fiercely anti-Nazi but intent on keeping her bookstore running, kept her head down.

Because the author's sources are, for the most part, his subjects themselves or their family and friends, all look at least a little bit heroic. Because all but Miss Beach were comparatively affluent, their sufferings were doubtless less than those of a Charles Anderson. There is room for a more comprehensive study of expatriate Americans' "life and death under Nazi occupation". This one, nevertheless, fills part of the niche quite admirably.

Americans in Paris, Life & Death under Nazi Occupation, by Charles Glass, tells the fascinating story of Americans trapped in Paris after its capture by the Germans in World War II. In doing so, author Glass meditates on larger issues: what is the nature of collaboration with the enemy? Can one live under foreign occupation and remain loyal to one's country? Where does one cross the line between treason and loyalty?

Glass estimates that perhaps 2,000 Americans lived in Paris under German rule. He tells the story of occupation through the lives of four different families. The hero of the piece is Dr. Charles Sumner, the chief surgeon at the American Hospital, who not only labored mightily to keep the hospital open under German rule (and free of German patients,) but at night was a leader in the resistance, ferrying downed Allied pilots to safe houses and ultimately on a long, clandestine path to neutral Spain. He endangered his wife and son through these activities and all three paid a severe price for them.

"Villain" is probably too harsh a term to use for another American in the book, the notorious Charles Bedeau. Born in France but a naturalized American, Bedeau continued to do business with the Germans after occupation, even promoting a Trans-African pipeline. Bedeau is a curious mixture of the amoral and naïf. While cozying up to the Germans, Bedeau opened his chateau to the Americans as a temporary embassy (it had served in 1937 as the site of the wedding of the Duke of Winsor and Wallis Simpson.) Traveling to North Africa to promote his pipeline on a German letter of transit, he kept the American state department's Robert Murphy fully informed of his pipeline scheme. The author even hints that Bedeau was aware of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Was Bedeau a traitor or just a business schemer oblivious to a world crashing around him?

Best known today of the Americans in the story is Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous left-bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, a refuge for writers such as Hemingway and James Joyce. Beach was fiercely anti-Nazi and closed her bookshop on rumors that the Germans intended to loot it. She welcomed the partisan uprising that preceded, prematurely, the retaking of Paris by Allied troops. But even Beach was not above intervening with the occupation authorities on behalf of a friend.

Lastly, there is the fascinating and complex Chambrun family. Aldebret de Chambrun was an aristocrat married to Clara Longworth, a Cincinnati native, the sister of a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a cousin of the Roosevelts. Their son Rene, with dual American and French citizenship, married Josee Laval, the daughter of Vichy France's Prime Minister, Pierre Laval. Laval was an arch-collaborator, responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps. Aldebret was the Chairman of the American Hospital and, with Dr. Sumner, struggled to keep it open. (He was unaware, however, of Dr. Sumner's resistance connections.) Clara de Chambrun ran the American Library, but disdained the partisans as communist agitators. Their son Rene went to Washington, D.C., to urge his cousin Franklin Roosevelt (unsuccessfully) for arms to aid the British. He traveled again to Washington to secure food supplies for Vichy France, which found most of its agriculture production diverted to the German war machine. On his first trip, he was labeled a hero. On his second trip, he was decried as a collaborator.

The author graphically describes the brutality of the Germans and the fear they instilled in Parisians. He also uncovers stories that should make Americans blush with shame. Black Americans in both WWI and WWII were denied the right to fight in units with their white countrymen. In WWI, General "Black Jack" Pershing refused to permit the all-black "Harlem Hellfighters" to march in a Paris victory parade. In WWII, General Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, directed the French division making its ceremonial entrance into Paris to rid itself of one-third of its troops because they were dark-skinned colonials.

I found Charles Glass's book well written and thoughtful. It is not and does not purport to be a complete history of the occupation or of Vichy France, although it provides great insights into each. It is the human element that Glass captures so well. One can empathize with Sylvia Beach as she shivers in her unheated apartment and simply note with astonishment when Rene de Chambrun hits it big at the racetrack. Life in Paris went on, but the strains of occupation brought out both the best and worst of its citizens, including its Americans, and sometimes the best and worst were present in the same person. Highly recommended.

World War II history has been written about extensively. There's hardly a battle or military event that hasn't been covered. Yet, some of the most interesting stories are those of the common folks caught up in that terrible time of war. Charles Glass has zeroed in on that element with his story, "Americans in Paris" with an in depth look at what happened to so many Americans who chose to stay in Paris after the German invasion.
Paris was the cultural hub of the world and in the 1920's and 30's Americans flocked there by the thousands. The famous and rich loved it and it attracted writers, playwrights and businessmen, many of them world famous.
The story starts in the years before the German occupation and gives you an idea of just who was there and what their live style was like. Almost 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris. Once the war broke out and occupation was imminent, most left but 2,500 stayed behind, refusing to leave their adopted homeland. Glass's story then concentrates on these people and what they endured. It was interesting to note the split in loyalty as many turned to the Vichy Government and Petain who were sympathetic to the German Government. Some remained loyal to a resistance movement while others made no distinction at all. Their individual stories are remarkable and heartwarming. You will be amazed that some would survive at all.
My only complaint is that the story is hard to follow at times as the author tries to cover so many different people. The names and events skip back and forth and it is hard to remember just who is who.
Nonetheless, it is an interesting read for those who love history and I highly recommend it.

This book, as other reviewers have noted, fills a gap in World War II history. It is not a military history, nor of the Paris occupation generally, or even the full story of several thousand Americans trapped there. Rather, it tight-focuses on a few high-society characters: Clara Longworth de Chambrun, businessman Charles Bedaux, Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital, bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, and their families and circles of friends. It's a compelling story in that none of these people could stay neutral in those times, but had to make choices that, either way, would put them in peril from one side or another -- or both, in the case of Bedaux. Some would collaborate out of choice or associations -- Countess Clara's son was married to Pierre Laval's daughter -- and some would work with the Resistance. All would be in danger, either from the Germans or, in some cases, from the Liberation.

While not a complete story of the American community in Paris -- I would have liked to hear more about how Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, both American Jews, survived the occupation, or what the de Chambruns went through during Pierre Laval's trial and execution. The story ends rather abruptly with the August 1944 liberation of Paris (though there is an epilogue). Still, the book does allow the reader to experience the times as the people caught up in it did. And caught they were, however high-society they were, however they sought to shape their own lives while subject to greater events. Still, it's a compelling story, and the characters' experiences would make for an interesting Masterpiece Theater drama. It's a fascinating ensemble cast and a chilling story.

It was never - still is not - clear exactly what behavior was correct for Americans in France after May 1940. For those, like actress Drue Tartiere, it was simple - once she decided she was not going to evacuate.

But that was a courageous decision, since she had already made anti-Nazi broadcasts, and the Germans had a price on her head.

Tartiere simply adopted her French husband's name, hoping the Germans wouldn't match her up with the American actress named Leyton they wanted, and joined the Resistance. Not as much of her story as one would like turns up in Charles Glass's "Americans in Paris," but he has a lot of ground to cover.

A couple of thousand American citizens were still in and around Paris when the German army arrived. Hundreds made their way to Spain, then Portugal, then home. A few moved the other way, trying to join up with the French army to fight. The rest faced an uncertain future, although Glass's subtitle overstates the actual risk. Not one of the score or so of Americans he follows was killed by a German, though several were imprisoned and mistreated. France was not Poland, and Americans were not Slavs; the Germans were discriminating murderers.

This is not to say that no one in the book met death at German hands, one way or another. A few American Jews did, but they are mere bit players in "Americans in Paris," and one of the main heroes, physician Sumner Jackson, was drowned after British planes attacked the German prison ship he was on. But the Germans were chary of applying their favorite methods to Americans.

Glass does not ask or speculate about why this was so.

It was simple also for those Americans who were pleased to collaborate with the Germans, or at best indifferent, but while a few names appear in the book, little is said about these people, though we would like to know about them as much as about Tartiere. Collaborators, for the most part, did not write memoirs or give interviews decades later. Their behavior is almost lost to history, recorded here and there in a few bitter remarks by the non-collaborators.

But the middle ground is where Glass pays most attention. If one were to stay and not be an active resistant, it was more or less impossible not to have something to do with Germany or Vichy, especially after November 1942, when Unoccupied France was occupied. Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Co., not a resistant but a successful non-participant for the most part, worried about her slight efforts to curry favor to get out of jail.

Beach, though famous among literary types, was obscure as far as Naziism was concerned. Others were not, and Glass concentrates on the cases of Charles Bedaux, a naturalized American businessman, and the de Chambrun family, who held dual citizenship (though born in America).

Bedaux, a fascinating character from any angle, was hounded by American counterintelligence and died in a Miami prison. The French, on the other hand, thought enough of him to name a street after him, showing how ambiguous the situation could be.

The "denunciation," often held out as one of the least savory aspects of Vichyism, existed as well on the Allied side, and denunciations, many if not all fraudulent, pushed Bedaux to his death.

Overall, Glass is more sympathetic to the Bedauxes and de Chambruns, who tried to maneuver in an impossible situation, than he is to the moralists and absolutists who thought the situation was simple. Robert Murphy, an American diplomat who was attacked for what many saw as an equivocal role himself, was notably unbending toward Bedaux; and then pretended nothing had happened. On the whole, Bedaux comes off better.

The de Chambruns were in an even odder situation. French patriots, they managed to keep open the two most important cultural activities of the Americans throughout the war, the American Library and the American Hospital; but they were regarded as trimmers and too close to Pierre Laval.

Withal, it comes as a surprise that two, or any, American institutions were allowed to operate during the war. Certainly, in America we have always been far more ruthless toward enemy alien institutions caught among us, even forbidding the teaching of German in high schools during World War I.

The great crimes were done by the Germans and their collaborators. These revolt but no longer shock us. What did shock me was learning that as the German army invaded France, the American consuls refused the protection of their government to American citizens if they were black. The vicious racism of the Mayflower descendants who filled the diplomatic corps in those days was well known, but you would think - or hope -- there would be limits. There were not.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and plan on reading it again, soon. The descriptions of expatriate life under NAZI rule among the Cultural"elite" of Paris is absolutely engrossing. The various descriptions of writers, diplomats, artists, and many more attempting to live according to their various moral compasses is fascinating. Some dealt well with life during the German occupation, according to their own lights. There were those who helped Jews and other persecuted classes to escape from Vichy France, as well as those who chose to collaborate with the invaders.

It was most intriguing to read of the mind-sets of those who made the decision to cooperate with the NAZIS. The various methodologies behind their justification of what was, basically, collaboration showed the tenuous link between physical bravery and moral cowardice. The book will "grab" you from the first page of the introduction, not letting go of your senses until the final page of the book

I highly recommend this book as being most relevant for scholars, artists and everyone else who could possibly become involved in a situation forcing rather difficult decisions between right and wrong. For those followers of famous writers, poiticians, and scientists of the time,this book adds a delicious "filler" to the lives that one had assumed were already well-documented in the annals of literature, science, and politics.

Read this book, then read it again, you will not regret the time spent observing real people facing one of the greatest moral dilemmas fo the 20th Century.

Highly Recommended!

You remember in _Casablanca_ when Rick left Paris as the Germans were coming in; he and Sam (but not Ilsa, sob!) crammed onto one of the last trains leaving Paris as the Germans were about to enter. As an American, Rick would have had a bad time in Paris, and it made sense for him to clear out. There were plenty of other Americans in Paris as the Germans came in, and not all of them left. Some helped the collaborationist Vichy government, some helped the Resistance, some were sent to concentration camps, and some managed to scrape by until the Germans were driven away. All these versions of their stories get told in _Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation_ (The Penguin Press) by Charles Glass. This is an important picture of American participation in a relatively quieter part of the big war, a book populated by Americans who were idealistic, confused, or complacent. There are villains, but there are plenty of heroes among these Americans who volunteered to stay on, mostly because they loved France and they hated the idea that Nazism should overcome their beloved Paris.

The Americans in Paris before war was declared formed the largest American community in continental Europe. It is surprising how independent some of them were allowed to be after occupation. Most were interned, but quite a few remained essentially free, having merely to check in with the police now and then. Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Company, was seen by others as courageously staying on, but dismissed any praise: "I never left Paris - hadn't the energy to flee, luckily, as nothing happened to us or the other monuments." Being interned was for her part of that "nothing," though she was freed even before liberation. The Countess said that the library could only survive if there were some accommodation with the Germans. She consented, for instance, that Jews could no longer use the library, but she and her staff were "ready and willing to carry books to those subscribers who are cut off from them..." She looked forward to the eventual freeing of France from Germany by America, but she felt that her collaborationist friends had helped France get through the worst of the occupation as easily as possible. The American Hospital functioned throughout the war offering good and often free medical treatment for wounded Americans, as well as for British and French servicemen. The hospital director always arranged that the hospital would be too full of allied troops to take on Germans. He was Sumner Jackson, and he was a real American hero. Not only was he the chief surgeon at the hospital (for a salary of $150 a month), he risked his life to help Allied soldiers and airmen escape from France. He would, for instance, take them in for treatment, then fake death certificates for them, and start them on their way back to Allied forces. His apartment served as a mail drop for couriers within the Resistance. He even allowed his fifteen-year-old son to go on an excursion to Saint-Nazaire, to get photographs of the submarine base there to be used in an upcoming attack. He, his wife, and his son were eventually caught and sent to the slave labor camps in Germany. The wife and son survived, but ironically Jackson died from Allied bombs in the last week of the war. More murky were the efforts of Charles Bedaux, an American of French birth. He was a self made millionaire, an efficiency expert with plenty of American, French, and German contacts that he drew upon for many different moneymaking schemes. His big wartime brainchild was a pipeline to carry peanut oil from West Africa over the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and he worked with the Germans on the plan, but was sent back to America and charged with treason.

These are the main stories in this extensive report about a little-appreciated part of the American war effort. There are other smaller stories, fascinating ones like that of Eugene Bullard, who had been a fighter pilot in the French Army's air corps during the First World War because he was prevented from flying in the American Lafayette Escadrille due to being black. He went on to become a boxer and drummer who married into the French aristocracy and was welcomed by his wife's family. He proved to be an asset as an intelligence agent in Paris, running a gym and a club where he could overhear conversations by German soldiers. They thought a black person wouldn't understand German. There is also the story here of how the French army, marching back into the city for liberation, was prevented by the American chain of command from allowing any of their African forces to be part of that scene. There are other villainies, major and minor, in Glass's detailed and fascinating book, but since the good guys won, this is a story mostly of victory, and therefore of heroism, whether overtly fighting against the Nazi menace or simply enduring until it passed.

This vivid account of a handful of Americans in the "City of Lights" under Nazi occupationis is very well written and historically instructive about France during the war--the resistance and the collaborators, and the gray areas in between. The author's made an excellent selection of the several Americans living in Paris before, during and after the war. Each had his or her own backround, education, ethnicity and life experience, which impacted if not mandated each's perception of the occupation, and the war itself. From the intellectual female bookshop owner, rubbing shoulders with James Joyce and Ernest Hemmingway, to the multi-millionaire businessman who often met with Ike's assistant but also Nazi economic planners, to the selfless and courageous physician and his wife keeping the American Hospital in Paris running, the cast of characters reflect individual reactions to hell on earth in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
The book has great structure and rhythm. As a reader, I was constantly evaluating the conduct of some of the main characters--are they actually cooperating with the Nazis, or are they giving them a "head-fake"? Some of the characters are not at issue--they were anti-Nazi patriots throughout. Others are not nearly as clear. Was planning to build a pipeline from the middle east to Europe intended to feed Hitler's hungry mechanized war machine, or was it the fulfillment of a personal dream, to ensure economic efficiency and prosperity after an Allied victory? Was personally leaning on FDR to feed starving Vichy French men and woman an act of mercy, or was it collaboration with the Nazi puppett? But what of it? What about the true collaborators? Despite the evil incarnate fueling the Third Reich, how can we make moral judgments about others experiencing the ultimate challenge to one's principles and decency with their lives and their family's lives at stake? We all would like to think we would never and could never succumb compromising our humanity in the interests of self-preservation, but not one of us can be sure until the moment comes. Glass's book makes the reader think of these things.
This book chronicles how a precious few reacted, under fire, and should stand as a historical testiment to those who sacrificed it all for the dignity and decency of mankind.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII history.