The children's concentration camp at Pithiviers witnessed some of the most shameful episodes in the chronicles of occupied France. In 1959, during the course of a summer affair with a haughty French aristocrat, eighteen year-old Dierdre discovers the diary of two Jewish girls kept hidden from the Nazis in his chateau. As love descends into cruelty, the frank depiction of Dierdre's sexual awakening mingles warily, and finally horribly, with the discovery of evil.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Following her acclaimed 1999 novel, Cracks, Sheila Kohler returns with the spellbinding Children of Pithiviers, once again mining themes of childhood and lost innocence. The specter of Nazism hangs over a small French village where Jewish children were detained before being sent to the gas chambers. Now, 25 years later, Dierdre, an 18-year-old girl with a troubled past, is spending the summer with an aristocratic couple who were somehow involved in those awful wartime goings-on. Dierdre gradually realizes what happened, while at the same time becoming her mysterious hosts' sexual pawn. Kohler's elegant prose propels the sinister, almost dreamlike narrative.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In the early 1940s in the Loiret region of France, townspeople shamefully collaborated with the Nazis to rip Jewish children away from their mothers, put them into concentration camps, and eventually send them to their deaths in Auschwitz's ovens. In this haunting novel, Kohler vastly increases the emotional impact by intertwining her account of these children with the story of narrator Deidre's corruption. When Sorbonne student Deidre spends the summer of 1959 with Madame and Monsieur in their estate in Pithiviers, she discovers a diary in the attic kept by two small girls who describe being cruelly separated from Maman and their day-to-day existence in the bleak yet safe attic. In the meantime, Deidre falls under the spell of first Madame, who treats her as a confidant, and then Monsieur, who eventually takes her as a lover. But the decadent, aristocratic couple (and their servants) are both much more and much less than they appear to be. Over time, Deidre learns their shameful secrets, their shallowness and greed, and their penchant for collaborating with one another and the authorities. The diary entries she keeps rereading and the pointed questions she asks fill in missing pieces of the puzzle and eventually reveal to her what kind of people she is living with and how they behaved nearly two decades ago. Readers will shudder at the miasma of decadence and corruption that hang over the characters in this well-crafted story. Very highly recommended. Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Sys., Harrisburg, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brave, powerful book,
By Dawn Raffel (NYC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Children of Pithiviers (Hardcover)
This book is a complex and chilling investigation of the darkest human impulses. The writing is exquisite, but more importantly, Kohler makes us ask ourselves the hard questions--which is how I define moral fiction. I can't imagine it was Kohler's intention to put the seduction of Deirdre on a scale with the tragedy of the children of Pithiviers, but rather, to make us look at the nature of corruption and compliance, to force us to look in the scary places--and this she has done brilliantly.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Subtle and not, this book will make you think,
By KatPanama "katpanama" (Readerville) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Children of Pithiviers (Hardcover)
The writing is merely superb but the thinking is more than that. A short novel with a long agenda and complicated acting out. This novel is entirely finest kind and full enough of itself that satisfaction is at least as complicated. This is a book I will be giving to my friends.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On Morality,
By A Customer
This review is from: Children of Pithiviers (Hardcover)
This is a book for people who don't need to be spoonfed lessons in morality. Rather than drawing comparisons between Diedre's summer in Pithiviers and the horrors of the Holocaust, I thought the author's point was that the children imprisoned and gassed by the Nazi's clearly are the more tragic victims. And I admire the fact that she didn't think she needed to explain that to me. While Diedre almost willingly participates in her own exploitation at the hands of her hosts, the children who came before her had no options at all. Yet by showing us Diedre's more contemporary story, Kohler is able to lead us to the more horrific history of this region of France and suggest that while the two horrors are not equal, they exist on an unfortunate spectrum of abuse that continues to exist to this day. This is really quite brave and daring, and the writing is exquisite.
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