Customer Reviews

Resistance: A Frenchwoman's Journal of the War

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Résistance is the harrowing journal and memoir of Agnès Humbert, a middle-aged art historian in Paris, and her experiences in Nazi occupied France during WWII. When Humbert first hears the rumors of an occupation, she is distraught and numb, but soon finds a strong will of opposition inside her. She begins to contact others who are like-minded and is soon embroiled in producing Résistance, a newspaper filled with propaganda, which she and her colleagues distribute anywhere and everywhere they can. Agnès meets several important contacts and knows that danger is only a heartbeat away, for if the Germans find out about her anti-Nazi sentiments and activities, she will be imprisoned. Though she knows the dangers, she continues with her work, only to be brought in for questioning regarding her activities. Following her eventual trial, Agnès is convicted and sent to prison. What ensues is the heart-breaking story of what she was subjected to after being becoming a political prisoner in France, and later Germany.

The first section of this book was given over to the specifics and details of who and what her group of friends did in opposition to the German invasion. Many were implicated, yet as her journal was never found, Agnès was not the cause of any imprisonments or executions. Unfortunately, many of the people responsible for Résistance were tried and convicted anyway. I found this section to be a little dry and methodical. It almost seemed that this part of the book acted as a type of ledger of information, rather than a chronicle. Many of the people were only briefly mentioned, and I had some trouble in understanding who was who and what part they played in the opposition. While I believe that it was important to know the events that led up to her imprisonment, this section seemed a little too matter-of-fact.

The majority of this book was devoted to the time that Agnès spent as a prisoner and laborer. During this time she suffered many abuses at the hands of the Germans. The tortures that she and her fellow prisoners faced in the prison were terrible, from starvation and beatings to severe confinement. Despite their atrocious treatment, the women were able to form friendships and take joy in the company of others, sharing news and small victories with each other. Many would not recant their political ideology even after being subjected to daily bouts of cruel treatment. I found it hard to believe that things could get any worse for them, but when they were moved to a German work camp, what had come before paled by comparison. In the labor camps, it was obvious that life was expendable and cheap. The overseers' attitudes went beyond the malicious and into the area of savagery. They were worked like dogs, with no care given to injuries or illness, and the living conditions and rations were pitiful. While Agnès and her fellow laborers struggled, inhaling caustic chemicals that gave them temporary blindness and suppurating ulcers, they still found ways to share political information and news among themselves. Sometimes these friendships were cut short, as their overseers didn't like their fraternization, and women would be moved to other areas of the workhouse. Agnès, nevertheless, found ingenious ways to sabotage her work, as it was the only way she could oppose the occupation from inside its confinement. She never let them break her spirit, no matter what was forced upon her. When help finally arrived in the form of American troops in April of 1945, Agnès had been imprisoned for 5 years. Despite her experiences, she immediately took charge and helped the American forces seek out fleeing Nazis and created a temporary hospital for the refugees and Germans alike. She took command of many aspects of this new civilian life, and was greatly esteemed by the Allied forces, fellow prisoners and the community.

One of the most amazing thing about this book was Agnès' remarkable wit and sense of humor. No matter what horrors the day brought her, she had an amazingly beautiful spirit that enabled her to continue laughing. She never showed despair and defeat; rather a cynical cleverness in which she documented the sufferings of herself and those around her. Despite all that happened to her and her compatriots, she never let go of her beliefs and fought in the only way she knew how. Agnès never let herself sink into depression, despite her many injuries or disappointments. I very much admired her courage and strength.

This story was both haunting and inspiring. Among the atrocities committed in WWII, this remains a story that is not often heard but that truly needs to be told. It may enlighten others to the fact that Jews were not the only victims of this terrible war. I found myself feeling maudlin and upset while reading this book, but I am glad that I read it. It is a terrible tale, but behind that tale lurks the spirit of of a woman who would not give up, turning a story that could only be ugly into a thing of beauty.

I remember reading this book years ago in the original French when I was a student, and I find it amazing that such an important primary source on the French Resistance and German occupation of France has taken sixty years to be translated. Agnes Humbert's sheer tenacity in banding together with her comrades to publish and distribute the illegal anti-German newspaper Résistance is a riveting profile in courage, yet Humbert never really draws any attention to her heroism, presenting her actions merely as what was required of a moral, patriotic person in a conflict where there were only two sides: for the Nazis or against them.

I agree with the previous reviewer that the second half of the book detailing Humbert's arrest and imprisonment is more interesting, better written, and overall more compelling than the early sections, which are indeed dry and expository. Which brings me to my only real objection to this very useful addition to the English-language literature on the civilian experience of the war: the publishers should have gone to greater lengths to commission a truly spirited and detailed introductory essay orienting the lay reader (or, more importantly, college students) to the timeline and chain of events in the Nazi takeover of France, the division into Vichy and German-administered provinces, etc. I think there is a great deal of room for confusion here for people unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar with the historical background.

Nonetheless, it's wonderful to know that this book is now available in English (and in a very nice, fluid translation)--a great addition to the reading list for any college course on WWII.

I came across Agnés Humbert's Résistance completely by accident while browsing the "New in Hardcover" section in Barnes & Noble one day, but rarely have I been more grateful for following my instincts on an unfamiliar book and author. From the moment I picked it up this book has haunted me. Too compelling to put down, but too harrowing to read straight through without breaks to recover emotionally, reading this book became a delicious struggle between my need to continue and my desire to stop and reflect.

Résistance begins with Agnés Humbert's actual journal entries from the summer of 1940 and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Paris. She describes the conception and birth of the French Resistance from a completely new point of view, almost as if it was a game she and her friends invented to annoy the Nazis. But it is the very casual way in which she describes certain horrors that brings home to the reader the atrocities of the Nazi occupiers. Her descriptions of the bravery, strength and loyalty of her compatriots brought tears to my eyes.

The later portion of the book, after Humbert's arrest, are also written in journal form, but these entries were written just after her release when the war ended. She writes "my memories are so clear that I am able to commit them to paper as they happened and in strict sequence. I remember everything as clearly as though it were written in notebooks". This portion of the book is truly an intimate look into the life of a prisoner of war, and you get the impression that as gut-wrenching as Agnés' experiences are, she actually got off somewhat easily compared to the treatment of so many other prisoners in Nazi camps.

Now that I've told you how clear she is in expressing the horrors of war, I need to tell you how very hopeful Humbert's book is. Although the tears flowed freely while reading many passages, the bleakness never took over, and often my tears were tears of admiration for a woman who was oppressed in so many ways, both physical and spiritual, and yet was still able to resist in any small way she could what she knew to be evil. You could not ask for a better narrator, a better guide through the unbelievable cruelties and unexpected kindnesses of the Nazi prison camps.

Humbert's journal/book covers the time period from just before the Nazi occupation of Paris to the end of the war and the American liberation of the prison camps in Germany. It is not a comprehensive view of the entirety of WWII, but it's not meant to be. It is one woman's harrowing and hopeful experience of losing her certainty in her country's leaders, but keeping her confidence in the spirit of her nation.

This review is based upon the Audible.com audiobook version of "Resistance"

For American readers, the phrase "French Resistance" often conjures up images of French men and women derailing German troop trains in the middle of the night, safehouses and transport for downed Allied Airmen and other various skullduggery.

You will NOT find that in this book. Most "Resistance" was probably very much like the efforts detailed in Agnes Humbert's book, with loose groups of associates making and distributing pamphlets and subtly engaged in undermining German efforts. If I had read an entire book about nothing but this kind of resistance in Occupied France, I would've enjoyed it tremendously.

What I got, however, was a book that is primarily about the experience of a Frenchwoman in Jail and in Slave Labor Prison for, from our perspective, relatively minor Resistance activities. Her account of her time in these locations is certainly well told and valuable from a general historical perspective, but again, it's not what I was looking for, nor what Audible.com's summary promised.

But even with all this in mind, and even if I knew exactly what I was getting when I embarked on the book, I still couldn't give it 4 or 5 stars.

Why?

Because the author idealizes Stalinist Russia to an extent that I, a reader of many books (dozens) about that dark time and place, find appalling. Her lack of recognition of the evils of the the Soviet Union, even though she had traveled to it and had ample opportunity to read reliable 3rd party accounts of that regime's systematic destruction of its own people, is indicative of either extreme naivete or willful blindness to its very real flaws. Her own very real suffering under the Germans was a pale shadow of the pain endured by millions of Soviet Citizens, from the mid 1920s and into the early 1950s in particular, and on a reduced basis until the era of Glasnost.

Granted, she wrote this memoir in 1946. As a capsule of a particular point of view of a person in a specific time and place, it is revealing and historically valuable. But that doesn't make her perspective any less galling to read, and the afterword's lack of comment on these views is a notable omission.

I found the 3 previous reviews to be very good. But I disagree with the first 2 reviews in their claims that the first half of Humbert's book is "dry and expository","methodical","a little too matter of fact", etc.

On the contrary, I found the first half of Humbert's book to be electrifying reading. There is an intense sense of urgency. We have to remember the book is a journal describing events as they happened almost form day to day. Indeed, the second half of the book was written immediately after her liberation as a slave laborer in 1945. But the entire book is uniform in its intensity and its profound, compassionate and shrewd reporting of unfolding events.

I consider this to be one of the most amazing accounts of WWII and the French Resistance that I've ever read. My heart and admiration go out to Agnes Humbert. An extraordinary woman! And to all those who shared her struggle.

This journal, by Agnes Humbert, is translated from the French by Barbara Mellor. It records Agnes' participation in the Resistance movement against German occupation of France during World War II. The courage and intelligence Agnes showed during this traumatic experience is amazing, and her style of writing, spare and to-the-point, is riveting. I'm so glad I was able to get a copy of this book from Amazon. It provides a realistic account of what many of France's citizens endured.

Agnes Humbert was an art historian turned member of the Resistance after Paris fell to the Germans in June, 1940. She, her family and much of the population of Paris fled the city as the Germans approached. Scenes of horror unfolded as she walked with masses of people from Paris to south of Limoges. Her account of her journey is immediate and heartrending.

Humbert was languishing in the countryside and sinking into despair when she heard a broadcast by General de Gaulle exhorting the French soldiers and people to rally round him and carry on the struggle. She wrote of her reaction: "A feeling I thought had died forever stirs within me: hope." Humbert was further buoyed by radio broadcasts recounting that the people of Paris were tearing down German posters as quickly as they were posted. The people of Paris were rebelling! She waded through the bureaucracy to obtain the papers that allowed her to return to Paris in August, 1940. Thus began her journal and memoir of her life as a member of the French Resistance and political prisoner subjected to forced labour in German prisons.

The book is two parts journal and one part memoir. Until two days before her arrest on April 15, 1941, Humbert maintained a journal. After she was liberated from the German prison in April, 1945, her journal commenced again. The story she told of the time in between was from memory. It was vivid.

Journal and memoir--throughout, the reader feels the author's sense of humor, sense of the absurd, and courage. One gains an acute understanding of the strength of conviction of Humbert and of her fellows, and further, of the risks they undertook both before and after their arrests. The reader will cringe at the descriptions of the abuse and deprivation Humbert suffered while in prison, and cheer her efforts to sabotage the enemy's war efforts in the small ways that were available to her.

I will not soon forget this book; it is incredible to me that it was published in 1946 but not published in translation until 2008.

I have only one other comment and that is about the translation. I believe the spirit of the book and the language of the book were accurately translated, so I am being a bit picky to say that the voice of the author does not come through as a French voice. The French have a certain way of expressing themselves that is different from the way we English speakers do. I would like to read it in French to see if it is just that much better.

Agnes Humbert's Resistance is the story of her life as France is occupied by Germans in World War II, her arrest for her underground activities, and her life after liberation. A section of the book is devoted to each of these three periods. However, although Humbert wrote the entire book in diary form, only the first third, recounting the occupation of Paris, is taken from her journal. The rest are reconstructions and more accurately described as memoir, rather than a day to day accounting of events.

Still, Humbert was a gifted writer, and her description of the fall of Paris and the populace's evacuation en masse paralleled the first "movement" of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise which, although fiction, was also written contemporaneously. Her keen eye for detail renders her story all the more poignant, although one sometimes wonders how she was able to retain all of names and descriptions, despite years of not having her diary. Still, if one reads this as a memoir, rather than a diary, it is an elegant and valuable addition to the literature of World War II France and the citizens who lived through it.

Résistance
By
Agnés Humbert
(Translated from the French by Barbara Mellor)
Published by Bloomsbury 2008 - 370 pps $26.00
Agnés Humbert (1894-1963)
Humbert was born in Dieppe, France, the daughter of French army officer Charles Humbert and English author Mabel Wells Annie Rooke. She spent her childhood in Paris, where she studied painting and design. In 1916 she married the Egyptian artist Georges Hanna Sabbagh (1877-1951), by whom she had two sons: Jean Sabbagh, a sub-mariner and advisor to General de Gaulle, and television director and producer Pierre Sabbagh. From 1929, she studied the history of art at the Sorbonne and at the Louvre school, and took a course in philosophy. Agnès and Georges divorced in 1934. Her first book was on the painter Louis David, published in 1936. She then worked as an Art historian at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris, and broadcast on art on Radio Paris at the start of 1936. She was 46 when her story begins.
Apparently, this work was first published in France in 1946 as Notre Guerre. Translation into English, and sale in the USA has taken 62 years: and I can understand why. Humbert's book has so many qualifications; they almost exceed the work itself. There is an introduction; a 33 page `translators notes'; and a 36 page `afterword' which is essentially a book report. If one reads that first, there is little point in reading the book. There are 16 pages of `appendix' together with a comprehensive `index', `bibliography' and notes on the author and translator. Phew!
If a diary needs all that explanation, shouldn't we be suspicious of the credibility of it? Well, it's not exactly a diary. The first 54 pages are contemporaneous notes, but the rest is from memory - or might that be imagination? The book was written in 1946 a time when Europe in general and France in particular, had been devastated by the Germans. One would have expected more venom from Humbert that is apparent here. This is my problem with the work. It doesn't ring true.
Madam Humbert describes the most frightful deprivations that she was a victim of, but it seems to have little effect on her. At the same time that she is being starved, frozen and beaten, she describes in erotic terms her fellow female prisoners. At the drop of a hat she strips naked and dances around the room to demonstrate her thinness (or something), to fellow prisoners. She mentions inmates copulating under machines and getting in trouble for it. Not inmates copulating with guards for various benefits, but inmates coupling with inmates. In between being starved, frozen, beaten and having acid poured on them as they go blind - they pop under a machine in full view of everyone including guards, for a quick tumble.
It is clear that Humbert is a rabid communist, and I suspect homosexual. It may be that people of that persuasion have a different libido to the rest of us. It will come as no surprise to married men that there are occasions when a headache can be an obstacle to sexual satisfaction, never mind being starved, frozen etc.
I was also astonished by the resilience of her and her fellow prisoners. She describes in the detail a manufacturing procedure that requires the use of corrosive acid. No protective clothing is supplied and the acid regularly assaults their bodies causing gruesome wounds. It also causes blindness. No medical treatment worth the name is offered, so they `self-medicate' by picking at the wounds and urinating on them. This does not seem to incapacitate them. Indeed a couple of the inmates attempted suicide by drinking a `tumbler' of acid. This same acid burns through to the bone. This kills them of course - no, it doesn't! The guards gave them a quick swig of antidote, and they were right as nine pence. One woman had a serious heart condition but none of the above killed her.
I live in Naples SW Florida, known as God's waiting room. Every medical treatment known to man is available here to the many heart patients, but they drop like flies. How could someone who starts sick survive such treatment?
The agony continues with no respite until the end of the war (five years), and the Americans arrive at Humbert's prison. At this point, I would have expected her to be carried off on a stretcher to an American Military hospital for treatment for her blindness, black frostbitten feet, emaciation, burns and general mistreatment, and a long period of recovery and rehabilitation. Err - No, she immediately becomes in charge of the town administration, local prison camps and the provision of shelter, food and first aid to refugees. Moreover, in her spare time she is the official Nazi hunter for the Americans. What a woman. If she had headed up the French Army instead of a department in the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires the Germans would never have reached France.
I love diaries, and I read this at one sitting. I found it a compelling read and, if it contained only a grain of truth it would still be a remarkable story.
This is not a book for everyone, but if `women's struggle against the odds' is your thing, you will enjoy this work.