Do You like book Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story Of A French Jewish Spy In Nazi Germany (2006)?
It didn't hurt that the author is the mother-in-law of one of our book club members and that she was there to talk to us. That being said, it's an amazing story ... especially when you see her in person.She also spoke at church:http://stjohnschicago.blogspot.com/20...She was likely in Paris at the same time as one of Bob's relatives, who was in the Resistance and was shot as the Germans were leaving. The word was passed from window to window.At the family church in St. Germain des Pres, bullet holes are still visible in the church.Sobering.
—Suellen
This is the fascinating memoir of a young French-Jewish woman who survives the Holocaust because of her quick wits, her Aryan looks, and a forged identification card. After Paris is liberated (about halfway through the book), the reader discovers the reason for the book's title: Marthe -- who was raised in the Alsace Lorraine area and is fluent in both French and German -- decides to work as a spy in German-occupied territory.She recalls so many details that this book is a stunning, albeit horrifying look at France during the war, portraying in living color the good people and the bad. Although many of her experiences -- and those of her many family members -- painfully illustrate virulent and widespread French anti-Semitism (I really expected better from the French Red Cross!), the following stunning image was an exception:"One by one as we approached (the border between occupied and Vichy France), the men stopped smoking and the women stopped talking, and they all turned to stare back at us. There was near silence as we squeaked along with our bicycle, watching them watching us."An old man in a dark shirt and working trousers stood up from his rickety old wooden chair as we passed his house and stared at us intently. I returned his gaze, my hands clammy on the handelbars. Without saying a word, he suddenly dropped onto one knee and, hand on his chest, lowered his head in prayer. Next to him, his wife knelt on both knees in the dirt and made the sign of the cross. At the next house, two men fell similarly to their knees and began praying for us, their soft murmurings carried to us on the summer evening breeze.Another passage that conversely blew my mind, witnessed by Marthe as she was posing as a German towards the end of the war, was a Wehrmacht officer regaling a busload of German women with tales of grisly murder in Russia and Poland:"'We'd take them from their villages, men, women, and children, and march them to a nearby forest or clearing, where they had to dig their own graves," he said, his eyes quite mad. 'Then we'd line them all up and open fire. You should have seen them run as we strafed them with bullets. Like little mice!'"His stubby fingers did little running movements and he made a squaking noise with his mouth. All the women in the bus laughed openly as the officer threw his head back and roared at the memory. I felt sick to my stomach . . . " Guess you had to have been there to get the "joke" but this passage legitimately challenges the state of complete ignorance claimed by many post-war German civilians regarding Germany's crimes against humanity. But even if these women, like many other German civilians, really didn't know exactly what had happened to the Jews, Poles, captured Soviets and Resistance workers, their ability to find humor in a scene of mass slaughter is quite telling.Because Marthe, a remarkable young woman, was often very close to danger, both as a Jew on the run and later, as a very capable French spy, and because this book is so well-written, it's a real page-turner.
—Kathryn
Wow. This lady had unbelievable guts. This is a war story everyone ought to read. It details the wartime experience of Marthe Cohn, a Jewish woman of binational French-German heritage who grew up in the Alsace region of Northeastern France, who in the end was able to put her bilingual skills and her incredible at the service of Allied intelligence by making espionage forays into the Nazi Germany itself. The first part of the story tells of the tightening of the noose on Jewish families in occupied France, and how it affected the fortunes and lives of Cohn's family itself, and of the fortitude and ingenuity necessary to survive it inspired. Most chilling is the arrest and eventual deportation of Cohn's sister Stephanie to Auschwitz, an moving account of hope and desperate measures that gives a face to one of the anonymous millions of Jewish murder victim statistics. What's perhaps most amazing is that Cohn manages to put herself through nursing school in the middle of the war, despite prohibitions against Jewish enrollment in schools by the French authorities, and then falls as if by accident into intelligence work after the liberation of most of France. Working for a while as an interrogator, Cohn moves on to actually penetrate Germany itself. The narrative doesn't stop there, though. It continues on with Cohn's experience as a nurse in French Indochina during the war there between the French and Vietnamese.
—Kevin
