This is an
historical novel, about Paris just before and during WW2 and Eastern
Montana in the Cold War of the eighties. It’s a shock for a reader
of my generation to realise that, in 2020, not just children, but
parents of children, probably do need to know what the early to mid
eighties were like. There are both similarities and differences in
the two threads, of course: Paris was occupied by the NAZIs, but the
thousand nuclear missiles buried in the American plains never flew
and Soviet Communism turned out to contain the seeds of its own
destruction. The Montana characters are geographically isolated,
those in Paris are isolated by their circumstances and their (fully
justified) fear of letting anyone know just what those circumstances
are.
Lily, a Montanan
teenager is fascinated to learn about the Paris that her new friend,
Odile (older than Lily’s parents) knew, even though it was Paris in
her darkest hour. It all sounds so chic, if not “cool” that she
wonders why Odile ever left and that’s not a tale that Odile wants
to tell. The central message of this book is that everyone has
something they’d prefer others not to know and it’s essential to
respect this.
The author does a
good job of portraying escalating oppression and declining nutrition
in occupied Paris, without pretending that Parisians knew about
everything that was going on elsewhere in Occupied France, let alone
the rest of Europe. The NAZIs kept everyone in the dark, unless there
was a news story which would take spin, in which case it was put on
posters everywhere in Paris.
She also does a good
job of showing how important “Crow Letters”, anonymous letters
denouncing people to the French police or even directly to the NAZIs,
were in that oppression. {It is beyond the scope of this book, of
course, but in Germany the NAZIs made a rod for their own backs by
offering a reward of 1,000 Reichsmarks to anyone who denounced
neighbours or even relatives to the Gestapo. By early 1944, the
Gestapo was fully aware (there were memos about it) that most of the
people they were arresting were good Germans denounced out of spite,
but to stop doing it, or to stop paying out the bounty, would have
been to admit that the NAZIs were fallible and had perpetrated a
great injustice, so it continued. The 610 Office in Communist China
may have the same regrets, one day.} She also shows us that
immediately upon being liberated, some Parisians behaved as
vindictively towards anyone thought to have been friendly to the
occupiers, as the writers of the Crow Letters had been to their
neighbours. Almost certainly, none of the Crow Letter writers were
amongst those publicly punished after the liberation, because nobody
knew who they were: they went for the women who’d had babies
instead.
This is a very
well-researched book and I have only two gripes:
French characters
refer to the Germans as “Krauts” even before America enters the
war, and I wonder how accurate this is? Also, the lethally-poor
treatment of captured French soldiers forced to do manual labour in
Germany, is put down to the Germans not caring whether they lived or
died. In fact the Germans did care about this issue: Heinrich
Himmler’s official policy on forced labour was called “death
through exhaustion.” The slaves were meant to die and the only
reason why fewer French prisoners died than Russian or Polish ones
was that the Germans needed the French economy to go on working as
long as the occupation lasted, and that meant letting the working
population still in France believe that their loved ones might one
day come back safely. Had the Germans won, this would not have
happened.
“The Paris
Library” is published by John Murray Press on the 2nd of
June 2020.
