Book Review of "The Paris Library" by Janet Skeslien Charles

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 2^nd of June 2020.