Paper Bullets - Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis - 2021 - 326 Pages

Stonewall Honor Book in Nonfiction

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

This is part of my Participation in Paris in July 2023 - Hosted  by Words and Peace 

https://wordsandpeace.com/2023/06/30/paris-in-july-2023/#list

Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets”—wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.

Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope.

Better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call “degenerate art.” In addition, Lucy was half Jewish, and they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies with Surrealists and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein." From the publisher 

The bulk of the action takes place on the British Channel island Jersey though the values that motivated the two women were derived from their artistic contacts in Paris prior to moving to Jersey. Both women came from wealthy Paris families and never had any financial worries. They met when quite young and would become lovers. They used pseudonyms and pretended to be step- sisters. They moved to Jersey a few years before the Germans invaded. Jersey was a popular vacation destination for Parisians. The women like the peace of the island a bought a huge house there.

When the Nazis took over Jersey the women begin to distribute a wide variety of "paper bullets" designed to make German soldiers turn against the war. They created a character called "the unknown soldier" whose message was that Hitler cares nothing about them.

Some Jersey residents engaged in passive resistance, others cooperate with the Germans, most just try to get by as conditions get worse as the Germans begin to see defeat is inevitable.

The period of the women's imprisonment is harrowing to read, some German guards tried to be decent, others hated the women.

The Nazis were not as against Lesbian couples as gay men and few locals understood their relationship.

Paper Bullets is an important contribution to the literature of the occupation of Jersey, French resistance, LGBTQ studies and World War Two history.

Jeffrey H. Jackson is professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. An expert on European history and culture, he is the author of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. He has appeared in documentary films and helped develop "Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story" for PBS's Great Performances.

Mel ulm

 

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2021 - 353 pages

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2021 - 353 pages 

The Invisible Woman is largely set in France during World War Two

This is the fourth work of historical fiction by Erika Robuck I have so far read 

My prior works  by Erika Robuck read 

Sisters of Night and Fog -2022.  Set also largely in France during WW Two

Fallen Beauty - 2014. Set in upstate New York in the 1920s and 1930s - focusing in part on the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay

Receive Me Falling. - 2009- Set mostly on the Sugar Cane Plantations on the Caribbean Island of Natal.  Shifting from the 1830s to the 1990s.

The Invisible Woman centers on Virginia Hall, an American woman working as an agent for the British OSS.  Her mission is to support French resistance fighters in German occupied France.  In addition to courage, loyalty, and endurance she has a prosthetic half left leg.  She is in her mid-thirties, speaks passable French and dresses as a much older woman in case her real pictures fall into German or Vichy hands.  Most of the resistance fighters are under twenty.  

Robuck vividly creates the terror of the war, the misery of wasted lives, the terrible cruelly of the Germans.  Virginia is involved in training the French fighters in sabotage and sneak attacks.  The numerous characters are very well developed.  Food is a very important concern.  There is an interesting romantic element.

Virginia’s activities can put her and others in danger if things go wrong.  There is a lot of tension in the events.  Virginia gets close to people even though this is contrary to OSS training. 

I found The Invisible Woman kept me more and more interested as I came to love the resistance and hate the Germans.

I endorse this book with no reservations to all into World War Two literature.

Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman, Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is also a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest essay collection Author in Progress. In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband and three sons.

I hope to next read her Hemingway’s Girl.

Mel Ulm

 

Kl: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps By Nikolaus Wachsmann - 2015 - 881 Pages

Kl: A History  of the Nazi Concentration  Camps

By Nikolaus Wachsmann - 2015 - 881 Pages

In March of 1933 an abandoned factory in Dachau surrounded by barbed wire held 233 prisoners. Wachsmann traces out in a very detailed  narrative the complex sequence of events leading up to the 22 majors camps and over 1000 satellite camps located in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe.  The camps were at heart of the Nazis program of terror and repression.  As war dragged on they became an important part of the German economy and war effort.

The camps were quite different from each other. Auschwitz, the biggest camp, was primarily a place to murder Jews.  Other sites were work camps where the SS had economic reasons to keep workers alive such as Dora where V2 rockets were made by slave labor.  Inmates with skills valuable to the Germans had a much better chance of surviving longer.  I fascinated to learn that there was a unit of about 200 inmates who counterfeited British currency.  They worked inside, had better food and had a much higher survival rate than inmates working outside.  

Wachsmann is the first historian to write a complete history of the camps.  He shows us how The camps were organized while vividly detailing horrors, the sadism, and the central role in murdering those Nazi ideology dictated were parasites, sub-human and enemies of the State.  We see how German doctors were among the most vicious of camp officials, giving lethel injections, performing barbaric experiments and selecting which of newly arriving inmates were at once sent to be killed.

Gas Chambers were phased in as the primary method of Killing because Germans found shoting 

 them traumatic.

Wachsmann shows us The Germans failed attempt to turn Russian  POWs into slaves laborers.  Most were judged to weak and about two million were murdered.  Only about two percent of Russian POWs survived to return home.

Almost everyone who worked at the camps very long stole things that were supposed to be used in war efforts.

There is a lot of information about the Command structure of the Camps.

As the war started to turn against the Germans, hard core anti-semites began to panic, fearing they would not suceed in Killing all of the Jews in the camps.  As portrayed by Wachsmann,most all Germans knew what was going on in camps and did not care much one way or the other.

There is much more in this book.  

“Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor in Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of London.

He studied at the London School of Economics, the University of Cambridge and at Birkbeck, gaining his PhD in 2001. His comprehensive history of the Nazi camps KL, published in 2015, won the Wolfson History Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate literary prize. Nikolaus has a particular interest in public history and Holocaust education, and serves on the academic advisory boards of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as well as the concentration camp memorials Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. He also curates a free educational website for students and teachers about the history of the Nazi camps.” From https://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/nikolaus-wachsmann/

Mel Ulm

 

. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson - 2020 - 593 Pages

 

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson - 2020 - 593 Pages

A New York Times Bestseller

World War Two - September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945

America, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 2, 1941 enters the war.  Churchill knew England needed America as a full ally to beat Germany. Larson vividly shows us Churchill’s efforts to get Franklin Delano Roosevelt to give England aid.  Before Pearl Harbor many Americans took an isolatiinist stance.  The end did not come quick but now Hitler’s fate was sealed.

Winston S. Churchill - November 30, 1874 to January 24, 1965

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Churchill then turned to a colleague and said, under his breath, "And ... we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that's bloody well all we've got."  June 4, 1940

I offer my thanks to those in The Facebook Serious Non-Fiction Group for letting me know what a great work of narrative non-fiction The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Book by Erik Larson was.  Even though of course I knew the outcome Larson maintains a high level of excitement and suspence.  This is a truly wonderful book.

Winston Churchill was for sure who  England very badly needed to lead them during England’s darkest hours.  

Churchill was a great orator, both in Parliment and on his periodic BBC addresses to The Nation.  He never hid The danger of German invasion but he built up the strength and Will to fight on in the English.  

Larson  brings to life numerous interesting persons in Churchill’s war Cabinet, each with their own strong personality.  Unlike Hitler, Churchill did not surround himself with cowering sycophants but strong knowledgeable men not afraid to contradict him, though he for sure had the final word.

We also get to know his wife Clemintine Churchill, a lady one cannot but admire,his three daughters and their romantic interests, and his gambling spend thrift son Randolph and his long suffering wife Pamela.  All of this “humanized” Churchill.

Larson marvelously describes The Blitz attack by German bombers on London and other cities (September 7, 1940 to May 11, 1941).  Churchill would walk through damaged areas, met by cheering crowds. The Germans could not understand why England did not turn on Churchill and surrender. Larsen shows us Command apparatus of The RAF and The Luftwaffe.

Plus Churchill loves his cat Nelson, often sleeping with him.

One person in The Serious Non-Fiction group said this was a hagiographical biography.  This is simply incorrect. Larson details Churchill’s drinking, his hosting of dinners way in excess of ration regulations, his neglect of citizens of the Empire in Africa and Indian, his pampering of his children, his holding of meetings while in the bathtub.

ERIK LARSON is the author of five national bestsellers: Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm, which have collectively sold more than 9 million copies. His books have been published in nearly twenty countries.

My thanks to Alan u for providing me with the Amazon Gift Card which allowed me to read this book.

Mel Ulm

Such Good Girls - The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R. D. Rosen (2014)

Such Good Girls - The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R. D. Rosen is an important addition to holocaust literature from which all but experts will learn a lot. Not long ago I read and posted on a very interesting book, The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross in which he told us that of the 1000 or so Jews who lived and survived all of the Nazi era in Berlin, each one depended on the help of Gentile  Germans to survive.  Some hid in plain sight, passing as Christian, others spent the years hidden in houses by hosts risking their own lives to help Jews.

In Such Good Girls we learn that while 70% of adult European Jews were killed during the holocaust, 90% of Jewish children were killed by the Germans.  In one horrific scene, we learn Germans drained the blood from Jewish children for transfusion into German soldiers, thus reversing the facts in a leading anti-Semetic myth.  

Anne Frank is the image that first comes to mind when one thinks of children hidden from the Germans.  Of course she did not survive.  Such Good Girls centers on three Jewish girls that survived.  We follow them from the hiding years up to their mid-seventies, living in America.

Sophia's mother, when she was five, totally induced her daughter to believe she was a Catholic from a family that hated Jews.   Her family did not at all "look Jewish" so this passing strategy worked, but Sophia had to totally be made to hate Jews for it to work, to avoid a fatal slip of the tongue.  After the war, in a very poignant scene, her mother tells her of her real identity.  It is very hard for her to accept it but in time she does.  She eventually emigrated to New York City and became a highly regarded radiology oncologist physician.  

Flora and her family were protected and sheltered by a Christian family.  She stayed hidden through the Nazi years.  She also moved to America and became a psychologist, pioneering in the study of hidden child survivors.  All of her family but her died in the holocaust.  

Carla lived through the war years hidden by a Dutch family.  Also moving to New York City, she became a psychologist and helped found an international organization of hidden child survivors.

Rosen does a very good job of letting us see the long lasting impacts their childhood experienced had on the three women.  We follow their lives from terrified and bewildered young girls to imminent professionals.  All worked in professions dedicated to helping others.  

One of the many fascinating elements in the book was the first large meetings of child survivors.  It was deeply moving to me to read of these meetings.  

This is a very good book, there is much in it I have left out about the years in hiding, the immediate post war period, the horrors of the Germans, and the common psychological traits of child survivors grown into adults. 

Biography Of Author 

R. D. Rosen has written or co-authored numerous books spanning different genres—from Edgar Award-winning mystery novels to bestselling humor books to narrative nonfiction, including Psychobabble (a word he coined in 1975) and A Buffalo in the House. He has appeared as a humorist and satirist on PBS, HBO, and NPR's All Things Considered.  (From Harper Collins)

As I read of the life lasting impact on the psyche of the child survivors I was brought strongly to mind the experiences of another survivor of a holocaust, Dana Hui Liu who spent five years in a labor camp during the years of the killing fields of Cambodia.  After posting on her very powerful memoir of these times, My Mother and the Tiger - A Memoir of the Killing Fields I was privileged to do a Q and A session with her and much of her thinking mirrors that of that of the survivors talked about in Rosen's book.

My Q and A Session with Dana Liu, a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields 

I strongly urge anyone interested in holocaust related issues to read this interview.  

Mel u