Search Results for France - Narrowed by: Personal narratives.

Diary of a witness : 1940-1943 / Raymond-Raoul Lambert ; translated from the French by Isabel Best ; edited with an introduction by Richard I. Cohen.

2024-05-09T19:54:03Z

by Lambert, Raymond-Raoul, 1894-1943.
Call Number 940.5318092 22
Publication Date 2007
Summary Raymond-Raoul Lambert's Diary has been among the most important untranslated records of the experience of French Jews in the Holocaust. Lambert, a leader of the Union of French Jews (UGIF), was, in the words of the historian Michael Marrus, ""arguably the most important Jewish official in contact with the Vichy government and the Germans."" Lambert's Diary survived the war and was published in France in 1985. It reveals Lambert's efforts to save the Jews in France, particularly the children.
Format: Electronic Resources
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Escape to freedom / Leon Rubinstein ; foreword by Michael Berenbaum.

2024-05-09T19:54:03Z

by Rubinstein, Leon, 1923-
Call Number 940.5318142092
Publication Date 2007
Summary As a ten-year-old child, Leon Rubinstein fled Germany with his parents in 1933 to Luxembourg and then Belgium, which they fled again on the morning of the Nazi invasion. They dwelt quietly as refugees in the south of France until the Vichy government began its roundup of foreign Jews for deportation. After his father's arrest, Leon endeavors to save himself and his mother with a daring journey to the border towns of southeastern France. Among their encounters, they hitch a ride with German SS officers, while disguising their identities. Their arduous journey leads them to Switzerland, where the memoir provides a rare look at the lives of Jewish refugees in the Swiss work camps. <br /><br />Throughout this deeply felt story is Rubinstein's awareness of his transformation from adolescence to young manhood amid the catastrophic losses and dislocations of the war years in Europe. His personal story resonates with anyone who remembers discovering love, as well as the necessity of choices and sacrifices.
Format: Electronic Resources
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Diary of the dark years, 1940-1944 : collaboration, resistance, and daily life in occupied Paris / Jean Guéhenno ; translated and annotated by David Ball.

2024-05-09T19:54:03Z

by Guéhenno, Jean, 1890-1978.
Call Number 848.91209 23
Publication Date 2014
Summary "Jean Guéhenno's Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1945 is the most oft-quoted piece of testimony on life in occupied France. A sharply observed record of day-to-day life under Nazi rule in Paris and a bitter commentary on literary life in those years, it has also been called "a remarkable essay on courage and cowardice" (Caroline Moorehead, Wall Street Journal). Here, David Ball provides not only the first English-translation of this important historical document, but also the first ever annotated, corrected edition. Guéhenno was a well-known political and cultural critic, left-wing but not communist, and uncompromisingly anti-fascist. Unlike most French writers during the Occupation, he refused to pen a word for a publishing industry under Nazi control. He expressed his intellectual, moral, and emotional resistance in this diary: his shame at the Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany, his contempt for its falsely patriotic reactionary ideology, his outrage at its anti-Semitism and its vilification of the Republic it had abolished, his horror at its increasingly savage repression and his disgust with his fellow intellectuals who kept on blithely writing about art and culture as if the Occupation did not exist - not to mention those who praised their new masters in prose and poetry. Also a teacher of French literature, he constantly observed the young people he taught, sometimes saddened by their conformism but always passionately trying to inspire them with the values of the French cultural tradition he loved. Guéhenno's diary often includes his own reflections on the great texts he is teaching, instilling them with special meaning in the context of the Occupation. Complete with meticulous notes and a biographical index, Ball's edition of Guéhenno's epic diary offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the diarist's cultural allusions, but also of the dramatic, historic events through which he lived"--
Format: Electronic Resources
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