The most amazing thing about this book is that it was written in 1942, just months before the Jewish Russian-born author, a convert to Catholicism, was shipped off to Auschwitz.

Planned as five novels, these two stories describing the German occupation of France didn’t surface until six decades after the author’s death in the concentration camp. The author’s eye-witness account, written under constant danger, is unlike a diary, a memoir or historical fiction of that time.

She describes the pettiness and snobbery of the rich who were reduced to refugees just as the middle and lower classes were. She witnesses collaboration as well as resistance, fraternization of young girls with German soldiers, resentment and humiliation as the German soldiers take over the towns.

--Recommended by Connie

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