Résistance
Subtitle: a woman's journal of struggle and defiance in occupied France
By: Agnès Humbert ; translated by Barbara Mellor.
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9781596915596
Subjects: Humbert, Agnès -- Diaries; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German; World War, 1939-1945 -- Underground movements -- France; World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, French; Prisoners of war -- France -- Diaries; Prisoners of war -- Germany -- Diaries; France -- History -- German occupation, 1940-1945
Genres: Diaries.; Personal narratives, French.
Work titles: Notre guerre.
Description: A real-life Suite Française, this riveting diary by a key female member of the French Resistance in WWII is translated into English for the first time. Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance--very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.) In the throes of their struggle for freedom, the members of Humbert's group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned. In immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her time in prison, her deportation to Germany, where for more than two years she endured a string of brutal labor camps, and the horror of discovering that seven of her friends were executed by a firing squad. But through the direst of conditions, and ill health in the labor camps, Humbert retains hope for herself, for her friends, and for humanity. Originally published in France in 1946, the book was soon forgotten and is now translated into English for the first time.--From publisher description.