When Paris Went Dark

About this book

From the Preface... I do not claim the mantle of historian but rather of storyteller and guide; I have perused with care what others have written and have teased out stories that have always been there but had settled under the dust of memory and history. I have plumbed the extraordinary archival work done by others and done some of my own, always looking for fissures in texts that allow for a richer reading of a traumatic period in European history. Here are the famous and unknown voices of adolescents and adults, Germans and French, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, visitors and residents, collaborators and patriots, novelists and historians, journalists and diarists, the still living and the gone. Some appear repeatedly, some occasionally, and some only once. I have interviewed men and women who lived in Paris at the time. They offered anecdotes that became bright tiles in a vibrant mosaic that reveals more clearly how a familiar and beloved city became, even temporarily, threatening and uncanny. As one person raised in Paris during this period answered when I asked if her parents ever discussed the Occupation: “It [the memory of the Occupation] was like a secret garden whose gates were always closed to us.” When Paris Went Dark makes an effort to look over that garden’s walls.