If you follow my blog, you’ve probably recognized that I have a penchant for sobering literature. While feel-good stories aren’t exactly banned from my shelves, most of what I read is either nonfiction or historical fiction that sheds light on a troubling period in human history. Likewise, when it comes to movies, I avoid rom-coms, Sci-fi, and horror, but tell me there’s a documentary about the Arab Spring or the War in Ukraine in town and I’ll clear my calendar in a heartbeat to attend.
The byproduct of decades spent consuming gloomy material is that over time, my perception of the adage “history repeats” feels like an unavoidable reality. I reject the notion that because the Internet now gives access to cultures and ideas from around the world—and from every corner of recorded history—that we are somehow less vulnerable to catastrophe. At the same, every dark period has its survivors and heroes that inspire confidence in man’s ability to overcome villainy and create a better world.
I recently read two biographical works from French authors that feature average citizens whose lives were shattered by the traumas they experienced during adolescence. These personal stories bring history to life in a way that broad-brushed analyses of events, political motivations, timelines, and statistical outcomes fail to achieve. Many people would like to forget about the horrors and injustices committed by their ancestors or fellow countrymen. For those who, like me, feel a keen need to understand the sins and triumphs of mankind’s past, the following books are worth considering.
La Guerre de Catherine
Set in France during World War II, La Guerre de Catherine tells the story of a Jewish teen, Rachel Cohen, who manages to evade deportation to a German concentration camp. While billed as a novel, the book is based on a true story and was written by Cohen’s daughter, Julia Billet. Cohen’s forced exile begins in 1941 when her parents, fearing for her safety, enroll her in a free-thinking boarding school outside of Paris.
The enlightened directors of the institute empower their pupils by placing them in charge of their own student-led government and newspaper. Each child is encouraged to explore the world as best they can from within the walls of their scholastic refuge. Guided by the director’s husband, a former photojournalist during World War I, Rachel becomes interested in photography. This generous instructor and protector, who the kids have nicknamed Penguin, cedes his top-of-the-line camera to Rachel and appoints her the official photographer of the school.
Penguin also teaches Rachel how to develop film in the school’s dark room and lets her experiment with various techniques to create a unique fingerprint on her finished works. As more and more Jews are rounded up and deported to Germany, however, the school’s directors decide that it is too dangerous for the Jewish children to remain in northern France. In preparation for departure to la zone libre, the Jewish kids must assimilate new identities: name, back story, and identity papers.
Rachel’s new alias is Catherine Colin. Over the next few weeks, all of the kids in the school are expected to learn and reinforce the identities of their Jewish classmates. Couriers who will transport the children one by one to new safe spaces, begin to arrive at the school. The younger children are the first to be evacuated. If German authorities decide to inspect the school, the little kids are the most likely to make a mistake if questioned.
When Catherine’s turn comes, Penguin gives her his camera and several rolls of film, asking her to document her journey and return at the end of the war so he can share in her experiences. Over the next 3 years, Catherine moves from one safe space to another, living with nuns, farmers, members of the French resistance, and so on. Each separation is fraught with peril and loss, but each new haven reveals the sacrifice and kindness people are often willing to extend to total strangers.
I found La Guerre de Catherine to be a fascinating account that sometimes terrified me but also filled me with hope. It targets the YA audience so the writing is relatively easy to digest. An invaluable bonus, the book includes photographs of the real Catherine and some of her wartime comrades. There is also a graphic novel adaptation that won the 2018 Prix Jeunesse at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême, France. The English translation is Catherine’s War.
Chroniques d’une jeune fille dérangée
Chroniques d’une jeune fille dérangée delivers an equally fascinating memoir about a young teen who must leave her native Algeria and settle in France after Algeria’s War of Independence in 1962. Like most wars, the Algeria-France conflict was a complicated affair, with many factions seeking to retain some semblance of power in the region after all the dust had settled. One such group, the pieds-noirs, were people of European descent who had lived in Algeria for numerous generations.
When France, headed by Charles de Gaulle, eventually capitulated, most pieds-noirs no longer felt safe to remain in Algeria. Numbers vary but by some estimates, over a matter of months, 900,000 pieds-noirs abandonned their homes and migrated north to Europe, most settling in France. One such refugee was Françoise Mesquida, the author of Chroniques d’une jeune fille dérangée.
Françoise arrived in France with her father and three sisters in 1962. Tragically, her mother had been killed while attending a demonstration in support of France’s continued involvement in Algeria. In March of 1962, de Gaulle had signed the Évian Accords which established an immediate ceasefire and outlined a process for Algeria to transition to a sovereign state. A few days after the accords were signed, hundreds of pied-noir civilians, who were against complete independence, organized a peaceful protest in Algiers.
As the nonviolent crowd approached a roadblock, the French Army detachment that was stationed there (pacification forces sent by de Gaulle to quell unrest) panicked and opened machine-gun fire. Between 50 and 80 protestors were killed—among them Mesquida’s mother—and another 200 were wounded. The mass-shooting was one of the rare times in French history where French forces fired upon innocent French civilians.
Mesquida’s memoir illustrates the complexities of immigration and assimilation in ways that, while uniquely personal, expose realities that many people would prefer to ignore. Migrants rarely leave their homelands on a whim and when they reach safety, they are greeted by people who work diligently to lend help them resettle and others who immediately treat them with contempt and distrust.
I’ve read other books about the difficulties faced by native Algerians who fled to France after the war. (One of my favorites, L’Art de Perdre, is reviewed here.) But I’d never suspected that pieds-noirs, people of European descent, also faced considerable bigotry and pettiness. According to a friend, who recommended the book to me, there aren’t a lot of personal accounts written by pieds-noirs, which makes this book an even more valuable read.
As horrific as the story of the Nazi rounding up and genocide of the Jews was, it’s at least a positive that so many people were willing to help them hide. This would have been dangerous for themselves, even in la zone libre, since the Vichy statelet was a creation of the Nazis and not really independent of them.
Does the novel say what happened to Rachel Cohen’s parents? One would hope that she made her way back to them after the war, but if they were living in Nazi-occupied France without benefit of the elaborate cover provided to the boarding-school refugees, their odds of survival wouldn’t have been good.
I also had never heard that the pieds-noirs encountered prejudice in France, but I do know that in Victorian times, white South Africans of British ancestry who migrated to Britain tended to be looked down upon. They spoke English with a distinct accent which sounded crude and bumpkin-ish to the British (in Britain, accents and dialects have long acted as markers of class and social status). Perhaps something like that was true of the pieds-noirs, if their families had been in Algeria for several generations and spoke French in a way that sounded odd or archaic to the people of the Hexagon.
Aside from that, the name Mesquida sounds Spanish to me. A lot of the Europeans who settled in Algeria were actually from Spain, though they assimilated into the local French population over time. I don’t know whether there was prejudice against Spanish ancestry in France in 1962.
Refugees from a defeat which led to loss of territory are sometimes shunned as a standing reminder of national humiliation — see how Palestinians are treated in most Arab countries, for example.
Thanks for reviewing these.
Excellent insights Infidel. Unfortunately, Racdhel’s parents did not survive but the book does not give details. Fortunately, the directors of her original school did survive. It turned out that Penguin was Jewish and he too had to eventually fled to the south. His wife continued to run the school and it continued to operate after the war.
You hit the nail on the head with your suppositions about what might have caused people to recognize the Mesquidas as pieds-noirs. Françoise never realized she spoke with an accent until her father bought the family a tape recorder for Christmas one year. Also, the family name would have been immediately recognized as not being French. Françoise’s father’s family had Spanish origins, while her mother’s family was French. But many generations had grown up in Algeria so no one spoke Spanish anymore. French was their native language.
It also seems that Françoise’s sisters and father had an easier time assimilating than she did. There were many factors that contributed to her feeling “deranged”, perhaps her mother’s violent ending was chief among them. Everyone’s experience and physiology is unique. But, her classmates didn’t initially accept her. She became the bad girl, so to speak, and never shook that persona.
Sad to hear about Rachel’s parents. If you read my blog at all regularly, you know I have a special loathing for anti-Semitism. It is one of the ghastliest of the long-running threads of history, that this particular ethnic group has been singled out for persecution again and again and again, for more than a thousand years, all over Europe and the Middle East.
Language is a very fundamental part of our sense of identity. It dates back to the hunter-gatherer stage before the dawn of agriculture thirteen thousand years ago, when all humans lived in groups of one or two hundred people, and almost certainly each group had a different language. Each group would have been violently hostile to all the others, with people attacking and killing any outsider on sight, as the few surviving hunter-gatherer societies (and chimpanzee groups) still are. That’s why people have a visceral sense of discomfort at hearing a strange language spoken around them — it dates back to the era when hearing a strange language meant you had strayed onto the territory of a rival group, and were in imminent danger of being killed. Even an “odd” and unfamiliar form of one’s own language tends to trigger a hostile reaction — “you’re not really one of us”. I certainly encountered that as a child, due to my mixed accent (from being raised partly in the UK and partly here). It may well be a more hard-wired prejudice than race.
More thought provoking reflexions. Thank you.
About the plight of Jewish children in France -and elsewhere- during WWII. I just read that a good third of the French have never heard of the Holocaust… (Bravo for the national education system)
As for the Pieds-noirs, many were hard hit in France. Sometimes for “leftist” reasons: “They were colons!” Others because they did get help resettling and of course those from the “Métropole” did not like it. One of the -many-reasons for the plight for “independance” in Corsica was the fact that many pieds-noirs resettled in Corsica, got financial help, worked hard and were successful. . One of the first establishments bombed by the FLNC in Aleria was run by a Pied-Noir.
Another point about Spanish, many of my Pieds-noirs friends in College had Spanish names. They didn’t speak a word. LOL.
And finally, I did get some inside information because I had a Pied-Noir girlfriend in Freshman year…
Again, thanks for the post.
Man, that’s really sad that so many French people haven’t heard of the Holocaust. I shudder to think what that stat is in the United States.
Thanks for adding more information about the pied-noirs. I didn’t realized so many settled in Corsica. Someday I’d like to visit.
Better not ask Google how many…
Corsica is very pretty. We went twice for the summer during a brief stint in France. I remember the water was soooo cold… LOL.
A very old friend of ours is from a very old Corsican family…
It is a complicated situation over there. The Autonomists and pro-independence are trying to push for independence. But I’m not sure Corsica would survive without the Millions of cahs paid by the French Gvt…
I’ve heard (perhaps from you) that the Corsicans can be a bit prickly. In general, I’ve found French people to be very welcoming as long as you make a small effort to speak their language. I’ve heard, however, the same tactics don’t necessarily charm the Corsicans.
I’m very skeptical when it comes to most separatist movements. We should be striving to soften the borders, not make them stronger. This seems like a particularly bad idea for an island. File under the grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side fallacy.
Agreed, we should bring down borders instead of building more… As for Independence, I consider myself Breton, (Think of the name!) even if I wasn’t born there, if I barely speak a dozen words of Breton… I do have roots that go back a long way there. Now, an independent Brittany? That would be stupid…
(Indeed the grass ain’t greener o’er there younder. No ma’am…)
I knew of your Breton roots. It’s great that you know so much about your family history. I have some ancestors who settled in Canada from France but I haven’t traced back to the region. They were early settlers in N America. Maybe we have a common grandparent. Qui sait?
On ne sait jamais… Eventually we’re all cousins aren’t we? Maybe that’s why war is such a bloody mess. Family feuds are the worst…
This is so interesting, Carol. I think our tastes in stories is often opposite, but I can tell from the way you explain here that I would benefit from broadening my horizons.
No worries. Very few of my friends share my reading taste. Too serious and too depressing much of the time. By contrast, much of what you post has a positive spin to it which is equally valuable and very refreshing.
I’m glad you read the reviews because even knowing a sliver is better than nothing.