Jacques Rossi is one of Stalin’s most well-known victims. Author of The Gulag Handbook, a fascinating encyclopedia of the Soviet forced labor camps, Rossi spent twenty years in interrogation, prison, and Gulag detention. Born to a prominent Polish father and French mother, the young Jacques became attracted to communism as a blueprint for radical social reform. He spent years in the communist underground in interwar Europe, agitating for the revolution, but he was arrested during ...

A novel that tells the story of a Jewish family in World War II and reaches deep into Jewish history.Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their family history, Sarde decided to reconstruct Jenny’s journey, including her exile from Salonica, move to Paris in 1921, and assimilation in France. The Nazi occupation then forced her and her family to hide a...

Dream in a Suitcase unravels a fast-paced journey of survival, resilience, and the transformative power of love. It is the first English-language memoir by a female Romanian American survivor of one of the most brutal communist dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain.The narrative offers a rich multicultural mosaic of a life divided not only between two cultures and languages-the heroine's native Romania and her adoptive United States-but also between Chicago's urban landsca...

In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, told in full for the first time—a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the power of friendship. Caroline Moorehead, a distinguished biographer, human rights journalist, and the author of Dancing to the Precipice and Human Cargo, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers of Mitchell ...

The New York Times–bestselling author explores WWII Paris history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn't—during the Nazi occupation.Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Par...

The extraordinary true story of a small group of Frenchwomen, all Resistance members, who banded together in a notorious concentration camp to defy the Nazis—from the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War**“At once heartbreaking and beautifully told, this is a masterwork of nonfiction, a must-read for anyone who wants more of the incredible true story behind Lilac Girls.”—Martha Hall Kelly, author of Lilac ...

**Shortlisted for the Women's Prize in NonfictionLonglisted for the 2026 American Library in Paris Book AwardLonglisted for the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for NonfictionFrom an award-winning historian, the story of World War II artists, intellectuals, and refugees, and one famed Paris hotel.**Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took h...

"Never Be Afraid: A Belgian Jew in the French Resistance" is the powerful, poignant, at times funny story of Bernard Mednicki, a working-class, activist member of his socialist union in pre-Nazi Belgium who flees with his family to southern France when the Nazis invade, assumes a Christian identity, and, through a series of events, joins the Maquis, the French resistance. Mednicki is a survivor and a fighter, a role model for anyone who has ever faced adversity. For Jews who grew up in the...

"Rosemary Sullivan goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. . . . A moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times." — Publishers WeeklyParis 1940. Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the conquering Third Reich, live in daily fear of arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Vi...

A New York Review Books OriginalSeparated from her mother—the famed author of Suite Française—during World War II, Irène Némirovsky’s daughter offers a “nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman” in a series of memoirs that reimagine her mother’s life (The Washington Post)Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, ...

“Le Chambon has long been mythologized in France for the actions of its inhabitants. . . . But, as this riveting history shows, the story is more complex. . . . If the picture Moorhead paints is messier than the myth, this only serves to enhance the heroism of the main actors.”— The New YorkerFrom the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the absorbing story of a French village that helped save thousands hunted by the Gestapo during World War II—told in fu...

July 20, 1894. The German Military Attache in Paris. Colonel Maximillien von Schwarzkoppen received a visit from a seedy-looking middle-aged Frenchman who would not give his name. He told Schwarzkoppen that he was a French army officer serving on the General Staff; that he was in desperate need of money; and was therefore prepared to sell military secrets to the Germans.Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then aged 35, was a high-flying career artillery officer. Shy, reserved, sometimes awkwar...