By Anne Sebba
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
Anne Sebba's tour de force of research and reflection, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s is a testament of silk and sacrifice; of choices to resist or collaborate with the Nazis; of dalliance, defiance, and survival that turned on a concierge's random kindness or a stick of gelignite strapped to the chest.
Sebba sources first-time stories of wartime women, and records tales of collaboration horizontale with real sensitivity for the "moral ambiguity" of those who exchanged sexual favours for privileges - or survival. "Right and wrong are not always clearly defined," she reminds us. Who would judge the child Marceline, who survived the camps digging burial trenches, which she passed off afterwards as vegetable patches? Who would denigrate a Jewish mother for taking the risk of handing her children over to a stranger promising, for payment, to spirit the young away to rural safety?
Sebba never lets us forget that the city Hemingway called a moveable feast became, under Nazi occupation, a place "where nobody could be trusted, denunciations were rampant and bellies were filled with foreboding and fear."
