The Liberation of France. Image and Event
Edited by H.R. Kedward and Nancy WoodMarching to Captivity. The War Diaries of a French PeasantGustave Folcher, translated by Christopher HillRescue as Resistance. How Jewish Organisations fought the Holocaust in FranceLucien Lazare, translated by Jeffrey M. Green
If one were to identify a common theme linking these books about the French experience of the Second World War, it is the theme of memory. Over recent years memory has become an increasingly familiar guide to broadening and deepening our historical knowledge of the reality of the war for the French, a reality far removed from the sometimes glib or stereotyped views which have tended to prevail here and there in the Anglo-Saxon popular imagination. The successive fiftieth anniversaries of events in wartime France the collapse in 1940, the round-ups of the Jews in 1942, the Liberation and purges of 1944 showed that disinterested historical memory is coming progressively to the fore as the 'living' memory of survivors fades.
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